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

“Dang, man.” I looked at Rali. “What did you put in this?”

“That’s a little Ten move I came up with this morning. I’m probably going to call it Sage Rali’s All-Nighter Erasing Breakfast. Basically, I put some of my Spirit into the cooking.”

Kest rolled her eyes. “I’m not calling you Sage.”

Seeing my bread was gone, Rali frisbeed me another piece.

“I might.” I downed that one in no time, too. “What’s your Spirit type if it works on food? Because the other day, I’m pretty sure you fed me a flour ball full of Spirit, too.”

“Warm Heart Spirit,” Rali said. “It’s a specialization of a specialization, and it is delicious.”

“All-Nighter Erasing is nothing a Coffee Drank can’t do,” Kest said.

Rali rolled his eyes. “This is way better for you. Those drinks are full of impurities.”

I glanced up at the lightening sky through the hole in the mine’s ceiling. Blue sunup was on its way.

“Guys, I need to get back to town,” I said. “See if I can’t use any of these Ki abilities under pressure and not get my butt handed to me this time.”

We gathered up the loot and Kest’s bag and dropped it all in the storage ring. All that weight immediately disappeared. That was epically handy, considering Kest had stored what felt like a ton of cinnabar in her bag.

“You should keep the storage ring,” I told Kest. “I don’t have anything to store, and it’ll be hard to explain where I got a ring from if anyone in the OSS notices I didn’t have one yesterday.”

“I am not keeping the most valuable thing we found down here,” she said.

“No, you’re keeping the ring and everything in it.” I held up Hungry Ghost. “I’m keeping the most valuable thing we found down here.”

Both twins wanted to fight me on that, so in the interest of getting back to town on time, I agreed to split the loot down the middle. They would keep the ring and all the cinnabar Kest had mined, and I would keep Hungry Ghost, then we’d split the money Kest got for selling everything else.

Then I could pay her back for the Winchester—I didn’t say out loud.

We headed back to Ghost Town, splitting off at the outskirts and going our separate ways. I stopped off at the boneyard, used Hungry Ghost to refill my Spirit sea, then hid the little skull under a broken tombstone. A quick check with Ki-sight showed the Miasma hanging around the graves creeping toward the skull’s hiding place.

“Happy Spirit-eating,” I told it, then headed for the saloon.

The blue sun was just starting to come up when I made it to the fight cage. The Bailiff and the three bruisers from the day before were already warming up and talking. Warcry didn’t show up until I’d already been there for ten minutes doing speed exercises with the Bailiff.

“Well, if Sleep-in Sally didn’t grace us with her presence,” the Bailiff cooed as the redhead walked up. The giant ghostly hands started a sarcastic slow-clap.

Warcry’s lip curled up in a sneer.

“I ain’t any later than he was yesterday,” he said, scowling at me. He was starting to grow some bristly red-brown stubble on his chin.

I rubbed my hairless jaw. How did he already have that level of facial hair? I could go without shaving for a month and barely get a couple dorky wisps.

“That makes it all better, don’t it?” The Bailiff rocked back on his heels. “You know, Mr. IFC Champ, I’m starting to think I might’ve figured out how you almost lost to this little indenture over here the other day. Pure, unadulterated laziness. You did all right in some lily-livered tourney on some fancy Confederated planet, beating rich folk who liked to think they were fighting for real, so you thought you’d be good enough to hang with the big gents on Van Diemann, but in reality, you wouldn’t know which end of a switchblade to stick somebody with.”

Red flames started flickering along the tops of Warcry’s ears and scalp.

“It’s easy to stand around flapping your gob while the rest of us train, isn’t it?” the redhead snapped. “Beating your gums about the fighters while they’re in the cage, hanging around the saloon while the rest of us’re out killing ferals, but you never lift a hand to put your Spirit where your mouth is.”

The Bailiff grinned, showing off his yellow brush of teeth. “Well, how’s about I do it right now? You win, you sleep in every day, and I won’t say boo about it. I win, you come early to training every morning and again every night.”

I frowned. That sounded like the kind of thing that would require a training dummy twice a day instead of just once a day.

“I never lose,” Warcry said.

“Isn’t that something.” The Bailiff’s ghost arms beckoned. “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Champion.”

Fire engulfed Warcry. He shot toward the Bailiff like a missile. Then he and the Bailiff disappeared in a blur of red and gray. The thud and ping of combat rang through the air, but I couldn’t see the actual fight until I enhanced my sight.

That’s when I realized Warcry had been taking it easy on me the day before. Either that, or he’d been too hungover to fight at full speed. He was throwing everything he had at the Bailiff, faster than the un-enhanced eye could see, but the Bailiff hadn’t even taken his webbed hands out of his pockets yet. All he was doing was hopping out of the way of Warcry’s attacks. Every now and then, one of his big ghost arms would block something, but for the most part he just straight-up avoided the blows.

Something hovering next to the Bailiff’s right hip, just beside his wrist, caught my eye. A little grayish figure, floating there like it was dangling from his pocket.

Then Warcry landed a roundhouse to the thigh that buckled the Bailiff’s leg.

The grayish figure exploded into a