The northern slopes of Freier Mountain petered out into ice-covered foothills, and the foothills petered out into nothing. Literally nothing: beyond the last of the mountain's influence, the land went flat and featureless and stayed that way until the eye lost it in the grey horizon. No trees, no settlements, no infrastructure. The emptiness of territory that had decided, apparently some geological age ago, that it wasn't going to participate in human civilization.
Linnie walked through it without apparent concern for the cold or the terrain, which said something about the condition of a person who had spent years living on an active volcano.
Aoi watched the landscape for a while and then stopped watching it, because it wasn't changing.
Behind them, at the edge of the ice field, a figure had materialized briefly, and then thought better of being seen, and had unmanifested.
"She's following," Shizuku said.
Linnie said nothing. After a moment: "She can come."
The effect this had was Aria erupting from the ground beside them in a single fluid movement, already talking before she'd fully solidified. "I knew it! I knew you'd let me!"
Aoi looked at her. "Why are you so excited about a dangerous place?"
Aria's ears went slightly sideways. "It's— it's complicated." She looked at Linnie sidelong. "I grew up in Freier Mountain. I don't know much about before that. But I've heard things over the years." A pause that was shorter than she intended it to be. "That's all."
Linnie's expression did not change, which was its own kind of confirmation.
An off-road truck appeared from somewhere practical that Liam decided not to examine too closely, given that the nearest structure had been several hours back. The driver knew Linnie, exchanged no conversation, and pointed the vehicle north.
The truck was loud and the road, insofar as there was a road, was not designed for comfort. Liam sat with his back against the side of the cab and drew small patterns on his palm with his thumbnail.
Shizuku watched this for a while. "You're drawing marks."
"Thinking out loud, in diagram form."
The pattern he was working through was theoretical: a Star Mark and a Sun Mark layered together, two systems with different fundamental mechanics occupying the same symbolic space. The Star Mark was Manipulation, personal, contact-based. The Sun Mark was Emission, range-capable, summoning-capable. He'd combined them into communication rings already. Whether the combination could do other things was a more interesting question.
He explained the situation with Camilla in a low voice, condensed. Tserriednich had Nen, had a Nen beast, and had apparently been inaccessible for months despite Kurapika being present in the same city. The fourth prince's particular interest in collecting human body parts was not a reassuring background detail for this specific problem. The butterfly effect had produced a version of Tserriednich who was more dangerous, earlier, than the schedule he remembered.
"Which talismans are you planning to use?" Shizuku asked.
Liam considered. "The Ginseng Fruit Gourd is non-negotiable. Leave the Nine Yang ability out of it; the Star Mark healing covers everything I'd use it for. The Nine Yin Enhancement is useful for genuine emergencies. The wind technique I can do natively, no talisman needed." He tapped his palm. "The one I'm uncertain about is this."
He turned his wrist over and a blade of aura extended from his palm, black and sharp and slightly difficult to look at directly. The Yin Nen Sword. It had been sitting at a philosophical classification problem since the day it had formed on Oath Island from the remnant of the True Martial King's Nen beast.
Technically, it was his ability. It operated at his direction, consumed his aura, responded to his intent. But he hadn't developed it, hadn't designed it, hadn't constructed it through any process of his own. It had been given its shape by someone who had been dead for four hundred years, and it had come to him through a circumstance so unlikely that treating it as a normal part of his ability set felt epistemically dishonest.
What did you call a thing like that? Ability didn't quite fit. Nen beast wasn't right, it had no independent existence. Nen weapon was closer but still reductive.
"Horcrux," Aoi said, looking over his shoulder.
"Don't say that," he said.
The truck lurched over something that was either a rock or a philosophical boundary, and then settled into a rhythm.
They heard the ocean before they saw it. The fog came first, rolling in from the north in thick slow banks, and then through the fog came the sound: constant, low, the deep respiration of a body of water that was under no obligation to be small.
The truck stopped at the coast and the driver left without ceremony. Liam stepped out and looked north into a wall of white.
The world ocean. The six continents were, in geological terms, a medium-sized cluster of rock in the middle of it, and this coast was approximately the edge of that cluster. Beyond the fog was distance so absolute it functioned like a different category of existence. The Dark Continent, that distant and enormous landmass, was referred to as a lake only from the perspective of something even larger, a fact that Liam preferred not to dwell on during quiet moments.
"This is your hometown?" Aoi said to Aria, looking at the featureless grey water.
"I don't actually remember," Aria said, which was the most honest answer to the question.
Linnie stepped to the waterline and stood there for a moment. Then she made a sound.
Shizuku's posture changed. The careful, attentive shift that meant she was listening hard.
It was Nen shaped into sound waves: not a voice exactly, not language as any standard translation software would recognize it, but something structured and intentional, propagating outward through the water surface and below it, carrying at depth with the efficiency of a signal designed specifically for that medium. It went out in pulses, layered, repeating.
Liam felt the aura behind it. His own total was sixty-two thousand and he had some practical sense of what that number felt like in operation. Linnie's output in that brief transmission was comfortably above his own ceiling. He revised his estimate of the old woman upward, filed it away, and made a note not to say anything that needed to be taken back later.
The surface of the sea moved.
Not waves, not weather. Shapes in the water, approaching, multiple, arranged in no particular formation but moving with the loose coordination of creatures that communicated in ways the surface world couldn't intercept. They broke water.
Aoi made a noise.
Half-human, half-fish was technically accurate but missed the texture of it. The upper bodies were human in structure, proportioned correctly, capable of expression. The lower bodies were something marine and built for the open ocean, scaled and powerful in a way that made the distinction between swimming and flying seem mostly semantic. They looked at the group on the shore with eyes that were adapted for deep water but recognized people regardless.
"Mermaids," Akane said, quietly.
"Fishmen," Aoi said at the same volume. "They're not— it's different."
Aria had gone very still.
Liam looked at the fishmen. He had seen one before. Or rather, his possessed oystercatcher at the NGL coast had felt a hand close around its body from below the water surface, human-shaped, impossibly strong, curious rather than hostile, before it released and went back down. He had asked Netero about it. Netero had not had a match in his classification of demihuman species.
Same hands. Same construction.
"You've seen them before," Shizuku said.
"NGL coast. That was one of them." He watched one of the fishmen produce a flat-bottomed boat from the water, assembled or conjured by some method that wasn't immediately obvious. "Or the same kind."
Linnie stepped down into the boat as it came to rest against the shore. The fishmen steadied it without being asked. She looked back at the group.
"All of you. Quickly."
They boarded. The fishmen took hold of the boat's sides and pulled, heading north into the fog.
The coast disappeared behind them in less than a minute. The sound of it disappeared shortly after. The fog closed in from every direction, directional reference dissolving, the compass points becoming a matter of trust. If there was a way to navigate this without the fishmen, Liam couldn't see it.
He moved to the bow where Linnie sat.
"These fishmen," he said, keeping his voice even. "And Aria's people. You said they have the same origin."
Linnie looked at the water moving past the hull.
"You mean they were once purely human," Shizuku said, from just behind Liam.
The old woman glanced at both of them. A strange, brief expression crossed her face, something between amusement and the look of a person who knew how a conversation was going to end before it began.
"You assume you're asking about them," she said.
The fog moved around the boat in long, slow currents.
"It may be you who turns into a rabbit," she said. "You want to explore the mysteries of life. Don't be surprised by what the mysteries answer back."
The fishmen pulled them deeper into the white.