“The sushi’s still here?” I joked. “I figured you’d get bored and swim off while we were asleep.”
“Asleep,” she echoed, scrubbing her round little head against my thumb.
Rali grinned. “I think you’ve got a pet, Hake.”
Without warning, she darted out of my hand and snapped up a mosquito.
“Hey, as long as it keeps thinning out the bugs.” When she came back, I petted her scaly side, then gently pushed her away and settled back into my stance. “Hang out as long as you want, Sushi.”
I went back to practicing. Rali gave me pointers and let me know when my breathing got off track, and the fish swam around eating bugs. After an hour or so, I called it good and sat down by the fire to cultivate some of the Miasma rolling in off the bogs.
Kest was still snoring softly, but over on his side of the fire, Warcry tossed and turned. Every now and then trails of flame ran down his head and arms.
“Is that normal?” I asked Rali.
“I’ve heard some humans do it if they’ve overcultivated,” he said, flicking his shaggy black hair out of his face, “but I don’t know if that’s true or an old wives’ tale. If any human was going to do it, it should be you after you use Hungry Ghost, since your cultivation is newest and it could overfill your sea, but you haven’t been flaring up with Miasma on this trip.”
“Maybe he’s dreaming about setting people on fire.”
“Or maybe this place is as full of nightmares as it is Miasma.”
I expected Rali to start making up one of his spooky theories that even he didn’t really believe, but when I looked, he was staring pensively into the fire.
My brain flashed back to the dreams about Gramps. “Why? Did you have a nightmare, too?”
“Not a nightmare really.” He glanced over at Kest. “Just a dream about being a kid again. Back when I still had my Universal Implant.”
I waited a second for him to elaborate. He didn’t.
So I asked him, “Was it pretty bad?”
He shook his head. “There weren’t any downsides to it, and it never hurt anything.” Then he remembered he was supposed to be the anti-implant guy and forced a smirk. “Well, besides everybody categorizing you as a number based on how much Spirit you’d cultivated instead of as an individual.”
“Well, yeah, obviously that stuff goes without saying,” I said, tearing up some strands of dry swamp grass and chucking them into the fire. “But do you ever wish you hadn’t removed it? You could check your ranking, see how much Spirit you had...”
Rali rolled his walking stick between his palms. “Everybody’s got a part of them that wants to compare themselves to something. But I wouldn’t go back for all the sweet mochi in the universe. Living without knowing is way more...” He thought about it for a second. “...relieving.”
“I can see that,” I said. “Like you don’t have to keep up with anybody else.”
“More like you don’t have to keep up with your own ego.”
I laughed. “Was that ever a legit problem for you? You don’t even have an ego.”
He grinned down at the fire. “Mine’s worse than anybody I know, Hake. That’s why I couldn’t keep the implant.”
“Whatever.”
“I wanted to be the best.” He shrugged. “I thought I was the best.”
“I mean, from what Kest said, you kind of were, right?” I said. According to his twin, Rali had blazed through the levels of kishotenketsu, making it to Ten way back when they were still little kids. For all we knew, he was in Ketsu already.
“I didn’t understand kishotenketsu back then.” He unfolded his legs, hiking his knees up and resting his elbows on them. “I thought Spirit was something to hoard so I could be better than everyone else, but the more I got, the more I wanted. My ego needed to keep up that feeling of progress. It took me forever to realize my motivations were all wrong. If I’d kept my implant, you’d be talking to a very different man, one with Cold Heart Spirit instead of Warm.”
“Yeah, right.” I threw a handful of grass at him. “You couldn’t use Cold Heart Spirit if your life depended on it.”
A couple glowing coals tumbled out of the fire, and Rali shoved them back in with the butt of his walking stick.
“That’s one of the reasons I knew we could trust you back when we first found you,” he said. “You just wanted to protect the life around you, even when that life didn’t directly benefit you. That’s why I made such a big deal out of that fight with the Contrails. I don’t want to see your Spirit corrupted into the killing machine everybody thinks Death cultivators should be. You don’t have to play by their predetermined rules. You’ve got your own code, kind of like the wandering heroes from the old sword legends.”
I stared into the coal bed, thinking about that.
“I think you’re just seeing what you want to see, man,” I said. “I’m not some great guy doing heroic stuff. I’m just an idiot who hasn’t screwed up bad enough for you guys to hate me yet.”
That made him laugh, a real, deep belly laugh. The sound rang across the swamp.
“Bleedin’ hell’s going on?” Warcry slurred angrily, turning over.
Rali calmed down. “We’re all that idiot all the time, Hake. If you could see the thoughts and motivations of the people around you as well as you can yours, you’d judge them just as harshly. Contempt is the end result of full disclosure.”
Kest sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Why are we having philosophical discussions at top volume in the middle of the night?”
“’Cause they need a kick in the teeth,” Warcry said.
I checked the time on my HUD. “It’s not long until day sunup anyway. We should get moving.”
With a little more grumbling, Kest passed out Coffee Drank to everybody—except Rali, who turned up his nose at
