Tserriednich had learned all four foundations of Nen from Theta with the methodical patience of a man who approaches every project as a personal insult to mediocrity. He mastered Ten, Zetsu, Ren, and Hatsu in sequence. He made Theta deeply uncomfortable in the process. Then, somewhere in the space between Ren and Hatsu, something else emerged.
It announced itself with a sound.
When he entered Zetsu, there was sometimes a faint hiss at the edge of his hearing. Something between static and electricity, barely there, gone the moment he focused on it. The first few times he dismissed it. The tenth time, he followed it.
His soul, for a fraction of a second, seemed to slip sideways out of his own skull and settle into the body of something standing behind him. From that position he could look forward, at himself, and at the next ten seconds of the world unspooling ahead like a recording.
Then the vision ended. And the world produced exactly what he had seen.
Every detail. Every motion. The angle of a door swinging open. The exact instant a guard turned his head. The world matched the preview frame for frame.
He spent three weeks testing it before he told Theta.
He did not tell her about the other two sounds.
The second sound was a tone, clean and sharp, unlike the first. When it came, his Nen beast slipped outside the current of time entirely for five seconds. The world stopped. Only the beast moved, scouting, confirming, clearing the immediate space of threats. Five seconds of absolute stillness, available on demand.
The third sound was different from both. It came from low in the frequency range, something like the grinding of a record played backward at half speed. When he heard that one, everything within roughly his ten-minute radius of movement reversed. Matter returned to where it had been. Aura, however, did not. He had confirmed this experimentally. The constructs spent during the reversed interval stayed spent.
Most people who discovered this fact found it unsettling. Tserriednich found it irrelevant. He didn't plan to lose anything worth reversing.
With three tools of that caliber layered across each other, failure was not a structural possibility. It was a scheduling error.
He returned to Shengdeli on the last viable day of the deadline, came directly to the palace, and found his father in the hall where Benjamin lay.
The moment he stepped through the palace gates, he activated the prediction mode. The hiss ran constant and soft under his hearing, a background track of the next ten seconds refreshing in a continuous loop. Every ten seconds, the future updated. He had been doing this for months. The operational cost was negligible. The information advantage was total.
He approached his father. He saw the ice coffin. He said his line about Benjamin.
And then the hiss intensified for a fraction of a second, and the preview showed him the next ten seconds.
It showed him getting sucked into a gourd.
Tserriednich processed this information in approximately one heartbeat. In the next heartbeat, he let his physical body follow the preview's script. His fake body completed the movement, said the half-sentence his father left hanging, and got pulled into the gourd mouth like smoke through a filter. A few seconds later, a version of himself that looked thoroughly drained was expelled back onto the floor.
Then that version dissolved.
Tserriednich, real body, had been standing behind his father from the moment the preview told him to step aside.
He watched the empty space on the floor where the fake body had just been, and felt something close to professional satisfaction.
Seeing his sudden disappearance, the man wearing his father's face must have been very surprised. Confused about what had happened.
"Father," Tserriednich said pleasantly, from behind the king. "What kind of pot did you just mention?"
The king's body turned around.
Liam, wearing Nasubi's skin, felt the Star Mark pulse where he had pressed his hand. The contact had been real. The mark had landed.
And then it vanished.
He counted: one, two, three. The mark was gone without a trace, no feedback, no lock-in. Not suppressed. Not destroyed. Simply absent. As though it had been applied to something that could not hold it. He filed this under Problems and kept his face arranged in an expression of paternal warmth.
"This," the king said, displaying the ornamental gourd, "is the ancestral vessel. The succession process, in its proper form, requires each participating prince to contribute a drop of blood to this gourd, which generates their guardian spirit beast. Through the beasts, the most suitable heir eventually reveals himself." He allowed a long pause, the kind that kings deploy to indicate genuine weight. "Benjamin will not see that day. I find myself wondering whether to begin the process at all, or simply to abdicate in favor of someone who has already demonstrated their qualities."
Tserriednich smiled with genuine amusement. "I assumed you'd called me back because you thought I ordered the assassination."
The king reached out and grabbed his hand with both enormous palms, patting it with the comforting gravity of a man who absolutely had not tried to inhale him with a gourd thirty seconds ago. "My sons killing each other? Impossible. Whatever the press is saying, don't let it touch you. It's theatre."
The Star Mark found the edge of Tserriednich's palm.
Liam did not activate it.
He sat with that decision for exactly as long as it took to identify the problem. The body in front of him had taken a physical hit that should have anchored the mark. But the mark had failed to hold once already, when it went into the gourd. And the body in front of him now, standing calm and composed with its hands in its pockets, had just materialized from behind him rather than in front of him.
The man had been behind him the whole time.
So what had gone into the gourd?
Liam's internal accounting revised three things simultaneously. First: the ability was not just entropy reversal. There was at least one other mode, something that produced a disposable physical copy that took damage and disappeared. Second: he did not know which version of Tserriednich was currently standing in front of him. Third: activating a Star Mark on a projected copy was a waste of a talisman at best and an information leak at worst.
He did not activate the mark.
"In that case," Tserriednich said, pleasant and unhurried, "I'd like to try. The gourd, the blood, the process. What do I do?"
The king explained. Tserriednich bit the pad of his finger and let a drop fall into the gourd's mouth.
Liam counted.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
At ten, the Tserriednich standing in front of him dissolved, and a new one was already speaking from behind him again.
Ten seconds.
A preview window. A forward-reading precognition that cycled every ten seconds, letting him slide his real body out of harm's way while a disposable copy walked through whatever trap waited in the future preview. Not entropy reversal. Not time stopping. Something older, something simpler: he saw ten seconds ahead, and anything that happened to his copy in those ten seconds simply did not affect him.
The thought formed in Liam's mind before he could stop it, surfacing from the archive of Earth memories like a fish coming up for air.
Someone on Earth had been very similar. Saw the future. Let the vision take the damage. Something from an old manga, the kind where the villain explains the ability at length just before being defeated. Some kind of crimson something. The details had blurred, but the principle had not.
This was the same mechanic.
Which meant that the man currently standing behind him, calm and politely waiting for his father to acknowledge that he had just vanished twice without comment, was a man who, at least on the ten-second layer, could not be surprised.
So. A body that could reverse ten minutes of reality. A body that could stop the world for five seconds. And a body with a ten-second preview window that let him feed his fake self into any trap he perceived in advance.
The Ginseng Fruit Gourd was useless here. The gourd had refined Beyond's clone. A clone with no aura, no independent will, and no ability to resist. What it had just received was a projection, a deliberate puppet sent in by a man watching from behind. You could not refine something that was designed to be spent.
Liam pulled the king's composure back into place.
"It's rare to be unconcerned," the king said, with a philosophical smile. "It's rare."
Tserriednich studied his father's broad back.
The face was wrong. Not the face exactly, but the weight behind it. His father had a particular quality of presence, the settled indifference of a man who found most things in the world mildly amusing and never urgent. The thing currently wearing his father's face was managing an impression of that quality. A competent impression. But there was a current of calculation running beneath it that his father had never bothered with, because his father had never needed to calculate, because his father had never found anything worth the effort of strategy.
He had suspected this from the moment the summons arrived. The treason charges were fabricated. The timing was too neat, the legal mechanism too clean, the evidence too convenient. Someone had access to the royal seal, the legal advisors, and the political will to execute a formal accusation against a Kakin prince within twenty-four hours of a staged assassination. His father did not move like that. His father moved like a continent: slowly, massively, and mostly because gravity required it.
Someone else had taken the controls.
Tserriednich filed through the candidates. The yellow-haired boy kept surfacing. The boy with the Nen ability that had sent Beatle back twice. The one who had been hunting him for months through proxies and misdirection. He still did not know who had first decided to make an enemy of him, or why, but he had a broad sense of the capability involved. And someone with that capability, sitting at the top of Kakin's political structure, issuing royal edicts from the king's chair, was a person who deserved specific and considered attention.
Later. He would give it later.
"You usurper," Tserriednich said, conversationally, to the back of the king's head. "You will die badly. I want you to know I consider that a guarantee, not a threat."
He activated the reversal.
The grinding, backward-disc sound filled the inside of his skull and then spread outward, and the world rewound.
The light through the hall windows reversed from deep amber back toward white afternoon. The ice coffin's condensation unbeaded itself from the surface. The king's body turned backward, retreating. Tserriednich himself stepped backward, step by step, back down the corridor, back through the palace gates, back into the waiting car outside, the entire ten minutes of the encounter unwinding cleanly until the world settled back into the moment of his arrival.
Outside the palace, the Second Prince's tactical teams watched through their modified eyepieces.
The lenses were running a continuous AR overlay, constructing a projected image of where the Fourth Prince had been ten minutes ago, tracking his path from the airport using interpolated movement data. The moment the reversal completed and Tserriednich's real body materialized at the entry point, his physical form would overlap perfectly with the rendered simulation of his previous position.
At the instant of overlap, every mark on every surface within the viewing angles resolved into clean alignment.
A sniper took the shot.
The bullet hit the Fourth Prince in the forehead at the exact moment his real body appeared out of thin air and locked into the AR simulation like a key turning in a lock.