Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  “Two hundred years, give or take.” She stood up and ran her hand over the closest wall. “Before they started dropping criminals on Van Diemann, mining companies used to fight over the rights to these outer planets. It could even be possible that these were miners from Van Diemann Mining Co. The ones that settled Ghost Town, then disappeared.”

  Rali laughed. “That sounds like something I would’ve come up with.”

  “It’s a guess based on the information in front of me,” Kest said. “Yours are wild conspiracies and fantasies based on whatever you think is cool.”

  “And spooky,” he said. “Don’t forget spooky.”

  She pointed at a deep crack in the rock of the wall. “Pick and shovel scars. There’s cinnabar back in here.” She dug around in her mostly empty bag and pulled out a little rock hammer and a pick about a quarter the size of the one I’d been using earlier. “This must’ve been a new tunnel. There’s still a decent amount left.”

  “Kest,” Rali said.

  She turned to look at him. He raised his eyebrows and kind of bobbed his head around like she was missing something obvious.

  “Oh.” She dropped the pick back into her bag. “How do you want to do this, Hake?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s your find,” she said. “Take whatever we can see on the surface or ransack the bodies for everything they’ve got? How thorough do you want to be scavenging this place?”

  I frowned. The mummies were all just sitting quietly. Peacefully. To mess that up seemed bad, like kicking over a headstone.

  “We’ll take what we can without disturbing them,” I said.

  She nodded. “I won’t pull any teeth, then.”

  I shot a look at Rali, my eyes wide, and he shrugged.

  “We’ll see how long she remembers,” he said, leaning his chin on his walking stick. “If she finds some rare metal filling, the bets are off.”

  “Cinnabar is rare and valuable,” Kest said, “and I didn’t tear into it without asking.”

  Rali snorted. “Because I stopped you.”

  “Maybe I could go over the bodies and you could do some mining,” I said to Kest.

  Graverobbing

  WHILE KEST MINED RED rock glinting with silvery metal from the vein in the wall, I got to work going over the mummies. Just like in the Shut-Ins, Rali didn’t help.

  “Graverobbing is against my nature,” he said, sitting down and resting his staff across his knees. “I’ll be over here meditating if you need me.”

  “More like napping,” Kest said, dropping another hand-sized rock into her bag.

  “Maybe he’s got a Sleep Spirit affinity,” I said.

  Rali grinned. “If only.”

  A handful at a time, I made a pile of the stuff the mummies had in their pockets. Whoever these people were, they hadn’t brought much into the mine shaft with them, just the random stuff people in any universe keep in their pockets—Spirit stones, scraps of paper, buttons, pieces of rawhide cord. Maybe they hadn’t thought they would be staying long. Or maybe they’d been in too big a hurry to grab anything besides their kids and the clothes on their backs.

  I’d had this niggling guilt trying to get at me since Rali had said this was graverobbing, but now that I was looking at the odds and ends piled together like that, the guilt disappeared. This wasn’t the important stuff. These mummies, back when they ran into this place, hadn’t been like, “Oh no, the end has come, I better get this invaluable strip of rawhide to safety!” I looked at the mom with her cheek resting against the staring baby, and I knew that this little pocket junk hadn’t even been on their minds when they died.

  I was trying to think of a way to explain this to Rali when the Transferogate beeped in my ear. Both Kest and Rali glanced my way to see what the noise was about.

  “Crap.” I looked up at the hole at the darkened sky. “I didn’t realize it was so—”

  The drain hit me then. I’d forgotten how bad it was. The kind of soul-sucking shame that it wasn’t even possible to remember, like a pain so intense that you immediately forgot the details when it ended because your brain couldn’t comprehend it when it wasn’t happening. I just barely noticed when I hit the ground.

  Three short beeps sounded. The drain ended.

  “Geez,” I winced, flopping my arms and legs out of the fetal position.

  “Hake? Are you all right?”

  “Is your shoulder rig malfunctioning?”

  That’s when I remembered I wasn’t alone. Kest and Rali were on their knees on either side of me, freaked out.

  “I’m fine.” I sat up, trying to think of a way to play it off.

  Rali scowled, the lace darkening his eyes until they were almost completely black. Rage looked out of place on a guy like him.

  “It wasn’t a malfunction, was it?” He sounded like he wanted to kill somebody.

  I shrugged. “It’s not a big deal. I’m just a wuss.”

  “So, it’s always like that?” Kest asked.

  “This is only my second time, so wouldn’t you say there isn’t enough data yet to be sure?”

  “Technically.” She didn’t sound very happy about it, though. “I’ll do some research on Spirit surrogate devices. They’ve been around for years, so there have to be studies about their effect on the surrogate.”

  “I don’t need studies to know it’s wrong,” Rali snapped. “Spirit’s sacred. If you milk it out of people like dairy animals, of course there are going to be consequences.”

  Kest frowned. “Yeah, and I’m going to find out what they are.”

  “Well, while you’re burying your head in the Confederated Planets’ approved manufacturing information, it’s probably doing irreversible damage to Hake’s cultivation.”

  “Guys,” I said, “either way, it’s over. I’m fine.”

  Rali went back to where he’d been meditating and snatched his walking stick up off the ground.

  “If I wasn’t nonviolent, the OSS distillery is where I’d start my rampage,” he said, dropping into the lotus position. “And I wouldn’t stop until every greedy, sacrilegious, Spirit-grubbing heretic was gone.”

  “Good luck with that in a whole wide universe,” Kest said.

  They glared at each other.

  I got up and dusted off the butt of my jeans. It made me pretty uncomfortable that my stupid reaction to the Transferogate had caused this fight. I needed to get myself under control in case they were around the next time it happened.

  Kest skirted around the mummies and looked down the shaft into the darkness.

  “I wonder how far this mine went,” she said. “Ghost Town’s that way, but most of the mine shafts around town branch the opposite direction.”

  “Still think these are the lost miners?” I asked, jingling a handful of hairpins I’d just taken from a mummy’s pocket.

  “The amount of Spirit stones versus the number of old coins makes sense with the Colonization Era clothes.”

  “Why does that make sense?”

  “Early settlers used Spirit stones as currency,” she explained. “Having extra Spirit to draw on was more useful out here on the edge of the galaxy than inert coinage.”

  “Too bad none of these stones are still full,” I said, dumping the hairpins onto the loot pile. Even with the three-way split, I could’ve ended up with a lot more Spirit than I could cultivate in one day.

  “That’s what was bothering me,” Kest said. “Spirit stones shouldn’t lose their contents over time. Something has to absorb the stored Spirit. There’s no reason all of these would be empty.”

  “Maybe these people had to use all their Spirit up,” I said. “Like there was some sort of fight, but they were losing, so they ran in here to hide.”

  Rali stirred over by the cave wall. “Or maybe it was some kind of spiritual storm or force that stole all the Spirit from the stones and chased them in here and hypnotized them into sitting down to
quietly accept their fate.”

  “Hake’s theory was speculation based on observable information,” Kest said. “Yours is fantasy based on nonsense.”

  I assumed that would start another fight, but Rali just laughed.

  “No offense, Hake, but my theory was more interesting,” he said.

  “Can’t argue with that.” I nodded at the loot. “That’s the last of it. You guys should come check it out.”

  We all sat down by the little pile of loot.

  I sifted my hand through the stones. “I figure we either split it three ways now, or you guys sell it and we split the profits.”

  “Two ways,” Rali said, flicking his hair out of his face. “I don’t want anything to do with profits or money.”

  “But you’ll let me pay Apek when you want ingredients for a special recipe,” Kest said.

  Rali shrugged. “I can’t be held responsible for what you do, Kest. I can only control myself.”

  “However we split it, we can’t just walk into Ghost Town and sell this all at once,” Kest said. “It’ll attract too much attention.”

  I bounced a Spirit stone in my hand. “Maybe I shouldn’t sell any at all, since I was one of the newbies they sent out here to test my loyalty.”

  Rali clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Hake, man, I hate to tell you this, but you failed.”

  I laughed. “No kidding.”

  Kest wasn’t messing around, though.

  “No one will be suspicious if I bring in some odds and ends every few days to sell along with the scavenge. They’ll just assume I found it in the Shut-Ins.” When I looked at her, lace trickled down into her cheeks. “Obviously I’d get receipts so you could see I wasn’t skimming anything.”

  “It’s not that,” I hurried up and said. “I didn’t think you would lie or anything. I was just thinking that would solve a lot of our problems, since I wouldn’t know what a fair price on this stuff is, anyway.”

  That was all true, but it wasn’t really what I’d been thinking. I had just realized that if this loot sold for good money, I could pay her back for the Winchester. I was excited to get that off my conscience.

  We sorted through the loot, putting stuff into two piles. I tried to get Kest to take two-thirds so she would have Rali’s share to buy him fancy sugar and ingredients, but both the twins hated that idea.

  “If you try to give it to me, even by proxy, I’ll commit ritual suicide,” Rali said.

  “That actually doesn’t scare me a lot,” I said.

  “It should. When I do it, I’ll stand close enough to you that my blood and effluence goes all over your clothes.”

  “He probably will,” Kest said. “And you won’t be able to clean it out of the fibers, either, trust me. There’s a reason I don’t scavenge clothing from the Shut-Ins.”

  I sighed and went back to sorting.

  “Fine.” I’d figure out some other way to get Rali his share. Maybe I could buy some ingredients and ask him to make something with them.

  “Those are going to require closer inspection,” he said, pointing at the hairpins I was holding.

  “These?” I shifted them on my palm. They didn’t look a lot different from Earth hairpins.

  But Kest was nodding. “Use Ki to enhance your sight.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “The same way you healed your necrotizing tissues and restored your internal alchemy last night,” she said. “Send a little Spirit to your eyes to strengthen your vision.”

  I tried, but it was like trying to catch smoke in my hand and then shove that smoke into a pop bottle.

  “Hang on.” I checked my reserve stat on the Winchester. Yeah, almost nothing after that Spirit transfer. “I need to cultivate real quick.”

  I started Swallowing the Universe, but my mind wouldn’t stay focused on breathing exercises. For some reason, it really wanted to focus on the mummies, so I let it, wondering who would willingly pack their kids into a cave to die. The turquoise Miasma flowed into my lungs, cold and heavy and a little wet, rolling through the channels and settling in my Spirit sea.

  At the back of my brain, I remembered to get the internal alchemy regulation going. It took some of the sting out of the Death Spirit hitting my organs.

  When I slowly came back and reopened my eyes, Rali was grinning.

  “You did it,” he said. “You were in the vein.”

  “All I was thinking about was how unfair it was for that baby and those kids to die down here.”

  “Maybe that’s where the Death Spirit vein was today.” He shrugged. “Or maybe you were picking up on their final thoughts. Death cultivators used to be seen as go-betweens for the living and dead.”

  “Whatever you were doing, you should figure it out and do it every time.” Kest made a vague motion around me. “The Spirit down here was swirling and compressing around you. It’s starting to relax now.”

  I looked around and didn’t see anything.

  Right. Ki-level sight enhancing.

  I shut my eyes again and focused on moving some of the Miasma up through my body to my eyes. It was slow getting started, but after a couple seconds, I could feel the cold saturating my eyeballs, turning them into icy orbs.

  “Keep your—”

  “Internal alchemy regulated,” I finished for Rali. “I forgot about it for a second.”

  “It might be smart to designate a portion of your Spirit for that job specifically,” Kest suggested. “Things and people are more effective at a task when it’s all they do.”

  I didn’t know how effective training a small part of my Spirit was going to be when, every day, I’d just lose it to the Transferogate, but I went ahead and split off a little of what I was sending to my eyes and concentrated on getting it cycling throughout my body. The sharp bite of ice in my eyeballs calmed down to something more like soft-serve ice cream.

  “Okay.” I held up the hairpins and looked at them again.

  Golden straws of light were bending down toward the stones on the pins, then shooting off again at odd angles.

  “Whoa. What are those lights?”

  “Luminous Spirit,” Kest said, studying the hairpins. “It’s one of the Celestial supertypes. It’s been worked into the artificery so that anyone can use the apparatus, regardless of their affinity. Given the way it bends, my guess is it’s some kind of camouflage or disguise array.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “That’s pretty cool. Wonder what this lady needed a disguise for.”

  “And why she didn’t use the array to escape whatever was happening down here,” Kest added.

  “Because maybe,” Rali said, holding up one finger, “she was a willing participant in this mass human sacrifice.”

  “Yeah, I’m not too convinced about the willing human sacrifice angle,” I said, thinking back to the babies and kids clutched in their parents’ arms.

  Looking around with the Ki-sight, I could see the Miasma hanging in the air kind of like ground fog, thick tendrils of it drifting in between the mummies and around the floor of the tunnel.

  Ahead of them, a huge greenish-black skull floated in the advanced darkness of the mine shaft.

  “Whoa.” I got up and started toward it. “Why didn’t you guys say that was there?”

  The floor gritted behind me as the twins stood up, too.

  “What was where?” Rali sounded genuinely curious.

  “The ginormous floating skull. You guys aren’t seeing this?”

  Rali blinked, looking around. “Um...”

  The skull was so dark it almost blended into the blackness, sort of like those images video games have you adjust before you play until you can just barely see their outline. Oily blue and purple shimmered across the dark green surface as I got closer, almost like the skull was telling me to keep coming.

  “Be careful,” Kest said. “I didn’t check the stability of the timbers that far in, and it’s always possible that my mining could have disturbed something.”

  “I
think it’s fine.” I had no idea—the ceiling could’ve been ten tons of rock held up by some spit and thread—but I really wanted to see what that skull was about.

  I clicked on my wristlight and started climbing up the cave-in of dark red rocks.

  When I looked up, the skull was gone.

  “Crap.” Maybe it needed darkness? I clicked my light back off.

  The skull reappeared, just barely visible like before.

  The rocks were getting bigger as I went. Boulders the size of basketballs and larger. They shifted and moved under my feet.

  When I reached the skull, it shimmered with oily purple and blue again.

  “Death cultivator meets the conditions,” a croaky voice whispered, echoing off the walls so that it sounded like a hundred people were whispering back. “Take the casket ring.”

  Suddenly, the rocks slid under my shoes, and I tripped back a step and fell on my butt. The skull sucked in on itself and swirled down toward my feet, disappearing in a little flash of greenish-black.

  When everything stopped shifting, I turned my wristlight back on and shined it at my sneakers.

  Reaching out of the fallen rocks, so close I was almost standing on it, was a mummified hand wearing a thin metal ring.

  Hungry Ghost

  “THAT DOESN’T LOOK ANYTHING like a casket,” I said under my breath as I knelt down to study the scratched-up ring. It looked like it would make your finger green if you wore it for more than an hour. “More like a prize from one of those quarter machines.”

  But the voice didn’t whisper, Check my other hand, idiot, so I wiggled the ring until it came off the crispy brown finger. Not super easy because all the fingers of that hand were twisted and bent the wrong way like they were broken. It finally slipped off the end and dropped into my palm.

  “Hake?” Rali called down the shaft. “Who’re you talking to?”

  “If the tunnel’s shifting, we need to get out,” Kest said. Her HUD light shined down the tunnel toward me. Just past where I was sitting, the shaft was completely blocked by the cave-in.