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

“However we split it, we can’t just walk into Ghost Town and sell this all at once,” Kest said. “It’ll attract too much attention.”

I bounced a Spirit stone in my hand. “Maybe I shouldn’t sell any at all, since I was one of the newbies they sent out here to test my loyalty.”

Rali clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Hake, man, I hate to tell you this, but you failed.”

I laughed. “No kidding.”

Kest wasn’t messing around, though.

“No one will be suspicious if I bring in some odds and ends every few days to sell along with the scavenge. They’ll just assume I found it in the Shut-Ins.” When I looked at her, lace trickled down into her cheeks. “Obviously I’d get receipts so you could see I wasn’t skimming anything.”

“It’s not that,” I hurried up and said. “I didn’t think you would lie or anything. I was just thinking that would solve a lot of our problems, since I wouldn’t know what a fair price on this stuff is, anyway.”

That was all true, but it wasn’t really what I’d been thinking. I had just realized that if this loot sold for good money, I could pay her back for the Winchester. I was excited to get that off my conscience.

We sorted through the loot, putting stuff into two piles. I tried to get Kest to take two-thirds so she would have Rali’s share to buy him fancy sugar and ingredients, but both the twins hated that idea.

“If you try to give it to me, even by proxy, I’ll commit ritual suicide,” Rali said.

“That actually doesn’t scare me a lot,” I said.

“It should. When I do it, I’ll stand close enough to you that my blood and effluence goes all over your clothes.”

“He probably will,” Kest said. “And you won’t be able to clean it out of the fibers, either, trust me. There’s a reason I don’t scavenge clothing from the Shut-Ins.”

I sighed and went back to sorting.

“Fine.” I’d figure out some other way to get Rali his share. Maybe I could buy some ingredients and ask him to make something with them.

“Those are going to require closer inspection,” he said, pointing at the hairpins I was holding.

“These?” I shifted them on my palm. They didn’t look a lot different from Earth hairpins.

But Kest was nodding. “Use Ki to enhance your sight.”

“How do I do that?”

“The same way you healed your necrotizing tissues and restored your internal alchemy last night,” she said. “Send a little Spirit to your eyes to strengthen your vision.”

I tried, but it was like trying to catch smoke in my hand and then shove that smoke into a pop bottle.

“Hang on.” I checked my reserve stat on the Winchester. Yeah, almost nothing after that Spirit transfer. “I need to cultivate real quick.”

I started Swallowing the Universe, but my mind wouldn’t stay focused on breathing exercises. For some reason, it really wanted to focus on the mummies, so I let it, wondering who would willingly pack their kids into a cave to die. The turquoise Miasma flowed into my lungs, cold and heavy and a little wet, rolling through the channels and settling in my Spirit sea.

At the back of my brain, I remembered to get the internal alchemy regulation going. It took some of the sting out of the Death Spirit hitting my organs.

When I slowly came back and reopened my eyes, Rali was grinning.

“You did it,” he said. “You were in the vein.”

“All I was thinking about was how unfair it was for that baby and those kids to die down here.”

“Maybe that’s where the Death Spirit vein was today.” He shrugged. “Or maybe you were picking up on their final thoughts. Death cultivators used to be seen as go-betweens for the living and dead.”

“Whatever you were doing, you should figure it out and do it every time.” Kest made a vague motion around me. “The Spirit down here was swirling and compressing around you. It’s starting to relax now.”

I looked around and didn’t see anything.

Right. Ki-level sight enhancing.

I shut my eyes again and focused on moving some of the Miasma up through my body to my eyes. It was slow getting started, but after a couple seconds, I could feel the cold saturating my eyeballs, turning them into icy orbs.

“Keep your—”

“Internal alchemy regulated,” I finished for Rali. “I forgot about it for a second.”

“It might be smart to designate a portion of your Spirit for that job specifically,” Kest suggested. “Things and people are more effective at a task when it’s all they do.”

I didn’t know how effective training a small part of my Spirit was going to be when, every day, I’d just lose it to the Transferogate, but I went ahead and split off a little of what I was sending to my eyes and concentrated on getting it cycling throughout my body. The sharp bite of ice in my eyeballs calmed down to something more like soft-serve ice cream.

“Okay.” I held up the hairpins and looked at them again.

Golden straws of light were bending down toward the stones on the pins, then shooting off again at odd angles.

“Whoa. What are those lights?”

“Luminous Spirit,” Kest said, studying the hairpins. “It’s one of the Celestial supertypes. It’s been worked into the artificery so that anyone can use the apparatus, regardless of their affinity. Given the way it bends, my guess is it’s some kind of camouflage or disguise array.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s pretty cool. Wonder what this lady needed a disguise for.”

“And why she didn’t use the array to escape whatever was happening down here,” Kest added.

“Because maybe,” Rali said, holding up one finger, “she was a willing participant in this mass human sacrifice.”

“Yeah, I’m not too convinced about the willing human sacrifice angle,” I said, thinking back to the babies and kids clutched in their parents’ arms.

Looking around with the Ki-sight, I could see the Miasma hanging in the air kind of like ground fog, thick tendrils of