by eden Hudson
Warcry brought his arms up to about chest height, hands and shoulders relaxed, weight almost evenly on both feet. He was still favoring his prosthetic a little, so maybe he hadn’t got that locked-up knee fixed yet.
I hunkered down into the muay thai high guard, fists by my forehead, elbows ready, weight on my back leg.
Left leg, nail him in the left leg, started running through my head in a loop, and I shifted a little so I could snap out a big front kick to his knee right off.
An ugly smile pulled at the corner of Warcry’s mouth like he knew what was coming.
The Bailiff waved a huge ghost hand between us like a NASCAR starting flag.
“Beat the everloving hell out of each other.”
Kishotenketsu
WARCRY HAD BEEN A BEAST in our join-or-serve match the day before, and that was without Spirit. With Spirit, he was like MMA Godzilla on steroids who could also catch on fire. I fought him so many times that morning that I lost count. But I didn’t lose count of the good hits I got in on him.
Zero’s an easy number to remember.
I tried kicks, elbows, knees, punches, and even a couple headbutts. None of them were anywhere near fast enough to land. By the time I saw where he was, he had already moved and was beating the crap out of me from another direction. Even when I laid on the speed with my Spirit stone reserves, I couldn’t avoid his attacks. My eye-to-brain-to-muscles reaction was way too slow.
Warcry socked me so many times in the stomach and kidneys that I started to get worried about internal bleeding, and he even broke my collarbone with this one unbelievable overhead axe kick from his prosthetic. It’d taken my OSS tattoo almost fifteen minutes and another Spirit stone to heal that break.
Then the Bailiff counted us off again, and we started again.
By the time the Bailiff stopped us for lunch, I’d used up six Spirit stones, putting me in debt to him for six hundred extra Spirit on top of the quota and his new fifteen percent commission. I kept trying to figure up how much that equaled, but my brain was so beat-up I never got the same answer twice. Basically, I needed to spend the rest of the day in the cemetery cultivating Death Spirit.
When Ripper and his buddies headed into the back of the saloon for lunch, I tried to drag myself off to the stables, but the Bailiff stopped me.
“Hang on there, indenture. Muta’i has an errand to occupy your afternoon. Get over there and see what he wants.”
“Awesome.” My stomach felt like it was trying to chew through my back, I had an impossible Spirit debt to repay, so I was probably never going to eat again, and all I really wanted to do was lay down and die, but I turned and headed for the distillery.
As I left, I heard the Bailiff tell Warcry, “Now then, let’s start off this body conditioning. No, hell, that’s not enough reinforcement. I thought I was dealing with a champ here...”
I glanced over my shoulder.
Warcry was in his fifty-fifty fighting stance, a snarl on his face, and the Bailiff was swiping that mega-bowie knife at his raised forearms. Thin bloody lines crisscrossed his skin.
“Better toughen that up some more, Mr. Champion. This is slipping right through.”
I winced, but Warcry didn’t scream or anything. Maybe this was the kind of training he went through all the time.
I turned around and kept walking, telling myself not to feel bad for a guy who’d spent the night before partying while I was starving and who was going to eat some huge delicious lunch while I was still starving.
“There you go, Mr. Champion,” the Bailiff said. “Earn that full-service saloon gal rubdown.”
Behind the stables, a cook was scooping out huge helpings of orange stuff to the indentures standing in line. I swallowed hard and tried not to stare.
There was no one waiting in line for the water pump, so I gulped down roughly a hundred gallons of water, then splashed my face and chest and arms to get some of the salt and grime off from fighting all morning. It would’ve been nice to take a real shower, but I hadn’t seen one of those on Van Diemann yet. If they had indoor plumbing here, it wasn’t for the servants.
When I got to the distillery, Muta’i was in the front room, haggling over a case of elixirs with what looked like a scaly walrus. I waited until the walrus paid him and left before I got his attention.
“The Bailiff said you had something for me to do,” I said.
Muta’i nodded, his horn rings jingling. “Couple of my acquisitions specialists found a Spirit jade vein out in the hills northeast of here. All distillery indentures are heading up to break rock and haul it back.” He tapped his HUD.
A second later, the Winchester buzzed. A map sprang up on my screen with a blinking marker and a heading arrow down in the corner.
“Follow that, and you’ll find the dig site,” he said. “It’s about four miles out. Should eventually come across some of the hooligans the Bailiff’s sending to keep watch.”
“For what?” I asked.
Muta’i turned and went behind the counter to a little closet filled with rock hammers and pickaxes and shovels.
“Ferals, unaffiliated cultivators...” He dug out a pick and spade with straps attached to the handles and passed them over the counter to me. “But smash and grabs by other small-time gangs are the highest likelihood. White jade’s used to make Spirit stones, so it’s rare that you find a deposit without somebody somewhere hearing about it. Every distiller worth his feed’s got eyes and ears scattered around the territory.” He looked pointedly at me. “That’s why I don’t send out the new arrivals with the first wave of diggers. In a slow release over time like this, I can find out who leaked the coordinates based on when the thieving squad shows up.”
“I’m not a spy,” I said, hooking the pick and shovel over my free shoulder.
“Then you’re not gonna go far in distilling.” He picked up a feather duster that looked ridiculously small and dainty in his huge hand and started dusting the bottles on display. “Get up there and get to work.”
“When am I supposed to cultivate, if I’m mining jade all day?” I asked, thinking of the new ridiculous amount of Spirit on top of my quota that I was supposed to transfer to the Bailiff by that night.
“You’re supposed to be doing it right now,” he said without looking up from his dusting. “Need me to tell you to breathe? To keep your circulatory bits working?” He shook his head. “Humans.”
I headed out the front, adjusting the pickaxe and shovel straps as I went.
Given Rali and Kest’s attitude about Spirit and internal alchemy, cultivating on the move was probably another one of those things everybody who’d been born in this universe understood. Somebody like me, who’d come late to the party, was either supposed to figure it out or starve to death.
Luckily, I had come from a world that had an internet, too. As I followed the heading arrow north out of town, I closed the fullscreen map and opened the hyperweb to look for some tutorials.
I found a couple pages that were obviously supposed to be for kids. The title cards at the top looked like they’d been written in crayon, and if they’d been in English letters instead of just translated in my head, the R in SPIRIT probably would’ve been scribbled backward to look extra babyish.
They were pretty helpful, though. They talked about filling your Spirit sea and went into more detail about the breathing Muta’i had tried to get me to do—also known as Swallowing the Universe. They also mentioned compartmentalizing a “special thought box” for automatic functions like keeping your internal alchemy balanced and regulating your heart rate and even doing stuff I didn’t realize was possible like flushing waste chemicals out of your muscles so you didn’t get tired or cramp up. My Anatomy/Physiology teacher would’ve had a hayday if he’d read that.
At the bottom of the page, I found the See Also section. Kishotenketsu, the word the twins had kept throwing around the night before, was the first link. I selected it.
Apparently, kishotenketsu was the word
for the art of Spirit use. There were four different stages—Ki, Sho, Ten, and Ketsu. I guess whoever invented the language figured they would smash the names of the stages into one word and call that good. Basically everyone in this universe was born with a Spirit sea, and they all learned how to control it in the first stage, Ki, right around the time they learned to read and write. Except more basic, because even people who were illiterate were able to keep their internal alchemy stable and cultivate while they were doing other stuff.
The point was pretty much that I should be as embarrassed about that as if I’d wet my pants. Thankfully, Rali and Kest had been cool about it. According to this page, some planets considered adults with a lack of Ki in public offensive enough to fine you or put you in jail.
After that came Sho, the stage where you developed and used the abilities of your specific Spirit type. They gave the example of someone with a Celestial Spirit affinity being able to pinpoint their location in the universe at any given moment without a HUD map. Most people eventually made it to the Sho stage in their kishotenketsu.
A lot fewer people made it to Ten.
The page didn’t have a lot of information on Ten, just vague stuff like “it is a very advanced stage, which cannot be reached without condensation,” and “many with exceptional Spirit talents who have worked very hard throughout their life are never able to reach it.” Apparently, less than ten percent of Spirit users who made it to the Sho stage ever got to the point where they could use Ten abilities.
Ketsu’s section was even shorter. Just two sentences.
Ketsu is the most advanced stage of kishotenketsu. Fewer than one percent of one percent who reach the Ten stage will advance to the Ketsu level.
Not super useful, but that was probably just because the age group the page was aimed at wouldn’t understand if they did explain it.
I checked my heading again to make sure I was still going in the right direction, then went back to the Swallowing the Universe section and started learning about separating “special thought boxes” in my brain where I could set my cultivation and internal alchemy to Automatic.
Spirit Jade Mining
GETTING TO THE DIG site wasn’t hard. The land was flat, red dirt most of the way. I kept reading and practiced Swallowing the Universe as I went. The last half-mile was climbing up through the hills, where the dirt sometimes gave way and sent me sliding back down a slope if I didn’t watch what I was doing, so I had to put down the Winchester and pay attention. But the heading arrow made sure I didn’t get lost, and after a while, I saw Ripper going the same way a little farther to the east, so I knew my HUD was working right.
Finally, I came over the top of a hill and found a group of people digging into a hillside with shovels. A lady with scaly brown skin like a copperhead’s and long black braids twisting in the wind was ordering everybody around. Except once I got closer, I realized her braids were actually snake tails, and they were moving on their own.
“The indentures are down in the hole,” she said, glancing at my shovel and pick. “Get down there and dig until you see Spirit jade.”
When she talked, I could see a writhing mass of snake heads at the back of her throat where humans had a uvula.
I swallowed and looked somewhere else. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Get off your HUD, new meat!” she snapped. I flinched, thinking that I’d screwed up already, but she wasn’t yelling at me. “Eyes on your stretch of horizon—and the horizon of the idiots to your left and right, since they’re probably as incapable of paying attention as you. Swear to blue sun, you home-squad hooligans are as useless as legs on a sandviper!”
As I headed for the hole, I peeked over to see who she was yelling at.
Warcry was putting his HUD down and scowling out at the dusty hills. He didn’t look a lot worse for his extra training—the cuts were healed up, anyway. I wondered whether the Bailiff had sent him over straight from his workout.
Down in the hole, a guy with eyes that took up half his head and a curled proboscis instead of a mouth was doing all the yelling and ordering around. Except his yelling was more of a high-pitched whistling buzz, coming through that long pipe of a mouth.
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” he buzzed at me as soon as I set foot in the hole. “Find a spot and start shoveling dirt. I ask for servants with at least half a brain, and Muta’i sends me a human!”
I unhooked the shovel from my shoulder, then squeezed into the biggest gap between the other three diggers and started going to town.
Because it was so dusty and dry out there, the digging was fairly easy. Every now and then I hit a packed-down crust, but rearing back and smacking down with the shovel usually broke through it. The manual labor was mindless and repetitive, so I had plenty of time to focus on my internal alchemy and Swallowing the Universe. With the day suns beating down on my back and bouncing off the dirt and no breeze down in the hole, I figured the best use of my internal alchemy was to keep from overheating. I was still sweating my nads off, but at least I didn’t get heatstroke.
The low-level Ki abilities used some Spirit, but the more I practiced it, the more efficient it was supposed to get and the less Spirit I would use overall, so I needed to learn that sooner than later. Plus, with my Swallowing the Universe breathing going on, I had more Spirit coming in than was going out.
Every so often, the proboscis guy called out a water break for two of the four diggers to climb out of the hole and get a drink from the bucket the hooligans had up top. Whenever it was my turn, I gulped down some hot water real quick, then checked my Spirit stats on my Winchester. The number was creeping up. This was way slower than Rali’s method of cultivation, but still enough to fuel my automatic regulations and get me up to the midrange double digits.
If the stuff I’d read on that kid’s site was any indication, it was harder to take in Spirit types that didn’t match your affinity. So, I could be surrounded by tons of Sand Spirit—if that was a thing—but since I had a Mortal affinity, my internal alchemy had to convert the Sand Spirit to Death Spirit before my sea would store it. Which meant I got way less Spirit for the same amount of work. Places like the boneyard, where Miasma was concentrated, were the exact opposite. Bigger payoff for less work.
On my third or fourth water break, someone down in the hole yelled, “We got Spirit stone!”
When I got back down there, they were uncovering a big hunk of sandy red stone with a vein of white jade as wide as my leg branching through it. Out came the picks.
I broke off a piece of jade the size of my head. It was still stuck to red sandstone, so I started trying to chip it off.
Proboscis stopped me. “Muta’i and his distillers will do the detail work. You worry about getting it out of the ground.”
“Incoming ferals!” one of the guards up top yelled.
“New Meat, Ripper, and Pakak, take defense!” the snake-haired lady ordered. “Head them off. I don’t want them within a hundred yards of our Spirit jade. Everybody else, eyes peeled for more.”
Running feet pounded the hillside, and I saw the snake-haired lady and a couple of the other hooligans shift positions around the hole. I craned my neck, trying to see over the edge.
“Mind your work and the hooligans’ll mind theirs,” Proboscis said, shoving me back toward the jade vein.
That sounded an awful lot like The Spirit stone’s more important than you. I squeezed the handle of my pickaxe harder and went back to hacking away at the rock. I couldn’t keep from looking over my shoulder, though. Especially when I heard the grunting and growling getting closer.
“That’s half a day’s pay, New Meat,” the snake-haired lady yelled at Warcry. “If I have to come over there, it’s half a week’s. Kill it and move on to the next.”
Between swings, I glanced over at the cat guy working next to me.
“What are ferals?”
“Mindless things that were once prisoners, now twisted by fallout poisons in the deepest parts of the wa
stes,” he said, flicking a bit of dirt away from one ear. “They hunger for unspoiled meat.” He looked up at me with his slitted pupils and smirked. “Unspoiled meat like us.”
Up top, it sounded like a street fight. The smack of fists on meat, growling, yelling, and even some metal and wood banging together. I recognized the baseball bat ring of Warcry’s prosthetic.
“Eyes on your work,” snapped Proboscis.
I chipped off another piece of white stone and waited to be overrun by some kind of rotting zombie monster from a post-apocalyptic video game.
“They smell us,” the cat guy said as he worked his pick. “We send their mouths watering like the finest foods in all of the universe. And when they get to us, they do not kill. They eat alive what they want now, then take the rest back to their hovels to feed on a little at a time.”
I tried to pretend like he wasn’t freaking me out, but I must’ve broadcasted it somehow because the cat grinned and kept talking.
“I once met a prisoner of the ferals who escaped. Human, like you. He had no meat on his arm between the hand and shoulder, and his belly was eaten to the organs. His mind was so broken from his captivity that he nibbled off bits of his own rotting hand-flesh.” The cat chuckled like that was funny. “He would eat nothing else.”
Someone out on the hillside screamed, and there was this tearing sound that might’ve been a throat being ripped out with mutant zombie teeth.
It might’ve been a lot of other things, too, but as amped up as my nerves were getting from listening to the cat’s stories, all I could imagine was somebody’s throat.
Beside me, the cat’s eyes glinted. “One less hooligan watching our backs.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat was too dry. I suddenly had to pee super bad.
Oh crap, was that sound something chewing?
A hand thumped me in the back of the head. My heart tried to rip out of my chest and run for it.
“Dig!” Proboscis shouted. “Stop again and I’ll chop off your arms and throw them to the ferals myself. Not like you’re using them.”
