Moonlight bathed the dirt path as Liam, Shizuku, Bisky, and their animal companions walked toward the brightly lit town ahead. The night air was crisp, carrying the distant murmur of a lively crowd.
At the entrance of the settlement, a weathered wooden sign stood planted by the side of the road. The script of this world was carved deeply into the wood, reading: Antokiba, Bounty City.
"Why is it called that?" Shizuku asked. She walked through the bustling night market streets, her dark eyes looking left and right with mild curiosity at the colorful stalls and wandering crowds.
"Look right over here," Liam said, pointing a finger at a nearby stone wall.
Shizuku walked over to inspect it. The entire surface of the wall was densely plastered with fluttering pieces of paper. At first glance, they looked exactly like criminal wanted posters, but a closer read proved otherwise. They were mundane task listings. Looking for a missing dog. Help needed caring for an elderly parent. Investigate a suspected cheating spouse. Each handwritten note came with a brief description of the job and an approximate monetary payment.
Liam crossed his arms and muttered, "It would have been much more accurate to just call this place a Quest Hub or a Mission Hall. Or they could have just planted a tree every single kilometer across the island, carved a hollow hole into the trunk, and stuffed a quest scroll inside for us to find."
"A lot of people are watching us right now," Bisky said suddenly, her voice low and casual as she walked.
"Yep," Liam replied, his relaxed expression not changing a single bit.
Shizuku reached out, gently stroking the soft, thick fur on the back of the neck of Lumos. Startled by the sudden movement, Jaku, the little gray sparrow perched nearby, hopped quickly away from her pale hand with a soft chirp.
Their eclectic group was undeniably drawing a massive amount of attention. People had been staring openly and covertly ever since they first stepped into the light of the town. Leading the formation was Liam, a tall, striking young man with a highly relaxed posture. To his left and right walked two highly unusual girls. Shizuku wore her signature glasses and maintained a perfectly quiet, detached demeanor. If someone just looked at her wide eyes, she seemed maybe thirteen or fourteen. Looking at her face, one might guess sixteen or seventeen. But if they observed her calm, cold composure a little longer, they would quickly realize she carried the weight of someone much older.
The blonde girl walking on the other side looked even younger. Dressed in a frilly pink princess dress, Bisky looked to be in her early teens at the absolute most. Having a Nen ability at that age was surprising, sure, but not entirely unheard of in this world.
However, what truly caught the greedy attention of the crowds was the massive beast quietly padding along behind the three humans. The crystal-white fur of Lumos shimmered with a beautiful, pale cyan glow in the darkness, looking almost like polished jade under the streetlamps. He was a legendary Misery Moon Tiger, widely known as one of the Seven Beauties of the world.
Every single player who managed to step foot onto Greed Island was a Nen user. Anyone who possessed the talent to unlock their aura naturally had incredible physical strength and stamina. Compared to ordinary people, they were all completely bursting with excess energy, which was exactly why this strange town stayed so incredibly lively and awake even in the dead of night. They had all come to this deadly island for the thrill of adventure, and they all desperately wanted something of value. Now, seeing what essentially looked like a walking ATM stroll casually through their town, while they were not exactly drooling on the dirt, many of the lurking players were definitely getting some very dark ideas.
Liam and his party continued walking steadily toward the town center, following the long walls covered with fluttering task listings.
"How many people are currently watching us? And from which directions?" Bisky asked quietly, keeping her eyes fixed perfectly forward without looking around the street.
"It seems like... maybe seven?" Liam answered, also refusing to turn his head. "Some are scattered in front of us, and some are lingering behind." It was basically entirely useless information.
"Fifteen," Shizuku stated in her usual flat, matter-of-fact tone.
Liam blinked, genuinely surprised by the high number. That many? Though, when he actually thought about it, it made perfect sense. The players crowding this town were all seasoned Nen users. Even if they were not actively using Zetsu to completely erase their presence, they could naturally suppress their aura just enough to make detection vastly more difficult than spotting a crowd of ordinary people.
"The correct answer is nineteen," Bisky corrected them smoothly. "Shizuku did much better."
"She really is vastly better at this than me," Liam admitted with a self-deprecating shrug.
Bisky glanced up at him. "Even though you have very little practical combat experience from your time as an ordinary person, you possess a truly considerable talent in the fundamental field of Nen. In that case, you can simply make up for your glaring lack of street experience directly through the application of advanced Nen techniques."
Liam looked down at her, highly curious. "How do I do that?"
"Use Ten to keep your surface aura as perfectly calm and still as possible," Bisky instructed.
"Okay," Liam said.
As he continued to walk down the bustling street, his physical body kept moving completely naturally, but his flowing aura immediately condensed. It formed a tight, invisible, and shapeless protective layer directly across the surface of his skin. It felt like a highly pressurized water balloon, or a thick layer of set jelly. No matter how his arms and legs swung as he walked, the aura casing remained flawlessly stable and undisturbed.
The group turned a sharp corner onto a narrower road. A few of the suspicious people trailing them on the street behind quietly shifted their pace and changed direction to follow.
"A human gaze is not actually invisible," Bisky explained softly. "Even completely ordinary people, if they are naturally sensitive enough, will suddenly feel like there is a hot spotlight shining directly on their back when someone stares at them closely. Let alone a highly trained Nen user. Aura is the literal power of life. Aura is the physical manifestation of the mind. As long as someone actively projects their sight toward a target, wherever their intense gaze reaches and their conscious thoughts go, a tiny fraction of their own aura gets projected right along with it. Even though the actual amount of aura carried in a gaze is minuscule, as fine as floating dust, and almost entirely nonexistent..."
Liam suddenly understood the profound concept. He entirely stopped trying to randomly guess which followers were lurking in which dark alleyways. Instead, he turned his focus inward, carefully examining the exact state of his own aura.
The aura tightly bound to his body surface, perfectly maintained in a solid Ten state, felt exactly like a deep pool of still, glass-like water. An outside gaze, as incredibly fine and light as dust, could not violently stir the water like throwing a heavy stone. But no matter how incredibly light a piece of dust was, it would eventually land on the surface. As long as you observed the water carefully enough. As long as you became entirely one with your own aura.
Wait a minute, Liam thought, his mind racing. He had previously thought of the En technique as nothing more than a highly diffused, expanded version of Ko, possessing absolutely zero defensive power but granting maximum detection range. So, working on that exact same logic, could Ten also be accurately considered a completely shrunk-down version of En? The defense stat was locked at one, with the massive perception circle completely collapsed down to just the very surface of the skin.
The tiny dust particles landed silently on the still water of his aura without creating any visible ripples, but the microscopic contact was more than enough for Liam to clearly feel the disturbance.
Many distinct dust particles began appearing in the aura around his body, one after another in rapid succession. Liam tracked them instantly, almost as if he was clearly seeing physical dust particles flying from various hidden positions to his side and rear, striking his body like miniature, invisible meteorites. They landed gently on his Ten, which remained as calm as undisturbed water.
By simply tracing the incoming flight trajectories of these tiny dust particles, he could perfectly map the hostile gazes. The exact source of one gaze was sitting at his seven o'clock position behind him, roughly thirty meters away. Another was lurking about fifty-five meters behind him on his far left. And another one was hiding slightly elevated to his right.
This was a completely novel, breathtaking experience. It felt exactly like gaining an entirely new, profound understanding of his own physical body. Of his flowing aura. Of his own mind.
It was also a highly advanced, nuanced technique that had absolutely never appeared in the manga during his previous life. Liam became so thoroughly entertained and absorbed by mapping the invisible grid of gazes for a moment that he almost entirely forgot what they were actually supposed to be doing in the town.
"But do not rely too heavily on this specific method," Bisky warned, snapping him out of his trance. "Instead, as you gradually get completely used to the feeling of being watched, you must learn to make accurate situational judgments without actively using it. Keep this crucial fact in mind: you can easily perceive the gazes of amateurs this way, but conversely, true masters with vastly better control over their own aura will project significantly less aura through their eyes. If the skill of an enemy is high enough, you might not even notice a lethal master standing directly next to you, looking at you casually. At that terrifying point, purely intuitive, ingrained reflexes will be vastly more reliable than rational, calculated perception."
"The subconscious," Shizuku said suddenly from his other side. She was also quietly imitating the technique of Liam, adjusting her glasses as she actively tried to sense the prying eyes of other people using the method Bisky had just outlined.
Bisky looked over at the girl with mild surprise.
Shizuku kept her eyes forward and continued, "Liam told me before that in the complex world of Nen, the subconscious mind is incredibly important. Sometimes it reflects your true, unfiltered essence much better than your active consciousness ever could. For a clear example, Vows and Limitations rely heavily on the subconscious mind, because we absolutely cannot deceive our real, inner selves."
"That is exactly right," Bisky agreed, nodding her head with a proud, teacher-like smile. "Human conscious thinking has severe biological limits. It constantly filters out massive amounts of environmental detail just to function. Like the words in books you only briefly glance at. The faces of countless strangers you only glimpse from the corner of your eye while walking through a dense crowd. But all those tiny details do not actually disappear into thin air. They settle deep into the subconscious mind."
"The physical brain forgets, but the aura always remembers," Liam concluded smoothly, completely understanding the lesson.
He looked up from the dirt road and saw they had finally reached a large, brightly lit general store sitting right in the center of the busy town square.
"Oh, we are here," Liam said, gesturing to the open wooden doors. "They should definitely sell maps inside."