Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (knowledgeable books to read .txt) 📗

had to squeeze them shut tight, and once they were closed, I was on high alert, listening for any little sound that might mean something wanted a piece of me while I wasn’t looking.

“Breathe in,” the minotaur said. “No, through your nose. Like you’re taking a long smell of fresh green fields.”

I inhaled. It didn’t smell like fresh green fields out in the distillery’s garden; it smelled like dust and hot cow.

“Breathe the Spirit down into your sea,” he said.

I cracked an eyelid, but before I could ask, he pointed at my belly button. I tried the breathing thing again, this time breathing until I expanded my chest and filled up my stomach with air.

“Now let the air out.”

I did.

“Not like that,” he snapped. “You’re letting all the Spirit you just breathed in leak back out, along with half of what you already had. Close your Spirit sea before you exhale.”

I looked at him. “How do I do that?”

“Use your brain. Humans have those, right?” He must’ve seen something he didn’t like on my face then because he pulled out the script remote.

I bit back the smart remark.

He nodded, then said, “Picture the sea in the center of your body. Breathe the Spirit into it, then picture putting a lid on it to trap the Spirit inside. Then breathe out the leftover air.”

I didn’t want to shut my eyes while he had that remote in his hand, but I finally forced them closed again and tried to do what he said. I couldn’t tell whether I was breathing in anything but cow B.O., but after the first couple of breaths, his horn rings jingled.

“Better,” he said. “Not a total disaster, anyway.”

“That’s it?” I asked, looking at him. “I just breathe?”

He shrugged. “You can get as fancy or as simple with it as you want, but that’s the basic idea, breathing in the natural energy of the universe. You should be able to check your progress on your HUD. If that ancient artifact is even capable of reading Spirit level.”

It had been before I fell out of the fight cage to what should’ve been my second death. I touched the Winchester’s cracked screen to wake it up, but it didn’t respond. I tapped it a little harder. That got its attention.

1 Unread Message, Sender Iye Skal Irakest

I wasn’t sure yet how to set that aside for later like you do with text messages, so I hurried up and read it.

Message later if you can, she’d said.

Then I swiped it away and focused on finding my profile with all its stats. After some opening of the wrong menus, I finally located it.

My Spirit was up to 28. Pretty decent increase, considering it had been 9 that morning.

Then I caught sight of a hunk of metal out of the corner of my eye. The Transferogate.

“What’s my quota?” I asked.

“Eighteen hundred Spirit per day.”

A sick feeling pooled in my stomach.

“Are you serious?” I looked down at my cracked screen, then back up at the minotaur. “Eighteen hundred, right out of the gate? There’s not even a training week where I get to learn on the job?”

“Go hungry a couple days,” Muta’i said, groaning as he stood back up. “You’ll start learning pretty fast.”

“But not today, right?” I checked the suns. The white one was at the ten o’clock position in the sky, and the blue one was around two. “It’s probably already half over. There’s no way I can make the quota before tonight.”

The minotaur headed for the back door of the distillery. “There’s always a way. There’s not always a good way, but there’s always a way.”

I jumped up and ran after him. He stopped in the doorway and turned back, glaring down his huge bull nose at me, nostrils flaring.

I backed up a step. “Am I just supposed to sit out here breathing for the next year?”

“Or in a boneyard or on a roof or under your cot in the servants’ stables,” he said. “Sit on a cactus and spin for all I care. Transferogate’ll do its job wherever you are. Eventually, you might even get good enough to walk and move around while you’re breathing, like a semi-sentient being. Until then, it’s going to be hard to meet your quota on the days you’re doing chores and running errands for the OSS.”

So, I sat out in the distillery’s little garden and breathed. All day. The white and blue suns wandered across the sky. When I started to bake, I moved into the shade by the fence, a safe distance away from the shark guy.

After a while, the shark guy’s HUD beeped. He tapped the screen, read it, then left, so it must’ve been someone wanting him to do something.

That reminded me of Kest’s message from earlier.

I messed around until I found the messenger app. There were a bunch of old messages from people named stuff like Ril and Tober and Wash, probably all sent to whoever had died with this Winchester down in the Shut-Ins. Only Kest’s was recent, though, so I figured that was probably a good sign germ-wise.

I opened it and typed out a response—Are you guys all right?

While I was waiting, I checked my Spirit. It was up to 52, not very encouraging considering I needed eighteen hundred.

Kest must’ve been waiting for my message. Her reply pinged my Winchester right away.

Don’t worry about us. We’re not slaves to the OSS.

Indentured servant, I sent back, hoping she would read some joking sarcasm into it. I probably could’ve sent a smiley or something with it so she’d know I was kidding, but I’d never really liked emojis. They seemed lame and kind of stupid.

Holy crap, what was I saying? Who the heck cared about emojis when he was enslaved to a gang and probably never going to eat again? Maybe I had sunstroke or major brain damage from that fall off the fight cage.

To keep from thinking about how impossible the odds stacked against me were, I told her about