Chapter 132. Byproducts
Rhys lifted his hands over the water and activated Trash Manipulation. He didn’t immediately latch onto any object or pull anything toward him, but simply stretched out Trash Manipulation, searching for everything he could sense around him.
Instantly, his senses lit up. The entire kitchen, the trash still stuck in the earth below, the hood hiding their operation from prying eyes from above—all were trash. Rhys took a deep breath and let it out, resisting the urge to roll his eyes at himself. Right. It was his hideout, his stronghold. There was so much trash here it was blinding. Singling out carbon dioxide in such a cluttered environment was a fool’s errand.
It was a deliberate choice to surround himself with trash, and in most cases, like an ambush or invasion, or even general-purpose training, it was a great idea, but in this moment? He’d have to spend twice the time and twice the effort just to tell if he could sense carbon dioxide, when even the air was laden with trash particles and impurities.
“Hey, Lira! Watch this pot. Don’t get in it, and make sure it stays clean, okay?” Rhys shouted.
“Why me?” Lira asked, looking up from cleaning her long, dangerous nails.
“You’re the most likely one to climb in. We aren’t selling bathwater yet, that’s a future endeavor! Keep the pre-soda safe, I’ll be right back!”
He left the garbage heap behind and jogged into the forest, away from the trash, the sewage entrance, and everything else that made his hideout a great location for a trash mage like himself in particular. When the air grew clear, and he couldn’t see a single scrap of garbage floating around under the trees, he finally slowed. A mossy spot at the foot of a large live oak beckoned him, and he sat down, resting his back against the enormous tree with its wide-ranging branches. He’d always had an affinity for live oaks, the monstrously enormous things with their branches that grew as far out as up. As a child, he’d climbed one in his parents’ front yard, before they got divorced. As an adult, he’d admired them whenever he came across them, particularly enjoying the one in the park nearby, before he’d stopped going outside. They were beautiful, and about the furthest thing from trash that he could imagine.
Clean air flowed around him. A spring ran gently in the background, trickling along the rocks. Soft, lush earth supported vines, undergrowth, and moss, and birds sang in the near distance. Rhys took a deep breath and let it out. This place was clean. This place lacked trash. This place was the ideal place to seek out the human byproduct, aka trash, known as carbon dioxide.
He folded his legs and rested his hands on his knees, feeling the urge to enter a truly meditative stance. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but it felt right. Closing his eyes, he breathed slowly, settling in to meditate.
Mana flowed in, clean and fresh… and flowed right back out as he breathed out, with only the slightest amount of accumulation in his core. Rhys almost laughed, except he didn’t want to lose concentration. He’d spent all his time working on trash cultivation, so he’d forgotten just how trash his talent was when he wasn’t working with trash. Truly, this was a pathetic level of talent. He thought back to his early days, when Bast and he had been getting chosen by schools, and Bast had been fought over, while the teachers didn’t even want to look at him. Now that he knew more about the world, he really understood it. Looking at his raw, normal talent, he was the kind of mage who would waste their entire human lifespan just attempting to gather enough mana, who, when he was an old graybeard, might be able to progress to Tier 2 and prolong his life enough to be a whitebeard by the time he hit Tier 3, his strength at that point meaningless as the end of his life rapidly progressed. Luckily, he’d discovered his true skill with trash, and was able to almost keep up with a once-in-a-century genius like Bast instead of wasting away trying to cultivate by the ordinary routes.
Still, he wasn’t trying to absorb mana. No, to the contrary; his deep breathing was for the purpose of generating as much carbon dioxide as possible, to make it easier to sense it around him. He extended his Trash Manipulation all around him, breathing evenly as he did so. Unlike the cluttered environment of his stronghold, there was little for Trash Manipulation to latch onto here. A discarded skeleton, left behind by a predator; a pile of ash from a long-abandoned campfire. He extended his senses further, deeper into the world around him. Bug carcasses loomed large in his vision, lit up like neon embers in the darkness of the forest. Further. He had to see more. Even smaller trash. Things beyond the limit of his normal vision. He needed Trash Manipulation to be more sensitive, more delicate, to sense further and detect more detail. He focused, focusing on nothing, on sensing, on reaching out. More. More. More.
Everything else fell away. He no longer felt the moss under his legs or the cool breeze on his skin. His entire self was absorbed in sensing deeper and further with Trash Manipulation. Time passed. Hours, then days. Lira stumbled upon him, only to retreat without disturbing him, and tell the others not to disturb him either.