God of Trash-Chapter 66. Everyone Shall Become Trash
Rhys gripped the intents—all of them. The bricks, the clay, even the shape of the new furnace itself, he held all of them in his mind. His mind trembled, struggling to hold that much information and keep focus, but he forced himself to hold on anyways. If it wasn’t trash from start to finish—trash as the raw material, trash that he was trying to create, trash that held it all together—then it would have been impossible. His mind would have failed, and he would have blacked out, or worse. But it was all trash. Every part of the process was trash, and therefore, related to his path. It came naturally to him, and that made everything just a little bit easier, just enough that he could hold on. His head ached. His temples pounded, and his eyes felt as though someone were piercing them with needles, but he gripped the intents in his mind and refused to let go. They struggled, but his will was greater. No—when it came to trash, his will was the greatest. There was no overcoming his will for trash. His all-encompassing love for trash meant he simply couldn’t be overpowered. If he was going to make trash, with trash, then nothing was going to stop him—least of all the trash itself.
The clay was the first to go. As a raw material, its intent had never been the strongest to begin with, and now that he was forming it into something greater, it quickly fell in line and adapted to his intent. It would become the binding material to hold his furnace together. It would become something greater.
The bricks were harder. They remembered the glory days, the old times and their better lives as a larger, more complete building. They recalled being crudely hacked apart just now, torn asunder for his pitiful, childish construction. They were trash, yes, but they still had pride. They had their past, and they wanted to cling to it, even if he gave them a vision of a new construction.
Rhys pushed back. This wasn’t just a new, trashy construction. This was a new thing to aspire to. Something to become. They’d been trash. Even if they had once been the wall of a grand villa, they’d been reduced to nothing but a pile of bricks lying in the garbage, of no use. True, he admired their tenacity, and he appreciated their pride in what they had once been, but that was in the past. They would never be a wall again. No one else was going to come and pick them up out of the garbage. They either rotted away here, or became part of his new construction. There was no going back to the glory days. No hero who was going to rescue them and make them something grand and beautiful once more. This furnace he was trying to build wasn’t grand. It wasn’t beautiful. But it was something. It was a construction. It was better than lying purposelessly in the trash, forgotten and unused, with nothing relying on them at all.
The bricks hesitated. Their will trembled, and begrudgingly, they gave in. Better to be used and remembered than rot away in iniquity. They had once been something far grander, but they were at least being used now, and this was better than sitting in the hole until they became dirt. Their intent changed, morphing to meet his requirements. No longer did they strive to once more take the form of the manor wall they’d once been. Instead, they worked in harmony with the clay, accepting the form of the furnace Rhys had built. It was a reluctant harmony, one that they joined by force of Rhys’s will alone, but it was harmony nonetheless.
Rhys watched it from outside, noting the pushback against his will even as it gave in. He’d convinced the bricks to take his side, but that was it. They weren’t excited about it. He hadn’t imbued them with new purpose, or inspired them to become something greater. He could still improve this new technique of using Trash Intent to impose his will upon something.
It had been easier with the clothes, even if that one skirt had desperately fought his will. He was more familiar with fabric and clothes, having spent long enough creating costumes back in the day to know the ins and outs of the material and the tricks and techniques to working with it. Intuitively, he’d known how to merge the fabrics together and shape something new. The bricks were different. He was truly an amateur brick-and-mortar worker, and everything in this combination knew it. Unlike with his robes, the end result was shoddy, a first attempt at making something with all the inevitable mistakes and downsides that came along with it. If he had more comprehension of bricks and masonry, he certainly could have created something better that would have pleased the bricks more, and not only that, but he could have more easily convinced them to take new form.
He tucked that tidbit in the back of his mind. He wasn’t aiming to become a master mason, so he’d only bothered to read the bare minimum on masonry. His comprehension was shallow, barely more than a child’s understanding of sticky-thing-plus-rock-equals-house. This, though, proved that there was value in gaining a deeper comprehension even of topics that he had no intention of mastering, if he meant to impose his intent upon the trash, anyways, rather than accepting and enhancing the trash’s own intent. There was little he could do about it, now. Once he began the process, he had to see it to the end or else start over, and he really did only need a shoddy furnace he could manually force together for his purposes. But for future constructions, he should definitely read the books and maybe even seek the advice of experts, if he could find them and convince them to take interest in his trashy constructions. Deeper comprehension would make it easier for him to enforce his intent and help him create greater objects, both.
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The fire burned on. Rhys kept one hand on the furnace to keep enforcing his intent over it, so it didn’t lose shape or crack during the cooking process. He knew that what he was doing was kind of stupid and risky, and that unevenly heated clay tended to cook poorly and crack, but this was the easiest, quickest, dirtiest route to the end, and if that didn’t sound like absolute garbage, then he didn’t know what did. The closer he kept to his path, the easier the repair on the trash-cauldron would be, and given how exquisitely difficult that task was going to be, he needed to make it maximally easy on himself.
He'd piled some burnable trash within arm’s reach, and fed that into the fire as the furnace cured. When that ran out, he pulled more trash toward him with Trash Manipulation, and continued feeding the fire. In between feeding the fire, he pulled out the books he’d picked up on forging and continued reading them. He’d intended to just get a quick-and-dirty understanding of forging, but it seemed that comprehension was the one place he couldn’t afford to be trash. Maybe at higher levels, having trash comprehension would allow him to pull off crazy stunts, but he was still too weak to affect reality at that range, which meant it was time to read. He leaned away from the furnace as he read, wary of Az’s wrath. If any soot or dirt got on the books, there would be hell to pay.
He considered going back to the blacksmithing teacher and asking for his expertise, but decided against it. Purple Dawn was still against him and his school. Attending a class was one thing, but asking someone to offer their specific expertise to his specific ends? In the first place, he didn’t want to tip his hand to Purple Dawn to that extent, and let them know exactly what he was up to. The inevitable sabotage attempts that would follow were not what he needed right now; for now, he needed to quietly build up to his ultimate goal, so that he could launch the plan to get super rich so quickly that no one could intervene until he already had a good lining of gold in his pockets. Secondly, the chances that the teacher would decide to give him fake advice and sabotage him were higher in a one-on-one situation. True, he still saw value in that, and he was pretty sure, even though he’d failed last time, that he could use trash advice to the contrary to pull true advice out; but he wouldn’t know if the teacher was giving him good advice or bad, and that would make the job so much harder.
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Mostly, he just wanted to execute his plan in silence. The idea of the teacher trying to sabotage him was secondary. And of course, that assumed the teacher gave him the time of day at all; there was always the chance he asked, just to get immediately turned down, and then he’d simply wasted his time. But no, his primary motivation was secrecy, or at least, avoiding drawing attention to himself. It was true that involving Bast ran contrary to that, but first off, he trusted Bast to hide his comings and goings, and second off, he ultimately needed Bast, if this plan was going to work out. He knew he could trust Bast if he involved the man from the get go, but he was worried that Bast might be a bit skeptical if he came up to him with a get-rich plan at the end of the day, when Bast had seen nothing of what built up to it.
He eyed the pile of organic compost and smiled a secret smile to himself. He’d pulled it out by instinct, but what a correct instinct it had been. He’d need that if this was all going to come together.
But first, repairing the cauldron.
The clay under his hand finally grew hot. Rhys had to swap to another part of the furnace to keep Trash Intent going, then rapidly swap fingers to prevent them from getting burned off. Trash Body would let him ignore the injury, but he could do nothing but sit and wait for Self-Regeneration and healing potions to fix him up afterward, and he needed his plan to kick off by the time of the tournament, not weeks afterward. He couldn’t afford to be down a few fingers during this critical time where he could make lots and lots of money—oh, and I guess there’s also the thing with Ernesto, he allowed, much less worried about that. Unless Ernesto tried to kill him outright, there wasn’t much the man could do that would truly punish him, since something like locking him up in Purple Dawn would only inform him as to Straw’s location and position, and there was still plenty of trash in dungeons. As for torturing him or something like that, he’d rather not, but… well, it was a risk he ran. In any case, he didn’t plan to lose to Ernesto’s champion, but he also intended to get filthy rich, and between the two, he’d always focused on gaining more than he’d focused on minimizing losses.
It was like when he’d had Cynog coming after him with the intent to kill. When he’d gone to Sorden, he’d asked for access to the upper peak, not for her to protect him to Cynog. Taking a loss or a beating was acceptable. Even being terrorized by a bully was acceptable. What wasn’t acceptable, was not progressing in the world. If he missed out on gains, he’d be far more saddened than if he took a small loss. At the end of the day, after all, he was trash. If he got hurt, injured, or tortured, that was simply his lot in life. But if he failed to make progress? That was a true loss. Failure to progress meant he’d stay as weak trash forever, and that was unacceptable. He wanted to become ultimate trash, not remain as some weak-sap sad sack trash.
Asking Sorden for access had worked out then, and focusing on his current plan over worrying about Ernesto’s champion would likely work out now. Besides, it wasn’t as though he would get dramatically stronger in the next few days, unless he found another toxic trash pit like the one he’d absorbed back in his home school. Even if he spent all his time igniting trash stars until the tournament started, he didn’t know that it would matter, given how little progress each trash star gave him. It wasn’t that they didn’t give him immense growth; they did, moreso than any of his previous efforts had. The problem was that progress from Tier 2 to Tier 3 required immensely more mana than from 1 to 2; not only that, but he suspected that the new pure qi that came from the hyper-dense impurities was the key to unlocking his next Tier or advancements in this Tier, and the trash stars gave such minute amounts of it that he didn’t really foresee great advancements in the near future. He could absorb the entire trash pit and only advance a small step. Something like the toxic trash pit would be different; that would be enough to make a significant improvement. But for all that the trash here was vast and powerful, it had less impurities per space than the toxic trash pit. The trash pit’s impurities were far more concentrated, and stronger, as well. Not that this trash didn’t have strong impurities, or that he couldn’t concentrate it, but even if he did, it would have fewer, less powerful impurities than the toxic trash pit.
That toxic trash pit was really something, he reflected, thinking back on it. It was insanely powerful trash, almost too full of impurities.
His mind flashed even further back. All the way back to an internet forum, and a few simple words: I have a problem with trash. It’s best if I just show you. Was this what that guy meant? That absolutexistence fellow who’d messaged him out of the blue. Had he been talking about the toxic trash pit? Was there more than one of them? Was that the problem?
Rhys considered for a second, then shrugged. If it was, then he’d already figured out how to solve absolutexistence’s problem. The idea of more toxic trash pits existing made his heart race a little, though he knew he shouldn’t get his hopes up; his only hint was a message from a mysterious figure on an online forum in another world, and who knew if the guy was even related to him coming here. It seemed likely, but he wasn’t going to count anything out. It could be that he’d gotten a weird spam message, then had a heart attack and gotten isekai’d the usual way. True, it was far more convoluted than absolutexistence being behind his transmigration, but then, he had no proof in any direction.
In any case, if the toxic pits were absolutexistence’s ‘trash problem,’ then they were solved, he just hadn’t gotten around to applying the fix yet—mostly due to the fact that he hadn’t found a second one. If they weren’t, then no loss, he’d figure it out eventually. He had lots of time, what with ever-increasing lifespans on the table. If he was summoned here by absolutexistence, then the existence was clearly in no rush to point him in the right direction, and if he wasn’t, then he really was free to explore and play to his heart’s desire; either way, he’d clean up the trash problem by the simple fact of it being his path, if there was such a problem, and if there wasn’t, then he’d simply be doing the world a service.
He had things well in hand, and he was doing fine, as far as he knew. Which meant he was free to apply himself to the present issues… like the furnace under his hand.
Despite his shoddy construction, it had held. The clay had baked in place, and his incredibly primitive furnace was ready to fire its first pot…er, smelt its first metal. He’d definitely be pushing it to its limits or further, but that was what Trash Intent was for.
Thump. “You done over there?”
“Just getting started,” Rhys said, turning to find a masked Bast with a heavy sack of sand. He grabbed up his pot and scraped the metal bits he’d found into it, pulled out the surface-level impurities with his trash skills—the dirt, bacteria, and filth accumulated during a long time in the trash—then set it into the furnace to heat. He nodded at Bast. “Dig a pit about six inches deep and about…” he gestured at the cauldron “…tall, and pour the sand in.”
“Bossing me around? Do you know who I am?” Bast asked, pulling himself to his full height. He’d always been taller than Rhys, and somehow, he’d grown during the time they’d been apart. Rhys, too, had grown for once, but Bast maintained his lead.
“Yeah, I do. You’re the dude who’s gonna be filthy rich when this pays off, so dig us that pit,” Rhys replied, not even looking up from feeding the furnace more fuel to melt the metal.
“I like the way you think, Boss,” Bast said, tossing a salute at Rhys’s back. Taking off his mask, he stuck it in his robes, then swapped robes from his white ones to more plain ones and got to digging.
