God of Trash

Rhys charged into the void before he could think about it any longer. He burst out of the confines of his core into a by-now-familiar darkness and immediately stopped. There were things in the void that he didn’t want to encounter—no, he didn’t even want to risk drawing their attention too hard. Staying close to the comfort of his core meant he could beat a quick retreat from the void if that being decided to take interest in him, especially an aggressive interest.

The instant he entered the void, he knew he’d made the right decision. The words of the tome suddenly started slotting into place in his brain, and everything made more sense about… everything. The void. The world. Life in general.

Whoa, some distant part of Rhys noted, I need to be careful. As he uncovered the truths contained within the tome, the realizations he made were adjusting not just his perception of the void, but his perception of the whole world. But how could it not? The void was so much. It was everything. Or rather… it was a lack of everything. It was the place where things could be, and the place where things were not. The enormity of it laid before him, stretched bare to the horizon. He, here, on the edge of the void, was the least of it, seeing the least of what the void had to offer. The void called to him. Further, deeper. This shallow end wasn’t enough to comprehend all the book had to offer. Just a little deeper, and he could understand everything. Entering the void had given him such a boost, so heading into the depths of the void would surely only continue to enhance his understanding. A little further. One more step into the darkness. It wasn’t that dangerous. He was still close enough to retreat safely. Just a little more. A little more wouldn’t hurt. He hadn’t sensed that terrifying being at all. It wasn’t close. He could make it a little further before anything took notice.

Rhys snapped back to reality as darkness closed in all around him. He spun around to find the spot of light that signified his core twinkling in the distance, far away from where he stood now. He shook his head, shaking off the remnant cry of the void, and raced back toward the light. It was like a siren’s call, luring him deeper even now. He could ignore it easily enough when he was conscious, but the draw tugged at him, calling him deeper on an existential level. When he was lost in contemplation, it became irresistible. He hadn’t even realized he was moving until he’d woken up, already almost as deep in the void as he’d ever gone.

He couldn’t sense the being he’d sensed last time, but then, he was pulling his mana in tight, trying everything he could to avoid drawing attention to himself. The pile of trash and excess energy oozing out into the void from his core drew more attention than him, but… Rhys lifted his head and took it all in. From here, the trash, and his core, were nothing but a tiny pinprick of light in the void. Like a single star in the abyss of space. The void was so immense and so empty that he was infinitesimally tiny. Not even worth looking at. The being he’d sensed before could be right next to him, or billions of miles away, and it was all the same to the void. It had infinite size, and no size at all; it was a place where space didn’t matter. Time barely seemed to. He didn’t know if he’d been in here for the blink of an eye or a thousand years. Hopefully closer to the former than the latter, but in here, time flowed so strangely that he couldn’t be sure.

Retreating to his star, he took a deep breath and settled in again. This time, though, he was ready for the siren’s call, and resisted it passively. His comprehension on the void expanded and expanded, and he realized that his attempt to stick the void to something as though it was a material was misguided in the first place. The void wasn’t something you could connect to something else. As an absence, it was naturally impossible to join to an object. No, he’d been thinking of it wrong. Too used to handling pieces of trash that were physical objects, and completely unused to handling trash in its concept form. As a void dimension outside of the regular confines of space, the void was more of a concept than an object. And when it came to connecting concepts to things, it was more important to imbue them than to join them. He didn’t need to weave the void into the basket, he needed to imbue the basket with the void. Give it the void attribute, and make the basket more void-aligned so that the void and the basket resonated, and called out to one another. It was like activating Trash Intent, not using Trash Enchantment.

But that was no good. He couldn’t activate Trash Intent on something on the other side of the world. He needed it to be more like Trash Enchantment, something with a one-time cost and a permanent effect, or else it was… not completely useless, but not useful, either. He could maintain one or two, maybe, at the most, maybe use them in combat to void people, but it would have the same limitations as any spell; someone strong enough would be able to fight back, or even outright block the spell, and he wasn’t sure that voiding people was a good idea, either, when his core was connected to the void. Giving living people direct access to his core didn’t sound like a great way to start off a fight.

No, I need something more permanent. Something that I can set and forget. Something I can cast a thousand times, something that other people can’t enter but trash can, something passive with a low ongoing cost. He twisted his lips, pondering the void and his basket at once. The void wasn’t opposed to permanence. The void itself was permanent. It was just that connecting the void and an object was something like connecting matter and antimatter. The basket was something, and the void was nothing. The basket wanted to exist. The void wanted it to nonexist. That was all. Except that ‘that was all’ wasn’t an easy thing to hear when Rhys desperately wanted ‘that was all’ to not be the answer. There had to be a way. Something he could do to make the existence and nonexistence align.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

In his mind, the image of the basket hovered. The concept of the void superimposed it, and Rhys’s eyes widened. That’s it! That’s exactly it!