After the Hunter Exam ended, Abachi never left Ronin's team.
Whether it was a newfound interest in exploration or simply that she'd lost her taste for performing, she stayed on for the time being and became part of the group.
Ronin had mentioned her name once while talking with Hisoka. The only answer he got was silence.
He still didn't know whether Hisoka wanted to see her again, but Abachi herself had started looking forward to the possibility.
Ronin had the feeling Abachi might be carrying some other thoughts about Hisoka. He was also pretty sure those thoughts were going nowhere.
If Hisoka was ever going to develop real feelings for anyone, the first person who popped into Ronin's head was Machi from the Phantom Troupe.
The two of them acted more like friends than anything else, though. Nothing romantic in sight. Still, their auras somehow matched in a way that felt right.
If he wanted to take the shipping thought in a more twisted direction, it would have been Illumi and Chrollo.
Ronin shoved the messy ideas out of his head and headed back into the ruins. Good news was waiting for him there.
He'd already half-expected it.
Someone had uncovered a stone tablet that recorded the history of the Kurta Clan. According to the writing, the Kurta had come from the Dark Continent.
That part wasn't unique. Every human group living inside the range of Lake Mobius had the same origin.
What actually surprised people was the next detail. Back then the Kurta had split.
One group followed the path their ancestors had taken when they first left, reached the lands around Lake Mobius, and chose to settle there.
The other group turned the opposite way and pushed deeper into the Dark Continent, searching for a new home.
The ruins Ronin's team was exploring belonged to the branch that had come to Lake Mobius.
The migration hadn't been smooth. From the sea crossing to the moment they set foot on the continent, the caravan had run into crisis after crisis. Plenty of clansmen vanished on the open ocean or simply broke away and headed somewhere else.
Only the largest group made it to the Mahavi Ruins and built a new settlement.
The final lines on the tablet talked about events that happened on the land that would later become the Etri Kingdom.
At the time the kingdom didn't exist yet. Dangerous species ran wild across the region.
The Kurta had been forced underground. Among those species were Chimera Ants.
They sealed the ants inside the caverns. Part of the reason was to keep balance between the four major powers in the area—the giant trees, the giant snakes, the Chimera Ants, and the spiders. The other part was pure strategy: find the ants' weaknesses and wipe out every last one that still held the surface.
Every year the heroes chosen through the sacrificial rites would check the caverns, then release large numbers of fire-fearing monsters to surge out together.
Even after the Kurta Clan itself was wiped out, the surface Chimera Ant populations never disappeared.
Kurapika pulled every historical document the Etri Kingdom had and dug into them. The kingdom itself had only been founded three hundred years earlier.
Records of the land before that were almost nonexistent.
Materials obtained from Kakin filled in a few blanks. Five hundred years ago this whole region was still a forbidden zone. Chimera Ants lived here, and so did another kind of creature that kept the ants in check.
Then, one day, both species simply vanished. Humans slowly began to move in and eventually founded a new nation.
Almost nothing was written about how those dangerous creatures disappeared.
Ronin, who actually understood Chimera Ant behavior, found himself stuck on one question. The Etri Kingdom sat right next to Kakin. Kakin had already existed for more than a thousand years and was a massive power by then.
So why had the Chimera Ants never expanded into Kakin's territory?
Every loose thread pointed straight at Kakin.
An ancient, closed-off country that had clearly spent a thousand years burying secrets.
The more pieces they uncovered, the more carefully Ronin treated the place.
There was also the matter of Beyond Netero. The man had spent decades setting pieces in motion inside Kakin. Was the goal really as simple as reaching the Dark Continent?
"The investigation into Kakin has stalled," Kurapika said when he sought Ronin out in March.
He had been digging into Kakin nonstop since the previous year.
The Fourth Prince of Kakin held more pairs of Scarlet Eyes than anyone else, after all.
This year the scope of the investigation had widened. It started in Kakin itself, then spread to the smaller countries around it. Slowly Kurapika noticed something strange.
Except for the ones founded too late—places like the Etri Kingdom—every small nation near Kakin had been wiped out at least once in the last thousand years.
Most of those locations had been infamous danger zones centuries earlier.
Yet no matter how deadly the surrounding lands became, the threat never once touched Kakin. The country simply sat behind its borders and never expanded so much as an inch.
Its map had been locked in place for a thousand years.
When Kurapika tried to push past that point, the investigation kept looping back to the same dead end.
"It's like some invisible force only lets us uncover a few strange facts," he said. "And the moment we find something that looks like a real problem, everything stops. The people doing the fieldwork, me organizing the intel—we all end up stuck at the same sentence: 'There's a problem here.' We just can't figure out what the problem actually is."
The only explanation that came to Ronin's mind was Nen.
Someone's Nen ability was actively blocking any deep look into Kakin.
"It's Nen."
"Yeah. It's Nen." Kurapika gave a short, bitter laugh. "If we can't find a way to get around that ability, we're never going to reach the core of whatever Kakin is hiding."
"What if we just go in ourselves and investigate on the ground?" Ronin asked.
"I've already sent people into Kakin. Some of them disappeared. The ones who came back didn't bring anything useful."
The implication was clear.
"Then the only way to get real answers is for us to go in person," Ronin said. "Though that kind of trip is probably going to be dangerous."
"Right." Kurapika nodded. "And I have a feeling the Phantom Troupe might head into Kakin as well."
"So when do we leave?" Ronin rolled his wrist, already itching to move.