AN: Bonus chapter is out. Thank you all for the support. We got to 400+ power stones this week; it's a new record. I hope we can break it next week with 600. I promise another bonus chapter if we do.
Check out my other story as well if you are interested. As a Viltumite in Dragon Ball. It's something I write while on break.
If you wish to support the stories and get access to early content visit [email protected]/skeri123
Adam didn't sleep that night.
He sat cross-legged on the observation deck of the airship, the lights dimmed, and worked on In. The technique was exactly what Netero had described: controlling the expression of projected aura so it became invisible to everything except Gyo. His Ten was already tight enough that his aura leakage was nearly zero. The challenge was applying that same principle to aura that had been separated from his body through Emission.
He started small. A single aura orb, emitted from his right hand, floating ten centimeters above his palm. Visible. A faint glow that any Nen user would recognize. He pushed his awareness into the orb's surface layer and tried to pull the expression inward, the same way Ten contained his body's aura leakage. The orb flickered, dimmed, and then snapped back to full visibility when his concentration wavered.
Again. Emit, contain, suppress the expression. The orb dimmed. He held it for three seconds before it brightened again.
Again. Five seconds.
Again. Twelve.
By the fourth hour, the orb was invisible to his naked eyes. He could still feel it through Haki, a small presence hovering over his palm, but there was no visual trace. He tested it by activating Gyo on his own eyes, and the orb reappeared as a dim outline. Without Gyo, nothing.
He spent the next two hours extending In to moving projectiles. This was harder because the aura was in motion, shifting properties, maintaining both Emission structure and Manipulation guidance while also suppressing its visible expression. Three variables instead of one. His first attempts produced projectiles that flickered in and out of visibility as they moved, which was actually worse than fully visible because the reappearing effect drew the eye.
By dawn, he could emit a single invisible projectile that stayed concealed for roughly four seconds of flight time. Not combat-ready. But the foundation was there, and it would get faster with practice.
His back ached from the cross-legged sit. His eyes felt grit-rough from the sustained Gyo cycles. The observation deck had filled with the pale gray of pre-dawn light without him noticing the transition.
The airship landed at Trick Tower.
Phase Three. A massive stone tower that rose from a barren plateau, hundreds of meters tall. The candidates stood at the top. The goal was to reach the bottom within seventy-two hours.
"The path down is yours to find," the examiner explained. "There are multiple routes. Some are faster. Some are safer. Choose wisely."
Adam extended his Haki downward through the tower's interior. The structure was a labyrinth. Passages, dead ends, trap rooms, and chambers that contained presences that read as human but hostile, probably prisoners or hired fighters stationed as obstacles. He mapped the fastest route in under a minute: a series of trap doors, two combat rooms, and a final passage that opened near the base.
He found a trap door that most candidates had walked past and dropped through.
The tower's interior was dark and cold. The drop was longer than the door's frame suggested. Adam used TK to slow himself in the last meter and landed without sound, and the air down there had the deep stillness of stone that had not been disturbed in a very long time. His path took him through a narrow corridor that opened into a wider room with a single occupant. A prisoner, large and bored, sitting at a table with a set of numbered tiles.
"Challenge room," the man said. "You win the challenge, you go through. You lose, you stay. Rules on the board."
The challenge was a number-matching game with a time component. Adam's Accelerated Cognition processed the optimal strategy before the prisoner finished explaining the rules. He won in four moves. The prisoner shrugged and opened the door.
The second combat room had a different setup. Two paths, one marked FIGHT, one marked PASSAGE. The fight option led to a prisoner who looked like he'd been training for this encounter specifically. The passage option required solving a physical puzzle, a sliding tile lock mechanism.
Adam took the passage option. TK moved the tiles into position from two meters away without him touching them. The lock opened in under a minute.
He reached the bottom of Trick Tower in just under three hours. He was the second person to arrive. The first was a candidate with pins stuck into his face who sat motionless in the corner, radiating the kind of disguised menace that Adam's Haki read as needles wrapped in cloth.
Gittarackur. Illumi.
Adam sat on the opposite side of the room and waited. He didn't look at Illumi. He didn't react to the disguise. He kept his aura at baseline Ten and his Haki running at low intensity, and he pretended to be exactly as uninteresting as every other candidate who'd walk through that door. The discipline of staying small in a room with someone like Illumi cost more than a hard sparring session. Every twitch had to be earned.
Illumi's disguised presence shifted slightly. An assessment. A dismissal. The needles-in-cloth feeling settled back into stillness.
Over the next three days, the rest of the candidates filtered down through the tower. Hisoka came through around hour eighteen, looking exactly as composed as he had at the start of the exam. Gon and Killua arrived together late on day two, arguing about which path had been more fun. Kurapika and Leorio staggered in at hour seventy-one with less than sixty minutes to spare, Leorio visibly wrecked and Kurapika visibly furious. Adam's Haki read the cause without needing the story. Their group had burned fifty hours inside a stasis room somewhere above, the kind of penalty a prisoner's wager could impose, and they'd clawed back the remaining distance with barely enough time to breathe. Adam watched them stagger past without looking up. They had no idea he had been three hours into the room before they entered the tower.
When the seventy-two-hour clock finally expired, the phase closed. The last handful of candidates who had not reached the base were disqualified on the upper floors, and the rest were escorted out to the airship waiting on the plateau.
Phase Three complete.
The next morning, before the airship departed for Phase Four, Netero found him.
"Show me," the old man said.
They used a cargo hold cleared of crates. Netero stood in the center with his hands behind his back and his aura suppressed to what felt like nothing, which Adam knew meant the old man was controlling his output with a precision that bordered on art.
"Three types," Netero said. "One technique. Go."
Adam had been thinking about this since the observation deck. Three types in one technique meant something that used Emission, Transmutation, and a third type simultaneously, not sequentially. Not an Emission blast followed by a Transmutation shift followed by Enhancement. All at once. A woven technique.
He raised his right hand and pointed his index finger at the far wall.
The idea had come to him during In practice, born from a memory of a show he'd watched in another life. A beam attack fired from a fingertip. Concentrated, narrow, efficient. In the show it had been presented as a martial arts technique, but in Nen terms it was an elegant combination of three types: Emission to project aura from the fingertip, Transmutation to give it piercing and thermal properties, and Enhancement to amplify the force concentrated into that narrow beam.
He'd never tried it before. He'd only thought about it.
He fired.
The beam was thin, barely wider than his finger, and it crossed the cargo hold in a fraction of a second. It hit the far wall and punched a hole the size of a coin through the metal plating. The edges of the hole glowed cherry-red.
Netero looked at the hole. Then he looked at Adam.
"That was three types," Adam said. "Emission, Transmutation, Enhancement. Simultaneous."
"I noticed." Netero walked to the wall and examined the damage. "The penetration is impressive for the aura investment. What did that cost you?"
Adam did the math. "Maybe eight hundred units. A fraction of a Ko strike."
"And it punched through reinforced hull plating." Netero touched the edge of the hole, which was still warm. "The efficiency comes from concentration. You're putting less aura into a smaller area, which means higher pressure per unit of surface. A Ko punch spreads thousands of units across your fist. This concentrates hundreds into a point." He turned back. "Crude. But the math is sound. What did you call it?"
Adam almost didn't say it. But the connection was too direct and the part of him that had watched the show in another life wouldn't let it go.
The original name, the one he remembered from a childhood spent in front of a television, had been Dodon Ray. A thin finger-beam fired by a villain he could still picture if he closed his eyes. He rolled the word over once in his head and decided he didn't want to wear someone else's label. Ray was theirs. A pencil stroke of light on a drawn page. What he had just fired was heavier, denser, closer to something industrial than something drawn. A beam, not a ray. One letter off from a memory, enough to make it his.
"Dodon Beam."
Netero blinked. Then he laughed, a full, genuine laugh that transformed his face from ancient sage into someone who found the world genuinely funny. Adam had not heard a sound that uncomplicated from another adult in months, and he had not realized he was missing it until it landed. "I won't ask where that name comes from. Show me more."
Adam spent the next hour demonstrating what he'd developed. The Guided Volley, Emission projectiles with Manipulation steering that tracked moving targets. Static Threads, Transmutation aura shaped into wire-thin strands with Emission range that he could anchor between surfaces. Each technique used two or three types simultaneously, and each one was visibly smoother than what he'd shown in the ball game.
Netero watched everything with the calm attention of someone cataloging data.
"Better," he said after Adam demonstrated a Transmuted aura thread that he emitted, anchored to a ceiling beam, and used to swing himself across the cargo hold. "You're starting to blend. But you're still thinking about the types. Enhancement here, Transmutation there, Emission to project. The blend should be unconscious. You shouldn't be choosing which types to use. You should reach for the effect you want and let the types organize themselves."
"That's how you fight?"
Netero smiled. "I've been training Nen for longer than most countries have existed. My aura does what I want without me telling it which category to use. That's mastery. You're not there yet, but you're closer than anyone I've met who isn't over fifty." He paused. "The In work?"
Adam emitted a small orb and wrapped it in In. Invisible. He guided it across the cargo hold with Manipulation. Netero tracked it with Gyo.
"Good. Four seconds of sustained concealment on a moving target. You learned that overnight?"
"The containment principle is the same as Ten. I just extended it to projected aura."
"Most people take weeks to make that connection." Netero's eyes were bright. "Now. Apply In to that beam technique."
Adam pointed his finger at the opposite wall. He built the technique the same way, Emission plus Transmutation plus Enhancement, but this time he added a fourth layer: In, suppressing the aura's visible expression. Four types running simultaneously.
The beam fired.
It was invisible. Adam could feel it through Haki, a brief spike of intent from his own output, but visually there was nothing. No glow, no light trail, no sign that anything had happened until the second hole appeared in the wall, two centimeters from the first.
Netero stared at the holes.
"An invisible piercing beam," he said quietly. "Four types. Simultaneous. Invisible. From a nineteen-year-old."
"Is that good?"
Netero turned to face him with an expression Adam hadn't seen before. Not amusement. Not the clinical interest from the night before. Something closer to wonder.
"I want to show you something," Netero said. He held out his hand. A small orb of aura formed above his palm and Adam watched with Gyo as Netero wove types through it with a fluidity that made Adam's best efforts look like finger painting. Enhancement strengthened the structure, Emission held it at distance, Transmutation shifted its surface properties three times in two seconds, each shift so smooth that the transitions were invisible. "Do you see what I'm doing?"
"You're changing the orb's properties without rebuilding it. The type shifts are continuous, not discrete."
"Yes. Because the types aren't separate things. They're aspects of one thing: your aura. You've been treating them as separate tools because that's how they're taught, how they're categorized. But aura is aura. Enhancement, Transmutation, Emission, they're just words for what the aura is doing at any given moment. A master doesn't switch between types. They let the aura be what it needs to be."
He closed his hand and the orb vanished. "Your En. You said you can use it but haven't invested in it. Why not?"
"My sensing ability is more efficient for detection."
"And if you wanted to use En for something other than detection?"
Adam had thought about this. En as a territory, not a sensing tool. A zone of controlled aura extending outward from his body, where he could manipulate the environment. Not to feel what was inside it, but to control what happened inside it. Combined with his all-type advantage, an En territory could become a space where he dictated the rules: his Emission attacks could originate from any point within the field, his Manipulation could guide objects or disrupt techniques, his Conjuration could create barriers or constructs on the fly.
"A domain," Adam said.
"Now you're thinking." Netero's smile was the sharpest version of itself. "Your sensing ability handles detection. En handles territory. Two systems, two purposes, no redundancy. That's efficient." He tapped his temple. "But a domain-type application of En is one of the most demanding Hatsu structures possible. It requires sustained multi-type output across a wide area. Most Specialists who attempt it burn out. They don't have the aura reserves or the type efficiency to maintain it."
"I have both."
"You do. Which is why I'm telling you this now instead of in ten years." He met Adam's eyes. "Don't rush it. A domain-type Hatsu built on incomplete understanding produces something fragile. Build the foundation first. Master the multi-type weave until it's unconscious. Train En separately until your range is stable. Then, when you're ready, combine them."
Netero walked toward the door. "IF there is time we'll spar once more before the exam ends. I want to see how far you can push the weave under pressure. For now, focus on Phase Four. It will test different skills than the ones we've been working on."
He stopped at the doorway. "One last thing. That Specialist aura pattern I felt in you, the one that threads through all six types at once. It's been getting stronger since yesterday. Something is forming. Don't force it. Don't direct it. Just let it happen."
Phase Four was Zevil Island.
The airship delivered the remaining candidates to a forested island surrounded by open ocean. Each candidate drew a numbered badge from a box, determining their target. The rules were simple: keep your own badge (3 points), steal your target's badge (3 points), and collect any other badges needed to reach 6 total points. Seven days. The candidates who reached 6 points advanced.
Adam drew his number. His target was number 44.
He checked the candidate registry posted on the airship's display. Number 44: Hisoka.
Of course.
The Bazaar didn't believe in coincidence and neither did Adam. Whether the draw was random or manipulated didn't matter. The result aligned perfectly with his secondary objective: prevent Hisoka from obtaining a Hunter License. Taking Hisoka's badge would give Adam his 6 points AND remove 3 points from Hisoka's total, forcing the magician to hunt down three additional badges from other candidates just to qualify.
The candidates were released onto the island at two-minute intervals. Adam went third. He hit the tree line running, TK-assisted leaps carrying him deeper into the forest canopy, and settled into a position on a ridge overlooking the island's central valley.
His Haki mapped the island. One hundred and forty-seven presences scattered across the forest and shoreline. Most were spreading out, finding hiding spots, forming basic strategies. Several were already hunting.
Hisoka was moving northwest at a casual pace. His presence burned like a torch in Adam's sensing range, that mix of predatory intent and barely contained excitement that hadn't dimmed since the exam began. He wasn't hiding. He wasn't hunting. He was walking through the forest like he owned it, daring anyone to approach.
Tonpa was southeast, roughly three hundred meters from Adam's position. Moving erratically. Nervous.
Adam considered his priorities. The secondary objective was Hisoka. The bonus objective was Tonpa. Hisoka was the harder target by orders of magnitude, and Adam wanted to spend days one through three preparing the engagement. Tonpa was an afterthought.
He dealt with Tonpa first.
It took twenty minutes.
Adam tracked Tonpa through the forest canopy, moving silently with Zetsu suppressing his aura completely. Tonpa was heading toward a stream, probably planning to spike the water supply. His Haki read the man's intent as petty, habitual, satisfied in advance. Tonpa had done this so many times that sabotage felt like routine.
Adam dropped from the canopy behind him. Tonpa heard the landing and spun, eyes wide.
"You," Tonpa said. He recognized Adam from the tunnel. His face went pale. "Look, I don't want any—"
Adam hit him once with an Enhancement-charged strike to the solar plexus. Clean, precise, calibrated. Tonpa folded and didn't get up.
He was dead before he hit the ground. The strike had been lethal by design, channeling enough force to stop the heart. Decades of sabotaging rookies, getting people killed through contaminated supplies and false information, and all it took was one hit from someone who knew exactly what Tonpa was.
Adam stood over the body for a count of three. The forest was loud the way forests always were when they didn't know anything had changed: insects, leaves, the small weather of a place that did not register the death of one human inside it. Adam's pulse stayed at sixty-two. He had expected something else. Some flicker, some catch behind the ribs, some moment of weight. Nothing came. He filed the absence away and decided he would think about it later.
Adam took his badge. Not his target badge, but worth one point.
BONUS OBJECTIVE: COMPLETE
Designated target [Tonpa] eliminated. +200 NP (Bonus Objective Completion)
He stowed the badge in his Spatial Pocket and moved north.
Days one through three.
Adam spent them in preparation. He established a base camp on the ridge, concealed with Zetsu when resting and In-wrapped aura markers when moving. His Haki tracked Hisoka continuously, building a behavioral profile.
Hisoka hunted four candidates in three days. Each kill was efficient and casual, like a cat playing with mice it had already decided to eat. His combat patterns were simple because his opponents were weak: close the distance, attach Bungee Gum, pull them in, kill. The whole process took seconds.
But Adam was watching for the details. How Hisoka used Bungee Gum's elastic properties. The range of the attachment, maybe fifteen meters maximum. The activation speed, nearly instant. The way Hisoka's aura shifted between Transmutation dominant (Bungee Gum deployment) and Enhancement dominant (physical strikes) with a smoothness that confirmed years of practice. And one thing that worried him: Texture Surprise, the secondary ability that let Hisoka alter the appearance of flat surfaces. He used it to disguise his badge as a simple cloth pattern on his chest, making it impossible to spot visually.
Adam could spot it anyway. Gyo showed the aura construct. But it confirmed that Hisoka's Nen was refined, layered, and versatile within his two types.
On the second night, Adam set up the terrain. He identified a clearing in the forest's northeastern section where the canopy broke enough for maneuverability but the surrounding trees provided anchor points for Static Threads. He spent two hours placing invisible Nen mines across the clearing, small Emission nodes wrapped in In and set to detonate on his mental command. He strung invisible threads at ankle height across three approach vectors. He mapped every tree, rock, and elevation change within a hundred meters and committed it to memory.
On the third evening, sitting alone in the clearing he'd prepared, something happened.
He was practicing the multi-type weave, running Emission and Transmutation and Enhancement through a single technique while maintaining In on the output and Manipulation guidance on the trajectory. Four types running simultaneously plus In. The aura in his body was moving in the pattern he'd felt during those long training months back in Kerenth, the one that pulled from multiple types at once and wove them into something his conscious mind couldn't quite replicate.
Except now he could.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no flash of light, no surge of power, no moment of transcendence. It was more like a key turning in a lock that had been waiting for the right position. The weave he'd been trying to achieve consciously, that Netero had been pushing him toward, suddenly clicked into a framework that his aura recognized and his conscious mind could hold.
Adam felt it land in his body before he had a name for it. A small steady warmth in his sternum that he recognized later as his aura settling into a configuration it had been reaching for since the apartment couch three weeks ago. He breathed once, slowly, and let it set.
Convergence.
The name came to him without thought, the way a Hatsu's name always did according to the Nen literature, the technique naming itself because the name was inherent to the ability.
He held out his hand and let the aura flow.
It moved differently now. Not in single types, not even in conscious blends. It moved as a unified spectrum that shifted between Enhancement, Transmutation, Emission, Conjuration, Manipulation, and Specialization the way light shifted between colors. Seamless. Continuous. Zero switching delay, zero efficiency loss, zero conflict between types.
He fired a Dodon Beam with Convergence active. The beam was everything it had been before, Emission plus Transmutation plus Enhancement plus In, but now the types didn't feel separate. They felt like aspects of a single output. The beam was cleaner, faster, and the In concealment was perfect from the moment of emission instead of requiring a fraction of a second to stabilize.
He created a Guided Volley. Six invisible projectiles that tracked independently, each one maintaining In concealment and Manipulation guidance without any of those systems competing for his attention. Before Convergence, six simultaneous guided projectiles would have required conscious management of each one. Now they ran on the same unified framework, and his mind had bandwidth to spare.
He felt the limitation too. Convergence only worked on techniques he created himself. When he tried to apply it to a generic Ko strike, nothing happened because Ko was a fundamental technique, not an Adam-created application. When he tried to analyze Netero's aura pattern from memory and replicate the type-shifting orb, it slid away from him. Convergence was synthesis, not mimicry.
A miracle. That's what Netero called it. This is why.
He sat in the clearing surrounded by his invisible Nen mines and his In-wrapped threads and the new Hatsu that fit into his aura like it had always been there, and he thought about the fight that was coming tomorrow.
Hisoka Morow. Badge 44. The magician. The man who viewed combat as pleasure and death as foreplay. Roughly equal to Adam in raw aura, vastly more experienced in Nen combat, and wielding an ability that turned everything it touched into a weapon or a trap.
Adam had Convergence. He had In. He had Haki and TK, Hamon and the Nanosuit and a prepared battlefield.
He laid the inventory out in his head and weighed it the way he had weighed groceries as a kid in his last life, when his mother had sent him to the corner shop with a number and a list and the rule that if it came under the number you got to keep the change. The total felt like enough. It almost always felt like enough until it did not.
It would have to be enough.