Back on that isolated small island, not long after Liam had first woken up trapped in the wrong body and entirely in the wrong world, he had met a newly licensed Hunter named Menchi. She had been actively developing her complex Conjuration ability at the time. The core concept she was painstakingly working to perfect was a rainbow seasoning. It consisted of six distinct colors, each carrying six entirely different physiological effects, ranging from red all the way through violet.
The green seasoning was the one she had successfully finished first. She had been deeply inspired, she claimed at the time, by closely watching the automatic healing function of Liam's Star Mark. The resulting green seasoning accelerated the human body's natural cellular recovery to a staggering degree, making standard medical first aid kits look like nothing more than a polite, philosophical gesture.
The red seasoning, however, had been entirely theoretical back then. Liam had never actually seen her successfully use it.
He was currently looking down at four hundred steaming bowls of it.
"It is literally just fried rice. I could eat a bowl this small in a single bite," a burly candidate complained loudly from the front of the crowd. "What kind of stupid exam is this? Did the Hunter Association hire a child to waste our time?"
The wooden chopstick left the examiner's table a fraction of a second before the man could finish his second sentence.
It cut through the air with a sharp whistle, grazing the speaking candidate's cheek just close enough to draw a stinging, thin line of bright blood. It struck the solid concrete floor directly behind his heavy boots at a steep downward angle, embedding itself three inches deep into the stone with a deafening crack.
The candidate did not attempt to complete his thought. He stood absolutely, rigidly still, the color draining completely from his face.
Menchi slowly lowered her empty hand, her expression completely flat. "You will take exactly one spoonful every ten seconds. There will be absolutely no exceptions to this rule."
She gestured lazily toward the small silver spoon resting neatly beside each porcelain plate. "You need to trust me on the pacing. This is strictly for your own health."
Several overconfident candidates in the dense crowd firmly felt that the correct, masculine strategy for a spicy food challenge was to commit fully, eat as fast as possible, and suffer briefly. Several of these foolish candidates muttered this exact sentiment aloud.
"Who said absolutely anything about spice?" Menchi replied, a dangerous smirk touching the corner of her mouth. "Do not worry about the heat. For the vast majority of you standing in this room, this will easily be the best fried rice you have ever eaten in your entire lives."
Her highly conservative phrasing was completely deliberate. Liam, Shizuku, and Machi had all survived Menchi's intense cooking before. Furthermore, Second Prince Camilla of the Kakin Empire was currently standing forty meters away, watching the proceedings with the cold attentiveness of someone who had not yet decided whether this peasant food was entirely beneath her notice. The careful qualification of "most of you" covered a massive amount of tactical ground.
Right beside Menchi, Knuckle had hopped down from the table. He found a large whiteboard, rapidly wrote out the exam rules in large, clear block letters, and planted the board upright at the front of the room where every single candidate could easily read it.
Rule One: One spoonful per ten seconds.
Rule Two: Each portion contains approximately thirty spoonfuls, with minor variation. Inspect your bowl thoroughly before starting. Absolutely no trading with other candidates.
Rule Three: Finish the entire bowl to advance. Leave anything in the bowl, and you are instantly eliminated.
The ordinary candidates stared at these strict rules and rapidly went through several different stages of paranoid interpretation. The food was obviously drugged. But the official examiner had just explicitly stated it wasn't immediately dangerous. A chemical stimulant challenge, then? Basic drug resistance testing? That was a highly recognized category of underworld exam content. Professional athletes often competed under severe substance testing. This bizarre setup possessed a certain twisted logic to them.
Nearby, Leorio's tortured stomach made a loud, painful editorial comment about physical challenges and his digestive system's current, entirely depleted capacity. Sweating heavily, he gripped Kurapika's arm for physical support.
Tonpa was staring blankly at the whiteboard from a safe distance. He wore the glazed, hollow expression of an older man who had violently lost a highly significant amount of water weight overnight, and was now being cruelly ordered to eat a heavy meal. The bold words written on the board actually seemed to physically shift and swim when he tried to look at them directly. He blinked his dry eyes several times.
However, the specific people in the room who possessed the ability to see aura looked at the whiteboard the exact moment Knuckle planted it on the ground.
Written directly over the visible marker text, glowing brightly in pure Nen, were three additional, hidden lines.
Hidden Rule One: This is a manifested Nen seasoning. It is absolutely not a chemical stimulant.
Hidden Rule Two: The seasoning is not lethal, but there will be severe physical consequences. If you are unwilling to accept those consequences, you may withdraw voluntarily right now.
Hidden Rule Three: Those of you who possess the skills to read this hidden message will receive special attention during this exam, beginning immediately with this bowl of rice.
Hisoka read the glowing text. Pariston read it. Camilla's dark eyes moved smoothly over the Nen letters with the minimal, bored acknowledgment of someone simply confirming a minor tactical detail they had already deduced. Liam, Shizuku, Kurapika, and Machi all read the hidden rules at the exact same moment and arrived at the exact same grim conclusion.
Across the cavernous room, Hisoka slowly turned his head. He found Pariston in the crowd. They made direct eye contact with the twisted, mutual recognition of two highly dangerous predators discovering that someone else at the party also knows exactly what kind of poison is in the punch. Both of them smiled wide, chilling smiles at this realization.
"When do we begin?" the two men asked aloud at almost the exact same moment, a coincidence which seemed to genuinely delight them both.
"Now," Menchi commanded.
Machi walked smoothly to the long table, selected a steaming bowl without a fraction of hesitation, and picked up the silver spoon with the tight, reversed grip of someone who had decided very early in life that dining utensils were a perfectly acceptable category of lethal weapon.
The rest of the group found their places at the table. Liam, Shizuku, Kurapika, Battera, Alice, Akane, and Aoi all took a bowl. Leorio positioned his shaking body in front of a plate, pressing his knees tightly together. He held the rigid posture of a desperate man who had made a firm decision about his personal honor and was now fully committed to seeing it through, completely regardless of the terrible biological cost.
Knuckle began the loud, rhythmic ten-second count.
Every single candidate in the room scooped up a spoonful of the deep red fried rice and put it in their mouths.
The food itself was absolutely exceptional. That was the very first thing Liam noticed. The rice possessed the perfect, impossible texture of something that had been meticulously cooked by a master who understood what they were doing at a level that most ordinary chefs would describe as deeply unfair. Each individual grain maintained its firm internal structure inside a delicate coat of egg that had been applied at exactly the right heat for exactly the right duration.
The red seasoning's flavor wasn't simply a burning spice. It was layered and complex in a profound way that made the word "spicy" feel like a vastly insufficient, insulting term for the culinary experience. Liam had been eating Menchi's high-level cooking for months, and it still genuinely surprised him when her food was this undeniably good.
He swallowed the first bite.
And then, the red rice hit his system.
It was not a dramatic, violent explosion. It was much more like a massive, heavy iron furnace being suddenly supplied with premium, highly combustible fuel. It was a gradual, intense, and unstoppable expansion of pure pressure radiating from his stomach outward into his limbs. His natural aura, which had currently been sitting comfortably at its baseline of around 60,000 units after the permanent Nen beast deduction, immediately started to move. It did not diminish or waver. It began to violently increase.
He paid very close attention to the rising number in his head.
The exact same overwhelming sensation repeated itself rapidly as more and more candidates around him experienced the exact same biological reaction. It was entirely visible to anyone currently looking around the room with Nen-aware eyes.
Hisoka's massive aura went first, violently erupting outward with the complete, terrifying lack of self-consciousness of a person who genuinely hadn't even considered the concept of restraint. His thick muscles visibly tightened and strained under the fine fabric of his suit. The heavy veins in his forearms popped, becoming starkly visible against his pale skin. Yet, his painted expression remained perfectly calm, looking exactly like a polite man evaluating a very pleasant meal.
Pariston's bright aura rose with considerably more elegance and grace, swelling outward exactly as though he had been politely informed this was going to happen hours ago and had perfectly arranged his body to be prepared for the surge.
Shizuku's, Kurapika's, and Machi's auras all moved simultaneously. Their energy did not rise smoothly. It pushed aggressively outward in jagged spikes, looking exactly as if their flesh-and-blood containment vessels had suddenly become entirely insufficient to hold the raw power inside them.
The nearly four hundred ordinary candidates who couldn't actually see aura with their eyes still felt something massive and heavy change in the atmosphere of the room. Their cognitive interpretations of the dread varied wildly, but their physiological response was identical across the board. The air grew thick and hard to breathe. Something terrifying was suddenly present in the underground room that had absolutely not been present thirty seconds ago.
Something incredibly large.
Several civilian candidates stumbled backward, dropping their spoons without consciously deciding to retreat.
"Second spoonful," Knuckle called out loudly. Exactly ten seconds had elapsed.
Liam steadily scooped up the second bite and swallowed.
More combustible fuel went directly into the roaring furnace. The internal number climbed even higher.
He mathematically tracked the surge in the back of his mind while he methodically chewed. His total aura capacity, accurately accounting for Jade's permanent allocation, was approximately 62,000 units under totally normal, rested circumstances. What he was reading internally right now was pushing considerably past that limit. He took the third spoonful, then the fourth, and closely tracked the exponential progression.
By the fourth bite, his aura spiked to roughly 95,000 units. By the fifth bite, it was hovering somewhere in the terrifying region of 100,000.
He did the quick mental ratio. Menchi's red seasoning was currently running at approximately a massive 1.5x multiplier on a person's absolute total aura capacity. It was not a permanent boost, presumably. It functioned as a temporary burst buff, the dangerous kind of bodily enhancement that usually cost the user something severe in exhaustion after it finally wore off. But while it was actively burning in the stomach, it was undeniably substantial.
He looked across the tense room at Second Prince Camilla. She was standing perfectly straight at the dead center of the cleared space her private soldiers fiercely maintained around her. She was eating her steaming fried rice with the precise, elegant movements of a royal for whom proper table behavior was not merely a polite social convention, but a rigorously trained, unbreakable reflex.
Her own hidden aura was rapidly rising too. She watched the glowing energy flare around her own hands with a calculating expression. She was actively reading the situation, rapidly recalibrating her tactical plans, and arriving at some dark conclusion.
Liam turned the complex political situation over in his head.
Chairman Netero had deliberately adjusted the entire exam structure at the absolute last minute. Menchi had been pulled from her original assignment and shifted into this preliminary first phase completely unexpectedly. The exact timing of that sudden administrative change corresponded perfectly with the unexpected arrival of the Kakin royal delegation.
The hidden Nen message written on the whiteboard had specifically stated that candidates who could read aura would receive special, targeted attention. In a chaotic room packed with four hundred unknown people, the Venn diagram overlap between "people who can read Nen" and "highly trained Kakin royal family private soldiers" was absolutely not zero.
So Netero saw Camilla arrive, Liam thought to himself, watching the red rice vanish from plates, and the old man firmly decided the first exam desperately needed a natural, unavoidable filter specifically designed to tell him exactly what kind of military monsters he was dealing with.
A forced 1.5x aura burst, applied simultaneously to every single hidden Nen user in the room, was absolutely not a culinary challenge. It was a precise, brutal measurement tool. It was an incredibly efficient, undeniable way for the Hunter Association to find out, all at once, exactly how much raw firepower everyone present was actually hiding.
Liam calmly took his sixth spoonful of red rice, swallowed, and watched the entire underground room begin to glow with terrifying, blinding power.
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