The fog lay across the water like something that had been there before the ocean and had decided to stay.
The fishmen pulled the boat through it in silence. They had been quiet for the entire crossing, quieter than usual, which was saying something because they did not talk much under ordinary circumstances. Liam had stopped trying to read their expressions two hours into the journey. They had the specific stillness of people performing a task at the outer edge of what they were willing to perform.
Aria stood at the bow.
"That's my homeland," she said, very quietly. It came out like something she had not planned to say out loud.
The island ahead was not visible so much as implied. A darkness in the fog with density to it, a shape that accumulated rather than resolved, growing closer without growing clearer. No shore details. No vegetation line. No light. Just the presence of mass where the fog was different from other fog.
Liam watched the fishmen.
Aria's recognition had come with something close to wonder. The fishmen's reaction to the same proximity was entirely different. Their pulls on the guide ropes had shortened. The ones nearest the surface were moving closer to the hull and further from the direction of the island. What he read in them was not the uneasiness of people in unknown territory. It was the uneasiness of people in known territory they had decided not to revisit.
At ten meters from the shore, Linnie moved.
She raised one arm and swept it forward, not dramatically, with the economy of someone who has never found drama useful, and the motion sent a pulse of force across the water in spreading rings. The boat stopped. The fishmen went still.
Linnie said a few words to them in the water, in whatever language they shared. Liam caught the cadence but not the content. The fishmen did not wait for her to finish before they released the ropes and dove, and within seconds, not a single one of them was visible on the surface. Their aura signatures, which Liam had been tracking as diffuse presences in the water around the boat, moved rapidly away and continued moving.
Aria stared at the water where they had been.
"Why did they leave? Aren't they curious?"
"They have been here before," Linnie said. Her voice had the texture of old wood in cold weather. "Once is enough for some people."
"You said it wasn't dangerous twenty years ago."
"I said I couldn't make any guarantees now. Twenty years ago I had a different basis for assessment." Linnie looked at the island. Not at the fog exactly, but at a specific point in the fog, the way a person looks at something they can see clearly that others cannot. "There is one person on that island. Find him. I cannot tell you what to expect because I genuinely do not know what to expect. The last time I came near this place the situation was different." She paused. "Fifty years ago, when we came back from the Dark Continent, this person left the gate. He followed us back. He has been here since."
Liam turned this over.
The Dark Continent. He had been assembling information about it since long before he arrived in this world, filling in the gaps between what the Hunter Association publicly acknowledged and what the older texts described. The standard account said that the known world, the six continents surrounded by Lake Mobius, was all that remained of what had once been a larger human civilization. Something had happened in the deep history that had caused people to withdraw from the vast territories beyond the lake. The exact nature of that something was not in the standard account.
The ruins were still there, according to the most reliable sources. Human ruins, in the Dark Continent. Whatever people had lived there, they had built things that remained.
The gatekeeper had stood at the entrance to that territory for however long the gate had existed, and fifty years ago had walked away from it and come here, to a small island at the northern edge of the known world, and not left since.
Why leave?
Why follow returning expeditioners back to a world you had been stationed at the threshold of?
And more pressingly: why had Netero sent Liam specifically here?
"Forget it," Shizuku said, beside him. "We're going up separately. I'll go first."
"I was about to say we're going up separately," Liam said. "I'll go first."
They had spoken at the same moment. They stopped and processed this.
"If we go up separately," Liam said, "then I go first."
"If one person goes alone," Shizuku said, "I'm the better choice. The Sun Mark, Moon Mark, Star Mark combination means you can pull me out if anything goes wrong. You going alone removes that option."
Both arguments were valid. Liam recognized a negotiation he was not going to win.
"Together," he said.
"Yes," Shizuku said.
Behind them, Aria had already jumped.
She had not been part of the negotiation. She had listened to it with the patience of someone waiting for people to finish talking about something she had already decided, then coiled and launched herself over the offshore water in a single arc that carried her fifteen meters and deposited her directly onto the island shore. She disappeared into the fog before she landed, swallowed by it so completely that a moment later there was no evidence she had ever been at the bow.
"Obviously a rabbit," Liam said. "Why does she move like a monkey."
He held out his hand. Shizuku took it. His aura shifted, and a wind came up around them, and they crossed the water without touching it, riding the current he shaped under their feet, and stepped into the fog together.
The light changed the moment they crossed the threshold. Dim before, now saturated with red, a blood-tinted brightness that illuminated nothing clearly and threw no shadows in any recognizable direction. The fog remained. If anything, it was thicker here, pressing close, reducing visibility to a meter radius of vague shapes. His Ten, pushed out as far as it would go, found edges and surfaces but nothing he could interpret.
There was a structure ahead. Large enough that he sensed its dimensions before he saw its outline, a rectangular mass more than ten meters high, dark and absolute in the red-grey murk.
Shizuku's hand tightened on his arm.
He followed her gaze to the left.
Aria was there, approximately twenty meters away. On all fours. The posture was wrong for a person, too low, the proportions redistributed in a way that suggested the spine had made some executive decisions about its preferred configuration. Her head, as he watched, finished becoming a rabbit's head, the features settling into full animal architecture: red eyes at the sides of the skull, the three-petal mouth of something that had never been designed for language, the enormous mobile ears tracking toward him.
She stared at him and Shizuku from a crouch, and the intelligence behind the animal eyes was still there, he could see it was still there, but it was fighting for space with something older and considerably less interested in conversation.
She lunged.
Liam sidestepped and slapped the star mark onto her as she passed, and the possession locked.
From inside the massive rabbit's body, the situation was immediately disorienting. The proportions were entirely different, the sensory input recalibrated toward ears and ground vibration and scent in ways that did not match anything he was used to operating. And beneath all of that, running through the body's aura like a current through water, something he could not name. Not a technique. Not a developed ability. Something that moved like instinct and felt like it had been there since before the body was born, and was now interfacing with the island's atmosphere in a way that had bypassed Aria's human consciousness entirely.
He recognized the texture of it from one other place. The Seventy-Two Transformations talisman. The ability that could rework the body's fundamental structure. That same quality of change operating at the substrate level.
This was not a comfortable discovery to make while inhabiting a large rabbit.
Liam summoned the Purple Gold Gourd talisman in the rabbit's paws, aimed it, and said her name, and the rabbit's aura went into the gourd. The refinement process was almost instant compared to what the gourd had managed with the princes. Her total Nen was modest, the transformation energy burning off quickly under the gourd's pressure. He released her, and she came out of it human-shaped and functional, looking confused in the specific way of someone who has lost ten seconds.
He controlled her hands and legs and walked her back to the shore, and then past it, and deposited her on the water and let the wind carry her back to the boat. He released the possession.
Outside the island, Aria's consciousness resurfaced to find herself standing on the boat next to Linnie, with no clear memory of the last several minutes. This was probably for the best.
Liam dispersed the gourd, brought his attention fully back to his own position on the island, and turned to look at Shizuku.
She had not moved from where she had been standing. She was watching him with the calm attentiveness that was her default register in any situation that warranted careful attention.
He looked more carefully.
Her cheeks. Her neck. The skin along the jawline and down toward the collar. A faint red, not a flush but a texture, the first growth of something fine and dense, like the beginnings of a pelt.