*rustle* *rustle* *clink*

The sound of trashbags and old bottles being moved was heard from a large trashbin behind a huge building. The methodical sound of old junk being opened and moved was very sad to listen to, as if the one doing it has been doing it for a very long while.

"Yes!" From the large trash bin, a dirty young figure sprouts up in jubilation with a weird small tool in his hand. Michael Pierce jumps down from the trash bin and lifts up a half-full sack. After dusting off some of the dirt he accumulated, Michael stowed away the tool. Michael grins with extreme pleasure as he walks out of the alleyway.

"Just my luck! I found a Mk. 2 magic focus, this a good find" Michael thought to himself. The sun was already starting to set, so Michael decided to call it quits and go home. Starting the long trek home, Michael was twiddling with the worn down and probably defective magic focus.

The world used to believe that superstitious things like magic didn't exist, especially when everyone was using mundane objects to run their everyday lives, but one day the phenomenon of magic was proven to exist and the government funded its research. The research done was fruitful and thus magic was slowly integrated into society and everyday life.

It started out small, a few small flickers of fire projected from one's finger, but humanity found out that magic could be enhanced through the help of technology. This helped immensely, as humanity not only advanced in the field of magic but also in the field of technology. Eventually, the magic focus came to existence, a handy device that boosted the measly magic control that humans naturally have. At first, they were bulky and huge, like the first computers, but just like the first computers, the magic focus became more and more compact until they were ready to be used by the public. The research was extremely expensive but after spending excessive amounts of funds, the Mk. 1 magic focus was released.

The Mk. 1 magic focus was modeled to be a metallic like glove made with very smooth and tough materials. The magic focus allowed humans to control and cast magic with ease, since the glove made a human's connection to magic better. Ever since then, the magic focus has been improved over and over, and right now the most recent magic focus was a Mk. 12 magic focus. If that is the case, then why would Michael rejoice over having found an extremely outdated magic focus, unfortunately the creation of magic focuses is not cheap and the general populace would probably only have access to Mk. 5 to Mk. 8 focuses, while the poor and downtrodden like Michael would only have access to outdated MK. 1 up to Mk. 4 magic focuses. So a Mk. 2 would already be a big find for someone like Michael.

In addition, magic focuses only increases a person's connectivity allowing them better control over magic, but it does not increase one's magical strength. To increase one's magical strength, they would need to increase their small mana pools and learn more powerful magic. It simply means that even if one has a Mk. 12 magic focus they wouldn't be necessarily stronger magic users, but would simply have better control over magic.

Walking in a narrow and dirty street, Michael Pierce already left the market area where he scavenged for parts to sell and was going straight home. While going home, he was already calculating how much a defective Mk. 2 would sell for.

"An authentic and working Mk. 2 would sell for around 25,000 credits... so a broken one should fetch around 2000 credits, while a second hand one would sell for 6000, 7000 if I find a good buyer."

Michael was already imagining how much groceries he could buy, and maybe a new pair of shoes as his current pair is almost disintegrated by the amount of time he spends wading in trash. While 7,000 credits would not be much for someone who's in the middle class, for someone like Michael who's below the lower class, it was practically like winning the lottery.

Turning to move around a shortcut he usually moves through, Michael saw something that wasn't there before. He saw a young man, younger than him, wearing a discreet but surely expensive black overcoat. On the ground was a dead woman, a bullet obviously pierced her forehead.

"Ahh..." Michael was just about to say something, but he couldn't move his mouth nor any body part in particular. For a split second he was seeing the sky as if he was lying down. He didn't understand at first but he was already dead and was lying on the dirty alleyway that nobody frequents. The first emotion he felt when fell down wasn't fear not regret.... it was anger.

Inside his dead mind, he was screaming.

"NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I CANNOT DIE LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!" The young man has long since disappeared but Michael was screaming louder, but his anger was not at the young man but it was towards everything.

"I CAN'T DIE YET!!!! I HAVEN'T CLIMBED TO THE TOP YET!!!!" As he lay there dead, his so called soul was screaming and yet he could not move nor will himself to stand up. "I PROMISED HER! FOR THE BOTH OF US!!! I CANNOT DIE!!!"

In the midsts of his raging soul, he hears a calm and very confident voice.

"Do you want to live and change everything?"

"YES!"

The voice stopped, surprised by the immediate answer.

"Then are you willing to make a de-"

"YES!"

The voice chuckled, amused by this turn of events.

"Amusing... and interesting. Then Michael Pierce, my deal is simple. You will be my host and in exchange I will give you a chance to grab life once more and climb the top."

Michael didn't immediately reply, his rage and anger suddenly doused by this mysterious disembodied voice. After collecting his thoughts and drowning his repressed anger he sighs and focuses on the current situation.

"Who are you?"

"A friend" Michael could feel that the voice was smiling, if it could.

".... A demon?"

The voice laughs lightly.

"Such a savage race, no I am not a demon."

"Then what?"

Another laughter resounds through Michael's head.

"A devil, my young boy. Tell me, are you disgusted?"

Michael chuckles and would smile if he could.

"No, I would never turn down such an oppurtunity. I've heard devils are the elegant cousins of demons, and making a deal with your types have been fruitful..."

"You are aware that I am after something else and I am simply using you"

"So? My whole life I've been used, abused and finally thrown away. I plan on climbing up with anything I can use. If you plan on using me? Then do so! I plan on using you as well!"

"Well said! A deal is a deal then!"

"Yes!"

Michael opens his eyes, and the first thing he sees is his old worn out door, leading to his apartment.

"What... Nevermind" Michael opens the door with his keys and enters.

"Archmage's Village" was located next to the Magical Waste Treatment Plant no. 32.

Although its name is very grand, Archmage's village is actually Grandeum's most dilapitated and poorest residential area. It is surrounded by dumps and landfills, but due to it's location, it literally has the world's cheapest rental homes, if you could even call them homes, and most of all, it is also near a magical item graveyard, a dump specifically made for magical items.

A location near so many dumps and junkyards would produce the most vile and horrendous living situation, and all year a disgusting scent would pervade the air, almost removing the possibility of life but for someone like Michael, this was paradise, minus the deathly scent.

Despite the extremely cheap rent, most people would not want to live here, several residential buildings were empty and unused. Due to years of wear and tear without any maintenance, both the exterior and interior were covered in cracks, corridors were covered in cobwebs. It was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost town.

Despite that, Michael liked the quietness here. No one would disturb him when he was tinkering with the defective magical items. Every day Michael would go to the graveyard and scavenge for magical items, fighting other scavengers, living a miserable life. Combining every factor, this place served him a lot of benefits.

Michael's home was roughly fifty square meters. There were two rooms, an outer one and an inner one. The outer room was for eating, drinking, and entertainment. The inner bedroom was remodeled into his magic item workshop, it was where he tinkered and made stuff.

When one enters his house, the first eye-catching image one would see would be the hundreds of tech processors, used for magical items, stashed in one neat area, all of them were properly labelled and sorted.

These tech processor units were mostly relics of several hundreds of years past, already losing their computing abilities but some of them were working as well and can be used to switch with a tool's defective part properly fixing it, albeit crude. They were picked up by Michael, becoming a part of his collection. He was an amateur tinkerer and was super into these kinds of ancient tech which were able to process a large amount of information in a person's mind.

On another side of the outer room is a very old and barely surviving bookshelf, filled with literally dozens of magical books. The books had titles such as , , , , and . Many were old books from dozens of years ago. They were gray and yellow as well as flakey and mushy. A lot of them were found, when Michael scavenged for books in the magical junkyard.

In the middle of the outer room, surrounded by Michael's bookshelf and processors, was a small, old and worn-out mattress. In all purposes, this was Michael's chair, table and bed.

And within the magical workshop of the inner room were his pile of scavenged parts and treasures, he's scavenged all over the junkyard and other places he frequented. There were a multitude of basic everyday magical appliances, but in his pile of stuff are some rare items as well, such as magical weapons, and enchanted trinkets. On the side of the magical workshop is a small alchemical table, where some very crude elixirs are placed but they exude a healthy scent. Unlike outside, this room was a complete mess. Another side of the room is filled with dismantled magical items that were separated into working and not working parts.

"Who says poor people can't be organized?" Michael muttered to himself when he reviewed his untouched home.

Once he sat down, he immediately pulled out the Mk. 2 Magic Focus and started to open it with his crude tools. Michael's eyes were shrouded, deep in thought, his mind was fully focused on opening and checking if the magic focus was still salvageable. After a while, Michael's eyes clear up and he smiles.

"A Mk. 2 that's in top condition, the only problem is that the wiring was a little loose. The owners probably didn't know how to deal with any of that and just threw it away. Such a waste of money" Michael opens the item and starts to fix the broken parts. "There! As good as new" Michael wears the thin metal glove and flexes his arm.

He flicks his finger and a small flicker of fire appears at the tip of his fingers. "Wow! it's far more effective than a Mk. 1. It takes me 30 minutes to make a small fire with a Mk. 1, but with a Mk.2 it only takes a flick of a finger."

Michael sighs when he hears a voice.

"When are you going to say hello?"