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

“I found it in a mine shaft,” I said. “It was on a dead body.”

“Sheigo!” one of the other chaos creatures wailed, grabbing at stringy purple hair.

The rest of them started wailing, too.

“Brave Sheigo!”

“Dead!”

“No!”

The chaos creature with the huge belly raised its stick arms. Its buddies quieted down.

“I feared this,” the creature croaked. “We were sent to this planet by Van Diemann Mining Company to mine Spirit jade, but when we discovered rolling silver, hired swords from Blue Star Mining were sent to our town to slaughter us all and take over the mines. We fled into the shafts while Brave Sheigo held them off alone.” The creature hung its head. “The tunnels collapsed in the battle.”

“The gasses,” a tiny, flat creature moaned.

“Invisible poison!”

“We slept!”

“As our bodies fell into their last slumber,” the huge-bellied chaos creature said, “our consciousnesses were pulled away and tossed into the far gorges. It was Brave Sheigo’s last attempt to save us from being trapped in the mines forever.”

Ice water trickled down my spine as I remembered the glassy eyeshine of that baby on its mom’s shoulder.

“You guys are the mummies.” I swallowed, looking around at them.

“The first inhabitants of Ghost Town,” Rali whispered, nodding slowly, “became the chaos creatures. Of course.”

“Brave Sheigo meant well, but we have never been able to find our way back to our bodies. Each night, we try, but when the blue star rises in the east, we fade away.”

“And the hunger,” croaked one of the other chaos creatures.

“So hungry!”

“Life essence!

“Starving!”

The twins, Warcry, and I all moved back a little farther.

“We will not harm you,” the big-bellied chaos creature promised. It set one scraggly hand on its stomach. “Sheigo was sent as our protector by our company, but he soon became our friend. You cultivate Death as he did and protect your friends as he did. You are an heir to his will. Our hunger for the living is constant, but we will not harm the inheritor of Sheigo’s will.”

“Or my friends?” I said.

The creature nodded. “Or your friends.”

My Spirit ran out again, and the OSS tattoo started eating away at calories. My body didn’t have much of those for it to feed on—the little body fat I’d had when I died had disappeared not long after coming to Van Diemann—so I took another hit from Hungry Ghost to refuel the script.

“Stop wasting your Miasma,” the chaos creature said. “It is running out like water through a sieve. Our healers will mend the wounds inflicted by the reaper.”

One of the creatures crept-rolled across the ground to me and wrapped itself around my useless arm like one of those blood pressure cuffs at Gramps’s doctor appointments. Another one sloshed across the cave floor and climbed up my leg onto my chest and flattened out. It felt like being hugged by water balloons, cold and rubbery and likely to pop at any second.

They both glowed purple, then the wounds started healing. I watched as the chip in my arm bone rebuilt itself and the muscle fibers sewed back together. I couldn’t bend forward to see if my stomach was doing the same thing, but I could feel the cold there seeping away and warmth replacing it. Shiny pink scars filled in the gaps, then the chaos creature healers hopped down.

“Apologies. We cannot fix the metal,” the bigger of the two said, pointing at my shoulder.

It took me a second to figure out that they were talking about the Transferogate. Looked like the angel’s scythe had sliced right through all the wires, tubes, and the bits suctioning it to my shoulder. Without that taking a good deal of the blow, I might’ve lost my arm at the shoulder.

“That’s okay, I hate this piece of junk,” I said. “Thank you.”

As they sloshed back into the crowd of creatures, I shrugged the Transferogate down my arm as far as it would go. Underneath, my shoulder was ultra-white against the browning I’d gotten from going shirtless under three suns, and a piece of tubing stuck into my armpit. I took a deep breath, braced myself, and jerked that out. It bumped against stuff inside my chest on its way out, which made me lightheaded because of the sheer wrongness of that feeling, but no huge wave of pain came from the OSS tattoo. Maybe breaking the Transferogate had stopped it from telling the script to hit the shock juice.

That reminded me.

I tossed down the Transferogate and looked from Rali to Kest. “The Bailiff was about to zap me with the script remote before you guys attacked, but he never did. I wonder how long it’ll take him to find it.”

“Oh, right.” Kest pulled something out of the storage ring. It was the script remote. “I grabbed it out of his hand when I threw up the Portable Shield Wall. He never knew what snatched it.”

Rali chuckled. “I’m not condoning stealing, but you have to admit, under special circumstances, it has its uses.”

“Talk about a relief,” I said, letting my shoulders slump. “I’ve been waiting for him to find that thing in the street and hold down the button.”

The huge-bellied chaos creature got us back to business.

“Death cultivator, you know of the mine shaft where our bodies reside, correct?” it croaked. “You are able to find this place again?”

I nodded. “We’ve been there a couple times.”

“Take us, please. Bear our consciousnesses to our bodies so that we will not fade when the blue star rises. We will be able to return to our souls and be released to the afterlife.”

I saw Rali’s eyes bug out, not with fear, but with some kind of manic excitement. This must be like something he’d read in one of his favorite sword legends.

“Bear you how?” I asked.

One at a time, the chaos creatures imploded, turning into shining purple crystals as round and smooth as marbles.

“Do not absorb the Spirit therein,” the huge-bellied one said when he was the last one still in his chaos creature form. “Please. Consciousness