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

The rest of the time I poured on the sweat hours and elbow grease.

A little at a time, Dead Reckoning sharpened and my Ki-level abilities got stronger, which rocked when I was fighting Warcry. By the third week, I was definitely pushing him in every fight.

The Bailiff thought that was hilarious. “If you can’t do better than that, Mr. Champion, I’m gonna have to kick you off my hooligan squad and let the smart boy take your place.”

Obviously, he was never going to do that, but just hearing it was usually enough to tick Warcry off and get him to double up on the effort. Even better for me. The harder he worked, the harder I worked, and the better my fighting got. I threw everything I had at him every time. I wanted to beat him, but even more than that, I wanted him to get better so he’d win at the tournament and my indenture would end early.

While all that was going on, my servant jobs stayed about the same level of difficulty. After what seemed like a million years, I finished breaking rocks. Then Muta’i’s scouts found an oasis out in the hills with some kind of special grass, which apparently mimicked some other kind of grass people used in real elixirs, so while Warcry and the hooligans cleared out the ferals that lived there and then fought off a rival distillery crew, a couple other indentures and I harvested sacks full of the crimson plant, then packed it back to the distillery. I looted the dead ferals again. Pretty much any time there were corpses to loot for the OSS, I got called in. I don’t know why it was never any of the other indentures. Somewhere along the way, I just started being known as the guy who looted nasty corpses.

I just reminded myself to breathe through my mouth and gather up the Death Spirit while I looted. Corpses gave off Miasma by the truckload when they were fresh.

That made me wonder why Mortal cultivators didn’t just kill a bunch of people and absorb the Spirit that came off of their corpses, but then I read on the hyperweb that some of them did. A lot, actually. That would be why the affinity had such a bad reputation.

Near the end of the month, the OSS had another cage tournament to celebrate the Shogun’s immenant Spirit breakthrough. I wasn’t allowed to fight; all the indentures were busy hauling healing supplies from Muta’i to the locker room.

Warcry won the whole thing, knocking Ripper off the Stand with a kick combo he used against me all the time in training. With Dead Reckoning, I’d gotten to where I could counter it about half the time. The other half the time, it was devastating—a roundhouse that would either take your head off or make you jump back, a spinning hook looking to do the same, and depending on positioning, either a mule kick to the chin or a straight back kick that would go right through your gut. Ripper jumped back to what he thought was a safe distance just in time for Warcry to nail him with that long back kick.

While the fights were going on and I packed supplies, I saw Kest in the crowd talking to her space moth smuggler, Naph. I couldn’t hang around to see what changed hands, but that night, when the twins and I met up at the boneyard, Kest told me to check my bank account on the Winchester.

“Holy cow.” I had twelve hundred and twenty-six credits. That was like a whole summer of working on a roof on Earth. Suspicion crept into me as I looked at the figure. “You didn’t sneak me any of the money from your cinnabar, did you?”

“No, most of that is just the sword from the storage ring,” Kest said. “Like I thought, it was a Colonization Era antique, so it was worth a lot. But I did sell one of the flutes last week, too, when a traveler came through looking for Spirit apparatuses. It had a major Heart Spirit array worked into it.”

While she was talking about the intricacies of the flute’s build, I did some quick research, then figured out how to transfer credits to someone’s account.

Her HUD beeped. She stared down at the notification that she’d just received a hundred and sixteen credits, confusion etching a line between her eyebrows.

“That’s for the Winchester and the Coffee Drank that first day,” I said.

She frowned. “I didn’t want payback for any of that.”

“Well, I didn’t want your charity, so neither of us gets what we wanted,” I said before I thought far enough ahead to realize that saying it out loud was the ultimate dick move.

Her eyes went almost completely black with only little pinpricks of white left over. The blood in my veins suddenly went cold, the way it did when I forgot to keep up my internal alchemy.

“Kest,” Rali said, bumping his sister’s arm, “you’re going Cold Metal on us.”

She glared at him, then without saying a word, turned around and walked out of the boneyard.

A little at a time, my blood warmed back up.

“All I did was pay her back,” I said, looking at Rali for some kind of agreement. “I don’t like owing people. I hate it.”

“Friends can’t owe each other, Hake, and they can’t give each other charity.” Rali laid his walking stick across his shoulders and hooked his arms over it. “Although you and Kest probably can now.”

The whole next day, the stupid crap I’d said to Kest kept hammering on my brain. My sparring was trash, and I ended up getting into a fight with Warcry right after training. All he did was spit too close to me.

So I shoved him. “Keep your loogies to yourself, dickbrain.”

“Or wot, grav?” He knocked me back.

I threw a punch at his teeth. Before it could connect, he slammed me into the side of the fight cage, forearm jammed into