Chapter 103. Cursed Holes
Rhys plunged into the curse power. The curse power was dense enough to become a liquid, but it didn’t support him at all. He sunk straight down into the depths of the well. Curse power poured directly into his body, soaking into every pore and sliding through every vein, coiling into his core. It would have been insidious, but Rhys drank it up like a gamer sucking down toxic energy drinks. More, more. Give me more!
His technique was the same. Compress, compress, compress, ignite. He drew out the potato plants and pulled out a new handful of tomato seeds to continue growing his crops whenever the vitality grew overwhelming, but his body was different now, and it took far more to overwhelm it. Down, down, down. The black liquid swirled around him, translucent enough that the sun could be seen overhead, but too murky to see the bottom. Rhys gazed straight down, as he condensed another golden orb in his core. There was something at the bottom of this well. The first bone he’d captured from the first rider trembled, as if it sensed its compatriot. Another piece of the same curse was at the bottom of this well.
As he plunged, a thought wiggled at the back of Rhys’s mind. What if this curse was pieces of Straw? Immediately, he dismissed it. The timeline didn’t add up. Infinite Constellation School had been tossing garbage in the hole for far longer than Straw had been imprisoned, and that skeleton at the bottom, the one who had held the sunshine sword, he still possessed right now, too afraid to use it in fear it would shatter, had died a long, long time ago, presumably fighting the very same rider Rhys had vanquished. Plus, Straw wasn’t a rider, nor did the rider look anything like Straw or emit anything like the kind of pressure Straw let off.
Still, he felt like the thought wasn’t far off. Maybe it wasn’t Straw, but a different Remnant Weapon. Some other cursed being built by the former demon king, torn apart and scattered over the lands.
Was that Straw’s fate, then? Rhys frowned, worry creeping up from the back of his mind, but pushed it down. Straw was a Strawman, at the end of the day. Even if he was torn apart, he’d still survive the experience. Not only that, but the sensation he got from Straw, and the sensation he got from a fragment of this cursed being, were incomparable. Straw was… a weirdo, and sometimes he’d felt stranger danger around the guy, but ultimately, he was just a guy trying to live his life, who’d had an unfortunate history the Alliance couldn’t overlook. This curse felt actively malicious, as though, were it reformed, it would tear the Alliance down with its own two hands (and four hooves). Comparing the two, the relatively harmless Straw was probably just imprisoned somewhere—somewhere Ernesto could access, at that—whereas this one had been ripped to shreds and sealed away with extreme prejudice. To put it simply, Straw is like a red-colored numbered dog who’s valuable experimental material, and this rider is more like the dangerous silver-haired man who picked length over girth. Both could be considered ‘evil,’ from a certain perspective, or at least, ‘nonhuman,’ but one of them was actually a nice guy deep down, and the other one wanted to hijack the Planet for Jenova… or whatever.
No, wherever Straw is, I bet he’s in one piece, Rhys decided, nodding. If he was wrong, at least now he knew to also look for a dismembered or pieced apart Straw. Damn, if they really did tear him apart… talk about a straw in a haybale. He shook his head. Hopefully they hadn’t torn Straw apart to, well, straw. Even if he spent the rest of his life looking, he wasn’t sure he could find all the bits of straw that went into a Strawman as large as Straw had become, when provoked. That thing had been massive. Bigger than the town they’d been in. He had to believe in Ernesto’s greed and desire to have the whole Straw here to study… that, and he wasn’t sure whether tearing Straw apart to absolute shreds would kill the man or not. Probably, right? Otherwise, what would constitute death for the construct? Burning and nothing else? It was the kind of hardiness that would let Straw survive the destruction of all the former demon king’s weapons, he supposed, but damn, what an impressive hardiness if so.
I kind of doubt you have to go that far to kill him, but who knows? He already had vitality embedded in his cells and a body with high Self-Regeneration. If his skills kept scaling like this, he could very well see a distant future where someone had to crush his every cell to kill him. It was a distant future, to be sure, and he wasn’t sure Straw was that powerful… but it was possible.
Guess I won’t discount that possibility, then.
As he thought, he continued to suck in curse power and condense gold orbs in his core. He had the distant feeling that he was doing this whole magehood and levelling up thing wrong; he could recall a few novels that had this kind of power style, and he was pretty sure the protagonists had only made one gold orb, not lots of them, but it seemed to be working, so who was he to tell this world that its cultivation system was a little wonky? Besides, this was reality, and that was novels, so between the two, wasn’t this one the more likely one to be the ‘true’ answer?
Or maybe this world’s just weird. All things were possible, after all. It wasn’t like he understood the basic mechanics that made magic tick. In the terms of his homeworld, he was doing chemistry, not physics, bashing together chemicals to see how they’d react without understanding the basic mechanics of how electrons moved from chemical to chemical during the reactions to form the new materials that came out the other side. And he certainly wasn’t doing mathematics, or figuring out the theoretical basis from which physics could be derived, though honestly, sometimes he kind of got close, like when he pondered the basis of trashiness or considered the deep implications of a new skill. One way or another, though, he definitely wasn’t doing physics.