One month later. Still Battera Castle.
The master bedroom caught the early morning light in long amber slants across the floor. Liam opened his eyes and sat up from his meditation posture without the bleary three-second delay that normal people required to remember who they were.
People with a lot going on in their heads tend not to need much sleep. He genuinely couldn't remember the last time he'd done a proper eight hours. Meditation covered the gap. When he needed genuine rest, he could close his eyes and drop into deep sleep in about ten seconds flat, wake up an hour later completely recharged, and go again. The body was a machine. He'd learned to run it like one.
The payoff for the last month of grinding: the final trace of death energy sitting in his system had finally burned clean. Converted. Processed into the purest aura his body could produce, which pushed his total capacity up to exactly 50,000. A round number. He appreciated that.
The reason it had taken a full month to clear what wasn't even that much residual energy was simple: most of his attention during that period hadn't been on purging death energy. It had been on building something new.
He rolled his shoulder and reached back to touch the mark on the back of his neck. The rose-gold five-pointed star was still there, same as always, but it had company now. A circle of fiery red traced around its outer edge, the line breaking into flame-like curves along its contour, like a sun drawn by someone who'd seen the actual thing and taken it personally.
Star Mark. Moon Mark. Sun Mark.
The third mark. The set was complete.
He'd been working toward this since he noticed the Moon Mark only operated at full range after dark, that being a side effect of Lumos's influence bleeding into the ability's subconscious architecture. The Moon shone at night. Obviously. So the counterpart had to be something that worked in daylight. Something that burned rather than glowed.
He washed up, left the bedroom, confirmed with the corridor guards that Shizuku was already outside, and went to find her.
The castle's backyard opened onto a wide stretch of open ground bordered by flowering beds, with a large tree of some species Liam still hadn't successfully identified growing right at the edge of the cliff. The tree had excellent posture. It was doing better than most people Liam knew.
Rock sparrows chattered somewhere in the upper branches. Underneath the tree, sprawled across a pale tiger the size of a small sofa, was Shizuku. She had a book open on her lap, her glasses slightly crooked, and the look of someone who had found an excellent spot and intended to remain in it indefinitely.
Lumos cracked one enormous eye open at Liam's approach and then closed it again. Apparently, he cleared the threat assessment.
"Eaten yet?" Liam set down the tray he'd collected from the kitchen.
Shizuku sat up and repositioned her book. "I could eat more."
"Then eat with me."
He spread a blanket, distributed breakfast, and leaned back against Lumos's flank beside her. The wilderness stretched out beyond the cliff's edge in every direction, flat and green and completely indifferent to them. The sparrows continued their argument above. It was, objectively, a fine morning.
Liam held out his open palm toward the empty space in front of them. The flame circle around the Star Mark on his neck warmed noticeably.
Aura poured from his palm in a slow, measured stream, somewhere between two and three hundred units, coiling and condensing and shaping itself with the precision of long practice. The shape that assembled itself on the ground was first a rough outline, then a figure, then a face. Then Kurapika, standing in the backyard of a castlewhile simultaneously standing in a city street three hundred kilometers away.
The avatar blinked. Looked at them. Adjusted.
"How's it feel?" Liam asked, taking a piece of bread.
"Like having an extra body." Kurapika's remote voice came out slightly hollow but clear. "Sight and hearing are sharp. Everything else has a lag. Touch, proprioception, temperature." He paused. "It's manageable."
"Can you use your abilities through it?"
Kurapika looked mildly offended. "Two hundred aura worth of projected form is not going to be enough to conjure a single book, let alone the full shelf." He paused again. "But I can tell that with sufficient aura behind it, yes. I could. The ability connection is there. The channel just needs more volume to carry it."
As he said it, his avatar's eyes shifted to scarlet.
The aura reading off the remote form spiked from its projected baseline up to nearly a thousand units in the span of a breath. More than four times what Liam had put into it.
Liam stared.
Shizuku looked up from her book.
"That's not from me," Kurapika said, answering the unasked question. He glanced sideways at something neither of them could see. "It's from over there. A few individuals have been following me since I left the craftsmen's district. They've been gradually closing the distance."
"What kind of individuals?"
"The kind that look at a teenager walking alone and see a transaction." His scarlet eyes moved flatly in the direction of some approaching presence three hundred kilometers away. "Human traffickers."
Liam thought about this. Kurapika was fourteen, looked twelve, walked alone in unfamiliar cities, and had the physical build of someone who hadn't yet found out they were supposed to eat more. Of course he got targeted. The boy was a recruitment poster for terrible decisions.
He also had over five thousand aura, Scarlet Eyes that multiplied that exponentially, and approximately zero mercy for people in that specific line of work.
"Right," Liam said.
"I'll be done shortly," Kurapika said, with the particular flatness that meant he was already handling it. "The items should be ready."
The items in question: twenty custom wooden gourds, ordered from a carpentry gift shop in the city two weeks prior. Small things, palm-sized, hollowed from specialty hardwood and coated in a jade-finish lacquer. Each one completely sealed except for a finger-width opening at the neck. The inside had been carved out by tools thin enough to fit through that opening, leaving each gourd a perfect hollow sphere that weighed almost nothing.
The surface relief carvings were the distinctive part.
Two infants. One facing forward, one reversed. One laughing, one crying. Wrapped around the gourd so that their curled bodies formed the lower hemisphere and their faces occupied the upper. Hands clasped together like a greeting.
The woodworker had completed the order without asking a single question, which either said something about professional standards or about what Liam's face looked like when he placed unusual commissions. He was choosing to believe the former.
Kurapika's avatar went still for a moment, the eyes returning to their normal grey-brown. "Done. I'm heading to the shop."
The avatar returned to light conversation while Kurapika's actual body, three hundred kilometers away, walked through streets that had suddenly become somewhat more navigable. Liam didn't press for details.
Twenty minutes later, the avatar relayed confirmation: items accepted, quality verified. One of the gift boxes had been opened at the collection counter, and the gourd retrieved and examined. Even Kurapika, whose experience with the unusual was now considerable, had apparently looked at the laughing-crying-infant carving for a long moment before putting it back in the foam padding.
"Whenever you're ready," Kurapika's avatar said.
Liam set down his mug and sat forward. He extended both hands, palms out, and let the Sun Mark heat up in earnest.
The aura that came out this time wasn't the steady trickle he'd used to project the avatar. It was a sustained pour, volume-heavy and deliberate, funneled directly into the remote form standing in front of them. The flame circle on his neck threw genuine warmth against the back of his collar. Thirty thousand units. Thirty-one. The number climbed until it matched the full aura capacity of the real body standing in a city street three hundred kilometers north with ten gift boxes in each hand.
The avatar shifted from translucent to solid.
The city-Kurapika dissolved.
The backyard-Kurapika became real, gift boxes and all, twenty wooden gourds accounted for, standing on the castle grounds in the morning light looking mildly windswept from the transit.
Shizuku looked at him, then at Liam, then back at Kurapika.
"Morning," she said.
"Good morning," Kurapika said, and set the boxes down carefully on the blanket.
Lumos opened one eye again, assessed the new arrival, and closed it.
The sparrows continued their debate in the tree above, unimpressed by the whole business.
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