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

Warcry went straight for the icy water of the creek and dunked his head and shoulders in.

That looked pretty great.

“Got your fish-finder on?” I asked Kest.

She checked her HUD. “We’re safe. No creek carp within fifty yards of our current location.”

“Awesome.” I took a running jump over Warcry and cannonballed into the deeper water. It was freezing and clear and perfect. I came up whooping with the cold, but happy.

We couldn’t go running past Ghost Town in broad daylight, so we stuck around the creek for a while, swimming and drinking and taking shifts sleeping in the shade. No creek carp showed up, but Kest had enough string and metal to put together a hand line for fishing. Rali found some grubs in the trees, and after a while he had a little pile of bluegill-like fish. I cleaned them with a knife from Kest’s storage ring while Warcry started a fire. Before long, we had all the little white strips of fish infused with Rali’s All-Nighter Eraser that we could eat.

When the night sun started to take over the sky, the twins led us through the maze of shut-ins to the east of Ghost Town. We kept a close eye on the top of the cliffs, looking for patrols of OSS, but we didn’t see anyone.

I thought we were going to have a new problem when we made it to the end of the Shut-Ins because we didn’t have a ladder already anchored and the rock wall there was straight up and down, but Kest had been planning for that.

“I’ll climb up, then drop down the ladder,” she said. She pulled on her usual chain gauntlet and the new cinnabar gauntlet she’d made after we looted the mine shaft. Then she stepped back and shot a weight into the rock over her head, putting all her weight on the chain to test it.

Satisfied that was anchored, she touched the cinnabar gauntlet to the cliff. After a second, the strips of reddish metal turned into what looked like mercury and rolled down her fingertips onto the rock. It climbed a couple feet, then burrowed into a crevice over her head, creating a braided chain back to the gauntlet.

“That is awesome,” I said. “But do you think it’ll hold?”

“That’s why cinnabar is so valuable,” she said, pulling herself up. “Rolling silver is a lot stronger than it looks. Besides, I’ll have a second anchor point, just in case the other fails.”

While she climbed, I stepped back into the shade with Rali and Warcry. Kest made rock climbing look almost easy. I’d done a little in the hills along the highway when I was a kid, and it killed your arms and legs. It wasn’t something you wanted to get halfway up and realize you were too tired to make it to the top. But she kept going, the gauntlets anchoring her as she went. It was pretty impressive.

Then I caught Warcry staring up at Kest kind of admiringly, too, and something weird happened to my stomach. I shoved my fists into my pockets and turned around to watch the trees for creek carp.

Once Kest was at the top and the ladder was secure, we climbed up and looked around.

No OSS popped out of the growing darkness and laid the smack down, so we took off through the Rust Flats toward the dig site.

It took until after nightsun high for us to find the mine shaft. The hills were shadowy and spooky, and the hole in the dirt looked like it dropped into forever.

We clicked on our HUD lights and climbed inside. The mummies were still sitting there, undisturbed, staring off toward Sheigo’s grave.

One by one, I took the glowing purple marbles back out of my palm. As soon as I set the first one on the sandy floor of the mine shaft, it rolled over to the mummies, then disappeared into a body. The mummy’s eyes glowed purple, but the body didn’t move. The rest of the marbles followed, picking out who they’d been in life and returning. Pretty soon, the shaft was full of glowing purple eyes.

Instead of finding its body, the very last marble turned back into a chaos creature. It was the one with the huge belly and stick arms and legs.

“You have reunited us with our remains, Death cultivator, and now we can be free,” it croaked. “Please accept this as payment.”

The creature pulled a slip of purple crystal shaped like the jade books out of its forehead and handed the slip to me. The raised characters on the front said Sudden Death Technique.

“This will aid you against the reapers, but beware. It comes with a steep price. You may only use it once without consequence. As we are already dead, we take the price of that first use for you. Use it a second time, and you will pay with your life.”

Once the creature was done saying that, it sloshed over to the overweight mummy and climbed into him.

Rali was giving me that wide-eyed manic look again.

“I told you,” he said. “Go-betweens for the living and the dead. That’s what people always forget about Mortal supertypes.”

“’Cause most of ’em kill people,” Warcry said.

“I’ll give you a heads-up if I’m going to do that.” I touched the purple slip to my forehead.

Just like with the jade books, this new technique rushed into my brain and stuck. Sudden Death didn’t use Spirit like everything else. It used life energy—literally, it stole years of your life—and that was what made it so much more powerful than Spirit techniques. Powerful enough to one-shot something like the angel of death. The trick was, the book didn’t say how many years the technique stole per use, and there was no telling how many total years you started out with. Using it one time could kill you, or it could knock you back to die at seventy-one instead of ninety-nine. Every time you used it, you rolled