God of Trash

Rhys grabbed a clump of energy that still hadn’t merged into the trash star. There were a few lumps like that, all of them the energy he’d drawn out of the guards. The energy clung to itself, taking a little longer to merge into the trash star than ordinary trash did. The energy passed through his hand and into the woman’s hand, but he didn’t release it yet. He kept dragging, pulling it through her body into the place where her core had been. She scrunched her face in pain and bit her lip, refusing to scream. Rhys sensed the damage inside her, the places where her passages were ripped and torn where the core had been ripped out, but he also sensed what her body wanted to be—what it knew it could be. He activated Trash Intent, and a core took shape inside her, reconnecting to her mana passages. The mana he’d pulled from the guard fueled it, forming its shape. The woman gasped as she felt the core inside her, but Rhys wasn’t done. He narrowed his eyes. He needed to fix it in reality, make it take physical shape, or else the second he released her hand, it would vanish.

He had captured more than just mana from the guard, but also his vitality and any other energy he could absorb. Now, he fed the vitality into the woman, growing new cells from the mana passages. He fed the vitality and mana into her ruined mana passages and repaired them, growing them back along the shape that Trash Intent gave him. A core and mana passages weren’t entirely physical, but they weren’t entirely non-physical, either. Mana and vitality went into forming them, and he poured both into reforming hers.

All the mana he’d gathered from the one guard vanished into reforming her core. Rhys drew out the mana of another guard and kept going, forming the last of her passages, then pushing further, shaping it into her core. At some point, he ran out of energy again, and drew out the mana of yet another guard. He transitioned from using Trash Intent to Trash Enchanting as the core took form.

It was shockingly easy, but only because there was no mana in her body. Without preexisting mana, there was nothing to oppose him as he reformed her core. He could create ghostly rat forms, and if he thought about it, if he used vitality and had some rat cells, there was nothing to keep him from recreating life. In comparison, reforming the woman’s core with vitality and mana, when he had pieces of her mana passages and her natural body to start with, not to mention lots of experience reforging his own core, was almost trivial.

The core he rebuilt wasn’t up to the standards of the one she’d had before. Her body was at least Tier 2, but the core was only Tier 1. Even so, it was a massive jump in power for someone who had been unable to process mana to be able to process mana once again. She could use spells, empower her body with mana, activate any techniques she knew… and potentially even Tier up again, with enough time and effort. It wasn’t a perfect, ideal solution, but it was better than nothing.

And from the look on the woman’s face, better than she’d imagined possible. She gasped and stepped back. Putting a hand on her stomach, she looked up at him. “H-how…?”

“Try it out. I don’t know how long it’ll work, or if it’ll work when I’m not here, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Of course. I… thank you.”

Rhys nodded, smiling earnestly for the first time in a long time. “My pleasure.”

She looked over her shoulder at the other mages. “Can you do it again? For everyone?”

Rhys shook his head. “No.”

“Oh, of course not. I shouldn’t have pushed—”