Liam sorted through the new data while his three sets of eyes looked at three different things.
The internal panel had updated. He was not entirely sure when it had started reflecting his Nen state in real time, whether that had been a gradual development or something that had crystallized during the transformation, but the numbers were accurate in the way things were accurate when the system doing the measuring was also the thing being measured.
Total aura: 100,000.
The natural system entry sat below the other six: Excellent, second tier, 7%. A seventh line where there had been six. He looked at it for a moment with the middle head and moved on.
The full picture, for reference, because precision was useful:
Manipulation: Talent, fourth tier. Emission: Talent, fourth tier. Enhancement: Talent, fourth tier. Transmutation: Excellent, third tier. Conjuration: Excellent, second tier. Specialization: Extreme, fifth tier. Natural: Excellent, second tier, 7%.
He had asked Bisky once about the relationship between training levels and practical output. The framework she had given him, which had proven accurate across years of application, ran from good to excellent to outstanding to gifted to extreme, each level representing not just a quantitative increase but a qualitative shift in what the practitioner could conceive of doing. Extreme was the ceiling she had described as theoretical for most practitioners. He had been there for a year with Specialization and was still finding new rooms in it.
Natural system at Excellent, second tier. 7%.
The 7% meant that of his current 100,000 aura, approximately 7,000 units were drawn from the ambient field rather than his own reserves.
He tested the first characteristic.
The arm on his left shoulder reached out, and the air in the palm became a whirlwind. His own technique, his own transmuted aura, nothing unusual. Then he stopped feeding his own aura into it and let the natural energy take over. The whirlwind continued without him. He took his attention entirely off it and it continued. He turned away and it continued.
Inexhaustible. As long as the natural energy was available and he had established the initial form, the form maintained itself.
He tested the flexibility next.
The arm on his right shoulder made a different shape with the same natural energy, and instead of wind a chainsaw appeared. Not his technique. Shizuku's. The aura took the form precisely, with the same quality and edge, the same buzzing frequency. He could feel the natural energy accommodating the pattern the same way water accommodates the shape of whatever it fills.
The original left arm paused for a moment and produced a ball of fire. Kurapika's Nen, the specific hellfire quality of it, the saturated crimson that the Scarlet Eyes state generated. Approximate. The color was slightly wrong and the heat was lower than the original, but the architecture was correct.
The original right arm paused longer. The index finger dripped something pink and adhesive that hung to the ground and then pulled a piece of gravel back up when he raised the finger. It swung like a pendulum. He had seen Hisoka use something with that physical logic. Not well enough to reproduce it accurately, but the natural energy could fill in the gaps between observation and understanding in ways his own aura could not.
The two rib-arms pulled out threads. Thin, dense, structured the way Machi's threads were structured, the same quality of tensile intent.
He gathered all six arms together, palms facing each other in pairs, and cycled through forms. The Purple Gold Gourd appeared in one pair and dissolved and became Blinky in another and dissolved and became other shapes from memory, stored forms pulled through the star mark's connective tissue. He could feel the Yin Nen Sword in its resting place and could feel, tentatively, that if he applied the natural energy correctly he could project it outward through the mark's connection without needing physical contact with his own palm.
That was new. He set it aside for later testing.
Shizuku was watching all of this with the focused attention she applied to things she intended to understand.
"Minor Formless Art," he said, with the middle head. "Nothing fixed. Any shape. Any technique that has left an impression strong enough to be a template." He looked at his hands. "It won't replace understanding. I can approximate Machi's threads because I've seen them in detail and I know the structural principle. I can't reproduce a technique I've only seen once from a distance. The natural energy fills in up to the boundary of what I actually know."
He looked up at the gatekeeper.
"Wood," he said, trying the name out.
The gatekeeper's amber eyes came down to meet him. "What?"
"Nothing. Just confirming it works." Liam gestured at the name. "You really don't have one?"
"I have not needed one. Names are for places with more than one of a thing."
"Wood," Liam said again, comfortably. "Brother Wood. Why did you help us with this?"
The gatekeeper settled back, which was the movement of a very large animal finding a comfortable position. "You would have arrived here regardless. The island does the work. I watch." A pause. "I'm bored. It's been a long time since anyone arrived. I wanted to see how it went."
Shizuku looked at the fog.
After Liam had guided the natural energy into her body at 0.1%, the world had shifted slightly. Not to the blood red that Liam saw. Something subtler, a texture to the fog that she could now feel pressing against her Ten, a presence in the air that had been there before but had been indistinguishable from atmosphere. She could faintly perceive the current that had been transforming her.
She looked up at Wood.
"You transformed this island into this environment deliberately," she said. "To filter for people with the capacity to interface with natural energy. You wanted to find someone qualified." She paused. "You need something from them. Which means you need something from Liam." Another pause. "And you have been stuck on this island for fifty years because Netero or Linnie or both of them asked you to stay, or because you can't leave, or both."
Wood said nothing.
"If you could freely command natural energy at the level required to do all of this," Shizuku continued, completely matter-of-factly, "you would be more capable than Netero. You're not more capable than Netero."
The gatekeeper looked at her.
He inhaled.
He exhaled.
"Follow me," he said.
"One moment," Liam said.
Time on the island was wrong. He had noticed it in the background for a while, a sense that the duration he had spent here and the duration that had passed outside the fog were not running at the same rate. Kakin had been active the whole time. The Tserriednich operation had been in motion. He had been managing it from the island through split consciousness and the possession network, and that had worked, but the sense of accumulated time pressure was something he should address.
He reactivated Aria's star mark from outside the island through his own. Then the Sun Mark, which required daylight he confirmed was still available. He assembled the divided consciousness, drew it together, fixed the Kakin thread into something that could operate at greater capacity for a short period.
Went.
The airport. The spiral shuriken descending. The smell of dust and broken stone afterward. Standing in the wind above the crater, three chins held in three separate hands, looking down at the aftermath and waiting for the signal his body had always received before.
No death energy.
He waited longer. Calculated the distance. Definitely inside the absorption radius. The explosion had been comprehensive. He had not held back.
Nothing.
He filed the question and came back to the island.
"All right," he said to Wood. "Where are we going?"
Far to the east, in a military facility in the buffer nation of Krafua, inside a chamber that smelled of chemical preservation and something older and animal, a consciousness resurfaced.
It found itself in darkness.
Not the temporary darkness of unconsciousness. Something more fundamental, a darkness with mass and texture, warm and enclosed and wrong in a way that took a moment to identify, because the wrongness was not about light or sound. It was about scale.
He was very small.
He had been a person, a specific, precise, fully-realized person with a history and a philosophy and a carefully maintained collection and a great deal of justified confidence in his own future. He still was that person in every way that mattered internally. The thoughts were his thoughts. The fury was his fury.
But the body was not his body.
Alive. That was the first and most important data point. Alive with a completeness that was, under the circumstances, quite remarkable.
He processed his aliveness with the specific ecstasy of someone who had felt the blade come down and had then somehow, incomprehensibly, found themselves on the other side of it.
A voice came, somewhere above and around him, the resonant quality of something very large.
"I didn't expect another one," the voice said, female, unhurried, with the satisfied consideration of someone examining something unexpected. "And a female, at that."