Liam had snapped a few photos of the black jade Buddha statue before Shizuku stored it in Blinky. Now, sitting outside Kurapika's hospital room, he pulled out his phone and fired off a text to Pyon with the images attached.
"Rabbit-sis, how much is this thing worth?"
He pocketed his phone and turned to Shizuku. "Come on. Let's get Kurapika something that isn't hospital slop."
They tracked down a nurse and ordered a proper nutritious meal for the recovering Kurta. As they walked through the sterile hallways toward the exit, Liam's phone buzzed. Once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession.
He pulled it out. Pyon had replied almost instantly, and there were several messages waiting.
"Buddha statue? Looks new. I'm not a jewelry appraiser. You asked the wrong person."
"But the carving technique has some Kakin Empire characteristics. Did you buy this in Kakin?"
"Where are you? Answer me."
"Wait, this face looks familiar. Where did you get this? Is the Buddha's face carved from a specific face?"
Liam grinned. Sister Rabbit was a world-class internet addict. A few minutes and she'd already reverse-engineered half his life from a single photo.
He and Shizuku stepped outside into the early evening air. The city sprawled around the hospital, neon signs flickering to life as restaurants opened for dinner service.
Liam typed casually as they walked: "What's new about it? This thing's at least 300 years old. Stop jerking me around and tell me how much it's worth."
The message had barely sent before his phone rang.
"Hello." Liam answered, scanning the street with Shizuku for somewhere decent to eat.
"Is it really a 300-year-old antique?" Pyon's voice came through sharp and skeptical.
"Could be 400, actually." Liam spotted a promising-looking restaurant and steered Shizuku toward it. "Depends on exactly when the guy whose face this is carved it. I haven't pinned down the exact year."
He thought about King Wangu Hui Guo Rou, the True Martial King who'd apparently eaten Nitro Rice and lived long enough to meet that Black Mist Lion elder centuries ago. If he'd consumed longevity rice, his reign must have lasted far longer than normal Kakin emperors, right?
The Great Elder's story had been vague. "Hundreds of years ago" could mean three hundred or four hundred. The old lion's memory wasn't exactly a reliable historical record.
When Liam had searched for information about the True Martial King on Ghost Island's internet, he'd found almost nothing credible. Just treasure-hunting rumors and tomb-raiding speculation plastered across conspiracy forums.
Everything about King Wangu Hui Guo Rou seemed wrapped in fog.
Maybe only the current Hui Guo Rou royal family had accurate records about him.
Which raised an interesting question that surfaced in Liam's mind unbidden: why hadn't Wangu Hui Guo Rou left his longevity rice in the Kakin palace?
"Hey! Are you listening?" Pyon's voice snapped him back to the present.
They'd reached the restaurant. A cheerful waiter was already bringing out the house specialties, setting dishes on their table one after another. Shizuku grabbed a serving spoon and efficiently loaded two bowls with rice.
Liam accepted his bowl and set his phone on the table, picking up chopsticks. "Go ahead," he said to the phone. "I'm listening."
To Shizuku, he added, "Let's eat."
"I'm asking you," Pyon's voice came through clearly even without speakerphone, "is the face on this Buddha statue carved to look like Kakin's True Martial King?"
"Yep." Liam took a bite of the signature dish. Pretty good, actually. "Lucky, right? I'm just walking through the mountains, and boom, there's this run-down Zen temple. I go inside, and hey, there's this ancient valuable Buddha statue with True Martial King Wangu Hui Guo Rou's face carved on it! So I just—"
The line went dead mid-sentence.
Liam held his chopsticks in mid-air, staring at his phone screen. Call ended.
"Seriously? She didn't even tell me what it's worth."
Shizuku looked at him curiously. "Are you really going to sell the Buddha statue?"
"Are you kidding?" Liam grinned. "I just wanted to see if True Martial King's creepy vibe would lure Rabbit-sis here."
Shizuku glanced at the phone on the table.
"She's good with tech," Liam said. "Probably already tracking my location. Don't worry about it. Let's eat first. Kurapika's going to be stuck in that hospital for a while anyway."
Shizuku could pack away food when she wanted to. Between the two of them, they ordered enough for five or six normal people.
Halfway through the meal, Shizuku paused while refilling her rice bowl. "Are you really not going to eat the rice in Blinky?"
"What if it makes me sick? What if there's some unknown side effect?" Liam shook his head. "That old lion is a Magical Beast. His body works differently than ours. We don't actually know if the Nitro Rice gave him that long lifespan or if he'd have lived that long anyway."
He speared another piece of meat with his chopsticks. "We're still young. If we really can't make it to the Dark Continent later, we can try eating it then. It's not like the rice will go bad inside Blinky."
Shizuku nodded thoughtfully and returned to her meal.
A few minutes later, she noticed Liam dipping his finger in his drink and drawing something on the table.
"What's that?" she asked.
"The talisman pattern the Great Elder drew on those little jade Buddha pendants after he danced around." Liam frowned, concentrating on getting the strokes right. "Don't tell me you've already forgotten? You usually don't bother remembering things you think are worthless..."
He trailed off as he noticed Shizuku blinking her large lavender eyes at him, a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Liam caught on immediately. "Wait, are you pretending you forgot?"
Shizuku calmly dipped her pale fingers into Liam's half-empty glass and traced the exact same symbol on the table, matching perfectly what the Great Elder had drawn in blood on the jade pendant and what Liam had just sketched.
Liam looked at her profile, at that subtle smile, and couldn't help laughing.
It was the first time Shizuku had shown this kind of playful, almost mischievous side. Like an actual fifteen-year-old girl instead of a walking tactical weapon.
"What?" Shizuku seemed genuinely puzzled by his laughter.
Liam put on a mock-serious expression. "So you were pretending this time. What about all those other times you said you didn't remember? Were you faking then too? How many times have you pulled this on me?"
"You saw through it the first time," Shizuku said simply.
"Really?" Liam pressed. "Think carefully. Maybe you did it before but you've forgotten that you forgot?"
Shizuku actually paused to consider this, her brow furrowing slightly. "But if I did it before and I've forgotten now, I wouldn't be able to remember it no matter how hard I tried, right?"
Liam started laughing again.
A small smile appeared on Shizuku's lips.
Wait, Liam thought, freezing mid-laugh. Was that deliberate? Second-layer thinking?
She knew perfectly well she'd never done this before, but she pretended to actually try remembering... playing cute to make me laugh?
I'm on the first floor thinking she's being literal, but she's actually on the second floor playing me?
But then again, I just figured that out, so I'm actually on the fifth floor!
Liam and Shizuku locked eyes, as if trying to read each other's thoughts. When he laughed, her eyes filled with confusion. When she smiled, he pretended to doubt himself about being deceived. Finally, they both broke into grins, finding the whole exchange ridiculous.
Still smiling, Liam glanced at the symbols they'd both drawn on the table with drink liquid, and something clicked in his mind.
"Wait a second..."
Shizuku's confusion returned, this time genuine.
Liam raised his hand and wiped away the wet marks on the table. Then he extended one finger, concentrating aura into it.
He pressed his finger to the table and began tracing the pattern stroke by stroke, the same design the Great Elder had drawn on the jade Buddha pendant. But where the Elder had used blood, Liam used pure aura.
Concentrated Nen released from his fingertip.
As Liam's finger dragged the energy across the table, completing the final stroke, a black symbol appeared on the surface, half text and half pattern.
Shizuku recognized it immediately. "That's divine script."
"I knew it. Symbols related to Nen abilities must have some connection to divine script." Liam felt a surge of satisfaction, then confusion. "But how many characters is this? Should we call it 'one divine character' or what? Can a divine script the size of two fingers really enable spatial teleportation?"
To be safe, Liam summoned Jaku, his rock sparrow, which had been flying around somewhere for the past few days. He had the bird press its aura-coated claw against the divine script on the table.
"Nothing happened..." Liam muttered, watching the bird.
Jaku tilted its head, question-mark energy radiating from its tiny skull, as if asking: Was something supposed to happen?!
"Maybe it's because the Buddha statue is inside Blinky?" Shizuku suggested.
"Go check in the bathroom," Liam said.
Shizuku headed to the restroom. In a stall, she manifested her bulging-eyed fish vacuum cleaner, then released the black jade Buddha statue from its storage. The half-human-tall statue wasn't particularly large, but it took up most of the bathroom stall.
After a moment, Liam's voice came through the Moon Mark on her ring: Still nothing. The Nen ability in the Buddha statue must be completely depleted.
Shizuku put away both the statue and Blinky, then returned to the table.
The meal was mostly finished, dishes scattered across the surface. Liam was absently petting Jaku, looking disappointed. "I thought I could get a teleportation skill for free! What a waste."
Shizuku sat down, pointing at the divine script on the table. "Maybe there are more divine characters inside the Buddha statue, and they work as a combination with this external symbol. But the internal script was damaged, so it lost its function."
Liam considered this and nodded slowly. That actually made sense.
"Try using En," Shizuku suggested. "Maybe we can see some details."
"Let's do it." Liam stood immediately.
They returned to the hospital. As soon as they opened the ward door, they found Kurapika sitting cross-legged on the hospital bed, hands clasped and resting on his lap, eyes closed in meditation. His aura flowed continuously around his body, wrapped tight in a layer of Ken like an invisible white shell.
"Working hard," Liam observed. "But your Ken's a lot smaller than it used to be."
Kurapika opened his eyes. "I'm still recovering. Why did you let it out again?"
Liam had closed the door behind them, and Shizuku had already manifested Blinky, releasing the cracked black jade Buddha statue onto the hospital floor.
"With Buddha supervising, you'll focus better on your training."
Liam said this with complete seriousness as he and Shizuku sat down cross-legged on either side of the statue.
Kurapika looked skeptical at first, but then noticed Shizuku's aura quickly expanding, forming a field about four meters in radius centered on her position.
Immediately after, Liam's En expanded outward, covering Shizuku's field entirely and enveloping the whole ward.
"When you said 'Buddha supervising the training,' you meant yourself, didn't you?" Kurapika asked, eyes closed again.
"Shh!" Liam didn't look back. "No slacking off."
Kurapika smiled faintly and returned to his focused meditation.
The entire black jade Buddha statue sat within the overlapping En of Liam and Shizuku.
Its outline, the texture of the jade-like stone, every single crack spreading across the sculpture, all of it reflected clearly in their minds, like a three-dimensional scan.
Just as King Wangu Hui Guo Rou's facial features were carved into the jade, the cracks had spread like spider webs throughout the material, and Liam's white aura seeped into those fissures.
Inside the cracks, fragmented black lines emerged bit by bit in their En, like pieces of a three-dimensional model.
Shizuku, do you see the divine script inside?
Liam's voice came through the Moon Mark.
It doesn't look complete, Shizuku replied the same way.
Liam tried piecing together the black runes he sensed in his mind, but they wouldn't fit properly.
Either some of the divine characters had been completely destroyed, worn away, or simply vanished, making reconstruction impossible.
Or the cracks had shifted and displaced sections so badly that it was impossible to tell which parts faced front, back, left, right, up, down, or even inside out. The script was probably embedded entirely within the Buddha's head. When it cracked, shifted, and eroded over time, restoring it in three-dimensional space became nearly impossible.
Eventually, Shizuku gave up. When she opened her eyes and turned around, she saw Liam with his eyes squeezed shut, sweat beading on his forehead. Most alarmingly, what looked like steam was rising from his ears.
"I can't do it." Liam opened his eyes and sighed. "My brain's completely fried..."
He and Shizuku turned to look at Kurapika on the hospital bed.
After explaining what they'd just attempted, Kurapika said, "I'd be happy to help with my Nen if I could, but unfortunately, I haven't learned En yet."
Liam wasn't disappointed. At that moment, he remembered that Pyon, Sister Rabbit herself, was probably already on her way.
Back at Sensui Mountain, Pyon had been the picture of technical competence, one hand holding a notebook, the other hand using En that looked like streaming code from The Matrix. Decoding and reconstructing the divine script in the Buddha's head shouldn't be too difficult for her, right?
Liam asked Shizuku to store the Buddha statue again, and this time all three of them actually practiced meditation together in the ward.
They sat cross-legged in similar positions, their aura forming layers of Ken around their bodies. As the Nen flowed and circulated, their concentration deepened.
A nurse knocked and entered. Seeing all three of them in that posture, she couldn't help wondering if they were practicing some kind of yoga.
When Shizuku glanced at her, the nurse quickly left.
Time passed. Eventually, another knock came at the door.
Liam opened his eyes. "Come in."
Pyon stepped into the ward, her rabbit-ear headband immediately identifiable. She looked around at the three meditating figures, then fixed Liam with a sharp stare.
"Where is it?"
"Where's what?" Liam asked innocently.
"The Buddha statue."
"Oh. That." Liam gestured to Shizuku.
Pyon's eyes widened slightly as she understood. "Don't release it here. Find another place. That thing might be a Kakin national treasure."
Liam grimaced. Sister Rabbit, isn't it a bit late for that warning?