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

refilled my Spirit sea, but didn’t put Hungry Ghost away. I couldn’t be sticking it in my pocket and getting it out every time I needed more.

Sword guy took another slice at me. I tucked and rolled; backing up out of his range wasn’t an option while he was throwing those hidden blade attacks.

I came up a few yards away, hunkering into a defensive position. Getting close enough for Dead Reckoning and reinforced physical attacks wasn’t going to work against this guy. I needed a ranged weapon.

Lately, I’d been thinking about adding a Spirit attack to my catalogue based on something I’d read about in Cloaking Your Spirit Level and Affinity. The book had mentioned that in the ancient past, Plague Spirit users had been accused of being evil from birth because they could cast things like Three Corpse Sickness on people. Obviously, whoever read the book was already supposed to be familiar with that, because there hadn’t been any explanation of what it was. But the name had given me an idea I’d started working on.

I mustered up all the Spirit I’d just taken from Hungry Ghost, then sent Miasma out of myself in three directions, left, right, and in front of me. My body got super hot all at once, burning up like I’d come down with a fever and swallowed a gallon of lava at the same time. I dragged in a little more Spirit from Hungry Ghost and made sure to get the internal alchemy going again before I spontaneously combusted.

The Miasma clouds were supposed to look like me, but they were just blobs with parts sticking off where arms, legs, and heads would be. Not very convincing.

The sword guy must’ve thought they were a well-thought-out and practiced attack, though, because as soon as he saw them coming he stopped advancing and swung his sword up in a defensive stance.

The blob farthest to my right got to the sword guy first. His sword sliced through the center of the Miasma, scattering the blob, then he lunged at the middle one, which had just caught up.

Hearing people run up behind me disrupted my concentration on the Three Corpse Sickness, and my last Miasma faded to almost nothing before the sword guy even went at it. I sucked in more Spirit from Hungry Ghost and threw out a Dead Reckoning, ready to fight off an attack.

The Bailiff’s ghost ape barreled past me, shaking the ground as it chased down a couple of the shadowy figures around Warcry. With huge fists, it snatched them up and smashed them into the ground. Ripper and a bunch of the hooligans had come running, too, and they cleaned up the rest.

Dead Reckoning lit up at my back.

It was the dog-jointed guy with the two-by-four again. How had no one knocked this guy out of the fight yet?

I reinforced my ribs and ate the swing, clamping my arm down over the smoldering two-by-four, then used it as leverage to crash a knee into the guy’s gut. When he doubled over, I nailed him with an elbow in the back of the neck. He lost his grip on the board and dropped into the dirt. I stepped back with the smoking two-by-four.

The tip of a sword whiffed through the very edge of Dead Reckoning’s range. The hidden blade attack didn’t even register until it laid open my side. I spun around, cocking the two-by-four back like a bat, but the sword guy was already out of my reach. Somewhere, I heard the rifle-armed guy letting loose again.

Then a flare of yellow light filled the street, lighting up the purple-orange shadows, and an incredible pressure shoved me into the dirt, flat on my stomach.

The OSS Shogun walked out of the ruined front of the saloon, shining like Earth’s sun. The fighting died down, and people hit the deck, slammed down by the sudden invisible force pushing down on everything.

In one hand, the Shogun carried a fanned deck of real playing cards, not the holographic ones they used at the saloon. As he passed non-OSS guys, he snapped the deck at them. Their heads rolled away from their bodies.

He got closer and closer to me. My eardrums felt like they were about to explode. The pressure ratcheted up until I started to get scared the Transferogate would be crushed and pinch my arm off at the shoulder.

When Shogun Takiru snapped his cards in my direction, though, it was the sword guy’s head that rolled away.

As he passed, the pressure eased up just enough that I could turn my head to see where he was going.

Down the street, the Bailiff and a couple of the shadowy guys who’d been kidnapping Warcry had managed to stay on their knees instead of getting pancaked on the ground, but as the Shogun pulled up to their side, the rival gangsters’ noses and ears all started gushing blood. The Bailiff grinned, bloody strings of saliva hanging from his brush teeth.

Shogun Takiru sliced the heads off the rival gangsters, and just like that, the fight was over.

Fight to the Death

AS SOON AS THE RIVAL gangsters were dead, the pressure disappeared completely. I stood up and tried to knock most of the dirt off my chest and stomach and face, but the sweat and blood all over me was gluing it on. My tattoo was burning Spirit as fast as it could, healing up the slice across my side and a bunch of other bumps and bruises I hadn’t noticed during the fight.

All around me, the OSS guys were looking around to see who’d survived. I recognized one of the corpses as a hooligan who trained with Ripper every morning. The snake-haired lady from the Spirit jade dig lay down the street with a sword through her face and a fistful of somebody’s half-burned shirt clutched in her fingers. The rest of the bodies were damaged bad enough that I couldn’t tell which gang they belonged to.

“Right mighty Shogun Takiru,” the