I used the hem of my shirt to mop the sweat off my face, then sat down next to the pool to cultivate.
“Does he even have a room left to sleep in after all that crashing around?” I asked her.
She pointed a fin at a dark window in the second floor of the pagoda. “Warcry takes a different, empty room.”
“Right.” Hopefully the Emperor would let us pay for the damages instead of executing us outright.
Some Mortal Spirit lingered around the Soulchamber grounds, maybe left over from the death Sentence I’d carried out on that blue guy. For the most part, the Spirit around the pool was Water, Stone, and Chemical, but there were some Organic Spirit types, too, from the plants and bugs in the area.
Once the Mortal Spirit was gone, I got down to the real work of wrestling in the other stuff. Theoretically, if I practiced this enough, I could get to the point where I could use my kishotenketsu no matter what sort of Spirit I had access to. Right then, it felt like I was light-years away from making that happen, but something Rali had said when I was getting frustrated early on with training my Ki abilities came back to me—We all start out at Ki. People who get to Ketsu are just Ki-levels who never gave up.
Kind of cheesy, but hopefully true.
Finally, I figured I was as prepared as I was going to get. I turned the Proving Forge bottle over in my hand. The Emperor of the Eight-Legged Dragons probably wouldn’t give me anything that wasn’t legit, but I was still wary about elixirs. I’d worked under a Distiller while I was indentured to the OSS. Muta’i had made ninety-nine bogus elixirs for every real one he turned out, because apparently counterfeiting was a major source of income for the small-town gang. Unfortunately, Muta’i hadn’t taught me how to tell the difference between counterfeit and the real deal, because he didn’t want me stealing any of his stock.
The wax seal scraped off under my fingernail. I pulled the cork out and sniffed the contents as if I would know the real thing by smell.
I didn’t. It smelled like the scorching-hot air coming off a gravel road in the middle of summer.
Sushi leaned in and got a whiff, too.
“Think it’s poisoned?” I asked her.
“No. No poison.” She shook her whole body with the negative. “Hot.”
I shrugged. “Well, it’s been sitting out in this sauna of a planet. Do you think leaving it out hurt it?”
“Grady hurts elixir?” she repeated like I’d just proved that there was such a thing as stupid questions.
“I meant like spoiled, smarty-pants. Back on Earth, we kept perishable stuff in fridges to keep it from going bad.”
“Elixir not perishes,” she said. “Just hot.”
“Good deal. Bottoms up.” I saluted her with the bottle, then killed it in two gulps. It tasted like hot ashes. The warmth burned down my throat and dropped like a bomb into my stomach. I coughed and pounded my chest a couple times. “Definitely would’ve been better cold.”
Except the heat wasn’t receding, it was getting worse. It spread like a brush fire out of control, through my Spirit sea and into each of the rivers, burning into the muscle and tissue. I’d used Corpse Fire sometimes to cleanse soul contamination from ferals, but that only ever burned along the top of my Spirit. The Proving Forge was boiling my insides, turning every inch of my body into a blast furnace.
It was going to cook me alive.
The elixir bottle dropped through my fingers and clinked away. I lurched forward, the lights of the pool going blurry, then fading out. Rough sidewalk scraped my cheek. It should’ve been warm from the heat of the day, but it felt like ice against my scorching face.
Somewhere far away, I heard Sushi yelling, but I couldn’t get a breath to tell her everything was okay. My lungs had shriveled into chunks of burnt steak.
The fire raged out of control, going from dull red to a brighter, more intense orange. Magma sank into the tissues around the Spirit rivers, radiating out to my skin, and the image of an egg exploding in a microwave flashed through my brain.
I tried to reach out and drag myself toward the pool, but I was groping blind and I couldn’t feel anything but the pain. Someone was screaming. The sound resonated in my gritted teeth.
At the edge of my consciousness, I found the little bit of Spirit I cycled to regulate my internal alchemy and keep the Miasma from freezing me alive from the inside out. I shut that down, then sent waves of Death Spirit gushing to the surface to suffocate the flames.
In response, the fire intensified, going from orange to the brilliant yellow of the sun. I fought back, pouring on more necrotizing frost. A glacier of turquoise ice formed around my Spirit sea.
“Ah, bleedin’ hell, grav,” Warcry cussed from some distant planet. Then his voice got louder, like he was yelling in my ear. “Don’t ignore your rivers! You’re letting ’em roast! If you want to come out of this with any arms and legs, you’ve got to focus on all of it at once!”
It took a monumental effort, but I broke up the ice floes in my Spirit sea and sent freezing flash floods rampaging through the Spirit rivers. The ice sublimated on contact with the flames, and I caught a brief flash of green before the fire ratcheted up another notch to a screaming blue.
Death cultivator doesn’t have enough Miasma in reserve to survive body proving! Hungry Ghost’s normal mocking tone was gone, replaced by fear. Death cultivator will burn to ashes. Unlock Hungry Ghost’s coffin! Hungry Ghost has endless stores of Miasma!
It was so tempting, but I knew if I let him take control, I’d never get it back. Lives were nothing but fuel to him. He
