The far shore of Hakagon Lake had a hotel where the valley exit should have been.
A four-story building, newer than the rock walls it sat between, blocking the canyon passage with the comfortable confidence of something that had not asked permission before being built there. Functional, temporary, and architecturally unconcerned with aesthetics. The kind of structure that said: you may rest here, briefly, while someone checks your paperwork.
Swimming toward it across four kilometers of open water, Liam counted approximately nine sets of eyes tracking him from various depths.
Candidates. Some still searching the lake bottom. Some watching his trajectory with the specific calculation of people who wanted what he had and were measuring whether the risk was worth it.
None of them moved.
The fried rice phase had served as an inadvertent reference document for threat assessment. Every Nen user in the water had seen what happened when Menchi's seasoning pulled everyone's aura ceiling into visibility. Whatever those candidates had registered about Liam at that moment, it appeared to be filed under permanent, and the file apparently said: no.
He and Shizuku surfaced at the far bank and climbed ashore without being intercepted.
The death energy hit him while he was still shaking water from his hair.
Cold and hot. The familiar pressure of something that had been waiting for him to be within range. He checked the tally.
Nineteen.
He had been swimming past something on the lake bottom, or rather Jade had, or rather it was the expanding absorption range doing what expanding ranges do. One and a half kilometers out, something had died, and the pulse had found him in the water without difficulty.
He was accruing death energy at a Hunter Exam without doing anything. The universe was either rewarding him or testing a theory about passive income.
He filed the number and looked at the hotel entrance.
Hisoka was sitting on a candidate.
The candidate was no longer using his head in the conventional sense, Hisoka having apparently made an editorial decision about that during the wait. A smoke key hung from one of Hisoka's fingers on a loop of Bungee Gum, swinging like a pendulum. He looked up at Liam and Shizuku with the warm recognition of someone who had been expecting friends.
Less than ten meters away, Morel sat in a lounge chair against the hotel wall. The enormous pipe was propped beside him, unused. He had a smaller pipe in his mouth, generating measured smoke rings that rose and dispersed in the afternoon air. He appeared to be enjoying the sun. He was also, very clearly, aware of Hisoka and the candidate and the smoke key, and he was not doing anything about any of it.
Shizuku looked at the small pipe.
She looked at the large pipe leaning against the wall.
She appeared to be processing a philosophical question about consistency.
"Aren't you two going to stop playing?" Hisoka said, standing. The smile he wore was the one he reserved for conversations he found genuinely entertaining.
"Have your fun," Liam said. "Just don't play yourself into a corner." He looked past Hisoka toward Morel, whose smoke ring production had not been interrupted. "Someone's disappeared. The kind of disappeared that feels intentional. I'm wondering if there's a hidden level I don't know about."
He said this last part specifically at Morel.
Morel produced another smoke ring. It was a very round smoke ring.
Hisoka's mouth opened on something that was almost a laugh. He was thinking about something, and whatever it was, it involved Greed Island and dice.
"Some things just happen to people," Hisoka said pleasantly.
Morel declined to confirm or deny the existence of any hidden levels. The smoke ring floated upward and ceased to be.
Hisoka raised his hand. The pendulum swung once, twice, and the smoke key left his finger on an arc that carried it forty meters out over the lake surface before it hit the water with a small sound. Somewhere below the surface, a silhouette moved fast. A candidate who had been waiting for exactly this moment caught it before it sank.
"I want another round," Hisoka announced to no one in particular, and stepped off the shore into the water headfirst with the form of someone who treated diving into lakes as a performance art.
Liam watched him disappear under the surface.
He thought about what Bisky had once said regarding Hisoka's physique, specifically the admiring way she'd described the architecture of the man. He looked at the water. He looked at his own mental image of what had just been visible.
That was it. That was the thing Bisky got a nosebleed about.
Genuinely baffling woman.
He turned to Morel.
"Waiter. Table for two."
Morel held out one hand, unhurried.
Liam placed three smoke keys on the palm.
Morel looked at them. He looked at Liam and Shizuku. "Two people," he said. "Two keys."
Shizuku asked: "Can we hold one in reserve for later?"
"No."
Liam said: "There's a third member. Number forty-one. Kurapika. He's somewhere in the lake and we can't locate him right now. If he shows up later without a key, can we cover him?"
Morel's expression did not change. "Key must be presented in person by the candidate." He said it the way people say things that are not going to move regardless of what follows.
Shizuku picked up the third key, turned toward the lake, and threw it.
It was a good throw. The key cleared the shore by several hundred meters and hit the water in open lake. Under the surface, eight silhouettes immediately reoriented toward the impact point. The scramble was audible from shore as a muffled underwater chaos.
"Stingy," Liam said, to Morel, and handed over his key.
Shizuku handed over hers.
Morel tapped each smoke key once with the large pipe. The gray-fog material dissolved cleanly, leaving behind two ordinary copper keys with room numbers stamped in the metal. Liam's read 21. Shizuku's read 8.
"Can't leave once you're in," Morel said. "Find your rooms. Restaurant is self-service. Rooms are on floors two and three." He looked at Shizuku specifically. "Shower and fresh clothes available."
Shizuku looked briefly relieved. Her wet sweater had been doing its best.
They went inside.
The hotel was a working space with beds in it, not the other way around.
The first floor lobby contained several racks of fishing equipment, a wall of diving gear in various sizes, and what appeared to be a compact research station with water sample analysis tools and a microscope that had seen recent use. The restaurant occupied half the back wall. No staff. A reasonable selection of ingredients available, all requiring preparation.
The stairs went up. They went up together to the second floor, where Shizuku's key fit Room 8 at the end of the corridor. They parted at the door.
"Moon Mark when you're settled," Liam said.
She nodded and went in.
Room 21 was on the third floor. Single bed, window overlooking the canyon wall and a strip of late afternoon sky. Small bathroom. His wet clothes were still wet, and the bathroom had a towel rack but no dryer.
He focused fifty aura, pushed it through the Transmutation channel, and converted it to wind moving in a tight circle around his shirt. Under suppression, the result was less gale and more enthusiastic breeze, but it did the job in about ten minutes. He hung the shirt to finish drying and lay down on the bed in the meantime.
He opened the Moon Mark channel and sent to Ring C.
Kurapika. No response.
He lay with the ceiling and thought.
Kurapika's Moon Mark ring, the C ring, could be sensed as online or offline through the channel. It was offline. Kurapika might have left the ring somewhere, or removed it, or the situation was more complicated than that. In a lake full of candidates who had already demonstrated willingness to shoot each other during a sprint, complicated was a broad category.
The lack of Star Mark connection was Kurapika's own choice, and Liam respected it, but it did create a specific gap in what he could know at any given moment.
He moved on to the other problem.
Nineteen death energy units, sitting in the tally and waiting.
The math was not complicated. Nineteen units, refined at the rate the process allowed, with the conversion yield he had tested over many months. The result would push his aura ceiling from the suppressed baseline to somewhere above ninety thousand once full recovery allowed it. The timeline for complete refinement was ten to fifteen days of consistent effort.
Slow work. Fine work. He was not in a hurry.
What he was less certain about was the interaction between Menchi's suppression effect and the refinement process. His current aura was pinned at fifty by an external Nen mechanism he did not fully understand. If he pushed death energy through the refinement channel while the suppression was active, the resulting aura increase might simply get absorbed into the suppression instead of increasing his ceiling. He would lose the death energy and gain nothing.
Four more hours. Let the suppression lift first. Then refine.
He checked the Moon Mark channel again before he closed his eyes.
Ring C still offline.
He put a mental note on it and let himself drift into the half-rest that served when actual sleep was impractical.
An hour passed.
He opened the Moon Mark channel toward Ring B.
Still offline.
He waited another few minutes. Then another few after that.
He sat up.
Shizuku's Ring B had been offline since she entered the room. That was correct: she had been showering, removing jewelry and wet clothes, the ring would naturally come off. The suppression on her aura was around two and a half hours total from ingestion, which meant the seal had lifted somewhere in the last hour. Once the seal lifted, Blinky became conjurable. Once Blinky was conjurable, Shizuku had access to the clean clothes stored inside it. Once she had clean clothes, she would be dressed, settled, and wearing her ring.
Ring B was offline.
The arithmetic did not work.
He got off the bed. Jade rose from the floor beside him without being asked, her light-blue Taoist robes settling in the still air of the hotel room. She had been in the lake for hours and had the unhurried quality of a Nen beast that considered time an approximate category.
He took the stairs down at speed, turned the second floor corridor, and found Room 8 at the far end.
He knocked.
Silence.
He knocked again, harder.
The door did not open.
He stood back. Jade had already moved. She passed through the ceiling of the corridor and into the room above, sinking down through the floor of Room 8 from inside. He heard, from his side of the door, nothing.
A few seconds passed.
Jade came back through the wall beside the door and stood next to him. Her jade mask communicated nothing by design. But the way she oriented toward him communicated plenty.
He looked at the door.
The room was empty. Shizuku's wet clothes were not there. Shizuku was not there.
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