God of Trash

Rhys was full, but only of food. He still had plenty of room for mana. That, and in the afterglow from that fantastic, cultivation-boosting meal, he wanted to try another round with the curse power-mana transition. His everything had been smoothed, detoxified, strengthened, reinforced, and empowered, and he could still feel some of those subtle and mysterious effects lingering in his body and mana infrastructure. He didn’t know that absorbing a bunch of curse power and turning it into hyper-pure mana under the meal’s effects would do anything, but it was worth a shot. Better than not trying, anyways. As long as he had bonuses active on his body, why not try to squeeze every last ounce of bonus out of those bonuses? The other kids were wasting it, going to dances or whatever. They should go focus on leveling up their magehood, the same as Rhys!

Then again, they probably aren’t trash. Other mages had the leeway to seek out useless skills and spend their time hanging out with friends and having fun. Most of them weren’t so absolutely locked to working on their skills, techniques, and spells all the time to avoid falling behind, unlike Rhys, who had to work hard or lose out.

He walked down the wall of the ravine and down into the depths, where a little hole marked the place the Impure Well had been filled in. As he descended, he came across a man, picking up the loot from the hidey-hole that had previously been hidden in the trash. The man jumped at seeing him, then fumbled out his sword, holding onto the smuggled goods with his other hand.

Rhys walked past with a little wave. “Good evening. Don’t mind me.”

The smuggler followed him with his sword, then, seeing Rhys was about to walk off, hid the smuggled stuff into a storage ring and chased after him, sword bared. “I can’t let you live, now that you’ve seen my face.”

“I saw nothing, but if you touch me, you’ll die,” Rhys replied, still walking away.

The smuggler paused. Their resolve, and consequently their mana, fluctuated, as uncertainty chipped away at their will to fight. They must have been an underling or something, weaker than the real smugglers, because his Tier was only two, the same as Rhys’s, and between the two of them, Rhys’s mana burned brighter. This man was barely a threat to Rhys. Only with some kind of earth-shaking item or gear could he hope to defeat Rhys.

“You saw me in the tournament, right? That was only a thousandth of my true potential.” He turned suddenly, facing the man. This close to the Impure Well, it was easy to draw forth its curse energy, and he fed it into the curse circulating around his core, giving it just enough power to appear, but not fully manifest. Projections of a pair of enormous skeletal hands materialized around him, one hand on either side of him. He smiled at the smuggler as the wind whipped up around him, a dark light playing over his body from the curse power he was using, his eyes in shadow save for the distant gleam of blue mana in their depths. “Out here, where no one will see our battle and no one will ever find your body, would you like to try me?”

The smuggler inadvertently backed away a step, then forced himself to freeze. His shaking hands held the sword tight, and a final sort of resolve burned in his eyes.

“Or you could leave and pretend you never saw me,” Rhys hinted. “I don’t care what you’re up to out here. Smuggling, grift, whatever, doesn’t bother me. I’m not a Purple Dawn student. Purple Dawn’s business isn’t my business, so you can rest assured that I don’t give a single shit about your plans.”