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352. Stone Tablet

At last, after Mag finally deflated and finished lecturing them on the superiority of birds, he settled down and faced the tablet. Clearing his throat, he began to read. There was a singsong quality to his reading that made it simultaneously easy on the ears and hard to listen to, like trying to piece the meaning out of birdsong, or pry apart the lyrics of an easy-listening song that just made him want to relax. It was completely out of sync with the actual contents of the tablet, which, as M...

351. Flipping Puzzles

The whirlwind struck two fleeing stone people and struck them down. With them gone, only one tone remained. Ike drew in energy once more, but this time, prepared to cast the Prince’s spell with his hand. He didn’t need a wide area to deal with a single tone. Whatever was on the other end of it, he only needed to hit one of them.

Once more, a twister blew apart the dense fog. By now, the fog was starting to dissipate, between Ike’s efforts to absorb it, and the twisters he’d been...

78. Into the Lion's Den

Laurent was waiting for him by the chip stand, one hand resting on the table. He looked up as the two of them approached, and his whole face lit up. Rhys thought to Bast’s warnings, and almost chuckled. How could someone so harmless and puppy-like do anything like that?

But then, people were strange in love, and this was the enemy, who had mistakenly fallen for his female self. He hardened his heart and reminded himself not to let his guard down. This was the Empire. The ultimate thre...

350. The Prince's Gift

Mana poured out of Ike just as fast as the King could draw it in. The Prince’s skill required an absolutely lavish amount of mana to activate, far beyond what Ike would ever consider reasonable, but when he considered the Prince’s history and upbringing, it did fall in line with the story the Prince had told him. If the Prince really had been raised in the lap of luxury, with everything provided for him, why would he bother to scrimp and save on the amount of mana he used on skills? Unlik...

77. Double Date

Rhys returned to the stall grounds just after midday. He’d tried imbuing the potatoes with his path as they grew, but the potatoes were living things; just like with the bones, they resisted any kind of intent or path-related influence, since they had their own path and intent. Rather than trying to overcome it, Rhys had backed off. Potatoes were not trash, after all. It was only after he transformed them into junk food that they became trash. Therefore, if he tried to imbue them with his p...

349. A Soft Hum

From the fog, where no one could see nor sense ahead of them, emanated a low hum. They followed it. In the sourceless, even fog, aside from watching the earth to see how it changed, whether the path was mossy, rocky, or twisted with roots, there was no way to tell whether they were progressing, or walking in loops. The hum gave them something to walk toward, a goal to reach. Even if they didn’t know what caused the hum, or where the hum issued from, at least walking toward it would get them...

76. Problem Customers

The next day was a down day, relatively. Only a few small ships pulled into the docks, and not all the salesmen bothered to set up their stalls at all, let alone hawk their wares as aggressively as they had the previous day. Rhys’s and Bast’s stall, on the other hand, maintained a long and winding line. They were still in the fad phase, and Rhys was loving it. Just as he’d promised, gold flowed like water from their customers’ pockets directly into their hands. The new ships full of s...

75. Sales are Skyrocketing

In one day, potato chips went from a total unknown to the talk of the town. Everyone wanted them, or knew someone who’d tried them, or had seen them somewhere, improbably peeking out from between the foil-lined pages of an old book. Purple Dawn’s students swore up and down that they’d had them for weeks, long before the new students showed up, while at the same time desperately clamoring to get their hands on a packet. The line at the stall wrapped around the whole plaza, and when Rhys ...

348. The Perpetual Twilight of an Unwalked Path

The fog lightened around the three of them. It wasn’t merely the illusion of walking through fog, where the fog in the distance appeared thick, but the fog near the walker appeared thin, but an actual thinning of the fog. Ike had drawn in enough that it began to clear around them, and from the way the strange energy flowed around both himself and Wisp, she was doing the same. Mag hopped along at his own pace. Whether he drew the energy in or not, there was no indication; but then, the bird ...

347. Foggy Path

Into the fog. Ike extended his aether as he walked, searching ahead of him to sense what came next, but all he could sense was the steady gray energy of the fog. The fog itself was imbued with… not mana, not aether, not lunam either, but some other form of magical energy. Something that twisted at the edges of Ike’s senses, almost comprehensible, but not quite. It was as if the fog itself was a form of magic, some kind of high-density mana that took physical form all around them. Ike trie...

74. Boil It Down

Rhys knelt by the glue cauldron. He injected mana into the water and bones, even tried to push the intent to become glue onto the bones, but nothing took. His intent slid right off the bones. They had once been alive, and they were full of such complex intents and emotions that there was no room for his desires, let alone a desire that pushed them toward total deterioration. It was a truth that gave Rhys other ideas, but for now, he put those ideas in the back of his mind. He was alr...

346. New Skills

The white stone figures rushed at them, and they rushed at the figures. They weren’t puppets. Ike was sure of that from the moment he first clashed, and his fist carved through stone instead of porcelain. They were stone, stone all the way through, their rough-hewn forms not carved by any man, but shaped organically. Rather than puppets, they were stone beings of some sort, golems, perhaps? But not golems that had been built; instead, Ike got the distinct feeling that these beings had grown...

73. Cooking

They shucked their disguises in the forest, storing them in their rings. The stream near the trash heap served as a good enough place to wash their faces, and the usual two gremlins returned to the site of Rhys’s burgeoning potato farm.

On the way, once Bast had assured him no one was listening or following, and his own senses detected no trash or impurities in unexpected places, Rhys explained his plan to find Straw. Bast nodded along, immediately on board. “Whatever you find out, ...

345. Wall

There wasn’t much to do in the empty land between the stone rose and the next region. They ran, and ran, and ran on, until the mountains finally rose up before them again. There was no sword-strike gap in these mountains, so they had no option but to mount them and make toward a relative low point in the peaks, a mountain gap where they wouldn’t have to summit the peak to cross to the other side.

There were no puppets around the mountain, but at the gap, a great wall rose before the...

72. Becoming Salesmen

The potatoes were growing. They had plenty of oil and salt. Tonight, at midnight, he was going to head back down to the trash pit and get started on packaging his chips, so that they wouldn’t run out of stock during peak sales time. But the most important part of their sales pitch was still lacking: namely, the face.

Luckily, Rhys had two handsome faces at hand. Unluckily, both of those faces were also the faces of their customers’ opponents. He’d been to sports matches before, ho...

71. Great Tracts of Land

By the time Mouse returned, Bast was long gone, and Rhys’s potato farm was well under way. It wasn’t yet time to set up the stand, so he was mostly farming the potatoes in preparation. He spent the rest of the day doing that, then, when the rats scurried up with tiny bits of trashure—most of them not particularly useful—reassigned them to guard his potatoes from their unenlightened brethren. The raccoon sauntered over and volunteered to guard as well, in return for a fresh absorption ...

344. Not Him

“Llewyn.”

“What about Llewyn?”

Ike pointed at himself.

Wisp furrowed her brows, only to raise them and widen her eyes in the next minute. “Ohhh. Yikes. No thanks, dude.”

“I agree, but…”

“You destroyed him, didn’t you? Wouldn’t you have absorbed him then?” she asked.

Ike shrugged. “Maybe? He’s a puppet, and it’s not like I shattered his core. It’s very possible he just… retreated, somehow. However Brightbriar puts souls in...

70. Growing Potatoes

With compost and potato scraps (from his making of the potato chips) both secured, Rhys could now turn to the next step of his formula: super-charging the chips to make them not just delicious, but also dangerously addictive. Delicious was good. Delicious was a start. It would make him a popular mom and pop type shop. But delicious wasn’t the extent of his ambitions. He wanted that addictive, trashy content that could capture the hearts of the entire world. That truly mid, inoffensive yet t...

343. Where Do I Begin?

Ike explained everything to Wisp and Mag, to the extent he himself understood it. Mag bounced along, bobbing his head thoughtlessly, simply absorbing the information without question. Wisp, on the other hand, frowned deeper and deeper with every passing second.

“So you… became the storm, or… the storm became you? And it told you things? And then the Prince and the King… are both pieces of you that Brightbriar carved out? Wait, hold up, how old are you? And… huh? Rosamund, too?...

342. The Storm and I

The puppet didn’t plunge its blade into a human being; it plunged its blade into a storm. Lightning crackled up the blade, singing it black and tearing over the puppet’s wooden arm. Spidery black marks burned up its pale arm. The raw power of the lightning broke the porcelain apart, shattering it into a thousand pieces. The puppet jerked away, but Ike closed in. He tossed the blade away. Red blood, his raindrops, splattered over the puppet. Like acid, they burned through the puppet—no. ...

69. Potato Chips

“Make… what?” Bast asked, lost.

Rhys handed him a knife. “Do as I do. You’ll figure it out.”

“Potatoes are going to make us rich?”

“I know, right? I was startled, too,” Rhys said. Startled that they had potatoes, anyways. In his world, those were New World foods, relegated to the far-flung American continent. But why not? Although he’d recognized lots of the foods, there were still lots of roots, herbs, and flowers he didn’t recognize, a grea...

341. Blast In

The puppet rushed at Ike yet again, but this was unlike any previous clash. The puppet’s all was in this blow. It refused to let him escape to rest, no matter what. Wisp tried to slow its approach with spider thread, but the powerful silk snapped like it was a mortal spider’s web. Mag fired birds to harass its face, and it ran through them as though they weren’t there. Desperation flared in its eyes, and its mana burned hotter in response. It wasn’t going to let Ike get away, no matte...

68. Poh Tay Toes

Rhys traveled from one end of the merchants’ district to the other, making a series of large purchases. He knew what would happen if he made these purchases; the prices would go up on everything he needed. The wise thing would be to purchase the materials slowly over a long time period, investing the bare minimum until he was making enough money to start making serious long term investments in mercantile companies, maybe even negotiate a long-term contract with one of the stabler merchants,...

67. Make a Fix

Without a good place to put the bowl inside the furnace, he simply placed it into the ashes directly. The metal slowly melted down. With the help of Trash Intent, Rhys kept the furnace from cracking, or the pot within it from breaking down under the immense heat. It stretched the limits of his skill, but he welcomed the training. The more skilled he became with Trash Intent, the more he could use it for, and consequently, the more powerful it became. He squinted his eyes against the headache ...

340. The Dust Settles

Ike and Wisp stepped toward the puppet. Dust still roiled all around it, bursting with blue aether here and there. The aether quieted. The dust settled. From the heart of Mag’s biggest spell stepped a largely unharmed puppet. It had a few small cracks where the spell had directly hit it, but no more damage. Its eyes gleamed with violence. Once more, it locked eyes with Ike, and this time, it charged directly at him.

Ike closed in as well. Behind it, Wisp shot spider thread at the pupp...

66. Everyone Will 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 wor...

339. The Final Blow

Mag’s spell hurtled toward the beast. Glowing brightly, trailing streaks of mana behind it, the bolt rushed toward the lone figure. Suddenly abandoned by Ike and Wisp, the beast watched them go, then looked up. The glowing blue ball closed in on it, rapidly eclipsing its sky.

It was too late to flee, and the ball moving too fast to think. The beast threw its hands up, opposing the spell with its body.

The blue ball smashed into its hands and exploded. The sound alone was enough ...

65. Smelting and Forging

Rhys returned before long with a scorched earthenware bowl. He held it up. “Here we are. Now we’ve got all the pieces assembled.”

“Except the fuel,” Bast pointed out.

Rhys turned and gestured toward the trash pit.

Bast sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Wanna help me sort it?” Rhys asked, rolling up his sleeves.

Sighing again, Bast shook his head. He gestured. “Get a pile over here, and let’s get started.”

Rhys pointed his han...

338. Beast Battle

Ike struck the beast hard in the midsection with his Hungry Sword just as Wisp’s foot found its spine. The beast screamed. It reached out to fight them off, only to give the birds access to its eyes. It immediately snapped its hands back up to defend its eyes, but that meant that Ike and Wisp were able to smash into it, and it was defenseless to stop them. It kicked at Ike, and Wisp tried to hook its other heel and send it to the ground. Slamming its first foot down, it barely caught itself...

64. Under the Mask

The white-robed figure lowered the mask to reveal a face Rhys knew well. One that had matured since the year or so when they’d last seen one another, but a familiar face nonetheless. He caught his breath.

“Bast?”

Bast cracked a smile. “That’s me. So you do remember me!”

Rhys shook his head. He put his hands on his hips and sighed. “‘You do remember me,’ says the guy who showed up in full-body-covering robes and a full-facial mask. How the hell was I suppose...