Chapter 97. Powering Up
The banquet wasn’t the next day, but the day after. Rhys checked, but the market was mostly quiet, with only a few stalls bothering to open at all. With no reason to bother making his chips and plenty of gold in his pocket, he was free to focus on absorbing trash.
Trash star after trash star. He had to turn to the rats to get more second-tier impurities, then seek out the campus rats through his Straw-hunting rat friend to get even more. The rat still didn’t have any information on Straw’s whereabouts, but that was fine. If it was easy to find Straw, he would have found him already.
The last of the trash vanished, leaving only the caches the smugglers were hiding in the pile. Rhys left those alone, figuring they’d want them back. Besides, he had little use for them. They weren’t trash.
Looking over the fruits of his labor, Rhys dusted off his hands and sighed, proud of a job well done. Nothing but a big, empty ravine laid before him. And yet… there was something wrong about it. A fierce sensation of trash still welled up from the bottom of the ravine, as if it were still covered in the enormous pile.
Rhys frowned. He scratched up a handful of dirt, but the sensation didn’t come from the earth—though the earth did have a fair share of impurities in it, from where the trash had decayed and leached into it over the years. No, it was coming from somewhere else. He walked the earth, seeking after the sensation. The edges? No… the center. Rhys followed the sensation out into the middle of the ravine, the dead ground rising up in puffs under his feet. He absorbed the impurities out of the earth as he walked, but even that did nothing to abate the sensation. It was strong. Almost the most powerful sensation of trash he’d ever felt, aside from the toxic trash pit.
Aside from… the toxic trash pit. Rhys stilled right over the place where the sensation grew strongest, then drew a broken shovel from his storage ring. Activating its intent, he struck the manifested blade into the earth. Could it be? Was this another Impure Well, like the one back at Infinite Constellation School? Ernesto had known about them, even gone out of his way to deliberately seek it out, and expected to find a curse at the bottom of it, which implied he knew about them. Was his knowledge firsthand? Were there Impure Wells on the grounds of Purple Dawn, too?
Only one way to find up. Earth piled up beside Rhys as he dug down. The deeper he got, the stronger the sensation grew. With nothing to do but shovel, Rhys found himself wondering if people weren’t drawn to dispose of things in the Impure Wells. At Infinite Constellation School, they’d used it as a dumping ground for useless and toxic potions. At Purple Dawn, they’d built a trash heap on top of one (if there really was one underneath the ground). Either way, they’d used the Impure Wells as a place to store trash. Was there something drawing them to use the wells as dumps?
A strange creeping sensation came over Rhys. He stopped for a moment, staring down toward the trashy sensation. If that was the case, then… could it be that these were what he’d been called here to clean?
He chuckled at himself. Lifting the shovel, he went back to digging. He was being ridiculous. Since the start of time, people had used things they considered as worthless or garbage as trash heaps. Whether it was the local retention pond or a swamp, if a land wasn’t immediately useful for human habitation or cultivation, then it became a dumping ground. The Impure Wells were more extreme versions of that than usual, in that they were more concentrated toxicity, and in that they were smaller, more precise points in the ground, but it was the same idea. Useless land was used as a dump. In a way, it was a credit to human ingenuity, that they could find a use for something they deemed useless; on the other hand, he’d hated nothing more than to see trash piled up on the side of the road back home, because the land along the road was ‘junk’ land that no one used, and therefore it was fine to trash it up. He’d even volunteered to help pick up that trash a few times before he’d ascended to an entirely-indoors existence, back in the dark ages known as his youth when he was required to go outside and get off the computer.
Toxic gunk started welling up around the shovel, and Rhys paused, letting it soak into his shoes. It was less vicious than the pit back home, without the secondary freezing, burning, and acid effects, but in return, the curse power contained within was doubly, triply, no, ten times as concentrated. Even Rhys, uniquely suited to handling curse power, could barley take contact with this gunk. It was black as night, and soaked into his skin on contact. Black bruises spread up his legs, and dark curse power corrupted his mana as it spread inward, toward his core, diminishing and filthing up the mana as it progressed. Rhys waited patiently, watching it come all the way to the edge of his core, a shard of mana held just outside a trash star. At the last second before the curse power took his life entirely, as his heart slowed and his veins turned to gunk, he jabbed the shard into the trash star and ignited it.
The curse power burned as he’d expected it to, exploding into purer mana than the mana he’d had beforehand. It wasn’t as pure as the droplets that came from igniting the trash stars, but it was close. Circulating the new pure mana through his mana passages, Rhys idly reinforced them and strengthened his core, but at the same time, he found himself wondering: what happened if he ignited a trash star built of nothing but curse power? If he compressed the curse power down to form the equivalent of the second-stage impurities, then burned it in the trash star technique, that usually squeezed out a single drop of that high-purity mana… what would happen? Curse power, when burned, gave him purer mana. Trash stars, when ignited, squeezed out a single drop of hyper-pure mana. If he combined the two…
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