"Even if you do not know the exact mechanics of Nen, you should be at least somewhat familiar with the feeling of it now. Your body is ready to learn the basics. As for how to properly learn and practice in the future? You can go back to your normal life and spend some of that leftover money to take private lessons from a professional Hunter."
This surging power. Is this really me? Battera looked down at his trembling hands in absolute disbelief. A soft, white glow wrapped around his aged skin like flowing water, illuminating the dim underground cellar. So this is what the Hunters call aura...
"Hey, hey, are you even listening to me?" Liam reached out and tapped his finger directly against the forehead of Battera.
The rose-gold Star Mark underneath his fingertip suddenly vanished. The flowing white aura immediately receded, sinking back into the body of the old man. Battera gasped, suddenly coming back to his senses as the overwhelming sensation faded.
"I am listening! I am listening!" Battera said hurriedly, bowing his head. "This is only natural. I would not dare to bother someone as skilled as Mr. Liam with such a trivial thing as teaching me the basics of Nen. I will easily find another professional Hunter to take lessons from..."
Shizuku tilted her head, her dark eyes looking at the billionaire with mild curiosity. "Do you even still have money left to hire one?"
"I always have to save some emergency savings for my own personal use..." Battera replied, looking slightly guilty. Besides, the vast majority of his massive fixed assets, properties, and corporate shares were still entirely intact. He could easily get a massive fortune back just by liquidating a small portion of them in the future.
"Professional Hunters really should not have to do such a simple, menial task as teaching a beginner anyway," Battera murmured. The old man suddenly thought of Tsezguerra, the Single-Star Hunter he had employed for so long. He turned his head, looking directly at the empty JoyStation console where Tsezguerra had just disappeared a few minutes prior.
"Looking for him to teach you? I strongly advise you to forget about it," Liam said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Battera immediately realized the implication and nodded. "Yes, you are right. I cannot let him connect the dots and realize that I suddenly opened my Nen nodes. It might expose you, Mr. Liam."
Liam waved his hand dismissively. "That is not it at all. The main thing is that Tsezguerra skills are barely adequate. If you want to learn properly, you need to find a teacher who is at least decent."
With that said, both Liam and Shizuku slowly turned their heads to look directly at Bisky.
Bisky noticed their stares and immediately looked back at them with profound confusion, putting on the most incredibly cute, innocent, and utterly clueless expression she could muster.
Do not cause unnecessary trouble for the grandma, Liam thought to himself, nodding clearly as he got the message.
Giving up on recruiting Bisky for the old man, Liam briefly gave Battera a verbal rundown of the Water Divination method and quickly outlined the fundamental differences between the six Nen types. After dumping the basic theory on him, Liam gestured toward the heavy wooden door, asking the billionaire to finally take his girlfriend and leave the cellar.
"Alice, can you actually see this strange aura on me too?" Battera whispered to the young woman beside him.
"Yeah, I can," Alice replied softly, her eyes wide as she looked at him. "I honestly thought there was something wrong with my eyes that had not fully healed after I woke up..."
Battera and his girlfriend, Alice, walked out of the underground room, their footsteps echoing softly as they headed up the winding stone corridor. But after walking only a few steps, they encountered someone coming down from the top level of the castle. Battera quickly turned back around, marching back into the cellar with an obsequious, nervous-looking man in a sharp suit trailing behind him. It was his personal lawyer.
Battera instructed the lawyer to hand over a thick stack of legal paperwork. After Liam accepted the towering pile of documents, Battera and Alice finally left the underground area for good.
Shizuku walked over and looked down at the papers. She saw that it was the official, legally binding statement from Battera regarding the immediate termination of the agreement to hire Hunters to clear Greed Island.
"You just got handed eight hundred billion Jenny in liquid cash and an entire ancient castle. You did not even want to let go of these occupied game consoles, huh?" Bisky said, a knowing smile spreading across her face. "You really do love money very much."
"Leaving them locked up is a shameful waste of perfectly good resources!" Liam replied, reading through the dense legal termination statement in a highly serious manner.
Satisfied with the paperwork, he asked Shizuku to manifest Blinky. The vacuum cleaner appeared with a bizarre mechanical wheeze, and Shizuku casually fed the entire stack of documents into its gaping mouth for safe storage.
Liam put his hands on his hips and looked back out over the rows of tables. He eyed the more than twenty occupied retro consoles sitting silently in the cellar. "Besides," he said leisurely, his voice echoing in the large room. "When you enter a massive game like this, you have to find a solid goal to keep yourself motivated, right? You are going in specifically to get the Blue Planet jewel. But I honestly could not think of a single item in the game that I am absolutely determined to get for myself..."
So your grand goal is just to kick all these stranded people out of the game so you can sell their consoles? Bisky chuckled quietly, highly appreciating the ruthless pragmatism of the boy.
Shizuku adjusted her glasses. "Do you really not have a goal? There must be something in there you want to do."
"You mean Razor?" Liam said, suddenly remembering the encounter. Yes, that was right. He wanted to go find Razor and settle the score with that annoying, narrow-eyed man. He still wanted to avenge his unceremonious deportation from the island.
The head of Shizuku was completely full of questions. "Razor? Who is that?"
"Razor! The guy with the squinty eyes! He gave us a spell card and blasted us off the island... forget it. It does not matter right now."
"Our primary goal from the very beginning has been to practice our Nen with Bisky," Shizuku reminded him in her usual flat tone. "According to your own detailed description, Liam, the environment of Greed Island inside the game is indeed a very good, highly convenient place to practice without holding back."
She was entirely correct. For people like Liam and Shizuku, living in a densely populated modern city made it incredibly difficult to find a wild, open, and convenient training venue. This was especially true for Liam. He primarily practiced Emission and Enhancement, which were both incredibly dynamic, explosive, and highly destructive Nen types. Even Shizuku was devastatingly powerful when she was dancing around swinging her vacuum like a heavy club. If the suction of Blinky was fully turned on during a spar, it would send sand, rocks, and heavy debris flying everywhere. It sucked up absolutely everything in its path.
They were no longer just the weak novices with a measly few thousand aura capacity from more than a year ago. If they tried to hide inside a normal hotel room and worked hard on their training, they would inadvertently transform into a professional demolition team in a matter of minutes, bringing the building down on their heads.
Renting a reinforced venue like a martial arts gym was simply not cost-effective or practical for people like Liam and Shizuku, who constantly moved around the world. Up until now, they could only make do by hiding in wild, overgrown parks on the outskirts of whatever city they were in. They constantly had to pack up and move their training spots from time to time just to avoid being watched, recorded, or photographed by wandering crowds of curious passersby.
As for abandoning the city entirely and living out in the remote, deep countryside... well, Shizuku might be perfectly willing to adapt to the rugged lifestyle. But a guy like Liam, who had been thoroughly accustomed to the absolute convenience of modern life his entire existence, would hate it. Living in an environment where he could not find a convenience store within ten kilometers, where the network signal was constantly intermittent, and where the electricity and water were cut off every other day? He really would not be happy living anywhere like that. Greed Island offered the perfect compromise: a massive, indestructible wilderness with clear rules, right at their fingertips.
"What about them? Do they want to go in together with us?" Bisky asked, pointing a finger toward the massive beast resting in the center of the cellar. Lumos was lying flat on the stone floor, and the little gray bird, Jaku, was casually hanging out right on top of the head of the tiger.
"Of course they are coming. Lumos has not even mastered the tiger-striped skirt technique yet," Liam said, snapping his fingers sharply.
Hearing the crisp sound, Lumos stood up immediately, his massive muscles rolling under his striped fur. The beast padded over to the storage cabinet and used his teeth to gently grab two heavy metal game rings. Jaku fluttered down from his perch and used its small beak to help pick up the two corresponding memory cards. They approached the rows of tables and quickly found an empty game console that still had space to insert the cards.
The metal ring belonging to Jaku was carefully slid onto its scaly bird claw, fitting perfectly like a heavy anklet. The bird hopped up onto the plastic casing of the game console, puffing its chest out and finally letting out a long breath after holding its excitement in for so long.
The fleshy, padded paw of Lumos was entirely too big. The standard-sized ring could not possibly fit on any of his thick toes. Instead, the tiger had to open his massive jaws and use one of his lethal, dagger-like fangs as a makeshift finger to insert into the device. The metal ring just happened to slide perfectly up the enamel, getting securely stuck in the thick middle section of the tooth. Fortunately, the game ring was an object entirely constructed out of Nen and had a highly special structure. It could not be scratched, bent, or damaged by ordinary physical external forces at all, so there was absolutely no need to worry about the beast breaking it.
Lumos turned and nodded his large head toward Liam, signaling he was ready. Then, the beast leaned his massive head toward the dark screen of the game console. He closed his golden eyes and shook his head slightly, forcefully pushing a thick surge of aura out from his forehead. Jaku did the exact same thing beside him.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
In the blink of an eye, both the massive tiger and the little gray bird disappeared completely out of thin air. They left behind nothing but two swirling clouds of white smoke lingering in the cool air directly in front of the plastic game console.
Shizuku walked over, waving her hand to clear the smoke, and asked with genuine curiosity. "They really disappeared just like that!"
"Why are you acting so surprised about it?" Bisky asked, raising an eyebrow at the bespectacled girl.
"Because they clearly still have the active Manipulation mark from Liam planted on them..." Shizuku explained, looking back at Liam for an answer. She knew the basic rules of Nen combat.
"You idiot. Teleportation-type Nen abilities generally belong to the Emission category," Bisky sighed, shaking her head. She walked past them, heading straight toward another completely blank Greed Island game machine with her arms crossed confidently. "It is entirely true that people or creatures who have already been successfully marked by a Manipulation ability can indeed automatically defend against the influence of other Manipulation users. But what do the strict rules of Manipulation have to do with an Emission spell? It just moves them from one place to another."
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