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

to take a real shower, but I hadn’t seen one of those on Van Diemann yet. If they had indoor plumbing here, it wasn’t for the servants.

When I got to the distillery, Muta’i was in the front room, haggling over a case of elixirs with what looked like a scaly walrus. I waited until the walrus paid him and left before I got his attention.

“The Bailiff said you had something for me to do,” I said.

Muta’i nodded, his horn rings jingling. “Couple of my acquisitions specialists found a Spirit jade vein out in the hills northeast of here. All distillery indentures are heading up to break rock and haul it back.” He tapped his HUD.

A second later, the Winchester buzzed. A map sprang up on my screen with a blinking marker and a heading arrow down in the corner.

“Follow that, and you’ll find the dig site,” he said. “It’s about four miles out. Should eventually come across some of the hooligans the Bailiff’s sending to keep watch.”

“For what?” I asked.

Muta’i turned and went behind the counter to a little closet filled with rock hammers and pickaxes and shovels.

“Ferals, unaffiliated cultivators...” He dug out a pick and spade with straps attached to the handles and passed them over the counter to me. “But smash and grabs by other small-time gangs are the highest likelihood. White jade’s used to make Spirit stones, so it’s rare that you find a deposit without somebody somewhere hearing about it. Every distiller worth his feed’s got eyes and ears scattered around the territory.” He looked pointedly at me. “That’s why I don’t send out the new arrivals with the first wave of diggers. In a slow release over time like this, I can find out who leaked the coordinates based on when the thieving squad shows up.”

“I’m not a spy,” I said, hooking the pick and shovel over my free shoulder.

“Then you’re not gonna go far in distilling.” He picked up a feather duster that looked ridiculously small and dainty in his huge hand and started dusting the bottles on display. “Get up there and get to work.”

“When am I supposed to cultivate, if I’m mining jade all day?” I asked, thinking of the new ridiculous amount of Spirit on top of my quota that I was supposed to transfer to the Bailiff by that night.

“You’re supposed to be doing it right now,” he said without looking up from his dusting. “Need me to tell you to breathe? To keep your circulatory bits working?” He shook his head. “Humans.”

I headed out the front, adjusting the pickaxe and shovel straps as I went.

Given Rali and Kest’s attitude about Spirit and internal alchemy, cultivating on the move was probably another one of those things everybody who’d been born in this universe understood. Somebody like me, who’d come late to the party, was either supposed to figure it out or starve to death.

Luckily, I had come from a world that had an internet, too. As I followed the heading arrow north out of town, I closed the fullscreen map and opened the hyperweb to look for some tutorials.

I found a couple pages that were obviously supposed to be for kids. The title cards at the top looked like they’d been written in crayon, and if they’d been in English letters instead of just translated in my head, the R in SPIRIT probably would’ve been scribbled backward to look extra babyish.

They were pretty helpful, though. They talked about filling your Spirit sea and went into more detail about the breathing Muta’i had tried to get me to do—also known as Swallowing the Universe. They also mentioned compartmentalizing a “special thought box” for automatic functions like keeping your internal alchemy balanced and regulating your heart rate and even doing stuff I didn’t realize was possible like flushing waste chemicals out of your muscles so you didn’t get tired or cramp up. My Anatomy/Physiology teacher would’ve had a hayday if he’d read that.

At the bottom of the page, I found the See Also section. Kishotenketsu, the word the twins had kept throwing around the night before, was the first link. I selected it.

Apparently, kishotenketsu was the word for the art of Spirit use. There were four different stages—Ki, Sho, Ten, and Ketsu. I guess whoever invented the language figured they would smash the names of the stages into one word and call that good. Basically everyone in this universe was born with a Spirit sea, and they all learned how to control it in the first stage, Ki, right around the time they learned to read and write. Except more basic, because even people who were illiterate were able to keep their internal alchemy stable and cultivate while they were doing other stuff.

The point was pretty much that I should be as embarrassed about that as if I’d wet my pants. Thankfully, Rali and Kest had been cool about it. According to this page, some planets considered adults with a lack of Ki in public offensive enough to fine you or put you in jail.

After that came Sho, the stage where you developed and used the abilities of your specific Spirit type. They gave the example of someone with a Celestial Spirit affinity being able to pinpoint their location in the universe at any given moment without a HUD map. Most people eventually made it to the Sho stage in their kishotenketsu.

A lot fewer people made it to Ten.

The page didn’t have a lot of information on Ten, just vague stuff like “it is a very advanced stage, which cannot be reached without condensation,” and “many with exceptional Spirit talents who have worked very hard throughout their life are never able to reach it.” Apparently, less than ten percent of Spirit users who made it to the Sho stage ever got to the point where they could use Ten abilities.

Ketsu’s section was even shorter. Just two sentences.

Ketsu is the most advanced stage of kishotenketsu. Fewer than one percent of one percent who