"Similar?" Liam said. "I don't see it."
He pushed his aura through the transmutation layer until it moved through him rather than around him. Wind inside and out, cycling through his airways, circulating inside his chest alongside his actual breathing, filling the space between his clothes and skin with a constant gentle pressure. From outside it would look like he was standing at the center of a contained cyclone, clothes rippling outward, hair moving in a direction the room's air currents did not explain.
He breathed in. The wind he breathed was his own aura, converted.
"As long as I want to," he said, voice distorted slightly by the movement of air through his mouth, "I can sustain myself on Nen wind alone before my aura runs out. Normal respiration is optional."
Whether that was strictly true was a matter of biology he had not yet fully tested. The Star Mark would handle hypoxia before it became fatal. Probably. But the point was the technique, and the point was valid.
"You can copy the shape of what I do," he said. "But what you get is aura that happens to be moving. What I have is aura that has become wind. That distinction matters."
Beyond held the copied technique in his palm and looked at it with the frank assessment of someone who had heard a fair criticism and was not going to argue with it. "From nothing to something is still a crossing," he said. "I don't know when it might matter. At a critical moment, any tool can be the one that makes the difference." He dispersed the whirlwind and let it return to ordinary aura. "Don't misread what I'm doing. Copying everything useful isn't about competing with people who do it better. That's a child's game."
"What's the adult game?"
Beyond opened both arms, expansive gesture, the kind that requires the room to be large enough to contain it.
"Go where nobody has gone. See what nobody has seen. Survive what nobody survives." He looked at Liam with the direct bright enthusiasm of a man who had found the thing he wanted and had not stopped wanting it. "Dragon pools and tiger dens that kill everyone else. I want to walk out the other side. That is the only competition I care about."
Liam nodded. "The Dark Continent."
"The Dark Continent." Beyond said it the way other people say the name of a place they love. "Infinitely far. Infinitely large. Infinitely dangerous. I've been there once and I intend to go again."
"You mentioned 'again.'"
"I did."
Beyond paused. He looked at Liam with an expression caught briefly between amusement and something that was almost genuine offense. "You're not curious?"
"Other people's travel stories don't interest me."
There was a short silence in which Beyond appeared to reconsider his read on the conversation. Then he smiled, mostly to himself, and let it go.
He touched the back of his neck with two fingers. Casual, like a man adjusting his collar.
"When you said you're not similar to me," he said, "I wasn't talking about the wind. I was talking about what you tried to do with the Manipulation ability. It failed. Right?"
"You're a clone," Liam said. "Nen abilities act differently on constructs."
"This body is a complete physical clone. Embodied, present, fully functional. Indistinguishable from my real one in all measurable ways." Beyond looked at him. "The reason your ability failed isn't because I'm a construct."
Liam waited.
"It's because my own ability has already been applied to this clone. First priority established. Your attempt found the position occupied."
The same principle as the Star Mark. External manipulation could not take hold when a self-applied manipulation was already seated. He had discovered this mechanic through his own technique and apparently Beyond had arrived at the same principle through an entirely different route.
"No Regrets in This Life," Beyond said. "That's the name of it. Applied to this clone, it allows me to use every ability I have at full capacity regardless of the distance from my real body." He looked toward the ceiling. "Which is quite far from here, in case you were wondering. Your En already swept the room and found nothing, I assume."
Liam had confirmed this, yes.
"Emission," Liam said. "Maintaining a functional clone at significant range. Transmutation, obviously. Materialization, given that the room I'm standing in did not exist in the hotel before you put it here. Manipulation, which is what you used on the clone." He raised one finger at a time. "Enhancement, since your body is doing things Enhancement does without visible effort. And whatever the Specialization ability is that allows you to learn any system from scratch."
Beyond's expression did not change but his attention sharpened.
"That's five systems demonstrated and one inferred. Hexagonal." Liam looked at the man. "And the Specialization is where it starts, right? The ability that makes every other system learnable. That's the foundation."
Beyond laughed. It was a full laugh, unguarded, the sound of someone who was genuinely pleased.
"Now do you see the similarity?"
Liam thought about the Memento Mori oath and what it had opened. He thought about Kurapika and the Absolute Time restriction, burning one hour of life per second in exchange for full access to every Nen system. He thought about what it meant to build a hexagonal ability set and why the Specialization type kept appearing at the center of it, the system that could not be classified and therefore was not constrained by the classification.
He thought about all of this and found it deeply irritating.
"Being hexagonal doesn't make two people similar," he said.
"We both look at our limitations and decide to remove them. That's similar enough."
"The reasons matter."
"Do they?"
Liam did not answer this immediately, because it was an actually interesting question and he was not going to pretend otherwise.
Beyond lowered his arms and looked at him with the evaluating warmth of someone making a serious offer.
"Join me," he said. "The Dark Continent. Unprecedented landscapes. Creatures that nobody has catalogued. Environments that have killed every qualified person who approached them." He leaned slightly forward, the energy of someone making a pitch they believe in. "You would survive where others don't. I know it by looking at you. We would witness things together that neither of us could reach alone."
Liam stood in the large empty basement room and heard this offer and felt a sensation he could not immediately name.
It was not excitement. It was not dismissal. It was the specific annoyance of hearing someone articulate a version of your own logic back at you from an angle you would prefer not to have recognized.
He had said similar things, in various configurations, to various people. Come with me. The things we could reach together. We would witness something nobody else will see.
Hearing it aimed at him from the outside was considerably less appealing than saying it from the inside.
He looked at Beyond.
Beyond looked at him.
The room waited.
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