The weak state was more disorienting than Liam had expected.
Menchi's red seasoning had a cost structure built into it, which was consistent with how her ability worked. Conjurer abilities came with rules. Five chains, five rules, as the original Kurapika had operated. Six books, clearly organized. The Nen ability equivalent of a legal contract. If you wanted the benefit, you accepted the terms, and the terms here were that the energy you borrowed would be returned with interest.
What was left after the plates were cleared: approximately 50 aura.
He hadn't been this depleted since the first weeks after waking up in this world, a disoriented child in a mass grave trying to figure out what his hands could do. Using full Ken at this level would burn out in under fifty seconds. Holding his combat attention simultaneously, eyes tracking, ears open, body ready to move, aura maintaining awareness would consume what remained in under ten. He was below the threshold for doing anything useful and above the threshold for panic, which was at least something.
The room had the quality of a battlefield after the engagement, when the noise stops and you find out what's actually standing.
Roughly 140 candidates remained out of 400.
The first cut had been straightforward: the aura pressure of the Nen users at full burst had simply exceeded what most non-Nen candidates could tolerate psychologically and physically. Several had fainted. Several had fled. Several had made it through some number of spoonfuls before the sustained overload of carrying double their usual output while being pressed on all sides by auras that dwarfed their own became too much.
What surprised Liam was the remaining hundred-plus. He scanned them carefully. Ordinary people. Not Nen users, not awakened, not trained. Their aura in the depleted aftermath read nearly identically to their aura at full burst from the seasoning, which meant their full burst hadn't been large enough to be a reference point. They'd eaten the rice, felt somewhat energized, and continued. The seasoning's effect on an unawakened person was apparently a fraction of what it did to someone with developed Nen, which made sense in the same way that a racing engine didn't do the same work in a bicycle.
The ordinary candidates sat around looking tired but functional. The Nen users sat around looking wrung out in ways that were difficult to conceal.
Akane and Aoi were propped against each other, visibly relieved to be done with the bowl. Alive, finished, present. They exchanged looks of mutual survival acknowledgment.
Battera and Alice had both completed their portions, which Liam had to admit was not the outcome he'd expected. Six months ago they'd been ordinary people past the age at which new physical disciplines become natural. He'd seen their Hatsu briefly in the fountain square, and the mutual reinforcement structure of their abilities apparently extended to endurance in ways he hadn't calculated for.
Leorio was in the bathroom and had been for some time. He was not coming back from this particular phase of the exam and seemed to have accepted this.
Machi breathed out through her nose and set her spoon down without looking at anything in particular. The expression on her face said that she had consumed the fried rice, she had passed the exam, and she would never discuss the experience afterward.
Camilla was pale. The sweat had gone past "fine sheen" into genuinely apparent, and her jaw was set with the specific tension of someone maintaining their public presentation through effort rather than ease. She'd managed it. All thirty-plus spoonfuls, expressionless, within the ten-second rule. Her three private soldiers had matched her pace without wavering or complaint.
The Second Prince had not been persuaded to withdraw.
Liam thought about Netero watching from upstairs. Had this been the plan, specifically? Use the red seasoning to measure the field, simultaneously make the exam genuinely difficult for strong Nen users, and see who among the royal delegation had enough to stay standing? If so, the result was useful intelligence and an interesting failure to achieve the secondary objective.
He checked his panel. Death energy: 8.
It had been 7 before the bowls were cleared.
He looked at where Tonpa had been sitting.
The white kitten had been on Tonpa's shoulder since the overnight hours. He'd registered it as a detail, filed it as Camilla's, and moved on. Now Tonpa was dead, and the kitten was gone.
Across the room, Camilla was looking at him. The white cat was in her hands. She was stroking it with one finger and smiling, which was not an expression he'd seen from her before. It was private and satisfied in a way that made the room temperature feel like it had dropped a degree.
He looked away before she could make the moment into a conversation.
The ability assembled itself in his head as a working theory.
She'd deployed it in the overnight darkness. Attached it to Tonpa at some point during the sleep period, something small enough and passive enough that a room full of exhausted candidates hadn't noticed it settling onto the target. After that: sustained drain. Vitality transferring over hours, slowly enough not to trigger obvious distress, quickly enough to complete the job before morning.
The mechanics, extrapolated:
The white cat attached to a target and began drawing their life force passively, storing what it collected. It returned to Camilla and delivered what it had taken. As long as the cat was attached, she couldn't directly attack the target. The cat would disengage from anyone who entered a state equivalent to full Ten or Ken, waiting out the ten-minute duration before departing permanently and refusing to reattach for an hour. The ability also had a range requirement: Camilla needed to be within a kilometer of the target for it to function.
Designed for attrition. Designed for patience. The kind of ability that worked over hours rather than seconds, that didn't announce itself and couldn't be blocked by strength or technique because it never engaged with either.
Liam thought about the two deaths he'd registered in the overnight darkness, the two candidates with the cut throats in the corner. Those he'd attributed to the visible killers moving through the room. Tonpa's death had come without that signature, without the specific cold of violent killing, which meant the drain had happened slowly enough that the death energy had arrived late, almost like a delayed signal.
He checked the number again. Still 8.
She's already attached it to someone else.
He looked at the room with this in mind and considered the geometry. The cat was small, white, visible, and apparently capable of sitting on someone's shoulder in a dark room full of people without being noticed, which answered the question of how she intended to use this ability in a crowd.
He thought about the scale. If she'd attached the cat to the first available target when she arrived and had been systematically working through the candidate pool, the Hunter Exam for Camilla Hui Guo Rou was less an exam and more a hunting ground she'd walked into with prepared equipment.
He filed this under things to think about later, when he had more than 50 aura to think with.
Knuckle stood beside Menchi and said something quiet that Liam was too far away to hear. Menchi was looking at the doll-girl with an expression Liam recognized as the one she deployed when she was recalibrating her model of a situation.
The doll-girl had eaten all thirty spoonfuls. She sat at the table looking normal. Her aura read normal. Except for that single pulse at the first bite, the compressed nothing of a baseline that had not fluctuated since, she might have been a candidate with moderate talent having a mediocre morning.
110,000 at baseline.
Before the multiplier.
Menchi had cooked for some genuinely exceptional people. She'd sat at the same table as Liam for years. She'd watched Bisky's assessment sessions on Greed Island and understood, roughly, what the upper registers of this world looked like.
She was looking at the doll-girl and recalculating the upper register.
The Nen beast, 1,000 meters below, was tracking the building's shadow footprint. Liam found its presence the way you find a familiar weight in your hand and was briefly grateful for the continuity of it. Whatever else had been temporarily taken from him by the seasoning's cost, that was still running.
He breathed out and waited for the next phase to begin.