Chapter 156. Normalizing Garbage
Trash can distribution was easier than Rhys had expected, but then, perhaps he should have expected it to be easy, when he’d already taken control of a multi-city criminal logistics network. The greatest portion of effort went into crafting the baskets, since he had to do that manually, and trash baskets had to be as large as public trash cans to be meaningful. Rhys went from having the same joking opinion about Underwater Basketweaving classes as everyone else did, to being of the impression that they should be mandatory for all college, if not high school students. Luckily, several of the mages in his repertoire, especially the ex-criminal kind, had basketweaving backgrounds due to having grown up as mortals in a medieval world, and once he pointed them at using materials from the trash, they were able to rapidly accelerate his basketmaking efforts. He still had to add the void to the baskets, but that limited his efforts in the process to the very final step, so that Rhys could put all his effort into adding void, rather than building the entire basket from scratch.
The chips, fries, and soda were mostly enchanted-slash-enpotionated by people who weren’t Rhys nowadays. He still stepped in to make a personal effort on the snacks associated with new cities, to make sure they got the good stuff for long enough for his brand to spread its name and get people hooked, but once he got them started, he could count on others to imbue them with the sense of enlightenment or whatever other magical qualities he required. After all, the whole point of the sense of magicality imbued in the snacks was that it was only a sense of magicality, not actual magicality, so it being Trash Intent or Trash Enlightenment wasn’t important, nor did anyone else have to worry about imbuing their path and accidentally giving other mages access to their enlightenment; the chips never enlightened anyone, and it was all nothing but smoke and mirrors, so it was safe for anyone to ‘share their path’ through Rhys’s techniques.
The void baskets were different. No one else had access to the void like Rhys did, and the few who even noticed there was magic on the baskets couldn’t quite describe what Rhys had done to them, just that he’d certainly done something, so Rhys had to manually en-void the baskets. He didn’t mind. It was something to keep him occupied, and the fact that he had to do something gave him an excuse not to do the thousand other things he could be doing, that were always nagging at the back of his mind. Like rescuing other people from the camps.
I’m going to do it. I have to. I want to. But I couldn’t do it too quick in succession. Too quick, one after another, and conditions would get worse, not to mention the Empire would lock them down far worse. It would happen eventually anyways, but he wanted to control it. Control how and when it happened.
Now that he had bases in several cities, he could launch simultaneous attacks in a way he never could before. On top of that, he had manpower that he hadn’t had before. True, he couldn’t use all the criminals, but some of them were trustworthy enough, or hated the Empire enough individually that he could count on them for raiding the camps. Everything he’d done, including the trash baskets, was for the sake of fighting the Empire and freeing mages from the camps. He felt like he hadn’t done enough because he hadn’t directly gone to camps and fought to free them, but that wasn’t it at all. He’d only been playing the long game. Building up his manpower, strength, and location so that he could attack more effectively wasn’t a waste of time, and it wasn’t a wrong decision to make. So why did he feel so guilty about it?
Rhys sighed and rubbed his forehead, looking down at the void basket in front of him. He hadn’t started feeling so weird about it until the curse backlash… or maybe until he’d started playing with the void? He couldn’t be sure. He’d done them both at about the same time, so it was hard to untangle the effects of the two weird things he’d done that might mess with his mental state.
On the other hand, I’m in prime shape to attempt that new mind attack technique! Rhys smiled, glad he’d been able to find the good in it all. Sure, it was a strange kind of ‘good,’ but he’d take it. Who would expect a mental attack from a guy who mostly fought in melee, anyways? He knew he wouldn’t. And an unexpected attack on a front where someone expected no attack was even better than an ordinary sneak attack.
He had no illusions about the technique. It wouldn’t be mind control, or mind influence, or anything even close to it. If it worked half as well ash e hoped it would, it would essentially be like spam-mailing someone’s brain. Or maybe forcibly making someone relive their own trauma, or maybe forcing them to live his? Whatever it was, it would be a blunt instrument. A momentary attack, no more, and no less. He didn’t know if he was relieved or annoyed that his mind attack was kind of trash. No, he knew the answer, he thought, smiling to himself.
Pleased. Very pleased.
Who needed some difficult, finesse-based, ultra-detailed mind manipulation skill when he could just slap his opponents with trauma instead? Who needed to coerce an enemy into walking closer to a cliff when he could just trauma-dump them and attack them in the momentary opening trauma-dumping gave him? Who needed the moral quandaries of mind control when you could just mind-punch someone instead, with no more worries than punching them in the face instead of the brain? It was the perfect kind of mental attack for a trashy guy like him.
Plus, it eliminated the need for therapy! Why waste time and money on therapy when you could just toss your trauma at someone else instead? Quick, safe, and effective!
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.