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

“Ominous. This might turn into a haunted adventure.”

Already the shadows were elongating and turning that weird orangey-magenta color. I’d spent the whole afternoon hauling rocks before Proboscis and the snake-haired lady had finally cut the whole crew loose for the day. Muta’i hadn’t had anything else for me to do when I checked in, so I’d bolted over to Kest and Rali’s, and we’d taken off into the wilderness.

When we got there, the dig site was deserted. I retraced the feral corpses to the hill cluster I’d fallen through.

Kest turned on the wristlight of her HUD and checked the cavern.

“Not too deep,” she said.

“About twenty feet and a sprained ankle.” I twisted my wrist around, inspecting the Winchester. Turned out I had a light, too, in almost the same place. I clicked it on and off a couple times.

“If you know Swallowing the Universe, you should try it now,” Rali told me, breathing a little hard from the climb up the hillside. “And keep doing it while we’re down there.”

Kest looked at him. “I thought you hated those corporate-invented exercises.”

“I do,” he said, leaning on his walking stick. “They’re soulless and mass-produced, and they don’t take into account the individual. But they’re also easier for a beginner like Hake to do while he’s walking around. Plus, since he already knows about it, I won’t have to waste breath explaining. You guys might not’ve noticed this because I look so fit, but I just hauled twice either of your weight up that hill.”

“A Buddha bod,” I said.

“What’s a Buddha bod?”

“Where I’m from, Buddha’s an immortal who really liked good food. He didn’t have your full, luscious mane, though.” I nodded at Rali’s long hair.

Rali flipped it over his shoulder. “One does what one can.”

One at a time, we climbed down on Kest’s smallest scavenging ladder, our wristlights bouncing around inside the cave.

I half expected the mummies to be gone, maybe discovered by Proboscis while I was hauling rock, but they were all still huddled down there. The baby’s eyes glinted when my light shined across them.

“So, what do you guys think?” I asked once we were all on solid ground again.

Kest eyed the walls of the cave. “Looks like an old mine shaft. The timbers haven’t rotted, so the humidity and organisms must be keeping to a minimum down here, which the desiccation of the remains supports.” She took a step toward the mummies. “Wonder what they were mining...”

“Wait,” Rali said.

She froze. “What?”

I looked around for some kind of monster or Indiana Jones–style trap.

But Rali got down on his knees facing the mummies and bowed his face to the cave floor, his black hair hanging in a curtain around his head.

“Thank you for allowing us into your final resting place, honored ancestors,” he said in a low voice. “Please excuse our trespass. We mean no disrespect.”

“You never do that when I’m scavenging in the Shut-Ins,” Kest muttered, crossing her arms.

Rali got back to his feet and dusted his knees and face off. “It’s mostly criminals and gangsters in the Shut-Ins. These people don’t feel like either.”

“Can you feel that with Spirit?” I asked him.

He shrugged.

“Don’t bother,” Kest said, crouching beside the mother with the baby. “He won’t explain. He thinks it’s cool to act mysterious.”

“You can’t quantify hunches,” Rali said.

“I can.” Kest pointed at the mom’s silky gold-and-blue robe. “This style of robes. I’ll have to research how to tell if they’re authentic, but they look like something from the Colonization Era.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“Two hundred years, give or take.” She stood up and ran her hand over the closest wall. “Before they started dropping criminals on Van Diemann, mining companies used to fight over the rights to these outer planets. It could even be possible that these were miners from Van Diemann Mining Co. The ones that settled Ghost Town, then disappeared.”

Rali laughed. “That sounds like something I would’ve come up with.”

“It’s a guess based on the information in front of me,” Kest said. “Yours are wild conspiracies and fantasies based on whatever you think is cool.”

“And spooky,” he said. “Don’t forget spooky.”

She pointed at a deep crack in the rock of the wall. “Pick and shovel scars. There’s cinnabar back in here.” She dug around in her mostly empty bag and pulled out a little rock hammer and a pick about a quarter the size of the one I’d been using earlier. “This must’ve been a new tunnel. There’s still a decent amount left.”

“Kest,” Rali said.

She turned to look at him. He raised his eyebrows and kind of bobbed his head around like she was missing something obvious.

“Oh.” She dropped the pick back into her bag. “How do you want to do this, Hake?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s your find,” she said. “Take whatever we can see on the surface or ransack the bodies for everything they’ve got? How thorough do you want to be scavenging this place?”

I frowned. The mummies were all just sitting quietly. Peacefully. To mess that up seemed bad, like kicking over a headstone.

“We’ll take what we can without disturbing them,” I said.

She nodded. “I won’t pull any teeth, then.”

I shot a look at Rali, my eyes wide, and he shrugged.

“We’ll see how long she remembers,” he said, leaning his chin on his walking stick. “If she finds some rare metal filling, the bets are off.”

“Cinnabar is rare and valuable,” Kest said, “and I didn’t tear into it without asking.”

Rali snorted. “Because I stopped you.”

“Maybe I could go over the bodies and you could do some mining,” I said to Kest.

Graverobbing

WHILE KEST MINED RED rock glinting with silvery metal from the vein in the wall, I got to work going over the mummies. Just like in the Shut-Ins, Rali didn’t help.

“Graverobbing is against my nature,” he said, sitting down and resting his staff across his knees. “I’ll be over here meditating if you need me.”

“More like napping,” Kest said, dropping another hand-sized rock into her bag.

“Maybe he’s got a Sleep Spirit