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

Not super useful, but that was probably just because the age group the page was aimed at wouldn’t understand if they did explain it.

I checked my heading again to make sure I was still going in the right direction, then went back to the Swallowing the Universe section and started learning about separating “special thought boxes” in my brain where I could set my cultivation and internal alchemy to Automatic.

Spirit Jade Mining

GETTING TO THE DIG site wasn’t hard. The land was flat, red dirt most of the way. I kept reading and practiced Swallowing the Universe as I went. The last half-mile was climbing up through the hills, where the dirt sometimes gave way and sent me sliding back down a slope if I didn’t watch what I was doing, so I had to put down the Winchester and pay attention. But the heading arrow made sure I didn’t get lost, and after a while, I saw Ripper going the same way a little farther to the east, so I knew my HUD was working right.

Finally, I came over the top of a hill and found a group of people digging into a hillside with shovels. A lady with scaly brown skin like a copperhead’s and long black braids twisting in the wind was ordering everybody around. Except once I got closer, I realized her braids were actually snake tails, and they were moving on their own.

“The indentures are down in the hole,” she said, glancing at my shovel and pick. “Get down there and dig until you see Spirit jade.”

When she talked, I could see a writhing mass of snake heads at the back of her throat where humans had a uvula.

I swallowed and looked somewhere else. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Get off your HUD, new meat!” she snapped. I flinched, thinking that I’d screwed up already, but she wasn’t yelling at me. “Eyes on your stretch of horizon—and the horizon of the idiots to your left and right, since they’re probably as incapable of paying attention as you. Swear to blue sun, you home-squad hooligans are as useless as legs on a sandviper!”

As I headed for the hole, I peeked over to see who she was yelling at.

Warcry was putting his HUD down and scowling out at the dusty hills. He didn’t look a lot worse for his extra training—the cuts were healed up, anyway. I wondered whether the Bailiff had sent him over straight from his workout.

Down in the hole, a guy with eyes that took up half his head and a curled proboscis instead of a mouth was doing all the yelling and ordering around. Except his yelling was more of a high-pitched whistling buzz, coming through that long pipe of a mouth.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” he buzzed at me as soon as I set foot in the hole. “Find a spot and start shoveling dirt. I ask for servants with at least half a brain, and Muta’i sends me a human!”

I unhooked the shovel from my shoulder, then squeezed into the biggest gap between the other three diggers and started going to town.

Because it was so dusty and dry out there, the digging was fairly easy. Every now and then I hit a packed-down crust, but rearing back and smacking down with the shovel usually broke through it. The manual labor was mindless and repetitive, so I had plenty of time to focus on my internal alchemy and Swallowing the Universe. With the day suns beating down on my back and bouncing off the dirt and no breeze down in the hole, I figured the best use of my internal alchemy was to keep from overheating. I was still sweating my nads off, but at least I didn’t get heatstroke.

The low-level Ki abilities used some Spirit, but the more I practiced it, the more efficient it was supposed to get and the less Spirit I would use overall, so I needed to learn that sooner than later. Plus, with my Swallowing the Universe breathing going on, I had more Spirit coming in than was going out.

Every so often, the proboscis guy called out a water break for two of the four diggers to climb out of the hole and get a drink from the bucket the hooligans had up top. Whenever it was my turn, I gulped down some hot water real quick, then checked my Spirit stats on my Winchester. The number was creeping up. This was way slower than Rali’s method of cultivation, but still enough to fuel my automatic regulations and get me up to the midrange double digits.

If the stuff I’d read on that kid’s site was any indication, it was harder to take in Spirit types that didn’t match your affinity. So, I could be surrounded by tons of Sand Spirit—if that was a thing—but since I had a Mortal affinity, my internal alchemy had to convert the Sand Spirit to Death Spirit before my sea would store it. Which meant I got way less Spirit for the same amount of work. Places like the boneyard, where Miasma was concentrated, were the exact opposite. Bigger payoff for less work.

On my third or fourth water break, someone down in the hole yelled, “We got Spirit stone!”

When I got back down there, they were uncovering a big hunk of sandy red stone with a vein of white jade as wide as my leg branching through it. Out came the picks.

I broke off a piece of jade the size of my head. It was still stuck to red sandstone, so I started trying to chip it off.

Proboscis stopped me. “Muta’i and his distillers will do the detail work. You worry about getting it out of the ground.”

“Incoming ferals!” one of the guards up top yelled.

“New Meat, Ripper, and Pakak, take defense!” the snake-haired lady ordered. “Head them off. I don’t want them within a hundred yards of our Spirit jade.