Chapter 67. Make a Fix
Without a good place to put the bowl inside the furnace, he simply placed it into the ashes directly. The metal slowly melted down. With the help of Trash Intent, Rhys kept the furnace from cracking, or the pot within it from breaking down under the immense heat. It stretched the limits of his skill, but he welcomed the training. The more skilled he became with Trash Intent, the more he could use it for, and consequently, the more powerful it became. He squinted his eyes against the headache and pressed on. A little more. A little more…
“Dug the pit, Boss, what next?”
“Fill it with sand, then press the cauldron into it,” Rhys said, distractedly. “The non-broken side first, then lift it up and press the broken side into the impression, perfectly lining it up.”
“’Kay,” Bast said.
The metal glowed red-hot, but it wasn’t melting. The flames weren’t hot enough. Rhys rubbed his forehead, struggling to think against the pain of maintaining two Trash Intents at the same time. What… what was it? I thought of this problem earlier, I know I did, but—
His eyes flashed. Rhys raised his hand and called a specific piece of trash to him. The additional activation of another skill, this time Trash Manipulation, spiked his headache, but he managed to hold all three skills, thanks to having reached Tier 2 and having the correspondingly upgraded mental and magical capacities. The trash tore out of the pile and landed in his hand.
Bast looked up, still in the middle of setting the cauldron into the sand, and squinted. “You about to play us some music?”
“Gods, I hope not,” Rhys muttered. He looked at the accordion in his hand, turning it over to get a better feel for how badly damaged it was. It was mostly intact, save a gaping hole on one side of the bellows, and gunk had accumulated over the keys and the internal mechanisms. It meant that air gushed out, and some of the keys would produce no sound at all, but that worked for him. In fact, better if none of the keys produced sound.
Bracing one side of the accordion against his hip, he pointed the gaping hole at the furnace and gave the instrument a good squeeze. Air gushed out, and the flames burned brighter, even if the metal momentarily darkened. Since Rhys wasn’t using Trash Manipulation any more, he used that small amount of mental and magical space to call out to the impurities in the trash and pull them into himself, cleaning the resulting materials so they burned hotter and more efficiently. He worked the bellows again, and to his surprise, the flames dimmed slightly. Rhys blinked. Huh? It was just as dark as it had been before he cleansed the impurities, almost as if new impurities had appeared. Once more, he called out to the impurities in the trash, and to his surprise, there were new impurities to be found. Not in the trash, but on it.
His eyes widened. The air! Of course the air was impure. Bast was just commenting about the scent. What was scent, but thousands of microscopic impure particles floating on the air? He’d been blind until now, blind to the impurities floating all around him all the time! But now that his eyes had been opened, how could he be so remiss as to go without absorbing them? Rhys took a deep breath, operating his mana and pulling in toward his core as furiously as he could. It was the standard method to absorb mana, but today, his focus wasn’t on mana, but on the air itself. The breathing was usually secondary to the mana absorption, merely a method to focus the mind and direct mana in the right direction, but in this moment, it was primary. He put all his effort into breathing, into sucking in as much air as possible. His lungs inflated. He drew the air deep, into his stomach, filling with air from the lowest part of his abdomen upward. As he sucked the air in, he called impurities as well, pulling the stench in with as much power as he could. The air tasted horrible, absolutely putrid, but that was a good sign. That meant he was successful.
Within his body, he aimed impurities into his core, marshalling them into the next trash star. While the impurities rushed toward him, he worked his makeshift bellows and pushed the newly-cleaned air into the fire. He breathed out, letting out clean air in the bellows’ direction at the same time.
He hadn’t cleaned all the air. Not even close. There was a small bubble of clean air around him, and that air, he sent into the fire when the flames needed more oxygen, but it quickly ran out. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and it was true for this as for anything else. The lack of impurities in the air around Rhys simply meant that the impure, denser air spread out, encroaching into the clean air and shoving it away.