Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  “You said it was hard to get messages off-planet back then,” I said. “Maybe they died before they had a chance to tell anybody there was valuable stuff here.”

  “Or—” Rali held up one finger. “—the final message they were able to send was so horrendous, so terrifying, that the company declared this planet cursed, caved in the mine, and its location was lost to time. Intentionally.”

  Kest glared at him.

  He sighed. “You guys are making this really boring. Get to the good part. Show him the books.”

  “What books?” I didn’t remember seeing any when I’d looked through the storage ring.

  Kest held the ring to her forehead, then said, “Jade books.”

  A handful of thin, pale green cards the size and shape of bookmarks appeared in her palm.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “See, I thought books were the same on this planet as they are where I come from. With paper pages and stuff.”

  The twins looked at me like I was nuts.

  “You put books on paper?” Kest asked. “Was it flame and water-treated?”

  “I mean...”

  “And what about paper-eating bugs?”

  “I like it,” Rali said. “There’s something poetic about using such an impermenant medium to record the things we think are significant today.”

  “Paper books are convenient,” I said a little defensively. “Anybody with a couple bucks can buy one. Once we started mass-producing them, our whole planet exploded with new ideas and junk.”

  “Why didn’t you just put them in info format?” Kest held up her HUD and shook it. “Then everybody could read them.”

  “Because physical books are...” I shrugged. “They’re better is all. We had ebooks. Info format ones, I mean, but they aren’t the same. Especially since getting a device to read on is so expensive and you can get a paper book from the throwaway pile outside the library for free.”

  “You’re being rude again, Kest.” Rali waved a hand at the jade cards. He looked at me. “Books used to be hard to come by here during the Colonization Era, too, since the hyperweb was so iffy in the outer planets. Jade slips were the most reliable and convenient way to access them, but you had to be rich to own one.”

  I frowned down at the green stone cards. “How do you read them?”

  “Similar to how you look inside the ring,” Kest said, demonstrating by touching one of the jade slips to her forehead. She held it out to me and pointed at the script on the flat side. “This is the title. If you ever find a jade book without script on the front, look at it with enhanced sight to make sure it’s empty. There are some books out there that can hurt you if you read them, which is why every book is required to have its title clearly displayed. The full ones with a blank cover are almost always malicious.”

  I checked the slip out with Ki-sight. It was glowing orange. I almost made a joke about unread book mods, but since no one in the room but me would get it, I didn’t.

  “What are these books about?”

  “This one’s about Mortal cultivation,” Kest said, holding one card up. She went through them one at a time, laying each one out like a playing card. “This one’s A Study in Mortal Techniques. Mortal Supertype and Specializations. Cloaking Your Level and Spirit Affinity. And this one’s just an old sword epic.”

  “Just an old sword epic?” Rali sat forward, scandalized. “That’s Ten Lightning Strikes Against the Hero, the best sword epic out there. Probably the best book ever written, period.” He looked at me with wide, crazy eyes. “You’ve got to read it.”

  I shrugged. “I like a good story.”

  “That’s your first assignment, then.” He snatched that slip out of Kest’s organized set and handed it to me. “The rest can wait until after we talk about Luko and Yin and Immortal Mountain and... Just read it. Seriously.”

  I pointed at the fourth slip Kest had laid out. “Why would somebody want to hide their level and Spirit type?”

  “Wandering sages used to do it all the time,” Rali said. “They would hide their level whenever they met someone. That way they could learn the person’s true nature before the sage revealed how powerful they were.”

  Kest didn’t look like she considered that a real answer. “Cloaking is used a lot by criminals. Certain Spirit types tend more toward violence and crime—Shadow, Life Blood, Mind, Cold Heart, and most of the Mortal types, like this guy obviously had an affinity for.”

  “But any type of Spirit could be used for evil, depending on how you developed your kishotenketsu,” Rali argued. “Even Warm Heart Spirit could develop destructive and deadly abilities if the user put their mind to it.”

  Kest caught her brother’s eye. “The number of recorded murderers with Warm Heart specialization doesn’t support that claim.” She pushed the jade slips across the dirt to me. “You should have these. They don’t have a set limit to how many times someone can read them, like some jade books do—”

  “Which is good, because you’ll want to read Ten Lightning Strikes more than once,” Rali said.

  “—so we can still sell them after you’ve absorbed all the information you want from them.”

  “Except for Ten Lightning Strikes.”

  I picked the slips up and straightened them in my hand. When I looked up, both twins were staring at me like they were waiting for something.

  “Wait, you want me to read them right now?” I asked.

  Rali shrugged. “Yeah, we’ll wait.”

  “I have to train in the morning.”

  “That’s hours away,” Kest said, looking out at the night sun.

  “Okay...” Feeling like I was missing something again, I picked one at random. “Here goes.”

  I pressed the cool jade card to my forehead. Immediately, information flooded my brain about the Mortal Spirit supertype and the hundreds of Spirit types under that umbrella, as well as speculations about Mortal Spirit types that hadn’t been discovered yet. As if it could sense that I was most interested in Death Spirit, the book focused in on that subtype, telling me about all the places it was best gathered, how to calculate the times of day and year it was strongest on your local planet, and the most effective enhancing pills and elixirs for Death cultivators.

  The book described how the author had finally convinced a Death cultivator to take him on as an apprentice after showing her that he’d figured out one of her secret techniques, Dead Reckoning, by secretly observing her for years. So, the dude was creepy as heck. But it didn’t describe the actual technique, so who knew if he was telling the truth?

  When I took the slip away from my face, I could read the title script on the front: Mortal Supertype and Its Specializations.

  I looked around, expecting Rali and Kest to have gone off and done their own thing while I was reading. It felt like hours had passed, but the twins were both still sitting there. Kest was on her HUD, and Rali was drawing elaborate geomentric patterns in the dirt.

  “How long was I reading?”

  Rali added little curvy petals to his drawing. “Almost one mandala’s worth.”

  “Eight minutes,” Kest said.

  Talk about handy. I could’ve gotten a whole lot more homework done if our textbooks had been like these jade slips.

  “Dead reckoning,” I said, thinking out loud. “Isn’t that where you’re on a boat and you throw something in the water and use it to figure out which direction you’re supposed to go?”

  Kest typed it into her HUD. “Here it says it’s ‘the process by which early interplanetary ships used a seemingly static object to calculate speed and distance.’” She snorted. “No wonder they got lost so often.”

  That gave me an idea. The author of Mortal Supertype hadn’t said what the Death cultivator’s secret technique was, but I knew what I thought it could be used for based on the name. I needed to know more about developing Sho techniques—namely if I could even do that at such an early stage in my kishotenketsu.

  I fanned the jade slips out in m
y hand. Now that I’d read one, the titles of the rest were decipherable. The script hadn’t changed, but it was like my brain could understand it in English now.

  I found A Study in Mortal Techniques and lifted it to my forehead.

  The answer to my question was part of the introduction. Like I’d hoped, the Ki and Sho levels of kishotenketsu were pretty fluid. You had to do something called Condensing before you could manage any Ten abilities, but most cultivators developed Sho techniques early on as they started to figure out what they wanted to do with their Spirit.

  “I have something I want to try,” I said when I finished reading Mortal Techniques. I looked at Kest. “Would you mind throwing those pointy weights at me again for a while?”

  Dead Reckoning

  THE NEXT MORNING, I was the first person out by the fight cage. Ripper and the other OSS hooligans showed up together as the blue sun started to reach into the sky, and a bleary-eyed Warcry was right behind them. Nobody paid much attention to me until the Bailiff showed up and made me go through the speed drills. I just used Ki on those, like usual. I didn’t want to give away my plan before I faced Warcry.

  When the Bailiff was satisfied with my speed enhancement, he called Warcry over from those slow exercises he’d been doing.

  “Face your opponent,” the Bailiff said. “Bow.”

  Excitement pumped through my body on the back of the adrenaline. Time to see whether Dead Reckoning would work like I thought. It’d been easy enough to do while practicing with Kest, but facing down a guy who wanted to beat me half to death was a whole different ballgame.

  “Take your fighting stances.”

  I brought my fists up to high guard and took most of the weight off my front leg.

  Warcry dropped into his usual fifty-fifty stance. He wasn’t favoring the prosthetic, so maybe he’d finally gotten the knee joint fixed. Or maybe he was just really feeling good about destroying me today.

  I made myself breathe and focus. If I didn’t pay attention from the get-go, I’d never have a shot at Dead Reckoning. Warcry was too fast to give me a chance if I hesitated.

  The ghost hand dropped like a flag between us, and the Bailiff said, “Whoop ass, gents.”

  I threw out a blast of Death Spirit, the Miasma hanging in the air in like a storm front between us. Warcry didn’t hesitate, just charged right through it, leaping into a big roundhouse.

  A blip went off in my Spirit sea the second he hit the Miasma. I zipped inside the kick and shot an arm out to block it. As my body twisted into that block, I used the centrifugal force to smash an elbow into Warcry’s jaw.

  He spun in midair. But instead of slapping the dirt unconscious like I’d pictured, Warcry hit the superhero three-point landing and glared up at me in shock and fury.

  For almost a whole second, neither one of us moved or said anything.

  Then the Bailiff hooted, slapping his knee with a huge ghost hand. “I’ll be dogged if the smart boy didn’t learn a new trick.”

  That snapped Warcry and me out of it at the same time. The redhead shot at me again, red flames screaming out behind him like contrails. I barely had time to get my Death Spirit out there, but thank God I did. Without Dead Reckoning, I would’ve been killed. Now that he knew I could fight back, Warcry was going all out. Full batteries of kicks and punches.

  Using Dead Reckoning, I kept up. I didn’t land a single counterstrike, but I did manage to block most of what he threw at me.

  Dead Reckoning worked how I imagined radar worked as a kid. I sent a cloud of my Spirit into the air around me, and that told the Spirit in my muscles where my attacker was. I could sense his attack and react all at the same time instead of waiting for my eyes to see it and my brain to process it and my muscles to get the message to move. Plus, my aim didn’t rely on my hand-eye coordination. It followed where the Spirit told me to attack, so my shots were way more accurate.

  Unfortunately, as Kest pointed out the night before, Dead Reckoning wasn’t very efficient. While we’d been practicing, I’d managed around six controlled blasts before I ran out of Spirit. Now that the adrenaline was pumping, I wasn’t as careful with how much Miasma I used at once, so just the two Dead Reckonings had already drained my sea dry.

  A few seconds and about ten thousand attacks from Warcry later, Dead Reckoning disappeared, my speed and Ki-sight dropped off, and all I saw was a blur of red fire and fists. Then I was in the dirt, spitting blood and trying to breathe through a smashed face.

  A shadow covered my sight for a second, and I flinched, bracing myself for the K.O.

  “You’ll live,” the Bailiff said. “Looks like you’re gonna need a few of these, though. I want to see Mr. Champion facing that ability the rest of the morning, Smart Boy.”

  Cold Spirit stone pressed to the tattoo on my forearm, battling with the burning heat of the OSS tattoo. Healing my broken face took three Spirit stones and, judging by the sudden ravenous beast howling in my stomach, a lot of calories. I could’ve used Hungry Ghost to refill my tank, but I didn’t want the Bailiff or anybody else to find out about the little skull. That seemed like the kind of thing you’d kill somebody to take. I would just make sure I had enough to repay the Bailiff’s Spirit loan before it was time to transfer the quota that night.

  And because the Bailiff wanted me to keep using Dead Reckoning against Warcry, I had to keep taking the Spirit stones. I ended up using twelve altogether for the morning training.

  It was definitely worth it, though. I didn’t beat Warcry, but I was making him work for the win. When our last fight ended, he leaned over with his hands on his knees, sweat dripping off his chin.

  I was on the ground, gasping for air, but still. It was nice to see that I wasn’t the only one dying.

  “Now that,” the Bailiff said, “is the intensity I was looking for, Mr. Champion. That’s what’s going to win us an affiliation.”

  A ghost hand scooped me up and set me on my feet.

  “You keep him hopping like that, Smart Boy, and if we get signed at the Wilderness Territorial next month, I’ll make sure your year of servitude is considered paid in full. Hell, I’ll even get you a spot with the hooligans. Whattaya say?”

  I swallowed another gulp of oxygen. I didn’t have the breath to say I’d believe it when I saw it, so I just gave him a nod and a thumbs-up.

  “Now, if I’m not mistaken,” the Bailiff said, “you got some rocks to break for the Master Distiller and something along the lines of fifteen hundred Spirit to repay on top of your quota.” He gave me a shove toward the distillery that almost made my shaking legs buckle. “On you get.”

  As I was leaving, I heard him tell Warcry, “You, Mr. Champion, have a defense to learn how to break before tonight. Keep it cranking away in the back of your mind while you’re on that escort job. Especially if you don’t want to spend your overnight doing body conditioning drills.”

  While I scarfed down the sticky rice and bean sprout concoction the second cook had made for lunch, I researched body conditioning on the Winchester. Most of it was similar to what you had on Earth, exercise and punching trees and scraping your shins with bamboo—and for the real psychos, cutting up your skin with huge bowie knives. But there was another component to it that strengthened and refined your Spirit sea. That was called taiji, and it consisted of those exercises Warcry did before training, centering your mind and body and Spirit all at the same time. According to the page, it was good for anyone’s kishotenketsu, but especially important when you were trying to break through to the next level.

  Talking out in the center aisle of the stables reminded me that I couldn’t hang around reading all afternoon. I bookmarked a bunch of taiji instructionals, then headed over to the distillery.

  I spent the rest of the day chipping sandstone away from Spirit jade and practicing Swallowing the Universe. When it was time to head back over to the fight cage, I checked my Spirit stats on the Winchester. In a little over seven hours, I’d only managed to add six hundred and e
leven Spirit to my reserve. Not even close to what I needed to meet the quota, let alone pay back the Bailiff’s Spirit stones and his commission. I headed for the boneyard to refill my Spirit sea.

  Something Kest had said about an apparatus as powerful as Hungry Ghost being dangerous nagged at the back of my brain, but I shut it down. I couldn’t afford not to use the grinning skull.

  Burning the Night Sun

  IT ONLY TOOK THREE training sessions for Warcry to figure out how to confuse Dead Reckoning. Just before he hit the Miasma, he would set off an explosion of Burning Hatred that blurred his movements. I still knew relatively where he was, but I couldn’t tell what his arms and legs were doing behind that flame wall.

  Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of my free time practicing with Kest and Rali, stepping up Dead Reckoning’s accuracy while also making it more efficient. What I came up with was basically a thin wall of Miasma surrounding me like a bubble, which didn’t waste nearly as much Spirit as a cloud did.

  I also started staying out in the boneyard most nights, cultivating and sometimes sleeping, too, which sounded creepy, but wasn’t if you were too tired to crawl back to your uncomfortable cot. Anyway, according to the jade books, just being around places where the Miasma collected would help me absorb it, so sleeping in the boneyard was more beneficial than sleeping in a stall made for barn animals.

  It was kind of cool to stare up at the night sun, too. If you weren’t freaked out by how unlike Earth it was, the black sphere and its orangey-magenta corona were kind of beautiful.

  I tried not to think about Gramps watching Westerns and eating freezer burritos alone, but that was hard to avoid when I stopped moving. I hoped to God he wasn’t too sad and that someone was watching out for him.