God of Trash

Rhys wandered through the sewers, absorbing trash as he went. This was close enough that he could return in a flash, but not so far that he had to worry about the others handling a member of the Water Syndicate alone. He sighed, a little frustrated. He wanted to go search for the Syndicate himself, but now that he had an establishment, he had to protect it, too.

This is annoying. I need a better solution.

He lifted his head, looking at the filth he sucked in. The sewers were pretty clean nowadays, with his constant efforts, but he was still just one guy, and he wasn’t walking the sewers on the daily. There was enough filth to make it worth it. Still, it was diminishing each time, while his needs for trash grew greater.

I need a way to get more trash.

Two problems. He sighed again, frustrated. What could he do? Something to gather more trash… to move instantaneously.

“The garbage truck!” he said aloud, then laughed at his own joke. As funny as a garbage truck would be, they didn’t exactly move instantaneously, or even quickly—since it wasn’t as though he truly needed instantaneous movement. Rapid movement would be fine.

Still, maybe there was something to that? Back at Infinite Constellation, he’d gone around collecting trash. In this city, let alone the Empire, that couldn’t possibly be a solution. It was too large. If he spent all his time gathering trash, he wouldn’t gain enough to make his efforts worth it. He needed something else. Something that congregated the trash, but more consistently than ‘whenever someone got annoyed enough to haul their junk to the garbage heap.’ That was far too slow. It was a good way for him to suck up historical trash, and—speaking of historical trash—he did fully intend to investigate the Empire for wherever it’d thrown out those valuable artifacts that were inconvenient to its rule, but it was somewhat useless when it came to ongoing trash, or a constant rate of trash absorption. Especially with his trash fire, he was currently insatiable when it came to trash, or at least, close enough that it felt that way. He needed more. More and more trash!

The Empire produced more than enough trash. It was absolutely filthy with garbage. Filth everywhere, piled up by every door. If he gathered it all, he’d have more than enough. Enough, even, to advance once more, if he was lucky.

But how? That was the thing. How could he acquire all the trash produced in the Empire? The Empire was a vast thing, absolutely enormous. There was no way for him to manually gather all the trash in one place. Like he’d just thought, it would take way too long.

He paused, the knee-deep water sloshing around him. Wait. There was something else. Something associated with the trash truck. Those ubiquitous bins, whether silver, black, green, or blue, and sometimes even exotic colors like yellow or purple: the humble, long-serving rubbish bin. The big kind, the kind kept outside and rolled to the street every Sunday, or whenever the trash truck came by. What about those?

Not a literal set of garbage bins. That would still require manual pickup, and though he could cobble together a trash service with his underlings, it wouldn’t be worth it. They wouldn’t be able to expand his chip empire, and since that was his real Empire-toppling enterprise, that was more important than strengthening himself right now. After all, once the Empire ate it, he could go back to happily levelling his own core, rather than his trash star, with no intercession by some bullshit repressive government. Thus, Empire toppling took precedence over seeking strength. That didn’t mean that he couldn’t seek strength, or that he didn’t intend to seek strength—no, he did, absolutely—but that he couldn’t dismantle his current efforts to realign his people to something as selfish as strengthening himself.

“Then, what if they all just teleport garbage to me?” Rhys said aloud. He walked on, continuing to absorb trash as he walked. He didn’t have a teleportation technique, but he did have something like it, didn’t he? Rhys touched his chest, where the little red book sat. The void. The hole in his core that led to the void let him store trash and mana on its far side, then absorb it back into himself. What if he connected all the trash cans to the part of the void near him, then absorbed the trash into his core from there?