"We actually managed to get the registration in on time."
Liam turned the newly conjured wooden gourd over in his palm, his brow furrowed in thought. "Didn't the Hunter Association usually send a chartered ship to collect the registered candidates from the different global regions? We are sitting in a remote mountain fortress in the middle of absolutely nowhere. I am genuinely not sure a collection ship is going to come out this far just for us."
Shizuku looked up from the thick book resting on her lap. "We could just bypass the collection phase and go directly to the Association headquarters ourselves."
"That is the obvious answer, isn't it," Liam said, slapping his knee lightly. "Honestly, we are practically colleagues with the examiners at this point. That old man Netero has been sitting on our situation for months now. We have gone through the tedious formal process, we have registered our names, and honestly, if he just issued us the licenses right now instead of making us sit through his ridiculous exam, it would spare absolutely everyone a lot of unnecessary trouble." He paused, a wry smile touching his lips. "Though, I suppose doing that would be highly unfair to the other ordinary candidates."
"That might be exactly why Netero specifically asked Menchi and the other elite Hunters to artificially raise the difficulty of the exam in the first place," Shizuku pointed out mildly.
Liam made a non-committal humming sound. He didn't take the threat of an artificially difficult exam too seriously.
Across the snowy courtyard, leaning heavily against the cold stone wall, Kurapika sat in the snow. He looked exactly like a man who had just been violently and thoroughly wrung out by a piece of demonic fruit. Which, technically speaking, was an entirely accurate description of his current state.
He pushed himself upright by agonizing degrees, his muscles trembling slightly with the effort. He had not felt this utterly depleted since before he had first unlocked his aura nodes to learn Nen. In fact, he possibly hadn't felt this weak since the day he was born.
"Exactly how long was I inside that gourd?" he asked, his voice raspy.
"About half an hour," Liam replied casually.
Kurapika absorbed that terrifying piece of information. Then, he began doing the brutal arithmetic out loud. "My total aura capacity right now is somewhere around 20,000 units. Half an hour of physical contact inside your gourd, and my entire reserve is completely gone." He paused, his gray eyes widening slightly as the math clicked into place. "That extraction rate is roughly ten units of aura per second."
Shizuku casually counted on her fingers. "That is exactly ten times faster than the aura recovery rate of sitting in deep meditation."
Kurapika's eyes darted toward the lacquered wooden gourd resting innocently in Liam's hand. His expression was a complicated mix that was not quite naked greed and not quite deep suspicion, but landed somewhere uncomfortably between the two.
Liam turned the small gourd over and gave it a gentle, deliberate shake. A faint sloshing sound came from inside—the distinct noise of heavy liquid splashing against hollow wood.
The sound was impossible, considering the gourd had been completely empty when Kurapika had been sucked inside half an hour ago.
Liam had finally decided on a proper name for his new Conjuration ability: Ginseng Fruit. He felt the mythological name was highly appropriate in several ways that he absolutely did not intend to ever explain to anyone else.
"Open up," Liam said, stepping forward and tilting the narrow neck of the gourd toward Kurapika's mouth.
Kurapika hesitated for a fraction of a second, but he took the gourd by the neck. He peered cautiously inside the dark opening before committing. At the very bottom of the hollow wooden interior, a thin, shimmering layer of light golden liquid caught the weak rays of the December sun.
He lifted the gourd and drank it.
The golden liquid slid down his throat and expanded immediately. It didn't hit him with the violent, forced force of a direct aura injection. Instead, it blossomed with the deep, soothing softness of pure warmth rapidly spreading through cold, stiff joints. It felt exactly like drinking the first hot cup of tea after an agonizingly long, freezing journey. His numb limbs responded instantly. The heavy, suffocating feeling of total aura depletion in his chest released by measurable, physical degrees.
The sensation strongly reminded him of carrying Liam's Star Mark, that same gentle, constant maintenance current running through his veins. It also felt similar to the restorative Nine Yang technique Liam had used on him before, though this specific energy came from an external source rather than coaxing his own depleted aura back into sluggish motion.
Liam reached out, took the empty gourd back, and casually dismissed it with a wave of his free hand. The conjured wooden form dissolved instantly into white mist.
"One second spent trapped inside the gourd equals roughly ten units of aura forcibly refined and extracted," Liam explained, his tone shifting into an analytical lecture. "One thousand units of extracted aura condenses to produce exactly one single drop of the golden liquid that just came out of that gourd. Let's call it aura concentrate. And as you just felt, the concentrate goes back into your system exactly as fast as the gourd originally drained it out."
He raised two fingers. From the patch of snow nearby, the Nen beast rose smoothly through the surface of the ground, moving exactly like a figure stepping silently through thick fog. Her long, wide sleeves fell perfectly straight, and her flawless jade-toned face gave absolutely nothing away.
"The gourd itself is somewhat inconvenient for me to manually maintain on its own," Liam continued, gesturing to Jade. "So, my plan is to carefully craft a set of specific talismans for the Nen beast to hold and operate whenever I am not physically around. If you or Shizuku ever want to borrow a session inside the gourd for extreme endurance training, you simply ask her to use one talisman. You go inside, get drained, and come out faster than any deep meditation session you have ever done in your life. The resulting aura concentrate automatically gets returned to my actual, primary gourd when you are done, ensuring none of the energy is wasted."
Shizuku, who had been following the explanation quietly from the sofa, immediately posed the most obvious mechanical question. "What happens if the person trapped inside produces the concentrate, but they do not drink it before they come out? Does the liquid just stay inside the borrowed talisman gourd?"
"That is exactly the part of the ability I needed to test next," Liam said, a glint of excitement in his eyes.
Two days later, Liam had successfully produced ten fully functional Ginseng Fruit talismans.
The three of them took one talisman each. They sat in a loose triangle on the thick carpets of the castle's grand main hall and activated their identical, palm-sized wooden gourds simultaneously. Following the strict activation conditions, all three of them pointed the open neck of their respective gourds directly at their own faces, spoke their own names aloud, verbally answered back, and were sucked inside at the exact same time.
The Nen beast was left standing entirely alone in the massive, silent hall beneath the glittering crystal chandelier. Three small wooden gourds rested innocently on the polished surface of the coffee table in front of her. She examined the items with the mild, detached interest of someone watching a pot of water slowly come to a boil. There was absolutely no shadow beneath her flowing robes. She had no feet, not really.
At exactly 2,020 seconds, the wooden gourd resting on the far right released a sharp puff of pressurized air.
Kurapika materialized heavily onto the plush sofa, looking thoroughly depleted and mildly surprised by the sudden ejection. He stared down at the small gourd on the table, panting softly. "I have absolutely nothing left in my reserves," he announced to the empty room. "But the gourd itself is still sitting right there."
The Nen beast slowly turned her jade head to look at him.
Kurapika had the very distinct, unsettling sense that if the flawless jade face could actually arrange itself into a human expression, it would currently be wearing the deeply patronizing expression of someone who considered his observation to be an extremely obvious outcome.
At roughly 800 seconds after Kurapika's exit, the middle gourd released another puff of air, and Shizuku materialized. She landed gracefully on the sofa cushions and sat perfectly quiet, her eyes distant as she was clearly already mentally calculating something about the experience.
Then, they waited.
Shizuku had successfully recovered roughly half of her total aura capacity through the Star Mark's passive restoration network by the time the left gourd finally stirred on the table. A small, dense cloud of exhausted air emerged from the neck and rapidly assembled itself into Liam's physical form. He dropped heavily onto the center of the sofa, wearing the deeply satisfied, relaxed expression of someone who had just finished a very long, very thorough session in a high-heat sauna.
"That," Liam said, speaking to no one in particular as he stretched his stiff arms, "really cleans out your entire system."
Shizuku leaned over and pressed her cool fingers gently against the back of his neck, checking his skin. "Your Star Mark is still there, completely intact. So, the extraction process inside the gourd cannot strip that specific Nen construct away. It seems the ability can only forcibly take raw aura directly from living people, not from established Nen marks that are already permanently embedded in the flesh."
Liam nodded slowly, his breathing returning to a steady baseline as his body adjusted. After a few minutes of silent recovery, he and the others verbally dismissed their three conjured Ginseng Fruits, the wooden forms dissolving into mist.
Liam then stood up and held out his open hand toward the silent Nen beast.
Jade gracefully raised her right sleeve. A bright point of concentrated light flew from the dark fabric and landed softly in Liam's open palm, instantly solidifying into another physical talisman.
He held the small paper talisman loosely in his right hand. With his left hand, he summoned his own primary Ginseng Fruit from scratch. He gripped the neck of the real gourd and gave it a hard shake.
The sloshing sound that echoed from inside the wood was significantly louder and heavier than Kurapika had expected.
Shizuku pushed her glasses up her nose. "So, even the aura concentrate produced inside the borrowed talisman versions flows directly back to your primary gourd when it is not consumed by the user on the spot. Absolutely all of it."
"Everything comes home eventually," Liam said with a satisfied grin, shaking the heavy gourd again. "It operates on the exact same spatial storage principle as Blinky. When Shizuku's Blinky gets dismissed, absolutely everything it ate stays perfectly stored within the actual Nen ability's separate dimension. If you could somehow turn Blinky into a usable talisman version and hand it to someone else, anything they sucked up with it would still end up deposited inside your real, primary Blinky."
Kurapika had been doing the math in his head again. He frowned deeply, staring hard at the sloshing gourd in Liam's hand. "The liquid sound in there is entirely wrong. Based on the sheer volume of that sloshing, you should have at least one hundred and fifteen drops of concentrate stored inside your primary gourd right now, perfectly accounting for the total aura the three of us just produced during that test. But I only refined about twenty drops of my own capacity. Shizuku has less aura than I do, and you have the most. Where on earth did the rest of that immense volume come from? The gourd isn't big enough to hold that much liquid."
Shizuku answered the question before Liam could even open his mouth. "Blinky cannot be overfilled."
Kurapika stopped and stared at her, thoroughly confused by the sudden change in subject.
"My vacuum cleaner," she explained simply, her tone entirely matter-of-fact. "The storage dimension inside it has absolutely no upper limit. I have never once had to think about it eventually becoming completely full. When Liam successfully developed a similar spatial storage ability around the exact same time he was constantly watching me use Blinky in combat, his subconscious mind just... didn't include the fundamental concept of a maximum capacity. It literally didn't occur to him to program a physical limit into the gourd."
Liam chuckled, giving the wooden gourd one final, heavy shake. "Exactly. So, the physical thing looks incredibly small on the outside. But it isn't. You three together represent what, maybe 60,000 total aura between us? Storing all of that wouldn't even register as a microscopic fraction of the gourd's internal capacity. We could go in and out of those gourds a thousand times in a row, and we would still come out with the exact same amount of infinite room left inside."
Kurapika sat in completely stunned silence for a long moment, staring at the unassuming wooden object.
"Given enough time and dedicated targets," Kurapika finally said, his voice laced with awe, "you could theoretically accumulate millions of drops of aura concentrate inside that tiny thing. It would be enough stored energy to completely restore anyone's aura on demand, indefinitely."
Liam waved his hand dismissively. "That is technically true, but my Star Mark already provides highly efficient passive recovery for anyone wearing it, working around the clock, entirely automatically. This new gourd ability is meant more for initiating extremely concentrated, high-stress endurance training sessions than it is for actual, practical battlefield logistics."
Kurapika looked at him with a flat, judging expression that clearly suggested he found Liam's casual, flippant dismissal of these terrifying, world-breaking facts to be genuinely unreasonable.
Liam ignored the look, murmuring half to himself. "One principle, when applied broadly enough, eventually becomes all principles. Now that I have basically filled in the very last strategic gap in my entire Nen toolkit, I honestly wonder what there is left for me to actually do with it..."
"Take the Hunter Exam?" Shizuku offered helpfully from the sofa.
"Right," Liam said, snapping his fingers and straightening his posture. "We have exactly ten days left before it starts. Let's just head directly to the Association headquarters and see if we can find Menchi."
To satisfy his own lingering curiosity, Kurapika activated a fresh talisman to produce another temporary Ginseng Fruit as a final test. The wooden gourd appeared in his hand. He shook it hard.
It was completely empty.
Only Liam's real, primary gourd actually held the accumulated concentrate. The talisman versions were perfectly functional extraction tools, but they were strictly loan equipment. Everything they managed to collect went straight home to the source.
Kurapika set the borrowed, empty gourd down on the coffee table and leaned back, staring up at the high, vaulted ceiling of the castle.
Outside the thick stone walls, the bitter winter wind moved steadily through the snow-covered branches of the courtyard tree. The dozens of little, carved wooden gourds hanging from their frozen strings knocked softly against each other in the cold, the hollow, wooden clatter echoing through the empty fortress.