Chikori, the dance hall gal who had told me about her murdered friends, was waiting for me outside my apartment building when I got back. Her segmented insect eyes shined with tears.

  “Is he…?”

  I nodded. “He’s not going to hurt anybody else.”

  “Oh, thank you, Death cultivator!” Chikori threw her arms around my neck. Her chelicerae clacked and her body shuddered. It took me a second to realize that was the bug version of sobbing. “Thank you, thank you!”

  Plenty of surreal stuff had happened to me since coming to this universe, but possibly the weirdest up to that point was holding a plastic bag of ramen-shack takeout while telling a bug girl that the guy who’d viciously murdered her friends and a whole bunch of other women over the years was dead.

  I knew I should feel something, but I couldn’t let go of oblivion yet. Dealing with evil sickos wears on you. You have to take your time coming back from it, kind of like coming out of meditation.

  A few passersby shot looks our way, but most of them ignored us.

  It was pretty late, the local version of after midnight, but people were still out wandering the streets. Summer on Ryu blistered. The temperature hovered around a hundred degrees every night and soared even higher during the day, so most folks in Hoshirong held off doing anything until the sun had gone down.

  Chikori’s itchy arm-hairs prickled against the back of my neck and sent creeped-out shivers down my spine. I tried not to be a jerk about it and patted her on the shoulder between her shiny beetle-wings.

  “Andi, Jae, Ver, Sheena…” She clacked her chelicerae one last time, then stepped back. “Nobody ever cared.” She dabbed at one segmented eye with a lacy handkerchief. “May the wronged dead forever bless you, Death cultivator.”

  Not much chance of that. There were a bunch of wronged dead one planet over who could tell her a thing or two about me.

  Blissfully ignorant, Chikori gave a little dip of her legs and head, kind of like a curtsey, then stepped out into the flow of foot traffic and hurried on down the street.

  I passed my HUD under the building’s security panel.

  The lock clunked open, but before I could go inside, the glowing purple ghost of a beautiful female spacemoth appeared between me and the door.

  “Andara, I presume?” I said.

  She didn’t laugh. No one in this universe gets my Earth references.

  “Death cultivator, your commitment to justice has been proven. You seek to bring reckoning, not only for crimes against the beautiful and good and mighty, but for the ugly, the marginalized, and the forgotten.”

  Her stardust-and-planet patterned wings fluttered a little as she reached up and touched her forehead. When her hand came down, she held a stone slip the size of a bookmark. A jade book.

  She held it out to me. “Powerful Enemy, Mighty Ally. For when the darkness overwhelms you and the dangers press in from all sides.”

  “Uh, thanks.” I’d had ghosts present me special abilities on jade books two other times so far, but I still hadn’t come up with a reply that sounded grateful and flowery enough.

  Awkwardly bowing, I took the slip from the dead spacemoth. My fingers passed through hers like they weren’t there. As soon as the book left her grasp, she faded away.

  Most jade books in this universe were the color I imagined when I heard “jade”—sort of swirly, pale green stone. Only the ones I’d gotten from ghosts glowed purple. You read them by putting them to your forehead. Learning by osmosis.

  The process usually took less than ten minutes, but I had already been standing out in the open too long. Dragon hooligans patrolled the neighborhoods on Ryu where the Emperor’s 0- and 00-ranks lived, but those guys didn’t always find all the assassins.

  Sometimes the guys getting close to becoming an 0-rank themselves didn’t look very hard.

  I stuck the jade book in my pocket with the ring and headed into the air-conditioned lobby, pulling the door shut behind me until I heard the lock engage again.

  Nobody in my building except for me ever takes the stairs. Hard to want to when you live on the sixth floor and there’s a bank of elevators right there. I alternate between the two randomly to keep ambushers guessing.

  In the stairwell, I set down the takeout bag, got into a sword stance and drew Wrathblade out of the air beside my hip.

  The voices started whispering the second the spectral uchigatana appeared.

  You could have told me to change. I would’ve done it. To save my life, I would’ve done it.

  I made one bad judgment call, Death cultivator. I got a little too big for my britches. Did I seriously deserve to die for that?

  I had plans. I had dreams. There was so much I wanted to do.

  “Search and destroy anybody but Kest, Warcry, Rali, Sushi, and members of or indentured servants of the Eight-Legged Dragons,” I told Wrathblade.

  It was pointless to include Rali and Sushi in the list. After that blowup on Sarca, I knew there was no chance they would be there. But a tiny part of me always hoped I’d be wrong.

  Wrathblade soared up the stairs ahead of me. Ten seconds later, it was back. Nobody lying in wait tonight.

  On the sixth floor, I repeated the process for the hallway, then again for my apartment, even though it had the highest-tech security Kest could get her cinnabar hand on and about a bajillion beefy low-tech locks, chains, and bars.

  Not because I was paranoid. Get attacked a couple times while you’re on the toilet—you’ll want a Wrathblade to clear your apartment, too. Takeshi-ketsu loved having a high-profile Death cultivator on call, but as the Death cultivator in question, I can honestly say that the “high-profile” part stunk out loud.

  The pay added up, though. The Komodo Emperor paid me a thousand credits for every Marked for Death target I took out. Even though Sanya-Ketsu, the Dragons’ traitorous former 002-rank, had made a big joke out of me being the cheapest hitman they’d ever hired, I still had more than enough cash coming in to rent this ridiculous apartment.

  This was by far the nicest place I had ever lived—and that included the time I was imprisoned in the high-class jail suite beneath Dragon Heartchamber 1 after Hungry Ghost used my body to turn Heartchamber 2 into a mass grave.

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  The ensuite bathroom was all black marble and chrome. The bedroom was laid out like a Zen Garden with a fountain in one corner trickling down into a stream that cut through the wall into the living room. In place of sand, the carpet made raking patterns wherever you walked. The windows had rolldown blackout shutters that—according to the Dragons’ real estate agent—could stop a rocket propelled grenade and also aid REM sleep by blocking light pollution.

  The stream and the Zen-sand carpet continued into the living room, where there was a sectional big enough for five people to stretch out on, and a whole projection wall to watch stuff on or play ultra-def videogames. Even the kitchenette was top-tier, a five-star restaurant kitchen shrunk down and jammed into the apartment of a guy who never cooked anything but toaster waffles.

  Sometimes I wished I could bring Gramps there so he wouldn’t have to live in our crappy trailer house in the small town where everybody knew his son was in prison and his grandson had been killed by a meth head. Then I remembered that I paid the rent with blood money and Gramps would probably hate me if he knew that. I could kill as many bad guys as I wanted, but it wouldn’t make up for what I was.

  With the place cleared, I headed for the bathroom, shucking the stupid gangster suit as I went. Nothing like scalding hot water and lots of soap after a long day at the office. To make sure I wasn’t going to star in a surprise reenactment of Psycho, I ordered Wrathblade to stand guard.

  Blood had glued the shirt to my shoulder, but the script tattoo had already healed the graze, so I peeled it away from my skin without doing any more damage. The Dragons probably kept someone on staff to mend bullet holes in expensive clothing, but I chucked the shirt and jacket in the trash. By order of the Almighty Takeshi-Ketsu, I had a closet full of extras.

  My fingers bumped the jade book in the pocket of my pants. I pulled it out. Powerful Enemy, Mighty Ally, the raised script on the front said.

  I pressed the stone slip against my forehead. Information started flowing immediately.

  Powerful Enemy sorted through the most powerful people you had ever battled and summoned one at random to fight at your side. It didn’t say what the cost was, but the two other abilities I’d gained from ghosts—Wrathblade and Sudden Death—both came with major catches, so odds were this one would, too.

  The book dissolved as the information transfer completed.

  “Welp, I’m never going to use that one,” I said, turning on the shower and getting in. With my luck, it would summon Blaise, the douchebag from my high school class.

  After I cleaned up and dried off, I put on real clothes. Since I was off the clock, that meant a t-shirt and cargo pants.

  I dug the ring out of my suit pants.

  How was I going to hide that from Kest? The second she walked into the apartment, she would sense the extremely rare Metal it was made of.

  I did some experimenting with Last Light, Last Breath, but it took tons of Miasma and concentration to maintain cloaking on something that wasn’t a physical part of me.

  “More research needed,” I muttered. That was one of Kest’s favorite phrases.

  I stuck the ring in my new pocket and headed for the kitchenette, checking my messages to see how long I had to figure it out.

  The cracked screen of my Winchester showed a notification that one thousand credits had been deposited into my Universal Savings and Loan account. The Eight-Legged Dragons’ payroll department didn’t mess around.

  No new messages from Kest, even though it was forty minutes past the time she’d sworn she would show up.

  Pretty funny, but also slightly concerning. Kest couldn’t actually be killed now that the Heartblood Crown had accepted her as its master, but she could still be captured. She always played off the fact that the Technols had put a bounty on her for spying on them, but the thought of those guys getting their hands on her got to me sometimes.

  I didn’t want to sound like I was worried, so I sent her, How’s that alarm treating you?

  It was barely five seconds before she got back to me.

  Sorry! I only meant to snooze it the first time. I had a breakthrough on this build. Another hour, tops.

  Right on its heels, she sent a second message.

  Maybe two. You should go ahead and eat.

  When Kest locked in, her idea of two hours could mean anything from a day to a week, and my stomach was already trying to chew me in half, so I took her up on the offer.

  While I wolfed down my triple order of cook shack ramen with spices and garlic and chives and meat slices from some kind of beef-ish local livestock and eggs that were almost the right size and color to be a chicken’s, I checked my stats.

  Name: Grady Andrew Hake

  Spirit: Cursed Death

  Height: 5'11"

  Weight: 163 lbs

  Age: 18 Ryuan years (Current Location), 14.7 Universal years

  Blood Type: O

  Credits: 1,628.2

  Spirit Reserve: 571,726

  “Dang,” I muttered. “Dropped another pound.”

  My height had shot up four inches over the last six months—either due to the difference in gravity on different planets or a late, after-death growth spurt—but for some reason I couldn’t keep weight on. Of my hundred sixty-three pounds, twenty-nine was the added weight of the Lunar Scythe reinforcing my skeleton. The rest was all muscle, but it looked like that muscle was made out of steel wire stretched too thin. I couldn’t bulk up.

  Maybe it was related to advancing to Ten. As far as I could tell, Kest hadn’t changed weight since her advancement, but even I wasn’t dumb enough to ask a girl how she avoided getting too skinny.

  Warcry was into all that muscle maintenance stuff. I’d ask him.

  Meanwhile, my Spirit sea was chock full. With all the Miasma I’d absorbed that night, I really needed to condense. If I didn’t, I might get overcultivated and accidentally release a bunch of Death Spirit in my sleep. Apparently humans were bad about that because they didn’t have the storage capacity the other, longer-lived races were born with.

  I finished off my noodles, chucked the container and disposable chopsticks in the trash incinerator built into the countertop, then pulled the Crucible Casket necklace out of my shirt.

  The little black carved-wood coffin with its inlaid silver filigree gave off definite Goth vibes, which I guess made sense since it had belonged to another Death cultivator before it accepted me. It was a powerful Spirit apparatus that intensified cultivation and condensing by speeding up the time inside. It also doubled as a good place to take a nap if you only had a few minutes and needed to recover from some serious wounds.

  I pried open the Casket’s lid.

  Instantly, crushing darkness and pressure enveloped me. I tried not to think about how the rough wood sides of the coffin pinned my arms to my ribs or how my garlic-and-chive breath bounced back at me off the lid that had to be less than an inch away from my face. It was always tight in there at first. When I’d been condensing for a while, the space would loosen up enough to do some taiji.

  When condensation is required, Crucible Casket space does not correspond to Death cultivator’s physical makeup, the female voice of the apparatus said. Crucible Casket corresponds to fullness of Death cultivator’s Spirit sea.

  To demonstrate, a glowing line drawing of the Casket appeared. Loose Spirit poured into it until the Spirit was straining to break the cartoon coffin open at the seams. The coffin pushed back until the Spirit was smashed down until it was shaped like a man. He had plenty of room, so he started going through flowing motions of taiji, pulling in more Miasma from outside as he went.

  “It doesn’t correspond to physical makeup,” I said, an idea growing on me, “but it does hold physical items. I’m in here, and so are all my clothes.”

  Death cultivator is correct, the Casket answered.

  “Can you hold a physical item while I’m not in here? And while you do it, can you compress its Spirit footprint? Make it so no one can sense the item or its Spirit from the outside?”

  I got back a sensation of thinking, almost like sand trickling through a cursor’s hourglass.

  With an application of Miasma from the Death cultivator, Crucible Casket can compress the signature of another Spirit, the female voice answered.

  More line drawings, this time of a guy wearing the Crucible Casket around his neck. Wavy lines of Spirit flowed off the Casket. The guy sent Miasma from his Spirit sea into the Casket, and the wavy lines disappeared.

  “How much Miasma does that take?”

  Two hundred fifty-two Spirit per hour.

  “Wow, okay, that’s specific.”

  It took some doing in such a tight space, but I levered my arm up and twisted my wrist around until I could reach into my pocket.

  “If I just drop this in here, is it going to disappear?”

  More thinking.

  Followed by even more serious thinking.

  Not very reassuring. I wasn’t gambling a piece of bling I’d paid two months’ worth of blood money for on a Maybe.

  I cut the Casket off. “You know what, let’s try this instead.”

  I forced my fist open, dumping the ring off my hand.

  “Death Grip.”

  A glowing turquoise hand erupted from the darkness and caught the falling piece of jewelry in its skeletal fist.

  Like with internal alchemy, I designated a specific segment of Miasma to keep Death Grip going and to keep the Casket compressing the Metal Spirit.

  I pressed my forehead to the lid of the Casket. The pressure disappeared and light flowed back in. I was kneeling on the tile in the kitchenette with the Crucible Casket hanging on the chain around my neck.

  I held the apparatus in front of my face and used Ki-sight to check for stray Spirits coming off it.

  Nothing.

  “Awesome.”

  Problem solved, I got back into the Crucible Casket and got condensing.