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

The angel’s scythe sheared through it like a box cutter through a T-shirt, and then I was bleeding from my right collarbone all the way to my left hip. I pumped Spirit to the gash, feeling cold take over my torso. The OSS tattoo burned like fire, but it couldn’t keep up with these wounds.

I got a flash of déjà vu. Wasn’t this how I’d died the first time? Cold and bloody?

“The bollix’re these now?” Warcry snarled.

“Chaos creatures,” Kest said. She raised her voice and yelled, “Get back! I have a Spirit Damper!”

I glanced their way.

A wall of translucent purple jello monsters were surrounding us, climbing over each other and creeping closer, sealing off our escape routes. Off to every side, shadows flickered and tried to catch my eye.

“Stay back!” Kest yelled, holding out her Spirit Damper and reaching for the lid.

“Back,” one of the jello monsters croaked, lunging at her.

Then the rest of the monsters started croaking, “back,” and hopping toward her like an army of toads.

As they closed in around us, Rali set his feet wide apart, holding his walking stick like a bo staff.

“Wait.” I’d caught sight of something just over the wall of chaos creatures.

Warcry almost bumped into me backing up, but I stepped around him.

A second, much taller wall had formed on the other side of the creatures corralling us. These were penning in the angel of death. She sliced them with her scythe, but as soon as the blade passed through, the jello monsters grew back together. It was like trying to cut soup.

“They’re holding her off,” I said.

A jello monster from our wall crawled over a few others and jumped at me, barking, “Back!”

I did what it said. New ones crawled over it, telling me to keep going “back.” All around the edges of my vision, their flickering shadow decoys tried to get me to look their way.

“They’re not trying to hurt us,” I said, focusing on the monsters right in front of me. “I think they’re trying to show us a way out of here.”

Now Kest and Warcry definitely thought I was crazy. But Rali looked from the creatures to me and back.

“I defer to the Death cultivator,” he said, lowering his staff.

A little bit at a time, Kest relaxed her grip on her Spirit Damper. She didn’t put it away, but it didn’t look like she was about to trigger it any second.

“You’re not bleedin’ serious,” Warcry snarled.

“Almost never,” Rali said. “But this tastes like Miasma, so it’s Hake’s domain.”

Warcry scowled at him. “You want me to listen to the grav who’s being sliced to ribbons by some invisible angel?”

“If I’m wrong, you can kill me later,” I promised.

Warcry let out a grunt halfway between frustration and anxiety, but he started backing up.

The monsters herded us toward a black hole of a cave near the end of the shut-in.

On the other side of their rolling wall, the angel of death had given up trying to slice through them. Now she was slamming full force into the creatures with booms that rocked the whole shut-in. Unlike her scythe, though, she couldn’t cut through. She tried going up and over, but the creatures at the top of the walls expanded until they were too heavy to stay up and flopped forward against the cliff, making a dome over our heads.

“In,” a purple jello monster croaked at me, and pretty soon all of them were yelling it. “In! In! In!”

“In the cave,” I said.

“This goes against everything.” Kest shook her head. “Just everything.”

I shrugged. “Your options are definitely die out here or probably die in the cave.”

Rali chuckled. “Sounds like fun.” He peeled off and headed into the black hole.

Kest took a deep breath, then followed her twin.

Warcry looked from me to the creatures yelling, “In!”

With a final snarl in their direction, he stalked inside.

I ducked in after him.

The wall of chaos creatures collapsed, and one of them flowed into the cave behind us. It was still rolling and sloshing forward even though it didn’t have any of its buddies to climb over. It turned back to face the entrance of the cave and raised one thin, weird arm sticking off its fat belly.

Then the cliffside collapsed, sealing us inside.

The Will of the Death Cultivator

A BURNING HAND GRABBED my arm, and I flinched.

“If this is Hake, you’re bleedin’ dead, grav.”

“You’re still alive, so you’re bleedin’ welcome,” I sneered, jerking my arm away from him. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. I was exhausted, and the Spirit I’d taken from Hungry Ghost was running low. I downed some more to keep my wounds sealed and get some internal alchemy regulating, but it barely touched the fatigue.

Light flickered in a thin filament, then brightened until I could see Kest holding up a squiggly strand of metal heated to a white-hot glow.

“What just happened?” She looked down at me. “I tried to get a lock on this angel of death creature’s Spirit signature with a modded version of my Fish Finder, but it wouldn’t track anything. And then those chaos creatures...”

Kest trailed off, turning to face the one that had followed us into the cave.

It wasn’t alone anymore. Dozens of the purple jello creatures were squeezing through the cracks between boulders of the cave-in like play-dough through one of those spaghetti makers. We had to keep backing farther into the cave because they were taking up all the space, even thinned out like noodles.

Outside, the angel of death battered away at the rubble.

The chaos creature with the huge belly and skinny stick arms and legs sat up.

“Why,” it croaked at me, “do you have Sheigo’s apparatus?”

“The what?”

“Hungry Ghost was his.” The creature tilted its head until its cheek was flat against its belly. “Yet it has accepted you as its master.”

I blinked. “You guys can see Hungry Ghost? I thought it was supposed to be hidden from everybody else.”

“All unliving can see one another,” the creature croaked. “From who did