God of Trash
Chapter 99. Vital Tomatoes

Rhys passed out the second he returned to his room. This wasn’t a sleep like the sleep he’d had the past few days, a sleep for pleasure or for ordinary exhaustion, but a deep, all-consuming sleep. He surrendered to it and didn’t wake up until late into the next day, and still felt groggy and exhausted afterward. Sitting up, he stretched, frowning a bit, but it only took him a short while to realize what it was.

He drew out his tomatoes to confirm it, scanning them with his mana. As expected, they had the same energy signature as he himself did. This confirmed his suspicion that he hadn’t truly gained Trashomancy—the skill hadn’t popped, in any case—but instead merely found a way to revitalize objects on a more true, deep level using some form of Aura and Intent. However, it still wasn’t a true revival. He’d forcibly fed the tomato seed his own vitality, and therefore fed the fires of whatever tiny spark of life remained in it. The ones that had burst, had burst because there was no life left at all. This one had still been some tiny bit alive; not enough that it could have grown the ordinary way, if he’d put it in dirt and fed it water, but enough that when he merged it with his own mana and vitality, that tiny spark was able to burst back into life. To prove that it wasn’t true trashomancy, it had died the second he stopped forcibly feeding it vitality and mana, with no ability to grow or survive without that tether. The tomatoes remained because they had matured enough, while the original plant was on life support, that they could survive on their own. It was like a far less disgusting version of keeping a woman or female animal alive for long enough for their baby to be born; he couldn’t keep the original seed, already on the verge of true death, alive without the constant feed of energy, but once he got the tomatoes from the vine, they were no different from any other tomatoes, except that they were full of the thing that had fed them: namely, his vitality.

Curious, Rhys took a bite of tomato. It tasted like a tomato, like he’d expected it to, but he almost spat it out in surprise when a gush of vitality slammed into his body. He pitched forward, clasping a hand to his mouth to keep himself from vomiting. No, no, push it down, push it down—he swallowed, and sat back, closing his eyes and crossing his legs to focus on his internal energies. The rush of vitality struck him, all massed up in one place. Rhys drew it out of his stomach and circulated it around his body. His exhaustion alleviated, and the low-grade headache he’d been feeling since he woke up diminished. One bite at a time, circulating his energy carefully, Rhys ate the tomato. The vitality he’d been missing, the excess he’d pushed into the tomatoes, came back to him as he ate this tomato. At the time, the mana had been too much, and he’d had excess mana, which he had converted to vitality to grow the tomato without realizing it. He’d put a little too much vitality into the tomatoes when he’d grown them, and ended up at a deficit, but the excess mana that he’d turned into vitality to grow tomatoes was so extreme that eating the tomato meant he not only regained his missing vitality, but gained more than he’d had to begin with. Basically, he had transformed an excess of mana into an excess of vitality.

Vitality coursed through him. This was the same energy that healing potions contained, and now, unrestrained by a carefully measured potion, it raced through him. Hidden injuries and aches healed away under the rush of powerful vital energy. As his body healed, it also strengthened as the vitality reinforced his muscles and organs. Before, he’d rebuilt his body from the cells up, but that was just fixing his physical state. Now, with vital energy, he tied his body to the magical force known as vitality, therefore transmuting his mortal physical body to something inherently magical. He felt his natural regeneration rate increase, and as he did so, got a surprising message:

Self-Regeneration: 35 > 55

His brows shot up. Twenty whole levels? How—but no, it wasn’t because he’d practiced the skill, or anything mundane like that. It was because he’d discovered a new insight into regeneration, and reforged his body to fundamentally regenerate far faster than it had before. It reinforced the message he’d been learning this whole time, that grinding skills was far inferior to searching for fresh insights and new ways to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish. Sure, he could have ground Self-Regeneration up twenty levels through brutal, self-punishing methods, but even if he had, he wasn’t sure the skill would enhance his regeneration as much as his new insight and reforging had granted him. Grinding skills was the lowest way to advance them, and gave him the least power per level. All the significant increases in skill and power came from his comprehension and hard work to increase his power through unconventional methods.

He pinched his chin. He’d beaten people a Tier above him before. Was this why? The fact that despite his low Tier and seemingly low skill levels, he had primarily advanced through strange an unconventional techniques, which gave him vast jumps in power that the System struggled to properly represent? It did make sense. He was following his path, finding the techniques and skills that worked best for him in particular, rather than following a generic path and simply doing what the masses thought was best in order to advance. Of course they would advance more weakly and less powerfully for simply doing the rote advancement, whereas he worked to eke out a path out of trash, and as a consequence, invested far more power in himself than those who followed the generic, easy path set forth by the System ever could. The System laid forth a path for everyone to advance, but what it didn’t do was lay forth the optimal path for anyone in particular. Advancing beyond the limits of the System was the secret to fighting above tiers and growing rapidly. It was something to be wary of, that he wasn’t the only person who must have discovered this. Just because someone was lower tier than him, didn’t mean they wouldn’t be able to put up a good fight. He had to live with his eyes wide open.

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Having contemplated the mysteries of the System, Rhys drew out another tomato. He was already full of vitality, but why stop at just being full? Why not go even further beyond, and try double-reinforcing his vitality? He was pretty sure he couldn’t manage three, but two? Two seemed doable. It was a shame about the tomatoes in general, that he wasn’t using them to make ketchup, but they were too valuable to give to others. He’d checked on the first one, but these tomatoes had no seeds. It made sense; they’d been forced into life by an unholy overload of mana and through rooting in Rhys’s own body and drawing on his personal vitality. It would be more shocking if they’d developed properly through and through. The fact that they were this complete was already a surprise. He’d half expected them to rot in a heartbeat, or be somehow immaterial.

Instead, they were a treasure. A treasure useless for dressing fries, but highly useful for advancing his magehood. Between the two, he knew he should be happier that he’d found something so useful for advancement, but a part of him, deep in his trashy heart, cried that he couldn’t sow any seeds to grow the base ingredients for the magic elixir known as ketchup. Still, he’d asked Laurent for some seeds. Maybe the man would come through. He still had all of Rina’s gear. If Rina needed to make one last appearance or two, he could make it happen. Anything for his beloved ketchup. Anything. Well, almost anything. Consent was key, and all that.

He ate the second tomato and reinforced his cells and body with vitality once more. There was no huge jump in regeneration levels this time, but he felt the vitality sink deeper into his every pore and crevasse, building up the power of vitality in his body such that it was more deeply linked in his flesh, until the two were inextricably entwined. From now on, his body was permanently linked with vitality, and would always possess more energy and regeneration than an ordinary fleshy body.

Of course, two tomatoes did not make a significant advancement, no matter how laden with vitality they were. Aside from the breakthrough of linking his body permanently to vitality, he was still at the trash tier of having a magically-enhanced body. Luckily, there were still more tomatoes in his inventory, more tomato seeds he could fish out of the marinara, and more curse energy to delve in that Impure Well. Rhys patted his full stomach. He couldn’t eat any more tomatoes—not because he was full, though that was the sensation his body was giving him, but because his body couldn’t handle any more vitality right now without deviating in some negative way. He could imagine what excess vitality would do to him, cells running wild, mutating and growing into strange cancers, and since this world didn’t know chemotherapy and he personally had no idea how to cure cancer, he didn’t want to push it too far and accidentally injure himself in some irreversible way.

Of course, if this world has cancer, I’ve probably already consigned myself to it, with all these impurities and all this trash… Rhys pushed the thought away. He’d just Tier up before it caught up to him. He hadn’t gotten any kind of cold or sickness since he’d become a mage, nor seen any other mages get sick. It was entirely possible that mages were immune to sickness. Whether immunity to transmissible illnesses extended to cancer or not, he couldn’t say, but it was a step in the right direction.

A quiet mew caught his ear. He turned to find a small tuxedo cat at his window. Rhys opened it and let Az in. “What brings you here?”

Az rubbed his head against Rhys’s arm. “Are you going to the banquet in your honor, runner-up?”

“Yeah, but it’s not in another hour or two, right?” Rhys asked.

Az purred. He looked up, meeting Rhys’s eyes. “Why not go early?”

“Er, is there a reason to…?” Rhys asked, then immediately rolled his eyes at himself. If Az was bringing it up, then of course there was a reason to go. Az wouldn’t just bring it up for no reason.

He nodded. “Shall we go?”

Az hopped up onto Rhys’s shoulders. Rhys wobbled for a moment while the cat stood on his shoulders, but then Az dropped down and went into boneless mode, draped around his neck like a living stole. The cat started happily kneading Rhys’s chest with his front paws and letting out a low purr, immensely pleased with himself.

Rhys went to the windows, then paused, internally staring at himself. What was he doing? There was a perfectly good door and a perfectly good hallway behind him. He was in no rush. There was no reason to use the window.

Yeah, but it’s so cool, a little voice whispered in his head, the same little voice that wanted to read trashy manga all the time, and Rhys nodded. The little voice had a point. It was so cool to hop down from windows. If only there were telephone poles to perch atop, or skyscrapers to look down from the corners of… ah, for all the poses he’d never get a chance to do in this world. At least the window hop was still open to him. Decided, he hauled his leg up and hopped down from the window.

“Where’s the banquet happening?” Rhys asked. He could wander the city until he found it, but he didn’t know. He was sure they’d given the other contestants information on where to go at some point in the last few days, but the other contestants hadn’t been hiding out in the dump ever since the tournament. Purple Dawn’s messengers still hadn’t found the dump, or rather, they had no reason to suspect anyone would be hanging out in there, and Mouse evidently hadn’t spilled the beans to them, so he’d gotten by without any invites or other annoyances.

“There’s a hall at the center of the castle,” Az offered nonchalantly.

Rhys nodded and set forth for the center of the school. It was time to attend a fine banquet, but first, time to discover whatever it was Az was strongly hinting he should discover. I hope it’s a hint about Straw, but with all the events happening in the world, a thousand different ideas came to mind. It could be about Bast, or the Empire, or Purple Dawn, or even Ernesto’s petty revenge on Infinite Constellation School after Rhys had beaten his champion fair and square—a thousand different things, all of them potentially devastating. All he knew, was if Az wanted him to know, then he definitely wanted to know. The cat wasn’t the type to get excited over nothing.

A little nervous, a little excited, he rushed toward the banquet hall.

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