Liam recited the terms of his new ability with the weary cadence of someone reading the fine print on a contract, already knowing a nasty catch was buried somewhere in paragraph seven.
"Manipulation: Sun Mark.
"Condition One: The holder of a Sun Mark can summon any other Sun Mark holder simply by speaking their name aloud. Doing this consumes an amount of aura directly proportional to the target's total aura capacity.
"Condition Two: If the summoner is willing and able to spend aura equal to exactly one hundred percent of the target's total aura capacity, the summoning is real. The target physically arrives at the summoner's location. Anything less than one hundred percent produces a projected puppet avatar instead. The absolute minimum threshold to create a puppet is one percent. Fall below that, and absolutely nothing happens.
"Condition Three: The projected puppet carries all of the summoned person's Nen abilities and responds entirely to the summoner's direction.
"Condition Four: After a puppet is successfully formed, the summoner can continue feeding it aura over time to gradually upgrade its percentage toward a full, physical summoning, provided the puppet isn't destroyed or manually cancelled first.
"Condition Five: A summoner can pool aura contributions from multiple Sun Mark holders in the vicinity to afford the cost of summoning a single target together."
Kurapika sat across from him on the blanket, listening with the patient, focused attention of someone meticulously taking mental notes.
Liam set his notebook aside and stared up at the clear blue sky above the castle courtyard, letting out a heavy sigh.
His original plan for the ability had been so elegant. He had wanted the cost of a full physical summoning to be exactly fifty percent of the target's total aura. Half price. Clean, efficient, and tactically brilliant. That cost would have made the Sun Mark one of the most flexible abilities in his entire kit. It would have functioned as an instant battlefield reinforcement system, allowing anyone connected to his network to show up wherever they were needed without draining the summoner dry in the process.
Unfortunately, the ability itself had violently disagreed with his logic.
It was too cheap. Too incredibly efficient. The development difficulty had shot up exponentially the moment he tried to force the threshold below one hundred percent. After three agonizing weeks of banging his head against the metaphorical wall, he had finally accepted that the universe simply wasn't going to cooperate with his bargain hunting.
A hundred percent it was. Full retail cost, or you get a puppet.
Which meant that physically summoning Kurapika into the courtyard earlier had cost Liam over thirty thousand units of aura in a single sitting. In the middle of an actual, serious fight against a capable opponent, burning thirty thousand aura just to bring in backup was roughly equivalent to simultaneously kicking yourself in the shins while trying to throw a knockout punch. It was a massive, dangerous drain.
The ability wasn't entirely useless, but it had definitely moved firmly out of the 'decisive tactical asset' column and landed squarely in the 'strategic logistics' column. Which was just a polite, corporate way of saying the Sun Mark was far more useful for moving people across long distances during peacetime than it was for actually winning a sudden fight.
He had managed to salvage the core concept with three crucial adjustments.
First was the cache puppet mechanic. You could build a puppet's density up over time, feeding it small installments of aura across multiple sessions. The progress was retained indefinitely as long as you didn't dispel the avatar or let it get wrecked in combat. The puppet could just sit idle at whatever completion percentage you had reached, waiting patiently for the final top-off.
Second was the breakpoint resume feature. If a fully summoned target suddenly needed to return to their original location, the summoner could immediately re-project them as a puppet at whatever aura percentage they could currently afford, maintaining a secure communication channel and a physical presence. It wasn't a full teleport back, but it was highly functional.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, was group summoning. Multiple Sun Mark holders contributing their aura simultaneously could split the exorbitant cost of bringing in one heavy hitter. This meant the ability scaled perfectly with organization size in a way that actively rewarded Liam for actually building a team.
Between those three adjustments, the Sun Mark went from being 'occasionally impractical' to 'genuinely useful if you plan ahead.' It was the absolute best deal Liam was going to get from the universe.
"So, just to confirm my understanding," Kurapika said, his eyes drifting toward the twenty identical gift boxes stacked neatly beside their blanket. "The complete standard issue package for a core member of our organization is as follows: The Sun Mark for daytime movement and logistics, the Moon Mark for secure nighttime communication, and the Star Mark for passive healing and absolute immunity to hostile Manipulation."
Liam waved a hand, his expression turning wry. "In theory, yes. In practice, not everyone actively wants someone else's Manipulation-type Nen ability permanently branded onto their skin. I say that with the full awareness that you are currently sitting here without a Star Mark on your body. I put it there once to save your life, and you politely gave it back the moment you woke up."
Kurapika had the grace to look slightly thoughtful, rather than immediately defensive. "The experience of wearing the mark, feeling its effects, and then removing it voluntarily made the rationale for trusting you much clearer. The choice to eventually accept it again feels much more considered now than it would have if I had never taken it off."
"That is an extremely diplomatic way of saying you wanted to know exactly what you were agreeing to before you agreed to it permanently."
"Yes," Kurapika admitted flatly.
"Fair enough," Liam chuckled. "Honestly, having a Star Mark stamped on me doesn't exactly make me feel deeply spiritual or free either, and it is literally my own ability."
Beside them, Shizuku had already moved on from the technical conversation. She had pulled one of the custom wooden gourds out of its protective foam bed and was currently holding it up to the bright morning light with both hands, turning it slowly.
As she spun it, the two intricately carved infants rotated past the sun. One baby was laughing joyously, the other was crying bitterly, their tiny wooden hands clasped together as if they were greeting whoever happened to be looking at them.
The gray rock sparrow that had been perched in the high branches of the tree above hopped down a limb. It cocked its little head, staring intensely at the bizarre wooden gourd, and then quickly hopped back up to a higher branch. Evidently, the bird had some serious concerns about the aesthetic choices involved.
Shizuku lowered the gourd and held it out to Liam.
He took it, turning the object over and over in both hands. He pressed the pads of his thumbs firmly across the lacquered surface, memorizing the subtle seams, the specific weight distribution, and the exact way the smooth jade finish sat over the natural grain of the specialty hardwood.
This was the mandatory process. This was exactly what the Conjuration category required. The target object had to become as intimately familiar to the user as their own hand before they could even attempt to make a perfect copy from nothing.
Bisky had explained the rules very clearly. The absolute baseline standard for Conjuration was that an ordinary person shouldn't be able to tell the real, physical thing apart from the created Nen copy. That was a passing grade. Shizuku's Blinky cleared that standard without any visible effort. Kurapika's conjured chains and books could reportedly fool even experienced Nen users at a casual glance, which put his skills at an incredibly solid rank for someone who had been practicing the art for less than two years.
Liam's current Conjuration output, however, when he actually tried to conjure the intricate wooden gourd from scratch, looked like a gourd in the same way a rough pencil sketch looked like a high-definition photograph.
The proportions were approximately right, and the general shape was suggestive of a gourd. In very strong lighting, with no real comparison available, someone who had never actually seen a gourd before might be charitable enough to guess what it was supposed to be.
He privately referred to his attempts as his 'fifty-jenny bargain bin special effects budget.' It was definitely not a compliment to himself.
"How did you actually manage to develop Blinky so perfectly?" Liam asked, his eyes never leaving the blurry, shifting practice piece slowly taking shape in his left palm. "Like, what was the actual starting point? What was the original object you studied?"
Shizuku was already back on the large, comfortable outdoor sofa. She had dragged a small television out onto the patio and was currently watching a broadcast that appeared to involve a highly competitive idol ranking show. She looked over the back of the cushion at him.
"A toy vacuum cleaner," she said simply. "It was from a cheap kids' play kitchen set. I had it for about a week when I was little, and then it broke." She paused, her eyes drifting back to the television screen. "I was actually pretty upset about it at the time. So, when I started developing my Nen ability years later, that broken toy was the very first thing my mind went to."
Liam considered this information carefully.
It made a very specific kind of sense. The emotional weight attached to the object mattered just as much as the physical details. You didn't build a flawless Conjured object out of cold technical knowledge alone. You built it out of a familiarity so deep and complete that the thing felt like it had always existed somewhere inside you, just waiting for the chance to be made real. Shizuku hadn't spent months meticulously cataloging the toy vacuum cleaner's exact dimensions with a ruler. She had simply missed it.
He looked down at the fifty-jenny blob of aura slowly dissolving back into his palm. He thought very hard about exactly how he felt regarding this specific carved wooden gourd.
Honestly? He felt aesthetically unsettled. The bizarre laughing-crying infant motif possessed a very particular, creepy energy that he hadn't fully anticipated before blindly placing the custom order. He also felt mildly defensive about the undeniable fact that absolutely everyone who looked at the gourds seemed to briefly question his sanity and personal taste.
That mixed bag of mild regret and defensiveness probably wasn't the strong, foundational emotional connection Bisky had in mind for Conjuration training.
He sighed, dropping the failed aura construct, and went back to turning the real, solid wooden gourd in his hands.
This tedious routine continued for most of August.
He played with the wooden gourds constantly. He held them during meals, spun them during strategic conversations, carried them while pacing the long stone corridors of the castle, and tossed them between his hands while watching Kurapika run remote errands via his Sun Mark avatar in distant cities. The creepy carved babies essentially became background furniture in his daily life. Lumos eventually learned to simply step over the discarded foam packing materials that began to accumulate near the fruit trees in the courtyard. Shizuku eventually stopped asking if he wanted her to hold one while he practiced, and simply started handing one directly to him the moment he sat down anywhere.
Slowly, his conjured version progressed from 'rough sketch' to 'passable diagram' and finally reached the 'someone might mistake this for the real thing in bad lighting' phase.
It still wasn't good enough. Not yet.
September arrived, bringing a chill to the mountain air. The weather changed rapidly. The sparrows in the backyard tree became aggressively loud for a few days, and then settled into a quiet, huddled routine.
On the ninth of September, Kurapika walked out from the main corridor, holding out a ringing cell phone. "You left this sitting on the kitchen counter again."
He lobbed it underhand across the courtyard.
Liam's hands were currently occupied. Both of them. One hand held the real, lacquered gourd, while the other was carefully maintaining a conjured copy that finally possessed the correct physical weight and about seventy percent of the right surface texture. He didn't want to drop the construct, so he simply turned sideways and let the phone arc right past his head.
Shizuku casually reached out a hand and caught it cleanly out of the air without ever looking up from her book.
She glanced at the caller ID. "It's Bisky," she said after a second.
Liam let out a breath, allowing the conjured gourd to dissolve into mist. He set the real one aside, took the phone from Shizuku, and wedged it between his shoulder and his ear. He immediately picked the real gourd back up with both hands, his thumbs tracing the carved faces.
"Aunt Bi. What's up?"
The sound that immediately blasted through the receiver was sharp, percussive, and incredibly violent. It sounded like a small explosion of rock and bone.
"Was that a hit?" Liam asked, wincing slightly at the volume.
"Yes," Bisky's voice came through, sounding slightly breathless. "Could you hear it?"
"I could absolutely hear it." Liam shifted the phone against his shoulder. "Very expressive strike. It really conveys a strong, definitive message to whoever you just punched."
Bisky's tone did not warm at the compliment. She began explaining her current situation at a rapid, clipped pace that strongly suggested she had already calculated exactly how much of her valuable time this phone call was worth.
She had successfully arranged for her underworld contacts to officially manage the secure storage and auction of the thirty pristine Greed Island game consoles that they had liberated from the Bomb Trio. The auction house handling the massive sale was located in Yorknew City. Any proceeds generated from the successful sales would move automatically through several layers of heavily encrypted intermediary accounts before finally arriving in the Bomb Trio's original bank accounts. From there, a massive portion of the funds would automatically route straight through to Liam's personal accounts, fulfilling the standing arrangement they had made.
The very first auction block featuring the consoles was scheduled for tomorrow. September tenth.
She was calling specifically to ask if he wanted to watch the live broadcast of the event.