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

whatever kind of writing the stuff on the hyperweb was, anybody could understand it.

My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t realized it, but the black sun had hiked itself up a good quarter of the way into the sky while we were messing around in the graveyard.

“Crap,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking about storing the Spirit. It probably all leaked out.”

Rali let his walking stick drop across his lap and threw his hands up. “This is the problem with quantifying Spirit. All that matters is how much do I have, how much can I keep, how strong am I, how can I get more.”

“I’m not trying to be insulting to...” What did you call something like this? Their religion? Magic? Way of life? “...to Spirit,” I said, my voice giving away that I was a little annoyed. “I just kind of have this thing about eating when I haven’t done it all day.”

“He needs extra calories, too,” Kest said. “If the script in his tattoo can’t find any Spirit, it will burn calories to accelerate the healing process.”

“I get being concerned about that,” Rali said, pointing first at her, then at me, “so I’ll overlook the loss of wonder and awe this once. Anyway, you should check your Spirit, because you were deep in a vein there, really tapping into the Miasma. I could see it flowing.”

“How?”

“Ki,” Kest answered me. “That’s the first level of kishotenketsu, the one where you’re learning all the basic Spirit abilities that everybody has. Strengthening your muscles, hardening your body against attack, speeding up your reflexes, enhancing your sight into other spectrums, that sort of thing.”

“Right, all that basic stuff,” I said.

“You’ll figure it out.” Rali flicked his hair out of his face. “You’ve got to get enough to work with first, though.”

I pulled up my Spirit stats on the Winchester.

“Hot dang.”

Kest leaned over my shoulder, and Rali even scooted up on his knees to see the screen.

“Three hundred and fifty?” Kest whispered. “You were only cultivating for—”

“Don’t!” Rali snapped.

She and I both jumped a little. He was serious.

“Don’t try to quantify it,” he said, taking the aggression down a notch. “It won’t work the same way twice, especially if you’re measuring and keeping track and boxing it in. Just let it be what it is and don’t try to put an equation on it.”

“What it is is awesome,” I said.

He grinned. “That is the correct response.”

“I need to do it again.” Before he could say anything, I put up my finger to shut him up. “Not just so I can meet the Spirit quota. Because it was freaking cool, and I want to learn how.”

Making the Quota

RALI AND I SAT AND cultivated for the next four hours. Kest got bored pretty fast and started wandering around the graveyard, scouring the corroded metal markers and touching up their soldering so that the lettering or designs were readable again. At first, the noise and smell of melted metal and flux were distracting, but eventually I stopped noticing them because I was so focused on the Death Spirit surrounding us.

While the night sun crept into the sky, turning the shadows all purplish-orange and dimming the light from the day suns, I went through various thought scapes Rali made up, breathing in the Miasma. The main focus of all of the talking, Rali said, was to get me to start thinking in Spirit instead of thoughts. Who I was, where I was, what death and mortality were, but also to let my mind wander until the now and I ceased to exist in the same place at the same time.

“The words aren’t important,” he said. “What’s important is finding the vein, just the right one. You try it.”

But the longer we worked on it, the harder it got to keep going. The cold wasn’t leaving my lungs when we took breaks now, and it was starting to soak into the rest of my chest and down into my stomach. I couldn’t stop shivering.

“Rali, his lips are blue!” Kest snapped. “Are you guys even paying attention?”

Her voice battered my brain, and I had to shut it out while I did the emergence trick Rali had taught me, climbing back up out of the concentration like I was fog rising out of wet grave dirt. I could shut out the sound okay, but I still felt her hands touching my face, blowtorches burning my skin, and I winced, but at the same time, they felt kind of good. They were really soft blowtorches.

Finally, I opened my eyes. Kest had pulled her hands back and was staring down at me, her eyes wide and scared, with the lace pattern all thinned out.

“Do this.” She held one hand in front of my face and touched her thumb to each one of her fingers in a row.

I tried to ask why, but my teeth were chattering too hard.

Kest shot a glare to her left, where I assumed Rali was. I couldn’t turn my head to look. My neck felt like it was made out of frozen solid steak.

“It’s hard to keep track of all the basic stuff,” he protested. “I haven’t thought about internal alchemy in years. Hey, Hake, if you can hear me, you need to spend some of your Spirit on protecting yourself from the Miasma. Focus on the coldest places inside yourself and cycle some Spirit through them. They should start to heat up.”

I closed my eyes again and pictured that turquoise Miasma bleeding through the muscles and organs that were frozen and dead, then hooking itself back to the sea and around again. A little bit at a time, it started to sap the cold from the dying tissue and warm me back up.

“Am I d-doing it right?” I asked, shivering.

“You’re catching on,” Rali said. “And you got a bonus lesson in the first level of kishotenketsu. Maintaining your internal alchemy is one of the most important Ki abilities. Most people learn it around the same time they