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

haven’t made it past the Sho step of Metal Spirit, and Rali passed into Ten while we were still kids.” She turned to her brother. “Rali, say stuff. Explain.”

He raised a doubtful eyebrow at me.

“I mean, this is my life for the next year,” I said, knocking on the Transferogate with my knuckles. “Any help that keeps me from starving to death would be appreciated.”

“Well, cultivation is at the center of your food problem.” He set his walking stick in the sand and tapped the top against his chin a couple times. “All right, come on.”

He came into the graveyard with me and wandered around, looking at the headstones. After going up and down the rows for a minute, he waved me over to an old worn-down stub of stone with all the wording and dates scoured away.

“Sit down here,” he said, making an X on the dirt in front of it.

I did, and he took a seat nearby, leaning back against a corroded metal marker and hooking his arm over it.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

It was easier to relax around him and Kest, so I didn’t have to fight to keep them shut like I had at the distillery.

Instead of telling me to start breathing, Rali said, “Think about where you are. Right now. And now. And right now. Every second, be where you are. Examine it with everything inside of you. Where are you? In a garden of bones. Before the ruins of a shrine to Life and Death.”

Suddenly, his tone shifted. “Kest, if you open your mouth, I’m going to hit you with my stick. You wanted me to do this my way, so we’re doing it my way.”

Then he switched back to that flowing voice. “Garden of bones, Hake. Fallen shrine. Bodies planted six feet deep, sleeping like seeds before the rain. What waters them? What grows here?”

The temperature around me was starting to drop as I pictured the rotting corpses underneath us, sleeping in decaying wood coffins. Infinite blackness from their perspective. Tons and tons of dirt pressing down on them.

I shivered.

“That!” Rali said in a harsh whisper. “You felt it. Breathe that in.”

I tried picturing the lid on my guts that Muta’i had talked about and trapping the Spirit down there.

“Nope, you lost it.” Rali sounded disappointed. “You’re breathing like you’re trying to sell me something. Like you’re adding and subtracting profits and losses. There’s no Spirit in it.”

I opened my eyes. “I’m just breathing.”

“Yeah, but you’re breathing wrong,” he said. “Close your eyes again.”

I sighed, a little frustrated, but I did it.

“Forget whatever nonsense the OSS distiller told you. Forget about quotas and numbers and money. Even forget about food. You don’t need it where you’re going. None of us do. We’re the seeds, Hake. We slowly rot and fall apart like this shrine on your right, and someday, they plant what’s left of us in rows with stone tags that let them know what sort of crops to expect. What grows here can’t be picked by hungry hands. It nourishes not the appetite of the stomach, but urgency and appreciation.”

The temperature dropped again. I could feel cold winter air flowing in through my nose and coiling in my lungs. In my mind, it looked like turquoise, but smoke instead of stone. Some kind of icy mist.

“This is the comforting bed at the end of every weary road,” Rali said softly. “No matter who we are, no matter where we began, we’re all trekking steadily closer to this dark and restful destination. Where are you now, Hake? And right now. And now.”

The temperature inside my lungs plummeted as the turquoise smoke sank into the tissue, turning it cold and hard. When I exhaled, it stayed. My lungs wouldn’t move ever again, but I didn’t freak out. That was okay. Like Rali said, it was where we were all headed eventually. The last breath.

“There,” he whispered. “That’s it.”

That was it. After the last breath, there was nothing else.

I opened my eyes. “That’s—”

Everything came crashing back at once, hot and bright and unbelieveably loud, like crawling out of the grave after a thousand-year sleep. Even just the noise of the dust blowing across the ground was like someone screaming in my face. I clamped my hands over my ears to block some of it out and squeezed my eyes shut.

“Oh right,” I heard Rali say. “I should’ve mentioned beforehand that coming back is rough. You’ve got to do it by degrees.”

“Geez.” As my ears readjusted to the sound around me, I loosened my grip on my head. “That was nuts. And really cool. It was like I was breathing this turquoise ice mist—”

“Miasma.” Kest leaned over the tombstone behind me. When I looked at her, she turned her wrist over to show me the screen of her HUD. She had some sort of info page about Spirit types open. “That’s what Mortal cultivators call pockets of Death Spirit. It means that your supertype is Mortal and your specialization is Death. Less than eight percent of the known population of the galaxy has a Mortal affinity, and less than one percent of them use Death spirit. So, you’re one in sixty-four billion.”

That was sick as heck. Not the math, math is the worst, but the Death Spirit.

“How do I find that page?” I asked, holding up the Winchester. “Maybe when I get a minute, I can read up on all this stuff.” Reading was better than math any day.

“You guys ruined it,” Rali said, scowling with disgust. “You were tapped into something real and pure there, and then you went and started messing with those—” He flapped his hand at the HUDs. “—artificial, unnatural eyesores.”

While he was complaining, Kest showed me how to get onto their version of the internet, the hyperweb, with the Winchester. It wasn’t a whole lot different. I could tell that the letters weren’t English, but my brain translated them as if they were, unlike the kanji-style script of my tattoo. Maybe