Chapter 35: Water Divination — Testing Aptitude
The moment Ross stepped clear of the three-minute straight shot, the overhead counter locked at [61:34:39], and he was the third candidate to reach Trick Tower's ground floor.
First and second had been Illumi, who had gone ahead, and Hisoka, who had been running at the front.
By any reasonable measure, they had cleared the third phase with extraordinary time to spare. The next sixty-one and a half hours were completely unoccupied.
The five candidates who had drawn the tower's theoretically most demanding route had cleared it faster than any other group currently in the exam. Even Lippo, watching the numbers, found himself genuinely impressed by this year's intake.
The prison's ground floor hall was vast and empty except for the five of them. Any sound they made came back at them off the walls.
After logging all five completions, Lippo checked on the rest of the field.
Beyond the five already here, the next fastest group was Badges 293 and 294 — two bald heads gleaming under the surveillance cameras with undiminished reliability, the clear frontrunners of the second tier. At their current pace, though, the ground floor was still at least twenty hours away.
The gap between first and second tier was not a gap. It was a cliff face.
Under normal conditions, the five-person long route would have cost forty-five hours minimum and arrived at the bottom with everyone exhausted. The three-person short route would have meant someone going down fighting, with unpredictable time cost and unpredictable danger. Instead, Ross had found a path within the rules, and the result was sixty-plus hours of free time on the other side.
Ross had clearly planned what to do with it.
By the unwritten conventions of the Nen practitioner community — Hunters included — ordinary people were not to be introduced to Nen without preparation, regardless of how much potential a given candidate showed. Ross had no intention of violating that. His plan was to work through the basics before the other candidates arrived. Ten to fifteen hours of working time, but a systematic first pass was enough.
He had entered Trick Tower knowing only Zetsu and Hatsu. During the eight-or-so hours that had followed — what could generously be called a real-life playthrough of If You're a Man, Go Down 100 Floors — he had worked out the other two through observation and practice.
Honestly, those two had always been paper-thin barriers. One good push and they gave. The only reason they had taken this long was that every available hour had been spent running, eating, or gaming, and he simply hadn't stopped to work on them until now.
Ten — the foundational layer beneath everything else in Nen. For a practitioner, Ten was roughly as essential as breathing. At the trained level it ran automatically during sleep, becoming physical instinct rather than something that needed deliberate activation.
Ren — a step up from Ten, a minor advanced application of it. In gaming terms: a sustained attempt to output eleven points from a baseline that naturally sat at ten, or more if the user had the will and conditioning to push it. The amplification ceiling tended to correlate with those two factors in particular. The way Yusuke's punches had worked during the Johness bout had been Ren — with the early shape of something more advanced starting to show.
The first thing Ross needed to do was get Ten running as a constant. Aura present on the surface at all times, woven into the body's rhythm, as automatic as the next breath.
But before that.
"Warden — I need to put in a supply request. A basin of water, one large and one small. Three cups. A few small leaves or plastic pieces. Paper and something to write with."
Lippo didn't respond directly. But a prisoner in work clothes appeared before long with everything Ross had asked for.
Inside Trick Tower, convicts serving lighter sentences — or those who had simply decided to make reasonable choices — were assigned work detail. Considerably more freedom of movement, no shackles, no meaningful incentive to attempt anything. They didn't run, for the same reason that the rock-climbing enthusiast voiced by Togashi had proven with his life: outside the walls was open wilderness, and the wilderness ate people. The tower was the only safe ground in this area.
The five candidates had functioned as a unit until the moment they reached the ground floor. That moment passed, and they stopped.
Illumi had been keeping his own company from early on. He found a section of shadow, settled against the wall, and went into what was effectively power-saving mode.
Hisoka made no effort to stay close to anyone. He sat down and began stacking playing cards, apparently aiming for a record.
Ross, Yusuke, and Kuwabara settled into a cluster and started talking quietly.
"What's all this for?"
Yusuke leaned in when Ross started arranging the items.
"Testing our type aptitude. A baseline for ability development going forward."
Ross answered plainly.
He drew a simple hexagon on the paper and labeled each corner clockwise from the twelve-o'clock position: Enhancement, Transmutation, Conjuration, Specialization, Manipulation, Emission. He added the Hunter script equivalent beside each label as a courtesy. (The HxH world's writing systems included English, Chinese characters, and the reskinned script used as the common tongue — the one thing it did not have was unmodified Japanese.)
Ross was the weakest combatant in this group by a considerable margin. In foundational Nen theory, though, he was almost certainly the strongest person in the room — and that included possibly Lippo. That was what rewatching the source material more than twenty times was actually worth.
Yusuke and Kuwabara were complete newcomers to the subject. Ross intended to make use of the time to give them a working understanding of it, on the grounds that preventable waste of talent was worth preventing. The thought he was currently having about these two was, he noted, the exact thought several people in the Hunter Association were currently having about him.
"In principle, everyone has exactly one natural type. Working and developing abilities within your own type runs at full efficiency. The further an ability type is from your natural one, the worse your efficiency — sometimes dramatically so. You can develop in a type far from yours, but you'll put in more and get less."
He paused, then pointed at the arrangement in front of them.
In the center of a half-filled basin, a small cup sat upright, filled with water to the brim. A clean plastic piece rested on top of the water's surface.
"This is the Water Divination. The water responds to the person using it, and the response tells you your type."
"I'll demonstrate first."
He placed both hands against either side of the cup and activated Ren.
In front of all three of them, the clear water inside the cup began condensing. Something solid formed slowly within it — irregular fragments settling at the bottom, looking for all the world like pieces of a broken circuit board.
"Matter appearing in the water is Conjuration type."
Ross noted this without any particular surprise. He had materialized the Little Tyrant console on the first day. The type had never been in question.
He looked at the other two.
"Who's first?"