The temple vanished.
The sky, the Dragon, Bulma's thumb up, the pale stone of the Lookout, the thin clean air at that altitude, all of it collapsed inward in the space of a breath, and what replaced it was the second-floor training hall of his own house.
The curtain was moving in the window draft.
Liam was standing exactly where he'd been standing when Akane activated her Hatsu, with his hand still extended toward the spot where the black energy sphere had been. Across from him, Akane stood in the same position, also with her arm extended, also blinking.
Between them, nothing. The sphere was gone. A small black butterfly was completing a lazy arc toward Akane's forehead, where it landed and flattened itself into a mark, dark and neat, like a stamp.
Behind them, the triangle: Shizuku cross-legged with her laptop, Aoi sitting very straight, Leorio with his arms folded.
"Why is nothing happening?" Aoi asked. "You said you were testing the Hatsu."
Leorio pointed at Akane. "Are you even concentrating? The sphere just disappeared."
"What are you talking about?" Akane looked at him with genuine confusion. "Aren't we done?"
Leorio and Aoi exchanged a look that contained several unasked questions.
Liam turned to Shizuku. "From your perspective. How long were Akane and I standing there?"
Shizuku had been watching through gathered aura, her attention sharp. She tilted her head. "Less than a second. You reached for the sphere, paused for a moment, the sphere turned into a butterfly and landed on Akane. That was everything."
She added: "You were both reaching for it, but it looked like neither of you could quite touch it. Very strange."
Liam exhaled. "From my perspective, Akane and I just spent approximately thirty hours in another world. Walked several hundred thousand steps. Met some people. Solved a significant crisis."
Silence.
"Was it a hallucination?" Leorio said finally. "Or a soul projection? Or, wait." He was doing mental arithmetic. "A materialized alternate space? But the scale you're describing, the energy cost alone would be..."
"It's Dragon Ball," Akane said, raising her hand helpfully. "Master says the comic. You can look it up."
Leorio's face went through several stages.
Shizuku had already opened her laptop. She typed, found a video, and turned the screen toward Akane. A clip was playing: analysis footage of a classic match, Goku versus Cell, the Cell Games arena, the specific way that particular fight had concluded.
Akane watched it with the focused interest of someone checking their memories against a record. "That's it," she said. "Gohan is much taller in person, though. And Trunks is younger than I expected."
Leorio pointed at the laptop screen. Pointed at Akane and Liam. Pointed back at the screen.
"You're telling me," he said, "that you went to this."
"Yes."
"That's a comic."
"We know," Liam said.
"Comics are not real."
"We're aware of the philosophical position."
Liam checked his pockets. All pockets. Every pocket on every piece of clothing, methodically, including the ones he rarely used. The Senzu bean he'd been carrying when Akane activated the return was not there. The clothes from the Dragon Ball world weren't there either. He was wearing exactly what he'd left the house in.
"So," he said. "We can't prove it was a real world. We brought nothing back."
"There is something," Akane said.
She raised both hands, let aura build between her palms, and pushed it into a shape. The aura went golden. Soft. It organized itself into a cloud-like mass with the specific texture of something that had been rendered precisely because the Nen ability had encountered the real thing and stored the pattern. A small golden cloud materialized in the air in front of her, floating with an entirely relaxed quality, completely physical.
Leorio's jaw did something that would have embarrassed him if he'd noticed.
"Nimbus," he said.
"Is that what it's called?" Akane seemed pleased.
Liam walked over and pressed his palm against the cloud. Solid. Warm. Real in the same way that any Conjuration ability was real, which was to say completely, once a Nen user with sufficient skill willed it into existence.
Shizuku was already reading.
"Only those with pure hearts can ride it," she reported from the encyclopedia page she'd found.
Leorio had already launched himself at the cloud. He passed directly through it and hit the floor.
He stood up, brushed himself off, and resumed his previous position with his arms crossed, expression suggesting that this outcome had been entirely consistent with his expectations and he was not bothered by it in any way.
Aoi watched him, mystified.
"Fine," Leorio said. "Even if you can materialize it. Even if it works exactly like the comic says. That still doesn't prove it was a real world. It's a comic. How is a comic a real world?"
"Excellent point," Liam said.
He meant it. It was genuinely an excellent point, and he had no answer for it, and neither did the universe, which was either honest about its own ambiguity or simply declining to comment.
He released Jade.
She materialized with her usual quiet presence, light blue robes, jade mask, wide sleeves with their respective contents and capabilities. Her right sleeve extended, and the sword slid into her hand.
"Akane," Liam said, "stand still."
Akane stood still. The sword entered her chest with the particular quality of Conjuration penetrating Nen, not physical injury, something more abstract, reaching into the construct of the Hatsu she'd developed, reading the rules written into it.
The talisman emerged on yellow paper, rose-gold markings, folded once.
Liam read it.
The rules were clean and specific.
Rule one: the Butterfly Hatsu could only be used on Liam.
Rule two: upon activation, it transported them to a world Liam "may have seen," whatever the Specialization ability interpreted that to mean, which was apparently broader than he'd assumed.
Rule three: on arrival, Akane randomly acquired an ability from that world and automatically shifted to the optimal Nen type to use it. The ability persisted until the Hatsu was used again. The next use reset her back to Specialization, dissolved the gained ability, and began the process again with a new destination and a new random acquisition.
Liam turned the talisman over.
Permanent cycle. No limit on uses. Each activation was a reset and a roll. Akane walked out of every world as a different Nen type with a different ability, carrying it until she chose to go somewhere new.
"The best application," he said, mostly thinking out loud, "is to find a world with the right ability, the right Nen type, and then stop. Stay at that configuration until you've extracted everything it offers. Don't reset until you've genuinely used it up."
He looked at Akane.
She was doing Water Divination. She'd produced a cup from somewhere, found a flat surface, and was watching the surface of the water with the specific attention of someone checking their own updated specifications.
The type had changed. Not Specialization. The Butterfly Hatsu had identified Conjuration as the optimal type for the Nimbus ability and shifted her accordingly. She was Conjurer now, walking out of the Dragon Ball world with the ability to produce Nimbus on demand, and would remain Conjurer until she chose to use the Butterfly Hatsu again.
Leorio stared at the Water Divination result. "So she can just. Change Nen types."
"She changes to whatever type is appropriate for the ability she acquires," Liam said. "Which is not the same as changing types freely. She doesn't choose the ability or the type. The Hatsu chooses."
"Still," Leorio said.
"Still," Liam agreed.
Shizuku looked up from her laptop. "The activation condition limits this to Liam only. So the talisman you're holding." She nodded at the yellow paper in his hand. "Liam could use the talisman on himself?"
Liam considered this.
He would go to a world. He might arrive naked, or he might arrive as a small chibi version of himself. He had no information on which.
More interesting: if he used the Universe in the Sleeve to store something before activating the Butterfly Hatsu, would the stored item cross with him? The sleeve existed outside normal space while items were inside it. If the dimensional transit occurred while something was stored in the sleeve, would it arrive on the other side, or would the two spatial mechanics conflict?
One way to find out.
He pinched the talisman between two fingers. The paper caught and blackened at the edges, and the rose-gold markings lit as the Hatsu encoded in it activated. The black energy sphere assembled itself in the air in front of him, small and patient, waiting.