Submerged in the heart of the death portal, Rhys watched the light grow closer and brighter, and braced himself. The second he’d stepped into the locker (stepped being a euphemism for having been frogmarched in this particular situation), suppressive spells had bourn down on him from all directions, suppressing his mana, his mind, and his physical might. They also afflicted his impurities, slowing down their circulation, which he hadn’t expected, but fortunately, he’d corrupted the locker something fierce ahead of time, so all the suppression was weakened enough for him to easily overcome it if he wanted. For now, he let it ride, not wanting Yulin to notice anything odd while he was still standing right there, paying attention, but it was supremely uncomfortable. I’m going to break down these restrictions as soon as possible.
Or… is this an opportunity? another part of him whispered. Sure, they were uncomfortable… but so were training weights. If he trained under these restrictive conditions, where he was weakened, yet still had to endure, wouldn’t he surely gain twice the results for half the effort?
Rhys considered for a minute, the part of him that liked number go up warring against the part of him that loved lounging on his comfortable couch and doing absolutely nothing, and then remembered Yulin. The guy was so powerful that he hadn’t needed to say anything or even exert his power. Rhys had looked at him and known he couldn’t win.
I’m still so weak. I thought I was strong at Tier 5, but I’m nothing but a frog in a tiny well, a little fish in a big pond. That being the case, his hard-working half smashed his couch-lounging half down and bared its teeth at the onrushing light. Come and get me. I’ll take it! Whatever you have to offer, I’ll take it all!
The light struck him. Rhys instantly recognized it; just like Yulin had promised, it was fierce mana, or what he now knew as ‘qi.’ Energy from another world, apparently. Meaning that the pinhole in Ryota’s core was a hole directly to another world.
Kind of like my hole to the void. Huh. Wonder why mine points to the void, and Ryota’s points to this other mage-inhabited world?
The qi began hammering him, and there was no more time to think. Heat poured through his veins as the crystal gym locker locked him in place and forced it through him, and he instinctively stripped off the impurities as the energy passed through. He was truly being used as a filter, and he kind of… didn’t mind it? It wasn’t the best impurities-to-time ratio, but it was almost zero effort. A lot of pain, but little effort.
Hold on. Should I allow myself to be used as a filter? Was Yulin firing up the portal right now? From what he’d said, they’d only be testing, but what did testing really mean?
Rhys held back. He let the qi flow through without filtering any impurities, but only for a blink of an eye before he started filtering again. He didn’t want to get killed or replaced, but he did want them to not think their death portal was complete and go summon a bunch of dangerous mages due to his overefficiency. So he flickered it on and off, mostly absorbing impurities, but letting a few past, as much as it hurt his heart to do it.
I can’t keep doing this forever. Even as he sabotaged the portal, he realized that. Eventually, they’d figure out what he was doing and that he was the problem, and remove him, and he didn’t want that. He liked his crystal gym locker. It was pretty and a nice upgrade from the steel ones back home. Didn’t smell like high school gym socks, for one. I need to develop a higher-grade sabotage technique. One they won’t immediately link back to me. For now, this is fine; it’s all I have, and from Yulin’s remarks, he clearly didn’t expect me to instantly slot in and work. But I can’t keep being an inefficient, trash-tier filter forever. Eventually, I’ll have to act like one of those expensive anti-allergen anti-smog anti-exhaust-fumes filters that catches almost everything. But they don’t know I’m still conscious at all, which gives me the opportunity to freely sabotage other parts they don’t know I can sabotage, and make it look like it’s not my fault their machine isn’t running right.
All notes for the future. For now, he was merely a conduit, and one struggling to survive at that. He’d been kind of backlining the pain, as someone used to subjecting himself to a lot of it, but it really fucking hurt. His whole body was burning up, and his core trembled, on the verge of collapsing. He, like Ryota and many of the other princes, wasn’t built for qi, and he was suffering for it. Unlike Ryota and the other princes, though, he had extensive experience in breaking down and rebuilding his body.
A fierce grin appeared on his face as he turned his focus inward. He let the qi tear him apart, but hovered right behind it, rebuilding himself where it passed. Qi had different requirements from mana and impurities, so after a few attempts that inherently blocked his impurity or mana flow, he abandoned his existing pathways altogether and began forging entirely new ones instead. It hurt. It hurt horribly. But with every passing second, as he forged new passages, it hurt less. The qi had a place to go, and as it began flowing through his secondary passages, his body slowly adapted to it. His muscles burned as he forced qi into them, mixing it with the existing mana and impurities.
It was an impossible combination; all three rejected one another. But that didn’t matter, because first and foremost, he was an impurities cultivator. He had filled his mana with filth until he could qualify it as impurities, and now, he did the same to the qi. With both mana and qi as filth, the three lived in harmony, nothing but a bunch of useless trash: just the way Rhys liked it. He greedily absorbed both impurities and qi, confident that Yulin wouldn’t even notice the quantity he was draining away, so great was the quantity of qi flowing through him. On and on, more and more, until his body, his bones, his organs and his core were all reinforced with qi the same as he’d reinforced them with mana and impurities.
His tier hurtled upward. From five to six, and still it kept climbing. On and on, higher and higher. Locked in the crystal coffin, with nothing to do but keep getting stronger, Rhys obliged, sucking up qi and impurities both.
And then the qi stopped abruptly.
What? Hey! Turn the hose back on! Rhys quietly extended his most subtle senses, his cursed senses, and found everyone leaving the building. Yulin was the last to leave, but at last, he, too left. Rhys was alone, locked in his crystal locker, hooked up to a giant death portal cooked up by the end boss of this area and still several tiers too weak to threaten, let alone stop, the man.
So he did what he did best, and got to work.
END BOOK 6
A/N: Hey guys! As usual, I'll be taking a week's break here. See you in a week with more Rhysy goodness!