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

little bigger around than a shooter marble. I’d been feeling a little on the shaky side since I hadn’t eaten, but when the Bailiff held the Spirit stone to my OSS tattoo, energy flowed down my forearm and filled my whole body. The hunger and weakness disappeared.

Once it was used up, the Spirit stone went from bright white to a grimy gray color.

“Take that Spirit and redirect it to your muscles,” the Bailiff coached me. “Focus on making them faster and stronger.”

To make sure I was getting it right, he held out the emptied Spirit stone in one ghost hand.

“Take it.”

I saw what was coming a mile away, so I lunged for it. Didn’t matter. His hand was gone before I even got close.

“Too slow. Speed them muscle fibers up some more. Go ahead. Take it.”

We played that game for about ten minutes before my fingertips finally grazed the stone.

“That’ll have to do for today,” the Bailiff said.

I leaned over and put my hands on my knees, trying to get my breath back. Sweat dripped into my eyes. It was embarrassing to be sweating my butt off from a game people use to tease little kids, but when the Bailiff called Warcry over, he was soaked, too, and all he’d been doing was these slow, relaxing push and pull motions. Also, he reeked like beer barf. That made me feel a little better.

“Face your opponent,” the Bailiff said. “Bow.”

I did a clumsy imitation of Rali’s bow.

Warcry’s looked way more practiced, all sharp angles and precise lines, and when he stood back up, his expression had flipped from contempt to stone cold and ready to kill.

The ancient caveman part of my brain started grunting and flailing its arms in terror.

“Take your fighting stances,” the Bailiff said.

Warcry brought his arms up to about chest height, hands and shoulders relaxed, weight almost evenly on both feet. He was still favoring his prosthetic a little, so maybe he hadn’t got that locked-up knee fixed yet.

I hunkered down into the muay thai high guard, fists by my forehead, elbows ready, weight on my back leg.

Left leg, nail him in the left leg, started running through my head in a loop, and I shifted a little so I could snap out a big front kick to his knee right off.

An ugly smile pulled at the corner of Warcry’s mouth like he knew what was coming.

The Bailiff waved a huge ghost hand between us like a NASCAR starting flag.

“Beat the everloving hell out of each other.”

Kishotenketsu

WARCRY HAD BEEN A BEAST in our join-or-serve match the day before, and that was without Spirit. With Spirit, he was like MMA Godzilla on steroids who could also catch on fire. I fought him so many times that morning that I lost count. But I didn’t lose count of the good hits I got in on him.

Zero’s an easy number to remember.

I tried kicks, elbows, knees, punches, and even a couple headbutts. None of them were anywhere near fast enough to land. By the time I saw where he was, he had already moved and was beating the crap out of me from another direction. Even when I laid on the speed with my Spirit stone reserves, I couldn’t avoid his attacks. My eye-to-brain-to-muscles reaction was way too slow.

Warcry socked me so many times in the stomach and kidneys that I started to get worried about internal bleeding, and he even broke my collarbone with this one unbelievable overhead axe kick from his prosthetic. It’d taken my OSS tattoo almost fifteen minutes and another Spirit stone to heal that break.

Then the Bailiff counted us off again, and we started again.

By the time the Bailiff stopped us for lunch, I’d used up six Spirit stones, putting me in debt to him for six hundred extra Spirit on top of the quota and his new fifteen percent commission. I kept trying to figure up how much that equaled, but my brain was so beat-up I never got the same answer twice. Basically, I needed to spend the rest of the day in the cemetery cultivating Death Spirit.

When Ripper and his buddies headed into the back of the saloon for lunch, I tried to drag myself off to the stables, but the Bailiff stopped me.

“Hang on there, indenture. Muta’i has an errand to occupy your afternoon. Get over there and see what he wants.”

“Awesome.” My stomach felt like it was trying to chew through my back, I had an impossible Spirit debt to repay, so I was probably never going to eat again, and all I really wanted to do was lay down and die, but I turned and headed for the distillery.

As I left, I heard the Bailiff tell Warcry, “Now then, let’s start off this body conditioning. No, hell, that’s not enough reinforcement. I thought I was dealing with a champ here...”

I glanced over my shoulder.

Warcry was in his fifty-fifty fighting stance, a snarl on his face, and the Bailiff was swiping that mega-bowie knife at his raised forearms. Thin bloody lines crisscrossed his skin.

“Better toughen that up some more, Mr. Champion. This is slipping right through.”

I winced, but Warcry didn’t scream or anything. Maybe this was the kind of training he went through all the time.

I turned around and kept walking, telling myself not to feel bad for a guy who’d spent the night before partying while I was starving and who was going to eat some huge delicious lunch while I was still starving.

“There you go, Mr. Champion,” the Bailiff said. “Earn that full-service saloon gal rubdown.”

Behind the stables, a cook was scooping out huge helpings of orange stuff to the indentures standing in line. I swallowed hard and tried not to stare.

There was no one waiting in line for the water pump, so I gulped down roughly a hundred gallons of water, then splashed my face and chest and arms to get some of the salt and grime off from fighting all morning. It would’ve been nice