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

it drifting in between the mummies and around the floor of the tunnel.

Ahead of them, a huge greenish-black skull floated in the advanced darkness of the mine shaft.

“Whoa.” I got up and started toward it. “Why didn’t you guys say that was there?”

The floor gritted behind me as the twins stood up, too.

“What was where?” Rali sounded genuinely curious.

“The ginormous floating skull. You guys aren’t seeing this?”

Rali blinked, looking around. “Um...”

The skull was so dark it almost blended into the blackness, sort of like those images video games have you adjust before you play until you can just barely see their outline. Oily blue and purple shimmered across the dark green surface as I got closer, almost like the skull was telling me to keep coming.

“Be careful,” Kest said. “I didn’t check the stability of the timbers that far in, and it’s always possible that my mining could have disturbed something.”

“I think it’s fine.” I had no idea—the ceiling could’ve been ten tons of rock held up by some spit and thread—but I really wanted to see what that skull was about.

I clicked on my wristlight and started climbing up the cave-in of dark red rocks.

When I looked up, the skull was gone.

“Crap.” Maybe it needed darkness? I clicked my light back off.

The skull reappeared, just barely visible like before.

The rocks were getting bigger as I went. Boulders the size of basketballs and larger. They shifted and moved under my feet.

When I reached the skull, it shimmered with oily purple and blue again.

“Death cultivator meets the conditions,” a croaky voice whispered, echoing off the walls so that it sounded like a hundred people were whispering back. “Take the casket ring.”

Suddenly, the rocks slid under my shoes, and I tripped back a step and fell on my butt. The skull sucked in on itself and swirled down toward my feet, disappearing in a little flash of greenish-black.

When everything stopped shifting, I turned my wristlight back on and shined it at my sneakers.

Reaching out of the fallen rocks, so close I was almost standing on it, was a mummified hand wearing a thin metal ring.

Hungry Ghost

“THAT DOESN’T LOOK ANYTHING like a casket,” I said under my breath as I knelt down to study the scratched-up ring. It looked like it would make your finger green if you wore it for more than an hour. “More like a prize from one of those quarter machines.”

But the voice didn’t whisper, Check my other hand, idiot, so I wiggled the ring until it came off the crispy brown finger. Not super easy because all the fingers of that hand were twisted and bent the wrong way like they were broken. It finally slipped off the end and dropped into my palm.

“Hake?” Rali called down the shaft. “Who’re you talking to?”

“If the tunnel’s shifting, we need to get out,” Kest said. Her HUD light shined down the tunnel toward me. Just past where I was sitting, the shaft was completely blocked by the cave-in.

I looked down at the hand. “There’s another mummy here under some fallen rocks.”

With the ring in my hand, I climbed back down to the twins.

“Did you guys hear any of that whispering or see that skull?”

They both shook their heads.

“It sounds like a seal.” Rali leaned on his walking stick. “High-level cultivators used to put them on their tombs so they couldn’t be raided by anyone unworthy.”

“Yeah, in fantasy stories,” Kest scoffed.

I held up the ring. “Well, whatever it was, here’s what it wanted me to take.”

They leaned in for a closer look.

Rali hmmed. “Are you still enhancing your sight?”

“Oh right.” I took a second to focus on sending Spirit to my eyes, then looked at the ring again.

A bright silvery light cone was blasting straight out of the ring and into the ceiling. Except, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like the light wasn’t blasting out of the ring as much as it was being sucked into it.

“That’s awesome,” I said. “So, what is it?”

“Another Celestial supertype,” Kest said, absently tapping her lips. “Some sort of mass compression or manipulation, probably worked using Black Hole Spirit.”

Rali rolled his eyes, then looked at me. “In case you were wondering what that translates to in plain Universal speak, it’s a space ring.”

“That’s not really something I understand either, man.”

“You put stuff in it,” he said. “Doesn’t matter what size or weight or how much.”

“Space rings are mythical nonsense made up by people who don’t understand artificery,” Kest said. “This is a mass-manipulating Spirit construct with specific limitations and uses, similar to what Naph uses to transport goods, not a magic infinite pocket dimension.”

“The floating skull called it a casket ring,” I said.

Rali shivered like an overexcited puppy. “Just like in the old sword legends!”

I grinned at what a dork he was being. “So, how do we open it?”

“In the stories, you press it to your forehead to see the contents and call whatever you want from inside,” Rali said.

Kest looked doubtful. “There’s probably a way to activate the script, if you can find it.”

“Yeah, there’s no script on this thing,” I said, turning the ring over in my hand. Even with Ki-sight, I couldn’t find anything but that silvery light cone. “We’re going with the storybook method.”

I put the ring on and held it to my forehead.

Images bombarded my brain—robes, shoes, a heavy-looking curved sword, a paper fan, two wooden flutes, a bunch of sealed clay jars, some thin green jade rectangles, full Spirit stones, and a tiny grinning skull the size of my thumbnail carved out of what looked like turquoise.

I concentrated on the little skull.

“Um...skull stone?” Hopefully, the ring had a search-engine-style attitude about the names of the items.

A cold misshapen little marble formed in the palm of my empty hand.

There were two sharp gasps, then the scraping sounds of Kest and Rali both taking a step back.

“What?” I took the ring away from my forehead so I could see my surroundings again.

“For a second...”