Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (best books to read .TXT) 📕

Kest sat back on her heels and pushed up her goggles, then inspected the blade-and-handle combo. The weld-point was still glowing red-hot, so she shoveled a couple handfuls of wet sand onto it, then washed it off in the stream.

“Hm.” She gave it a test swing. “Durability’s not going to be great. And I should’ve added an angle for power.”

“You’re going to use it one time,” Rali said.

“That’s not an excuse for shoddy craftsmanship.”

He rolled his eyes and looked at me. “Artificers, am I right?”

I kind of half got the joke, but sometimes my mouth makes up for what my brain misses out on.

“For me, she’s still coasting on the whole saving my life thing,” I said.

That got him laughing.

Kest threw her bag back over her shoulder and waded into the willows, hacking a path with her new machete.

“I’ll wait out here,” Rali said. He tapped his nose. “My olfactory receptors get sensitive on an empty stomach.”

I shrugged and followed Kest into the trees.

“How did you weld that with your hand?” I asked her, catching up.

“Metal Spirit.”

“Right. That doesn’t tell me anything, actually. What’s Metal Spirit?”

She looked over her shoulder at me. “You know. Elemental supertype with a Metal specialization?”

“I know what ghost spirits are and what liquor spirits are. Not what metal spirits are.”

Kest grunted as a willow branch popped her across the arm, then spun around and started hacking the one that got her. I took a couple steps back.

“Don’t you have kishotenketsu where you come from?” she asked.

“I’ve never heard that word before in my life, so I’m going to say probably not.”

“You don’t have Spirit?” She sounded like she didn’t believe me. “Like, at all?”

“I promise I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is it magic?”

She snorted. “There’s no such thing as magic.” Then her eyes got huge. “Why? Is there magic where you’re from?”

“No.”

“Oh.” She went back to chopping at the trees. “Spirit here is like...like the energy that animates everything. If you think of your kishotenketsu like an engine, then Spirit’s the fuel that makes the engine run. You gather it, store it, use it up.”

“So far, I’ve heard you guys mention Metal Spirit and Elemental Spirit. Are those the only types, or are there spirits for everything in the world? Tree spirit, water spirit, backpack spirit...”

She ignored the lame joke and wiped some sweat away before it could run into her eyes. “There are a ton of different Spirit types, but they’re mostly just specialized categorizations of the supertypes—Elemental, Organic, Ordinal, Entropic, and Mortal. You can gather any Spirit that’s around, but your body has to convert it to your type before you can use it.”

With another couple swings, Kest cut through the last of the trees, and we stepped out into a clearing in the shade of where cliffs came together. The sand there was rippled like an untouched river bottom, and some random junk had washed up there—an O-ring that looked like it had come out of an engine block, a broken mason jar, and one of those shiny chains they have on pens at the bank.

Kest reached over her shoulder with the machete and stuffed it into her bag, then started picking up the junk.

“Decent,” she said, “but not what we’re looking for.”

Faded flood lines were worn into the rock of the cliff, most of them way over our heads. I craned my head back to follow the highest one.

“How often does it flood down here?”

“Not very, but you don’t want to be down here when it does,” Kest said, checking a map on her watch screen. “When it rains, this place fills up fast, and everything washes down to the corners of the Shut-Ins. There should be a pocket around here somewhere...”

Trailing off, she leaned forward and peeked into the spot where the rock walls met like she was trying to peek around a blind corner.

“Jackpot,” she said, rubbing her hands.

The metal in her bag clanked as she crossed the sand and disappeared around a corner I hadn’t seen at first glance because of how well the colors of the walls matched each other. I followed her into a shallow pocket cave tucked back in the rock.

The smell hit me first, a stank like old hamburger and scummy mud mixed together in a trash bag and left to bake in the sun for a week. I jerked the damp collar of my T-shirt up to cover my nose, but that didn’t help. The nastiness filtered right through the cotton.

“Geez, what is—” I broke off when I saw Kest huddled down in the back, digging through a pile of old falling-apart clothes.

Except it wasn’t just old clothes. There were rotting corpses inside the clothes, the bodies thrown on top of each other like dirty laundry. Some were human, some were alien, but they were all dead and in various stages of decay.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Salvaging. What does it look like?” She rolled a squishy body off the pile and started digging through its pockets. She came up with a set of spiked brass knuckles. “Nice. I thought this guy looked like a hooligan.”

“He looks like roadkill that’s about to pop,” I said. “Do you want, like, a face-shield or something?”

“He’s not bloated, just fat,” she said, poking his ballooned gut and making it slosh. “See? Not hard. The trip down the wash usually stabs holes in them somewhere along the way that lets the trapped gasses out. I almost never have one explode on me.”

I backed up a couple steps. “Almost never isn’t never never.”

She moved down to the dude’s feet and pulled at his boots. They came off with a slurp. From the looks of the slimy foot bones sticking out of his pants, he’d left most of the meat inside.

“Gonna have to wash that out,” she muttered.

I winced, but Kest didn’t even notice. She was too busy undoing a dead shark-looking guy’s gun belt. She slipped it out