noct
patreon
97. Powering Up
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 14:00:31 +0000 UTCThe banquet wasn’t the next day, but the day after. Rhys checked, but the market was mostly quiet, with only a few stalls bothering to open at all. With no reason to bother making his chips and plenty of gold in his pocket, he was free to focus on absorbing trash.
Trash star after trash star. He had to turn to the rats to get more second-tier impurities, then seek out the campus rats through his Straw-hunting rat friend to get even more. The rat still didn’t have any information on Straw’s whereabouts, but that was fine. If it was easy to find Straw, he would have found him already.
The last of the trash vanished, leaving only the caches the smugglers were hiding in the pile. Rhys left those alone, figuring they’d want them back. Besides, he had little use for them. They weren’t trash.
Looking over the fruits of his labor, Rhys dusted off his hands and sighed, proud of a job well done. Nothing but a big, empty field laid before him. And yet… there was something wrong about it. A fierce sensation of trash still welled up from the field, as if it were still covered in the enormous pile.
Rhys frowned. He scratched up a handful of dirt, but the sensation didn’t come from the earth—though the earth did have a fair share of impurities in it, from where the trash had decayed and leached into it over the years. No, it was coming from somewhere else. He walked the field, seeking after the sensation. The edges? No… the center. Out into the middle of the field, the dead ground rising up in puffs under his feet. He absorbed the impurities out of the earth as he walked, but even that did nothing to abate the sensation. It was strong. Almost the most powerful sensation of trash he’d ever felt, aside from the toxic trash pit.
Aside from… the toxic trash pit. Rhys stilled right over the place where the sensation grew strongest, then drew a broken shovel from his storage ring. Activating its intent, he struck the manifested blade into the earth. Could it be? Was this another Impure Well, like the one back at Infinite Constellation School? Ernesto had known about them, even gone out of his way to deliberately seek it out, and expected to find a curse at the bottom of it, which implied he knew about them. Was his knowledge firsthand? Were there Impure Wells on the grounds of Purple Dawn, too?
Only one way to find up. Earth piled up beside Rhys as he dug down. The deeper he got, the stronger the sensation grew. With nothing to do but shovel, Rhys found himself wondering if people weren’t drawn to dispose of things in the Impure Wells. At Infinite Constellation School, they’d used it as a dumping ground for useless and toxic potions. At Purple Dawn, they’d built a trash heap on top of one (if there really was one underneath the ground). Either way, they’d used the Impure Wells as a place to store trash. Was there something drawing them to use the wells as dumps?
A strange creeping sensation came over Rhys. He stopped for a moment, staring down toward the trashy sensation. If that was the case, then… could it be that these were what he’d been called here to clean?
He chuckled at himself. Lifting the shovel, he went back to digging. He was being ridiculous. Since the start of time, people had used things they considered as worthless or garbage as trash heaps. Whether it was the local retention pond or a swamp, if a land wasn’t immediately useful for human habitation or cultivation, then it became a dumping ground. The Impure Wells were more extreme versions of that than usual, in that they were more concentrated toxicity, and in that they were smaller, more precise points in the ground, but it was the same idea. Useless land was used as a dump. In a way, it was a credit to human ingenuity, that they could find a use for something they deemed useless; on the other hand, he’d hated nothing more than to see trash piled up on the side of the road back home, because the land along the road was ‘junk’ land that no one used, and therefore it was fine to trash it up. He’d even volunteered to help pick up that trash a few times before he’d ascended to an entirely-indoors existence, back in the dark ages known as his youth when he was required to go outside and get off the computer.
Toxic gunk started welling up around the shovel, and Rhys paused, letting it soak into his shoes. It was less vicious than the pit back home, without the secondary freezing, burning, and acid effects, but in return, the curse power contained within was doubly, triply, no, ten times as concentrated. Even Rhys, uniquely suited to handling curse power, could barley take contact with this gunk. It was black as night, and soaked into his skin on contact. Black bruises spread up his legs, and dark curse power corrupted his mana as it spread inward, toward his core, diminishing and filthing up the mana as it progressed. Rhys waited patiently, watching it come all the way to the edge of his core, a shard of mana held just outside a trash star. At the last second before the curse power took his life entirely, as his heart slowed and his veins turned to gunk, he jabbed the shard into the trash star and ignited it.
The curse power burned as he’d expected it to, exploding into purer mana than the mana he’d had beforehand. It wasn’t as pure as the droplets that came from igniting the trash stars, but it was close. Circulating the new pure mana through his mana passages, Rhys idly reinforced them and strengthened his core, but at the same time, he found himself wondering: what happened if he ignited a trash star built of nothing but curse power? If he compressed the curse power down to form the equivalent of the second-stage impurities, then burned it in the trash star technique, that usually squeezed out a single drop of that high-purity mana… what would happen? Curse power, when burned, gave him purer mana. Trash stars, when ignited, squeezed out a single drop of hyper-pure mana. If he combined the two…
Did I just discover a method to farm hyper-pure mana?
Rhys wasn’t one to sit around and mull over-long on theory when he had all the components right here in front of him, just waiting for him to give it a try. The curse power still welled up underfoot. He didn’t want to jump in yet; staking his life on being able to absorb trash was all well and good, but this time, he wasn’t pressured by a man vastly more powerful than him. He’d rather take things slow and absorb it at his own pace. Sure, he could probably jump in and survive, but why not experiment a little and figure out his strategy first?
So thinking, Rhys eagerly absorbed the curse power. When his core filled up, he compressed it from all directions, pushing and pushing until it became a little nugget of nasty, or in other words, a second-level impurity. The second he formed one of those impurities, he instantly worked on absorbing the curse power to form the next bundle, and so on, and so forth, piling up the impure clumps in the bottom of his core—careful to keep them separated from his droplets of hyper pure mana. Interestingly, the hyper pure mana seemed to avoid the clumps of impurity on its own, like water and oil. Rhys made a note of it and tucked it away in the back of his mind, but didn’t know what else to make of it for now. Curse power didn’t hesitate to infect mana, nor did impurities hesitate to corrupt it, so why did this hyper-pure mana behave as though it could fend off impurities?
A question for later. When he had enough of the dense impurities formed from pure curse power, Rhys started absorbing the curse power without compressing it… at first, only to realize his idea was flawed. A trash star wasn’t quite a true star, but it came close; it ignited because the weight of the trash he’d absorbed pushed down on it from all directions and pressurized the super-impurities deep inside his core to the point that they were willing to ignite, when usually they resisted ignition.
Rhys considered for a moment. He could go find trash, but that felt like cheating. He looked at the super-abundant curse power all around him, leaking in from underfoot, and a thought came to him. What if I put so many second-tier impurities in my core that they ignited under their own weight, without any extra trash? In other words, rather than using trash to apply so much mass that the impurities would ignite, he simply added more and more impurities until their own mass ignited them. In some ways, it was closer to a true star, which was built of a limited number of gasses, which collapsed in on themselves without any external help from heavy trash or rocks or anything like that.
It occurred to him that igniting a trash star like that might kill him, but at the same time, his heart raced with excitement. Kill him, sure. That was a risk. That was always a risk when he was playing around with impurities. But what if it did the opposite? What if this was the push he needed to break through Tier 2 and step onto Tier 3? Maybe one Impure Well wouldn’t be enough. Maybe he’d need two or three, or even a hundred. But this… this was exactly the kind of limit-pushing he had to engage in if he wanted to continue growing as a mage!
Laughing maniacally, Rhys dug down, causing more of the curse power to well up. It was so condensed it was a thick liquid, the color of dark maple syrup but if maple syrup smelled like death and rot instead of sugar and sap. One after another, he condensed second-tier impurities inside his core. The curse power kept welling up, and he kept condensing the impurities. Over and over. The impurities clustered at the center of his core and started building out. From a tight knot at the center of his core, to a dense cluster, to a ball. The ground sunk underneath him as the curse power flowed into him and out from under his feet. He let it sink, still not ready to plunge inside. Curse power had a different kind of corrupting effect than impurities. They were similar enough that he could resist both at this level, but he didn’t want to throw himself wholesale into curse juice out of nowhere, when he hadn’t really trained to absorb and handle curse power.
More and more impurities built up in his core, filling it up. The curse power welling up at his feet slowed as he sucked so much out that it started to get difficult to draw more up. At last, he could fit no more impurities in his core. It was full up of curse power, completely filled with the compressed curse energy.
Rhys circulated the final mote of mana he had, trembling with excitement and fear in equal proportions. He’d be absolutely beset by pure mana. It would be more energy than he’d ever handled before, with the trash stars, with the previous Impure Well, with his previous trash-burning efforts—energy to surpass all of those. Mana of such proportions that his best efforts to handle it—reforging his body—wouldn’t even absorb a proportion of the mana he would need to handle once he ignited all these impurities.
He manifested the scrap of mana in his hand, twisting it around his fingers. The little blue mote swirled around, shining in the darkness he’d built by digging this hole. It was mesmerizing… but also, he was stalling. He realized it, and couldn’t stop himself. Why was he stalling? It was obvious, wasn’t it? This was terrifying. He had so much potential mana inside of him. He’d essentially rolled a boulder up to the top of a mountain, then stood underneath it. If he pushed it, if he unleashed all that potential energy, would he survive?
Did I bite off more than I can chew? A note of doubt welled up in his mind, but he quickly crushed it. One didn’t advance without risking something. To put it another way, a mage who didn’t take risks, couldn’t grow stronger. Yes, this was a risk. No, he didn’t yet have a plan on how to use the energy. But if he stood here and wavered, waited until he was definitely strong enough to absorb it, then he would never grow stronger. Then he would really be trash, and even mediocre talent like Walter would surpass him, while he had to keep up with Bast if he wanted to have meaning in his own eyes.
“That’s right. Being a mage means biting off more than you can chew!” he declared to no one. Before his resolve could waver again, he formed the scrap of mana into a needle and plunged it into his core. The curse power impurities trembled, glowed red hot—then exploded. Overwhelming power rushed out, pouring into him with no gates, no restriction, no going back.
Oh fuck—
Comments
Kermit The Frog
🐸⭐
Jumure
This is one of those illegal cliffhangers I’ve heard about on the internet. ‘Fraid we’ll have to take you to jail noct.
