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

me. His long whiskers twitched when he saw that I’d noticed him.

The catfish guy’s eyes traced the patterns of bones, then looked pointedly back at me.

I couldn’t see him doing anything with Spirit, not even when I stopped cultivating and poured all my focus into checking him out with Ki-sight.

He stepped away from the wall, coming my way. I sent out a thin wall of Dead Reckoning in preparation.

A train screamed into the station, wheels clacking like an air rifle against the rails. People of every shape and size shoved out of and into the cars. Under the cover of the crowd, I jumped up and moved away from where I’d been sitting, getting lost in the flood and watching for the catfish guy.

Then the train doors wheezed shut, cutting off anyone who’d been left on the platform. The train screeched back into motion, and the people who hadn’t been able to make it into the subway in time cussed and wandered over to the benches or stood looking down the tunnel for sign of another train.

The catfish guy was gone.

I looked around. Had he gotten on the train? Was he hiding somewhere, getting ready to ambush me?

A hand broke through Dead Reckoning, reaching for me. “Hake, what—”

I spun around, throwing a big hook.

With Ki-sight I could see Rali’s lace eyes widen just before he ducked the strikes at lightning speed.

“Your reaction time has really improved,” he said as he came back up.

“Wow, sorry.” I hooked my hands in my pockets and blew out a harsh breath. “I thought you were someone else.”

He flicked his hair out of his face. “I wouldn’t want to be that guy, whoever he is.”

“What’re you doing down here?”

“Wandering the neighborhood talking to beggars. I was actually lost until I felt you cultivating.” He tipped back his head and studied the architecture. “It’s kind of body desecrate-y, but I bet that appeals to you.”

“I mean, I think it’s cool.” I shrugged. “And there’s enough Miasma down here to fill a hundred Spirit seas.”

Rali grinned. “It’s a good place for a Death cultivator. What’s the plan now?”

I scanned the subway platform one more time for the catfish guy. He wasn’t there.

“Head back to the hotel and get some supper?” I suggested. According to Warcry, complimentary room service was a normal thing at fancy hotels like Jade Rennaissance, which was lucky considering we’d spent almost all of our pooled resources on the room.

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard since we got to this city,” Rali said.

No one attacked us on the stairs or ambushed us as we emerged from the station, so maybe the catfish guy really had hopped a train.

I hadn’t realized how long I’d been down there, but when we stepped out aboveground, the dim light that had filtered through the canopy of buildings and overpasses had been replaced by darkness lit with flickering neon signs and the light spilling out of storefronts.

The station wasn’t far from our hotel. Rali and I made the walk in just under ten minutes. I thought it would be weird checking in since one or possibly two of our party had already gone up to the room, but once I showed the manager the booking confirmation Kest had sent me, he handed over the key code to our room without asking any questions.

I wondered what Rali would’ve done if he’d come in by himself. Asked the guy at the desk to call one of us to confirm he wasn’t just a crazy guy pretending like he had a room here?

Our room was on the eighth floor, and Warcry and Kest were already inside. He was at a table on the balcony, shoveling some super fancy pizza with ten kinds of meat and ten more kinds of vegetables into his face. Kest was sprawled across one of the two huge beds on her stomach, staring at her HUD.

“He’s ranked in the low twenty-thousands,” Kest read, “and his finisher is—”

“Finally!” Warcry said through a mouthful of pizza. “One of you listen to her coaching. I already told her I don’t want to hear a word about the other fighters.”

Kest sat up on the bed, tucking her bare feet under her. “If you know who you’re up against, you can analyze their weaknesses ahead of time and strategize for your match.”

“Strategies are a waste of time,” Warcry said. “You do what you do when they come at you. If you take time to think about some convoluted plan you made ahead of time, you’re dead.”

“Life or death in the moment,” Rali said, heading out onto the balcony and grabbing a slice of pizza. “That’s an enlightened way to look at it.”

“See?” Warcry said to Kest. “Your brother knows what I’m talking about.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Well, I want to know who I’m up against.” I flopped onto the bed opposite Kest.

“Oi, get off me bed! You’re sleeping over there, grav, on the foldout.”

I ignored him. “Are the individual brackets out?”

Kest shook her head. “Registration doesn’t close for another hour, but they keep a running list of competitors updated. I’ve been checking their profiles based on the guess that they’ll set up the individual bracket similarly to last year’s, starting with the highest rank versus the lowest to speed up the early eliminations.”

“I’m probably still the lowest rank on the planet.” I hooked my arms over the edge of the bed and started to pull up the Wilderness Territorial page on my HUD. Then I caught a sniff of myself. “Geez. I’ll look after I take a shower. They’ve got indoor plumbing in this place, don’t they?”

Kest pointed at a door along the side wall. I grabbed a piece of pizza off the balcony table and gulped it down on my way into the bathroom.

Instead of a stand-up shower, there was an enormous claw-foot tub with a faucet and sprayer. I wasn’t used to sit down shower-baths, but after a month of washing up with a rain barrel and water pump, any kind of