Bury Them All: A Cultivator's Path

Chapter 3

The next morning, he woke from meditation with the ghost of a smile already on his face.

The improvement wasn't subtle. He could feel his cultivation climbing almost visibly now, hour by hour.

He straightened his robes and stepped outside.

Someone's coming.

A large, broad-shouldered man was walking toward the hut, dressed in an outer disciple's white robe, a hard edge to his expression that suggested he wasn't someone to cross carelessly.

"You're Silas Marrow?" Bram Hollis stopped in front of him, face cold.

"That's right." Silas offered a small bow, expression carefully harmless. "Have you brought a body, brother?"

"I'm staying," Bram said, biting down visibly on something ruder, though his tone stayed clipped and formal despite himself.

"Go on, then." Before Silas could ask anything further, Bram tossed him a bell. "Corpse Bell. Yours is worn out — take this one, keep it somewhere visible, or tie it to your belt. When it rings, there's a body waiting."

Silas turned the bell over in his hands, and something clicked — the old bell he'd been fidgeting with that first day. So that's what it had been for. Three months here, and nobody had thought to mention it.

Then again — he didn't exactly know anyone.

"I'll be living on Skypillar from now on too." Bram studied him. "You didn't collect your stones yesterday. Steward Foster would've told you I was coming, otherwise."

"Forgot," Silas said, with just enough irritation to sound plausible.

In truth, he hadn't gone yesterday, or the month before that, and had no plans to start again.

"Come inside, brother — I'll put on some tea." Silas offered the invitation with an easy smile.

Bram didn't move. Whatever courtesy existed between cultivators clearly didn't extend to mortals without cultivation of their own.

He looked over the hut's crumbling walls, turned, and walked off toward a stretch of forest half a mile out.

A while later he emerged hauling five long timber poles in one hand.

"Building?" Silas wandered over.

There were technically two abandoned huts already on the mountain, remnants of past corpse-handlers. Bram apparently cared for neither, and intended to build fresh.

Which meant, Silas realized, that Bram intended to be here a long while. A new colleague, then — like it or not.

Deeper in the woods, Silas found neat stacks of pre-cut, perfectly smoothed timber — the kind of clean work only a cultivator's strength could manage without proper tools.

He hefted one of the beams and carried it toward the new build site, about a mile from his own hut, tucked beside a stream with old vines and gnarled trees framing the water. Genuinely picturesque, if he was honest — Bram had an eye for scenery he clearly didn't extend to people.

By the time he set the log down, his face had gone red from the effort, sweat soaking through his robe, breath coming ragged.

Bram gave him one cold, assessing look — but didn't stop him from continuing.

The gesture, awkward as it was, thawed things slightly. Silas used the opening to make conversation, and learned, eventually, Bram's name and a little of his history.

He hadn't volunteered for corpse duty. Skypillar was short-handed, and after injuring a fellow disciple in some dispute, he'd been sentenced to two years of exactly this.

"Keep the bell close. Don't wander." Before Silas could dig further, Bram cut the conversation off cold.

Corpse-handlers or not, in Bram's mind the gap between mortal and cultivator was simply unbridgeable. Silas, rootless and powerless as far as anyone could tell, didn't qualify as a colleague worth the name.

Silas let it go and returned to his hut.

At noon the next day, the bell rang.

Silas walked to Bram's half-built house — already an elegant little loft despite being unfinished — and knocked.

"Brother Hollis! The sect's sent a body — come help with the burial!"

No answer. He knocked again, louder, noting the faint spiritual pressure gathering visibly around the structure.

"Piss off!"

The shout came muffled through the walls.

Silas didn't push further. In hindsight, the bell and the distant house had told him everything he needed to know about how this was going to go.

Left with no choice, he collected the corpse alone — which suited him better anyway. Other hopeless cultivators clawed their way up rank by rank through blood and ambition. All he needed to do was keep digging.

Three bodies waited by the bridge this time, all wrapped in white cloth.

He carried them one by one deep into the mountain and spent half a day laying them properly to rest.

Techniques acquired: Sky Burial Cultivation Art (fifth level), Fireball Technique, Skyriding Technique, fragment — Four Seasons Sword Art

Immortal experience gained

Spirit root fragment gained

Techniques acquired: Sky Burial Cultivation Art (fourth level), Fireball Technique, Skyriding Technique

Immortal experience gained

Spirit root fragment gained

Silas exhaled slowly, eyes opening.

Under the spring air, he picked up a stray branch and began moving it through a loose, testing pattern.

Boom.

The branch's motion pulled something audible from the space around it — a low roar, and out of thin air, droplets of water condensed, multiplying rapidly until hundreds hung suspended.

He stopped moving.

The water didn't dissipate. Instead it fell, punching small craters into the earth wherever it struck.

"Definitely high-tier swordwork," he murmured, equal parts impressed and disappointed, "but only the Spring Rain chapter. Incomplete."

Three months of collecting, and this was only his third real technique — and a formidable one, at that. Unfortunately, whoever had originally learned it had never possessed the Summer, Autumn, or Winter chapters. Combined, all four would form something called the Four Seasons Sword Art — reportedly monstrous.

Someone else would eventually complete it, or master what remained of it. All Silas had to do was wait for that person to eventually die.

Seven more days passed. Several more bodies arrived, none above the fifth stage of Qi training.

Silas gained little from them directly, though his Fireball Technique kept refining itself, climbing from three polished variants to four, each noticeably stronger — the natural result of layering hundreds of small insights on top of each other.

The rain-sword technique he practiced quietly, alone, and each time came away more convinced of its potential — already stronger than his refined fireballs, and still incomplete.

Walking back from one such burial, he crossed paths with Bram near the bridge.

Bram didn't acknowledge him at all — walked past with his chin raised, eyes elsewhere.

Silas had been ready to nod a greeting. The moment passed before he could. After being ignored a few times running, he simply stopped trying.

This world doesn't move for anyone, he thought. Strength decides everything, right down to the bone. I doubt even the sharpest operator from my old life would get far here.

What Silas didn't know was that Bram's indifference had curdled, this time, into something closer to genuine hostility.

Unlike Silas — who'd simply written the man off as a stranger — Bram had decided he was being disrespected. Repeatedly ignored, by a rootless mortal, even after Bram himself had reached the fifth stage of Qi training? That was insult enough. And today, Silas hadn't so much as glanced his way.

If Silas had known what was going through Bram's head, he'd have argued the point. He hadn't meant anything by it. He simply hadn't thought about Bram at all.

But that distinction meant nothing to Bram. In his mind, mortals bowed to cultivators as a matter of course — whether he chose to speak back was his own prerogative, but the bow itself wasn't optional. Silas's blank, unbothered expression read as the deepest possible insult.