Liam sat perfectly still beneath the sprawling canopy of a massive oak tree. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and even, the dappled sunlight shifting across his features.
A few paces away, Bisky perched on a sun-warmed boulder. She focused a sharp layer of aura into her eyes, carefully observing the dense, tangled flow of energy wrapping around Liam's body as he meditated.
His total amount of aura is actually increasing, she thought to herself, narrowing her eyes. It reminded her of the old man, Netero. As a seasoned member of the Hunter Association and a master of Shingen-ryu, Bisky had sparred with Netero more times than she could count in her youth. She had seen him meditate with total focus. Whenever he did, he radiated a strange, heavy momentum that was difficult to put into words.
But Netero was a grandmaster of martial arts. He meditated to stimulate dormant physical skills and refine his life energy through sheer discipline. Liam, on the other hand, was just sitting there, yet his raw power was climbing steadily.
Liam was entirely focused inward, currently refining his accumulated death energy. After spending some time on Greed Island, his internal panel showed exactly four points of death energy ready to be used.
He mentally allocated three of those points into his Transmutation affinity. Instantly, his upper limit for that category jumped from three percent to six percent. His only remaining weak point, Conjuration, also saw a slight residual bump, settling nicely at eight percent.
With his single remaining point of death energy, he targeted his total aura capacity. The numbers shifted rapidly in his mind. From 30,906, it ticked up to 31,000, then 31,404, jumping to 31,502, before finally coming to a stop at 31,999. A single point of death energy had yielded over a thousand points of raw aura.
Satisfied with the massive gain, Liam slowly opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was a pair of large, jewel-like eyes staring intently into his, mere inches from his face. Bisky had slipped right up to him without making a single sound.
"Aunt Bi, it is really not polite to hover over people like that," Liam said, leaning back slightly against the tree trunk.
Bisky ignored the complaint, speaking almost to herself as she analyzed him. "This Nen ability of yours. It improves your baseline qualities across the board, doesn't it? Including your potential in other Nen categories. That explains why you were asking me all those highly specific questions about cross-category techniques earlier. And on top of that, it can force an increase in your total aura capacity in a really simple, brute-force way."
Liam let out a small laugh, genuinely impressed. "I would expect nothing less from a veteran Hunter in her fifties. Your observation and analytical skills are terrifying."
Instead of punching him for the age comment this time, Bisky just looked at him seriously. "I do not know the exact mechanics of your ability, but you need to remember one thing above all else. You are fundamentally a Manipulator. No matter how many secondary skills you develop, you must keep your core affinity in mind and let it guide your training and your combat."
She reached out and poked him firmly in the center of his chest with her index finger. "Nen is the heart."
Liam nodded, acknowledging the weight of her advice. Then, a playful smile crossed his face. "Are you not even a little curious how I can pull off something like this? To tell you the truth, my capacity in all six major Nen types is sitting at almost one hundred percent."
Bisky just snorted, straightening her posture and crossing her arms. "Do you think you are the first person in history to try something like that?"
"Oh?" Liam raised an eyebrow, genuinely curious now.
"Ever since the hexagon chart and the concept of Nen types were created, people have been trying to master everything," Bisky explained, her tone dry. "Most of them fail miserably and achieve absolutely nothing in their lives. If you neglect your natural affinity, trying to master adjacent or opposite types takes twice the effort for half the result. It is a waste of time. But of course, where millions fail, someone is naturally bound to succeed."
She paused, the playful edge leaving her voice as she looked at the horizon. "Chairman Netero once told me that there are indeed a few monsters in this world who have achieved complete mastery over all six types."
Liam wondered if she was talking about the real Ging. "What about before the concept of Nen types was formalized?" he asked.
Bisky rolled her eyes. "Before people had charts and labels, they just practiced whatever they could figure out. If they stumbled onto the right path for their body, their skills grew by leaps and bounds. It was a natural progression. If they practiced the wrong way, they hit a wall and chalked it up to bad luck. What else is there to say?"
Liam nodded slowly. It made perfect sense. The Hunter world was modernizing, and the study of Nen was becoming just as systematized as their technology. The ancient users had to figure it all out blindly through trial and error.
His gaze drifted over to where Shizuku was sitting in the grass a short distance away. She was in the middle of her own training, trying to polish her Blinky ability. Ever since Bisky had mentioned that the key to mastering Conjured items was their degree of reality, Shizuku had shifted her focus back to her primary affinity.
But figuring out how to make Blinky more real was a strange challenge. From a purely practical standpoint, it did not matter if the vacuum looked authentic or not. It clearly did not belong in the normal world. It was a metal vacuum cleaner with a massive, fleshy mouth full of jagged teeth. Anyone with half a brain could look at it and instantly know it was a product of Nen.
Even so, Shizuku wanted to push her limits and improve it. It sounded a bit strange to admit out loud, but Blinky was her very first partner, and really her only friend before she met Liam.
To exercise that sense of reality, Shizuku pushed aura into her eyes and concentrated. When simply looking at the object proved insufficient, she expanded a small field of En, creating a perfect sensory dome with a two-meter radius. The field enveloped Blinky entirely, allowing her to feel every microscopic detail of her creation from every possible angle.
She was searching for fake spots, tiny, unstable fluctuations in the aura that made the metal casing feel slightly hollow or the teeth feel a little less sharp. Her plan was simply to find those weak points and smooth them out with sheer focus to make the weapon undeniably real.
Suddenly, a pair of small hands wearing white gloves pushed into the edge of her En.
Shizuku looked up. Bisky was standing over her. Invisible waves of dense aura began pouring from the older woman's palms, swirling into a rapidly expanding, turbulent storm. Bisky spread her arms wide, looking as though she were physically wrestling with a massive, violent sphere of chaotic energy. Slowly, she pushed that raging sphere of aura right over the small vacuum cleaner.
This chaotic mass of energy was not a specific Nen ability, and it definitely was not an attack. It was just an area of raw, disruptive static. But the moment it enveloped Blinky, Shizuku felt her Conjured item become incredibly heavy.
The mental strain required to keep the vacuum physically stable skyrocketed. Within seconds, Blinky began to vibrate violently, like a television screen losing its signal. The fleshy, tooth-filled mouth warped and lost its shape, the entire construct threatening to dissolve back into pure aura.
Shizuku gasped, a look of sudden realization washing over her face. "So this is how Conjurers train for authenticity."
Bisky winked her left eye, a challenging smile on her face. "Try to maintain your weapon normally while sitting inside this storm."
Liam walked up behind them, watching the exercise with keen interest. "I get it. By constantly increasing the violent, chaotic pressure of the surrounding aura, you force her to concentrate harder, directly increasing the difficulty of maintaining the object's reality in the physical world."
"Do not just stand there analyzing it. You are not going to learn a trick this simple just by watching, are you?" Bisky said, not taking her eyes off Shizuku's struggling form. "You told me you have perfect proficiency in Emission. I am only going to explain the mechanics of this once, so listen closely."
Liam immediately paid attention as Bisky broke down the exact method for projecting and sustaining that kind of disruptive aura mass. Beside them, Shizuku gritted her teeth, sweating slightly as she fought against the turbulent environment, trying to force Blinky's metal shell and jagged teeth back into a solid, stable form bit by bit.
The three of them kept up their intense training for the rest of the morning. When the sun finally hit its peak, they took a break, having Shizuku release some of their stockpiled food from Blinky's seemingly endless storage for a quick lunch.
With their stomachs full, it was time to move on to Liam's main objective for the trip: finding Razor. Liam's memory of the Greed Island arc was a bit fuzzy on the exact details, but he remembered that the card Razor guarded was called Plot of Beach. That meant the man had to be stationed in a coastal town, likely near a large lighthouse.
Rather than walking the whole way, Liam pulled the tiger-skin skirt from his waist. Activating the Seventy-two Transformations, his body twisted and expanded rapidly, dark feathers sprouting across his skin as he took the massive, broad-winged form of a giant roc.
Bisky and Shizuku climbed onto his feathered back, settling in against the wind. With a powerful sweep of his immense wings, Liam launched them into the sky, tearing through the clouds at breakneck speed as he aimed for the nearest coastal settlement.
As the sprawling shoreline and the clustered roofs of a port town came into view far below, Liam opened his beak and let out a booming cry that echoed across the ocean waves.
"Razor! Please answer if you hear this!"