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

being rude again, Kest.” Rali waved a hand at the jade cards. He looked at me. “Books used to be hard to come by here during the Colonization Era, too, since the hyperweb was so iffy in the outer planets. Jade slips were the most reliable and convenient way to access them, but you had to be rich to own one.”

I frowned down at the green stone cards. “How do you read them?”

“Similar to how you look inside the ring,” Kest said, demonstrating by touching one of the jade slips to her forehead. She held it out to me and pointed at the script on the flat side. “This is the title. If you ever find a jade book without script on the front, look at it with enhanced sight to make sure it’s empty. There are some books out there that can hurt you if you read them, which is why every book is required to have its title clearly displayed. The full ones with a blank cover are almost always malicious.”

I checked the slip out with Ki-sight. It was glowing orange. I almost made a joke about unread book mods, but since no one in the room but me would get it, I didn’t.

“What are these books about?”

“This one’s about Mortal cultivation,” Kest said, holding one card up. She went through them one at a time, laying each one out like a playing card. “This one’s A Study in Mortal Techniques. Mortal Supertype and Specializations. Cloaking Your Level and Spirit Affinity. And this one’s just an old sword epic.”

“Just an old sword epic?” Rali sat forward, scandalized. “That’s Ten Lightning Strikes Against the Hero, the best sword epic out there. Probably the best book ever written, period.” He looked at me with wide, crazy eyes. “You’ve got to read it.”

I shrugged. “I like a good story.”

“That’s your first assignment, then.” He snatched that slip out of Kest’s organized set and handed it to me. “The rest can wait until after we talk about Luko and Yin and Immortal Mountain and... Just read it. Seriously.”

I pointed at the fourth slip Kest had laid out. “Why would somebody want to hide their level and Spirit type?”

“Wandering sages used to do it all the time,” Rali said. “They would hide their level whenever they met someone. That way they could learn the person’s true nature before the sage revealed how powerful they were.”

Kest didn’t look like she considered that a real answer. “Cloaking is used a lot by criminals. Certain Spirit types tend more toward violence and crime—Shadow, Life Blood, Mind, Cold Heart, and most of the Mortal types, like this guy obviously had an affinity for.”

“But any type of Spirit could be used for evil, depending on how you developed your kishotenketsu,” Rali argued. “Even Warm Heart Spirit could develop destructive and deadly abilities if the user put their mind to it.”

Kest caught her brother’s eye. “The number of recorded murderers with Warm Heart specialization doesn’t support that claim.” She pushed the jade slips across the dirt to me. “You should have these. They don’t have a set limit to how many times someone can read them, like some jade books do—”

“Which is good, because you’ll want to read Ten Lightning Strikes more than once,” Rali said.

“—so we can still sell them after you’ve absorbed all the information you want from them.”

“Except for Ten Lightning Strikes.”

I picked the slips up and straightened them in my hand. When I looked up, both twins were staring at me like they were waiting for something.

“Wait, you want me to read them right now?” I asked.

Rali shrugged. “Yeah, we’ll wait.”

“I have to train in the morning.”

“That’s hours away,” Kest said, looking out at the night sun.

“Okay...” Feeling like I was missing something again, I picked one at random. “Here goes.”

I pressed the cool jade card to my forehead. Immediately, information flooded my brain about the Mortal Spirit supertype and the hundreds of Spirit types under that umbrella, as well as speculations about Mortal Spirit types that hadn’t been discovered yet. As if it could sense that I was most interested in Death Spirit, the book focused in on that subtype, telling me about all the places it was best gathered, how to calculate the times of day and year it was strongest on your local planet, and the most effective enhancing pills and elixirs for Death cultivators.

The book described how the author had finally convinced a Death cultivator to take him on as an apprentice after showing her that he’d figured out one of her secret techniques, Dead Reckoning, by secretly observing her for years. So, the dude was creepy as heck. But it didn’t describe the actual technique, so who knew if he was telling the truth?

When I took the slip away from my face, I could read the title script on the front: Mortal Supertype and Its Specializations.

I looked around, expecting Rali and Kest to have gone off and done their own thing while I was reading. It felt like hours had passed, but the twins were both still sitting there. Kest was on her HUD, and Rali was drawing elaborate geomentric patterns in the dirt.

“How long was I reading?”

Rali added little curvy petals to his drawing. “Almost one mandala’s worth.”

“Eight minutes,” Kest said.

Talk about handy. I could’ve gotten a whole lot more homework done if our textbooks had been like these jade slips.

“Dead reckoning,” I said, thinking out loud. “Isn’t that where you’re on a boat and you throw something in the water and use it to figure out which direction you’re supposed to go?”

Kest typed it into her HUD. “Here it says it’s ‘the process by which early interplanetary ships used a seemingly static object to calculate speed and distance.’” She snorted. “No wonder they got lost so often.”

That gave me an idea. The author of Mortal Supertype hadn’t said what the Death cultivator’s secret technique was, but I knew what I thought it could be used for based on