“Not if you want to keep from killing us all in our sleep,” Warcry said. “Sit down.”
My muscles twitched and shivered at the thought of sitting. Every fiber in my body screamed to charge headlong into action—run, jump, fight, move, do anything except hold still. Sitting sounded like torture right then.
“Or,” I suggested, “we go back to the temple and finish this tonight.”
“If I have to choke you out, I’ll do it, grav,” he growled.
“Pretty sure I could take you.”
“If you want to advance to Ten without killing yourself or one of us, then you need to learn how to condense.” He pointed at the ground. “Now park it.”
I blew out a shaky breath. A small, unfortunately loud part of my brain knew he was right and that if I wasn’t so hyper, I wouldn’t want to endanger anybody else.
Robotically, I folded my legs and sat down on the smooth river rocks. Right away, my knee started bouncing.
Rocks clacked together as Warcry sank down to my left.
“And no, you bleedin’ can’t take me,” he snapped.
Condensing
“CLOSE YOUR EYES AND focus on your Spirit sea, grav.”
That was almost as hard as sitting down, especially with the cacophony of jungle sounds crashing against my skull. Night birds and bugs and twigs snapping and leaves rustling and the artifact team drinking and talking and messing around on their HUDs and the constant running monologue inside my head yelling like a little kid on a sugar high.
I bounced on the spot and pressed my eyelids shut with my thumb and forefinger.
“I know it’s proper awful,” Warcry growled, “but you have to hold still and let go of the noise. Inside and out, yeah?”
I opened my eyes. “You’ve been overcultivated before?”
“Not since I was halfway through Sho. Happens when you take in too much Spirit too fast. I was trying to catch up to... to somebody who could cultivate faster and store better’n me.”
I opened my mouth, but he cut me off before I could get going again.
“Humans start out weak in the storage department,” he said. “Disorganized. That elixir the Emperor gave you got your body ready for Ten, but it’s your sea needs work now. It’s trying to store too much loose Spirit.”
Thinking about Spirit amounts made me want to check my reserve stat. I opened my eyes and reached for my Winchester’s cracked screen.
Warcry knocked my hand down.
“Leave it. Focus.”
I held my eyes shut and really tried to focus on my Spirit. The Miasma had been whipped up into a typhoon, all raging violence, battering at the edges of my Spirit sea, trying to bash its way out.
“What do I do now?”
“Good job keeping your gob shut for almost a whole second.”
“Thanks.”
“That wasn’t a...” He sighed. “Just focus on your Spirit. It’s got a natural movement to it. A way it wants to go. If you had all the time in the world, you’d go into seclusion, and it would eventually condense itself. But humans’ve got eighty, maybe ninety years altogether. We can’t waste time in seclusion. So you’ve gotta find the way it’s already naturally moving and speed that up.”
I homed in on the swirling center of the storm. “I think I get what you’re saying about the movement, but—”
“Don’t talk, grav. Just do.”
“But I don’t know how—”
“You’re never gonna find out asking somebody who don’t even have the same Spirit type.” Rocks shifted as he adjusted his sitting position. “If you want a textbook, get one off the hyperweb and stop wasting my time. But so’s you know up front, half that nonsense is written by rubbish liars who’ve never even made it to Ten for themselves. If you want my help, clam up and get to work. What direction’s your Spirit condensing?”
“Kind of... around. Like a whirlpool or maelstrom or whatever they’re called in the middle of the ocean.”
“Death Spirit condenses in a spiral, then,” he said like he was making a note to himself. “All right. Not the easiest, but not the hardest, either. So help it along. Spiral it in faster and tighter in one concentrated area.”
Creating the spiral was similar to creating that black hole that sucked in Miasma at the center of Reclaiming the Dead. The hard part was getting that raging storm to all turn in the right direction at once. It was like trying to push a truck out of a muddy ditch and back onto the road—once it caught traction, the Spirit turned under its own power, pulling in more from around my Spirit seas and rivers. The spiral corkscrewed tighter and tighter, until loads of Death Spirit was compacted inside.
Little by little, that feeling like my bones were going to rip free of my muscles and sprint off into the jungle started to calm down. The Spirit boost from the skeleton life point gem wasn’t gone, it was just finally properly stored. I could access it if I needed to by running the spiral in the opposite direction, kind of like reeling script out of that ring, but it wasn’t holding me hostage anymore. The Miasma in my sea and rivers had gone from a near-solid mass back to that familiar turquoise smoke, except for the tiny, brilliant galaxy spiraling at its center.
I climbed back out of that internal grave by degrees, just like Rali had taught me to, so I could avoid the post-meditation freak out. The jungle sounds were still there, but things in camp had quieted down to almost nothing. Condensing must’ve taken longer than I thought. The hooligans had all turned in for the night, and the coals in the fire pit smoldered among the ashes.
I leaned out over the water. The turquoise smoke was gone. Without moonlight, I shouldn’t have been able to make out my reflection, but my Ki-senses were sharper now. I could see my face like I was looking in a mirror.
Warcry’s reflection was staring at me suspiciously.
“No Miasma leaking out of my face holes,” I said. “That’s got to be an
