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

me to keep using Dead Reckoning against Warcry, I had to keep taking the Spirit stones. I ended up using twelve altogether for the morning training.

It was definitely worth it, though. I didn’t beat Warcry, but I was making him work for the win. When our last fight ended, he leaned over with his hands on his knees, sweat dripping off his chin.

I was on the ground, gasping for air, but still. It was nice to see that I wasn’t the only one dying.

“Now that,” the Bailiff said, “is the intensity I was looking for, Mr. Champion. That’s what’s going to win us an affiliation.”

A ghost hand scooped me up and set me on my feet.

“You keep him hopping like that, Smart Boy, and if we get signed at the Wilderness Territorial next month, I’ll make sure your year of servitude is considered paid in full. Hell, I’ll even get you a spot with the hooligans. Whattaya say?”

I swallowed another gulp of oxygen. I didn’t have the breath to say I’d believe it when I saw it, so I just gave him a nod and a thumbs-up.

“Now, if I’m not mistaken,” the Bailiff said, “you got some rocks to break for the Master Distiller and something along the lines of fifteen hundred Spirit to repay on top of your quota.” He gave me a shove toward the distillery that almost made my shaking legs buckle. “On you get.”

As I was leaving, I heard him tell Warcry, “You, Mr. Champion, have a defense to learn how to break before tonight. Keep it cranking away in the back of your mind while you’re on that escort job. Especially if you don’t want to spend your overnight doing body conditioning drills.”

While I scarfed down the sticky rice and bean sprout concoction the second cook had made for lunch, I researched body conditioning on the Winchester. Most of it was similar to what you had on Earth, exercise and punching trees and scraping your shins with bamboo—and for the real psychos, cutting up your skin with huge bowie knives. But there was another component to it that strengthened and refined your Spirit sea. That was called taiji, and it consisted of those exercises Warcry did before training, centering your mind and body and Spirit all at the same time. According to the page, it was good for anyone’s kishotenketsu, but especially important when you were trying to break through to the next level.

Talking out in the center aisle of the stables reminded me that I couldn’t hang around reading all afternoon. I bookmarked a bunch of taiji instructionals, then headed over to the distillery.

I spent the rest of the day chipping sandstone away from Spirit jade and practicing Swallowing the Universe. When it was time to head back over to the fight cage, I checked my Spirit stats on the Winchester. In a little over seven hours, I’d only managed to add six hundred and eleven Spirit to my reserve. Not even close to what I needed to meet the quota, let alone pay back the Bailiff’s Spirit stones and his commission. I headed for the boneyard to refill my Spirit sea.

Something Kest had said about an apparatus as powerful as Hungry Ghost being dangerous nagged at the back of my brain, but I shut it down. I couldn’t afford not to use the grinning skull.

Burning the Night Sun

IT ONLY TOOK THREE training sessions for Warcry to figure out how to confuse Dead Reckoning. Just before he hit the Miasma, he would set off an explosion of Burning Hatred that blurred his movements. I still knew relatively where he was, but I couldn’t tell what his arms and legs were doing behind that flame wall.

Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of my free time practicing with Kest and Rali, stepping up Dead Reckoning’s accuracy while also making it more efficient. What I came up with was basically a thin wall of Miasma surrounding me like a bubble, which didn’t waste nearly as much Spirit as a cloud did.

I also started staying out in the boneyard most nights, cultivating and sometimes sleeping, too, which sounded creepy, but wasn’t if you were too tired to crawl back to your uncomfortable cot. Anyway, according to the jade books, just being around places where the Miasma collected would help me absorb it, so sleeping in the boneyard was more beneficial than sleeping in a stall made for barn animals.

It was kind of cool to stare up at the night sun, too. If you weren’t freaked out by how unlike Earth it was, the black sphere and its orangey-magenta corona were kind of beautiful.

I tried not to think about Gramps watching Westerns and eating freezer burritos alone, but that was hard to avoid when I stopped moving. I hoped to God he wasn’t too sad and that someone was watching out for him.

Some nights, Kest and Rali stayed out and cultivated with me. There was plenty of Metal Spirit in the boneyard for Kest to gather from the markers and run-down fence and rebar in the shrine ruins, and Rali said Warm Heart Spirit collected wherever he was content, which was everywhere, all the time. They helped me learn the taiji movements, even though Rali preferred to meditate in stillness.

With Hungry Ghost and all the extra cultivating and conditioning, I didn’t miss the quota once over the next few weeks, even on days the Bailiff was feeding me Spirit stones like candy. Personally, I thought that was great. Rali, though, was starting to side with Kest on the Hungry Ghost issue.

“The more your cultivation relies on an apparatus or elixir, the less sustainable your progress is,” he said. “At the higher levels, you’ll plateau and get stuck there.”

I’d never actually thought about getting my kishotenketsu to the higher levels, just surviving training was taking all my concentration, but to placate the twins, I cut down to only using Hungry Ghost to meet the quota.