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

of the feral’s arms hung down the hole I’d fallen through, and rays of blue-white light shined in. I could hear Ripper up there yelling.

“I’m all right!” I yelled back. “I just twisted my ankle!”

He didn’t answer me.

“Ripper? There’s a hole down here. I fell through into a cave or something. Can you throw down a rope?”

Nothing but the echo of my own voice.

I looked around.

With the little bit of illumination coming through the hole above, I could see that this cave went farther back into the hill. The light dropped off pretty fast, and just past it was the kind of advanced darkness that you only see in endless nightmare voids.

There was a pair of eyes shining at me.

“Ripper!” I yelled so hard my voice cracked. The shout echoed back to me about a dozen times.

The eyes didn’t move or blink. They were right at my head-height while I was sitting, so maybe they were some kind of animal? Something the size of a big dog.

I flung my arms at them and yelled, “Go! Get out of here!”

The eyes didn’t even flinch.

My forearm started burning. The tattoo had turned bright red, working on healing my sprained ankle.

I pushed up until I got my good leg under me, then I stood on it, just barely letting the sprained foot touch down. Pain flared up the leg. That was not going to bear weight for a good while.

There was nothing down there to use as a weapon but rocks from previous cave-ins. I grabbed one the size of a pool ball and cocked it back, ready to launch.

The eyes were still in the exact same place.

I hobbled forward, my free hand on the wall of the cave.

No reaction from the eyes.

I passed under the hole, temporarily blocking the rays of blue-white sunlight from outside.

You know how sometimes when there’s light shining into a dark space, you can’t see anything but what the light touches until you block some of the glare? When my body blocked the light from outside, I finally got a look at the creature the eyes were attached to.

And all the rest of the creatures back there with it.

Mummies. At least fifty of them, probably more, all huddled back in that passageway. Some were sitting, others were sprawled on the floor or curled up in fetal positions, and one really fat one was slumped forward with his chin on his chest. Kids were curled up in parents’ laps, adults clutched each other or babies, one even had a little thing that might’ve been a tiny dog or a huge rat cradled in its arms.

All of them except one were seated facing away from me, staring into the blackness of the shaft like they were waiting for something. Only a baby, hanging over what I guessed was its mom’s shoulder, was looking my direction. His open eyes caught the glare of sunlight and shined as if the desiccation process had turned his corneas to glass.

I shivered and hobbled forward a few more paces. When I got closer, I could see the glassy parts of the baby’s eyes were just shiny crusts, like a solidified bubble. There was nothing behind the shiny crust but empty eye socket.

Why were they down here? I looked down the blackness of the passageway in front of them. Had they all been looking that way because something had been chasing them, or was this some kind of mass human sacrifice?

“Yo, indenture!” Proboscis’s high-pitched tooting voice made my heart stop. “You still alive down there?”

I swallowed.

“Yeah,” I called back. “Just a sprained ankle. I’m fine.”

“Well, don’t expect it to get you out of work. You’ve got healing script in your OSS tat just like everybody else.”

A knotted rope dropped down.

I limped over. “I can’t climb up. My ankle’s still healing.”

Proboscis sighed so loud that I could hear him down there.

“Just grab on,” he called.

I wrapped it around my forearm. “Ready.”

Dust and dirt skittered down as he dragged me up. When I got back out in the brilliant light of day, another indentured servant was going through the pockets of the two ferals I hadn’t searched yet. The OSS wasn’t going to miss out on any loot on my account.

“What was it,” Proboscis asked me, “an old mine shaft or something?”

I opened my mouth to tell him, but stopped myself at the last second. I could give the mysterious mass grave up to the OSS, who had so far all been a bunch of dicks...

...or I could bring Kest and Rali back here with me later.

“Nah, I think it’s a karst,” I said. At Proboscis’s blank look, I explained, “There probably used to be water running through here, hollowing out some of the rock. Might be hollow spots all over this area.”

“Great,” Proboscis muttered. “Plenty of spaces for ferals to hide. Did you at least manage to bring the loot satchel up with you, or are you going back in the hole?”

I held up the bag.

“Take it to Bera,” he said, waving a hand toward the snake-lady on the hill. “As soon as your ankle can bear weight, grab a crate and start hauling Spirit jade. I want that whole vein back to Muta’i before night sun high.”

I waited until I was facing away from him to let the smile out. A trip carrying Spirit stone back to town would give me plenty of time to message Kest.

Sneaking into a Mass Grave

“DID YOU TRY CULTIVATING there?” Kest asked as we climbed the first of the low hills near the dig site that evening. “Underground with a bunch of untouched corpses, surrounded by corpses on top of the ground—the Mortal Spirit should be extra concentrated.”

“I didn’t think about it,” I said.

“A mass, unmarked grave,” Rali said. “Did it look like they’d been killed and tossed down the hole?”

I shook my head. “They were just sitting there. Like maybe they went in to wait and then just sort of...died.”

The black lace in Rali’s eyes glittered with excitement.