Death Cultivator 2 by eden Hudson (books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📗

up and jabbed me in the rib-bruise with his walking stick. “Let’s repair that blockage in your side, Death cultivator.”

Healing and Restoration

RALI HAD ME LIE ON the floor on my good side and lift up my shirt so he’d have access to the massive bruise taking up my left side. Right away, he noticed I’d been killing the nerves around the stabbing scars.

“That’s going to have to stop,” he said, pushing an orange wave of Warm Heart Spirit into the blockage. “Our bodies experience pain for a reason, Hake. You’re re-damaging it every time you fight because you can’t feel the tissues tearing open again.”

“It was just a temporary fix,” I said.

“You’re doing it right now,” he said. “I can see it. Stop deadening them for a minute and give me a chance to work here.”

“Oh, right.” Without realizing it, I’d gotten in the habit of feeding a constant stream of Miasma into the area, as second nature as keeping my internal alchemy going. I concentrated and cut the flow to those nerves. A little at a time, the pain came back, turning up like a phone with the volume button held down.

“Warcry said it’d kill the nerves off,” I said. “But I must not have been doing it right. They kept coming back.”

“That’s...pretty weird,” Rali said. “I don’t think humans are supposed to work like that. You’ve been building up a ton of soul contamination, too. What’s the deal, man? Why’d you stop purging it?”

When he said it like that, it sounded really stupid that I hadn’t been using Corpse Fire, but some part of my brain thought the constant threat of barfing up my guts was the least I deserved.

“I forgot,” I lied.

He cocked an eyebrow at me, but didn’t call me on it.

“Well, it might not be very effective until I get these tangles worked out anyway. You can try it when everything’s flowing right again.”

Out of the corner of my eye, the orange light of Rali’s Warm Heart Spirit glowed brighter. Something inside my rib cage slipped like a knot coming free. I winced. Stuff moving around inside you isn’t a normal or good feeling.

“Nice,” Rali said, nodding. “Okay, cycle some of your purifying flame through there so I can see where it gets hung up.”

I sent a concentrated dose of Corpse Fire to the spot burning off the built-up contamination.

In a flutter of purple and white, Sushi reappeared by my face.

I smiled and scratched her head. “Forgive me for yelling earlier?”

“Earlier?” She leaned into my hand like a cat. “Grady.”

“Seriously, you’ve got to stop calling me that,” I told her. “Nobody in this universe calls me Grady. It’s just Hake.”

Rali leaned over my side to get a better look at the fish. “I thought she could only mimic what she’d heard someone else say.”

I shrugged my off-the-ground shoulder. “Maybe she can hear the speaker system way up here when they call me.”

He didn’t look convinced.

A knock on the door sent Sushi swimming under the bed, but it was just Warcry.

“How ya goin’, lads?” The ginger dropped onto the easy chair and kicked his legs over the side. “You put the grav back together again yet, big man?”

“Working on it,” Rali said. “Hey, congratulations on getting in with the Prison League Fighting. You’ll be back on people’s HUD screens in no time.”

Warcry shrugged. “Gotta keep the name recognition, don’t I? My sentence is up in three years. If I want to go back to IFC, having Warcry Thompson on the bill needs to sell tickets.”

Something else under my ribs lurched, then came undone. That time, blinding pain shot down my left side, and I spent a couple minutes writhing around, throwing Corpse Fire at it.

“Sorry,” Rali said. “I’m trying to keep it as painless as possible, but it’s really messed up in there.”

The conversation tapered off again while Rali sent wave after wave of his restoration ability into my side. I kept the Miasma cycling and tried not to yell whenever something in my side shifted. Warcry watched all-girl fighting on his HUD—although the matches sounded like something else at first because of all the feminine grunts and groans.

“Dude,” I said between flares of pain, “are you watching porn?”

“You wot? No, ya sick-minded clown!” Warcry’s face turned scarlet, and he hurried up and turned his screen around so Rali and I could see two beautiful alien women kicking the holy crap out of each other in a fight cage. The little clothes the ladies had been wearing were pretty raggedy, and they showed off a lot more than they covered up. “It’s Beauties versus Beasts—ladies fighting each other and wild animals. Them Heavenly Contrail coves back in the swamps mentioned it...” He flopped back in his seat. “It’s actually proper fighting, not that staged tripe in mud or jello without clothes...”

“I mean, they didn’t look like they were wearing much,” I said.

“Yeah, well, IFC fighters don’t wear much when we’re in the cage, do we? Just our ring shorts and gloves.”

I snorted. “I don’t really want to know what sort of skimpy outfits you wear. I don’t need that image in my head right now.”

That got Rali laughing, which made me feel a little better about our argument. That relief disappeared when he jabbed me in one of the unfinished knots, though. I gritted my teeth and kicked the floor with the heels of my work boots to keep from yelling. Heat rolled across me in waves and sweat plastered my hair to my face.

“Get what you deserve, don’t you, mind in the gutter,” Warcry grumbled, slumping back in the chair. “I know real fighting, grav. I seen a bout yesterday where a gal had her face torn off by a crag wolf. That don’t happen in them soft-core slugfests.”

By then Sushi had realized it was safe and gone back to nosing around the corners of the room for bugs. I made a mental note to take her up top the next time I