The Moon Mark had always been a night tool.
During daylight hours, its range stayed roughly city-scale. Useful for local coordination, insufficient for anything that required reaching across a continent in real time. After dark, the range expanded dramatically, the suppression lifted, and with sufficient aura output the mark could bridge the full span of the six continents. This had been the operational constraint since he first developed it.
It had been the operational constraint for approximately the next thirty seconds after the natural energy entered his system.
The 7% allocation changed the equation in a way he had not predicted but probably should have. Training levels were barriers constructed from the practitioner's own limitations: the gap between understanding a technique conceptually and being able to execute it across the full range of its theoretical capacity. The natural energy did not interact with his training levels in the way that more aura would have. It did not push the numbers up. It went around the barriers entirely, the way water does not get stronger to move past an obstacle but simply finds the available path.
Bisky's framework: good, excellent, outstanding, gifted, extreme. Five stages of mastery. The extreme was theoretical for most practitioners. The natural energy, added to his existing competence, made the framework temporarily irrelevant.
He would call this state Sage. Not a level of training. A condition. A buff that opened every ceiling simultaneously for the duration it was maintained.
He filed this terminology internally and returned his attention to the summoning connection that Camilla and Kurapika had just opened.
They were doing it properly, both of them pulling together through the Sun Mark connection, which was the right approach given that materializing 100,000 units of aura in a remote location required the same kind of effort as physically moving that mass against resistance. What it required from the receiving end was two experienced Nen users, coordinating well, working at the upper limit of what they could sustain.
Liam materialized in the Kakin palace.
He could feel the effort it had cost them. Kurapika was breathing with the precise deliberateness of someone not displaying exertion while experiencing it. Camilla was brushing her hair back from a forehead that was damp, which she was not going to comment on.
Aria was sitting on a nearby surface eating a carrot.
She looked at the three-headed form with the assessment of someone who has seen it before and has decided it is not the most interesting thing in the room, found this conclusion approximately correct, and went back to eating.
"Next time," Camilla said, "have your aura in the gourd first. It would be considerably easier. Camilla is the king now. This kind of effort is not appropriate for a king."
Kurapika breathed.
Liam looked at his six hands. He placed one on Camilla's head, one on Kurapika's, one on Aria's who looked up mid-carrot, and did nothing dramatic with any of them. The natural energy moved through the contacts in the specific way he had been learning to direct it, gentle, opening rather than filling, the door mechanism that he had discovered worked for Shizuku and Akane and Aoi and, in an attenuated version, for Gel.
He had no formal name for this application. Sage Touching the Top was technically accurate and completely terrible as a name, which made it exactly the kind of name he tended to use.
The world shifted slightly for all three of them in the same second.
He separated a construct from his aura and Jade appeared, extending her sleeves, releasing the three passengers she had been carrying since the building impact. Shizuku landed with the composure of someone who has been in stranger situations. Akane landed and looked around at the palace interior with the expression of someone catching up to multiple plot developments simultaneously. Aoi landed and immediately said "where are we" and then identified the context from available evidence and went quiet.
"Natural energy," Shizuku said to the room. "Seventh type. Ambient aura field generated by all living things. Liam figured out how to interface with it. The form affects the clarity of the perception. The percentage of your own aura you can redirect toward the absorption is the limiting factor. It increases with practice."
She said this with the economy of someone who has explained a concept enough times to have found the shortest accurate version.
Camilla was already thinking. Liam could see it from the way her focus had turned slightly inward, the expression she wore when she was running calculations that she had not asked permission to begin yet. The natural energy had opened the perceptual door at approximately 1%, enough to feel the ambient field and understand what it was, and she was already stress-testing the implications against her existing abilities.
The Million Reincarnation Cats required her to die in order to activate. The Three Thousand variant, the subsidiary ability, required proximity to Liam. These were the constraints. Natural energy's apparent characteristic was that it eroded constraints constructed from training level limitations. She was clearly wondering which of her constraints qualified.
"The chimera ant situation in Kakin," Liam said.
"Being managed," Camilla said, not entirely pulling her attention back. "I sent the appropriate forces."
"Good." He meant it. Camilla's appropriate forces were people who could handle division-commander level threats, and the ants that had come to Kakin were unlikely to be anything more than that. "Kurapika."
Kurapika looked at him.
"The Nitolomi that Shizuku collected at the mountain."
The eyes sharpened. The Scarlet Eyes did not activate, but the quality of attention changed. He said nothing.
"The Dark Continent environment is what sustains it," Liam said. "When Shizuku took it out, it decayed immediately because the environment here can't support it. But the Dark Continent environment isn't simply altitude or geography. The core difference is the ambient natural energy concentration."
He paused to let Kurapika arrive at the next step himself, which he did in approximately two seconds.
"If you can replicate the environment—" Kurapika started.
"Temporarily. Locally. Long enough to test it."
Liam gathered the 7,000 natural energy units he was currently holding and worked them into a sphere. Not transmutation. Not conjuration. The natural energy shaped itself as he directed it, the Minor Formless Art applied to environment simulation rather than technique replication, his understanding of what the Dark Continent's ambient field felt like translated into a bounded space.
The sphere grew to approximately two meters in diameter. Dense, textured, the air inside moving differently from the air outside.
Shizuku summoned Blinky, which emerged from the chainsaw ring with its characteristic bulging fish-eye expression, and opened it to retrieve the Nitolomi. The collection inside was substantial, a weight of something precious that had been sitting in the time-stopped interior since Freier Mountain. She released a small amount over the edge of the sphere.
It touched the outer boundary of the sphere and hit the standard atmosphere and began the process of immediate decomposition. She adjusted the release, dropping it inside the boundary instead. The same thing happened at the wrong concentration level.
He adjusted the natural energy density. Too high was also wrong. He found the gradient through six iterations, narrowing the range, until a handful of the rice grains settled inside the sphere and did not decompose.
They sat in the natural energy field, crystal-clear and faintly fragrant, grain by grain, exactly as they had been collected.
Shizuku released more. A full portion. A bowl's worth, suspended in the sphere like an arrangement, each grain catching the ambient light.
Camilla reached toward the sphere.
"Kurapika," Liam said.
Camilla withdrew her hand with the dignified unhurry of someone who had not been about to do anything improper.
Kurapika stepped to the edge of the sphere. He stood there for a moment, looking at what was inside it, composing himself with the care of someone who knows that strong emotion produces involuntary Nen output and strong Nen output changes outcomes. He was very controlled. His eyes were red anyway, because some things did not wait for permission.
He stepped inside.
He lifted a handful of grains. He put them in his mouth and chewed and swallowed, and the flavour of something extraordinary in a world full of extraordinary things registered on his face as pure surprise.
Beside him, the Book of Resurrection opened.
He had not consciously activated it. The Nen recognized what the moment required and responded without waiting for direction. The sixth volume's pages separated, and the stored contents of the jar emerged from the book's internal space: his childhood friend's face, preserved, eyes closed now, the face he had closed the eyes of in that room full of jars.
The vitality that the Nitolomi carried began to move.
Kurapika was crying. He was not making any sound. The tears were red, the same red as his eyes in this state, the colour his clan had always carried.
Blood vessels. Then structure. Then the beginning of continuity, rebuilding from the head down, the slow and irreversible mechanism of the sixth book doing what he had named it to do.
The room was very quiet.