The television remote was getting a serious workout.
"Heavy rainfall warning issued for the greater Angelos region..."
Click.
"Beef prices continue to climb sharply as Texas cattle shortages officially enter their third consecutive month..."
Click.
"On September twentieth, the royal family delegation from the Kakin Empire will arrive in the Principality of Diyina for a state visit..."
Liam held the remote loosely in his hand. He watched the screen for a moment, not really absorbing the information, before his thumb hit the button again.
"The Crocodile Mouth Tribe of Moralida launched their fourth equal rights protest march this week, with civilian participants numbering in the..."
Click.
"Tomorrow morning at exactly nine o'clock, the renowned Yorknew Auction House will hold its annual special underground sale. Our reporters will be providing real-time text updates at the following web address..."
He finally stopped flipping.
The flat-screen television mounted on the stone wall of the castle's living room was large enough for him to easily read the scrolling text from the sofa across the room. He had just rapidly cycled through seven different news channels looking for absolutely anything related to Yorknew City. This was all he had found: a brief, thirty-second fluff segment with a generic website address plastered across the lower third of the screen, and absolutely nothing that looked like an actual live video broadcast.
He sighed and picked up his cell phone from the coffee table.
"There is absolutely no TV coverage of the auction," he said the moment the line connected. "I have looked through every channel. Was there actually supposed to be a broadcast?"
"Of course there isn't," Bisky replied, her voice crackling slightly over the line. She sounded more bewildered by his question than genuinely annoyed, which somehow made him feel worse. "Liam, this is an illegal, black-market auction literally filled to the brim with international criminals and mafia bosses. What on earth did you think they were going to do, broadcast the event live on public television for the authorities? I gave you a URL for a reason. Use the URL."
"You didn't actually say it was a private stream before I hung up last time."
"Well, I am saying it right now," she shot back. There was a brief, heavy pause on the line. "And do not ask me how I managed to get it."
He wisely chose not to ask.
A text message pinged on his phone about two minutes after they ended the call. The URL Bisky sent was unusually long and structured in a bizarre format he had never seen before, either in this world or his previous one. It was filled with random bracketed sequences and punctuation placed in ways that strongly suggested the creator had either invented their own highly complex encoding convention from scratch, or they were simply being deliberately obfuscating to keep casual hackers out. Given the criminal context of the auction, it was probably a healthy mix of both.
Beside him on the sofa, Shizuku casually picked up the discarded remote and switched the channel back to the cheesy tokusatsu drama she had been watching before he rudely interrupted her. She sat cross-legged, her expression entirely neutral, as she watched a man in a bulky, brightly colored foam suit dramatically fight another man in a slightly different foam suit.
The next morning, exactly at nine o'clock, Liam sat at the large dining table and opened his laptop. He carefully typed the bizarre URL into the browser, character by character. He hit enter and watched the screen flash rapidly through a dense sequence of cascading code he couldn't even begin to follow, before the scrambled data finally resolved into a clear, live video feed.
The camera angle was fixed from a high ceiling mount, tucked away in the upper corner of a massive, opulent room. Whoever had originally set this feed up had managed to route the auction house's internal security surveillance directly into a viewable external stream. This impressive feat meant one of two things: either Bisky had highly skilled, deeply embedded connections in very specific places within the mafia, or she was simply comfortable physically beating people until they gave her things that most people wouldn't dare ask for.
On the laptop screen, the grand auction was already in full swing.
The current lot being presented on the brightly lit stage was a person.
Across the table, Kurapika went entirely rigid. He didn't react dramatically, and he didn't make any particular sound. His fists simply closed tightly on his knees, his knuckles turning white. His eyes instantly shifted from gray to burning scarlet, and he sat with the cold, concentrated stillness of someone actively performing significant, painful internal work to keep their rage contained.
Shizuku, sitting next to Liam, watched the horrifying auction on the screen without any visible reaction whatsoever.
Liam looked at the screen, watching the bidding numbers climb, and then took a moment to carefully examine his own internal response to the scene.
What he found was the distinct absence of one.
He had read about horrible things like this. He had seen human trafficking depicted in dark fiction. In his previous life, he had passively absorbed the grim reality of it secondhand through various dark corners of the internet. But the knowledge had always been safely abstract, separated by screens and distance.
Here, it was not abstract at all. It was happening live on a screen in the exact same room as him, a real person being sold for cash. Yet, what he mostly felt was a faint, unsettling sense of emotional distance, as if he were safely watching something unfold through thick, double-paned glass. And beneath that detachment, he felt a mild, nagging impatience because the auction was dragging on, and he still had his Conjuration gourd to finish practicing today.
He sat with that chilling realization for a long moment, the sounds of the auctioneer buzzing from the laptop speakers.
He firmly decided not to decide what that emotional detachment meant about him as a person.
The auction stream ran for a very long while. Eventually, the horrific lots ended, and the items shifted to rare artifacts and games.
"Greed Island consoles really do go for serious money," Shizuku remarked quietly, her voice lacking any particular emphasis or excitement.
"They really do," Liam agreed, finally reaching out to close his laptop. "How much did we make in total?"
Unlike Liam, who had spent the last two hours absentmindedly practicing his aura constructs with a wooden gourd in his lap while the stream played in the background, Kurapika had been watching the auction properly the entire time. The flat, slightly judgmental look Kurapika gave him clearly confirmed this fact.
"Two units sold successfully," Kurapika reported, his voice tight but controlled. "The combined final hammer price was eighteen point eight billion Jenny. After the auction house deducts their commission, processing, handling fees, and various other hidden costs, the final net profit routed to us is just over fifteen billion Jenny."
Liam nodded slowly, digesting the number. Fifteen billion was an incredible sum, but he wasn't entirely sure whether he found that amount deeply satisfying or merely expected at this point.
"Right. Anyway," Liam muttered. He stood up from the table, stretched both arms high above his head until his spine popped, and clapped his hands together once, the sharp sound echoing in the dining room.
Thick, pale aura poured steadily from his open palms. The shape that rapidly assembled itself from the mist on the stone floor was incredibly familiar to him by now. It possessed wide, floor-length sleeves, a flawless jade-toned complexion, and wore an expression of serene, slightly unsettling amusement—a specific facial detail that had taken him considerably longer to get exactly right than the rest of the physical form combined.
The Nen beast materialized fully, settling lightly onto the floorboards. Jade briefly glanced around the room, taking in her surroundings, and then slowly began to sink through the solid stone surface, looking exactly like mist dissipating in reverse, vanishing downward into the foundations of the castle.
Liam currently possessed exactly 60,000 aura capacity. Permanently allocating ten thousand units to maintain the Nen beast continuously still left him with a massive pool of fifty thousand units for everything else. The math worked perfectly in his favor. The Nen beast could persist indefinitely, acting independently without drawing on his active combat reserves in any way that truly mattered.
He watched the blank spot on the floor where she had disappeared.
Kurapika recovered from the lingering tension of the auction broadcast faster than Liam expected, easily catching up with his current train of thought. "You are not taking the Nen beast back?"
"No, that is the entire point of the experiment," Liam explained, turning away from the table. "I want to make the Nen beast's constant physical presence normal instead of a deliberate, active choice. I am going to keep her maintained passively at all times. She can learn the layout of the environment. She can function as ambient, invisible surveillance around the castle when I do not immediately need her for active combat." Liam tilted his head, looking thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Also, it is incredibly good practice for passive mindfulness. If I can learn to keep her running continuously without consciously thinking about the aura drain, that represents a highly meaningful threshold in my training."
"Can you maintain that connection even while sleeping?" Kurapika asked, sounding genuinely curious.
"That is exactly the hard part," Liam admitted. He glanced over at Shizuku.
Shizuku shrugged. "You already successfully maintain the Moon Mark's telepathic relay connection while you are sleeping, so technically speaking, the precedent for passive maintenance already exists in your brain. Doing this should honestly be much easier than finally finishing that wooden gourd of yours, and the gourd is nearly done."
"The gourd," Liam muttered darkly, glaring at his hands, "has been a deeply humbling experience."
"Conjuration isn't actually as incredibly hard as you keep implying it is," Shizuku said mildly, entirely missing his frustration.
"That is very easy for you to say," Liam shot back, "especially considering your incredibly complex ability essentially materialized out of thin air just because you missed a broken plastic toy."
Kurapika sat silently in his chair, simply watching the two of them bicker. He said absolutely nothing, which, coming from him, was the conversational equivalent of a highly pointed, sarcastic comment.
Autumn rolled into the mountain region with the usual, cold indifference of the changing seasons. The large tree in the backyard rapidly dropped most of its leaves, the dry foliage scattering across the stone courtyard. The noisy rock sparrows thinned out as the temperature dropped, only a few stubborn ones remaining. Heavy snow finally arrived in late November, blanketing the fortress, and it stayed.
Despite the freezing temperatures, Liam moved his daily practice sessions outside, sitting cross-legged directly under the bare branches of the fruit tree. He sat shivering in the cold, holding the real, lacquered wooden gourd in one hand and his flawed, conjured attempt in the other, meticulously cataloging the minute physical gaps between the two objects.
Slowly, the gap between reality and aura began to close. Then, the progress accelerated.
By mid-December, the bare, dark branches of the tree above the courtyard were heavily draped in white snow and bizarrely hung with twenty identical small, wooden gourds dangling on thin strings. They swayed gently in the bitter winter wind, looking like some kind of deeply unsettling agricultural fever dream. Liam had been methodically hanging them up one by one over the previous weeks, using them as a constant, surrounding visual reminder of exactly what the finished object was supposed to look and feel like. Because of his eccentric training method, the quiet backyard now strongly resembled an abandoned prop warehouse for a creepy mythology play.
On the fourteenth of December, Liam sat perfectly still under the snowy tree and let out a long, slow exhale.
His warm breath plumed and condensed in the freezing air, but instead of fading away, it suddenly changed. The white vapor didn't stop being breath; it gathered, thickened, and sharply outlined itself. The mist followed a complex structural shape that had been living deeply in his hands and his muscle memory for four agonizing months. The shape rapidly gained actual physical weight. It developed a smooth, hard texture. It became something real that caught the weak, gray winter sunlight and threw it back exactly the same way the real lacquered wood did.
A gourd rested in his palm. It was small, perfectly palm-sized, and flawlessly lacquered. Two intricate infants were carved deeply into the surface. One laughing joyously. One crying bitterly. Their tiny, wooden hands were clasped tightly together in a permanent greeting.
He caught the heavy object securely before it could slip from his numb fingers.
Total aura: 60,000. Death energy: zero.
He sat in the snow, staring at the perfect creation for a long, silent moment.
"Finally."
He needed to be clear with himself: he had actually been able to conjure the physical shell of the gourd perfectly for roughly two months now. That aesthetic part of the training had finally clicked together around late October. What hadn't been completely ready until this exact moment was the complex, specialized Nen ability he was trying to build directly into it.
That hidden ability was the actual project. The wooden gourd was merely the physical vessel.
He looked up from his hand. Kurapika was standing quietly in the ankle-deep snow by the far stone wall of the courtyard, having apparently been standing there watching him practice for quite some time.
Liam stood up, brushing the snow from his knees. He raised the newly conjured gourd high in the air, using his thumb to pop the small wooden cork stopper free from the narrow neck. He leveled the dark opening directly at the blond youth and called out across the freezing courtyard.
"Hey, Kurapika. I am calling your name. Do you dare to answer me?"
Kurapika didn't hesitate. "Yes."
The reaction was instantaneous. Kurapika seemed to come apart at the edges first, his physical form wavering exactly the way thick smoke moves just before the source flame goes out. Then, all at once, he was completely gone.
The snowy courtyard was entirely empty, leaving only Liam, the howling wind, and the creepy hanging gourds swaying on their strings.
Inside the vessel, Kurapika found absolutely no walls, no floor, and no ceiling. He was surrounded by pitch blackness, and possessed a faint, disorienting impression of floating—a sensation that wasn't quite hovering in place, but wasn't quite falling either. The only source of illumination had been the tiny, distant circle of light from the opening of the gourd's neck, and that had vanished into darkness the exact moment Liam had shoved the stopper back in.
Floating in the void, Kurapika calmly began to catalog everything he could about his new prison.
The activation conditions for the ability were fairly obvious in retrospect. First, the open mouth of the gourd had to be aimed directly at the intended target. Second, the user had to call the target's name aloud. Third, and most importantly, the target had to verbally respond. Finally, replacing the stopper perfectly sealed the spatial capture.
Working from that logic, if someone currently outside the vessel simply removed the stopper, escape for the person trapped inside would presumably be immediate. It was a severe constraint, but definitely one worth noting for future tactical planning.
However, the much more interesting discovery came a moment later.
Kurapika realized his thinking was becoming slightly sluggish. It wasn't stemming from mental confusion, panic, or any physical injury. Something built into the dark space itself was actively drawing on his aura reserves. It was draining him quietly and steadily, like a hand resting gently against a running water tap. The extraction wasn't violent or painful. It was actually almost gentle, at least by the brutal standards of the hostile Nen abilities he had encountered in the past.
He recognized exactly what the ability was doing to him, and despite being the victim of it, he found the design genuinely clever.
When Kurapika finally emerged from the gourd a few minutes later, blinking rapidly against the sudden glare of the snow and feeling somewhat physically drained, Shizuku was already standing by the tree. She held her cell phone loosely in her hand.
"Good news," she announced, her voice flat, not even bothering to look up from the screen. "I just received the official confirmation email. The three of us are fully registered for the upcoming Hunter Exam. It starts in January."
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