Under List's guidance, Ronin met one of the game's designers, Dwun, in a room inside the castle piled high with garbage.
Dwun was a tall, skinny, scruffy young man with hair like a bird's nest.
The smell in the room was honestly terrible. There was every kind of trash imaginable—food waste, game cartridges, figurine models, even some game items.
But the most eye-catching thing was still the mountain of books stacked everywhere.
"Oh? Someone finally cleared the game? Doesn't look like the person I was expecting, though." Dwun stood up from the garbage pile and casually tossed the game controller in his hand aside.
A "game over" sound came from the computer speakers in front of him.
Dwun felt around on himself, pulled out a card, and handed it to Ronin while saying, "Sit wherever."
Ronin looked at the garbage all over the floor and genuinely had no idea where anyone was supposed to sit and chat.
Still, he accepted the card.
Ruler's Blessing.
It was also card No. 000, also SS-rank in acquisition difficulty, and also limited to only one copy.
However, the holder of this card no longer received an invitation. Instead, they would obtain a castle, along with a village of ten thousand people under that castle. Most importantly, the people in that village would live according to the laws and orders established by the card's owner.
It truly placed one above ten thousand.
But this card held no appeal for Ronin. He casually put it away, didn't sit down, and directly asked the question he most wanted answered.
"After this, will the game open a second playthrough, or will new gameplay be added?"
Dwun froze slightly, clearly not expecting Ronin to ask that.
He scratched his messy hair. "The second playthrough will open, and new cards will be added at the same time."
"The final boss won't still be Razor, right?" Ronin asked curiously.
This time, however, Dwun didn't give him a clear answer.
"That's something you'll have to explore for yourself."
"All right." Ronin nodded. "The difficulty will increase, won't it?"
"Not by too much. The current difficulty is already more than enough for ordinary people." Dwun clapped his hands. "Oh, right. Since you've collected all one hundred types of cards, one more thing will happen."
As he spoke, he started rummaging through the garbage pile. After a while, he came back with a long rectangular box.
It was an extremely ornate box, and when opened, it revealed three slots inside.
"This card binder can hold three cards from your designated slots. Cards placed inside can be taken back to the real world and used there." Dwun held up three fingers. "However, you can't place two or more cards with the same number inside. You can only choose three cards from the hundred in the designated slots of your binder."
Ronin closed the box and held it in his hand.
Dwun continued, "Now then, next comes the joyous and celebratory game ending."
"Come with me," List said, stepping forward again.
Ronin nodded. He already knew everything he wanted to know, so he had no intention of lingering any longer.
After all, he wasn't Gon.
"Will you continue participating in the game?" List hesitated briefly before asking as they left.
"Not sure. At least for now, this game doesn't have much appeal to me anymore," Ronin replied without giving a definite answer.
Because what he needed to do next was head to the Hunter Exam venue and find a way to meet Chairman Netero there.
He had already investigated Netero's movements.
However, the chairman spent most of his time at the Hunter Association headquarters, and meeting him there wasn't easy.
Not to mention, Vice Chairman Pariston was there as well.
Besides that, Ronin had already contacted this year's chief examiner through certain channels. When the exam began, the examiner would help him meet Chairman Netero during the test.
And that chief examiner was Lippo, the one in charge of Trick Tower.
Although the exact contents of the Hunter Exam changed depending on the chief examiner, they didn't change every year.
A place like Trick Tower was put to use once every few years.
After all, the prisoners there made excellent trial tools. Using the examinees to test Trick Tower's operations and expose its flaws was also an excellent choice.
List didn't say anything more. He had only been curious.
And the source of that curiosity was the powerful Nen surrounding Ronin. Even though Ronin was merely maintaining Ten, List could still sense that he was far from ordinary.
On top of that, when he had communicated with Razor earlier, he had heard quite a bit about Ronin from him, which made him even more curious.
Being praised by Razor was no easy thing.
When Ronin came out of the castle, he saw that the entire town had fallen into a festive atmosphere.
This was probably the completion festival Dwun had mentioned before he left.
The festival would last for three days. Only after it ended would the game enter its second playthrough. At that point, Ronin and the others could choose whether to stay in the game and clear it again, or leave.
When he found Shizuku and the other two, Ronin saw countless beams of light flying toward the town.
They were players rushing over after hearing the festival announcement.
Among those players, some were overjoyed, while others had tears in their eyes or were openly sobbing.
After all, not everyone had the ability to obtain items like Leave or Pass.
After spending this long in the game, Ronin had already figured out the situation. Although some people had awakened Nen, their use of it was extremely crude. There actually weren't many players who could truly be considered proficient Nen users.
In Ronin's eyes, most of the players were half-baked, and they had no real ambition to improve either.
After all, to Ronin, this game was practically the ideal tool for helping Nen users train.
Even if someone didn't follow Biscuit's step-by-step training method, just fighting monsters out in the wild would continuously raise their strength and deepen their understanding of Nen.
But after most players entered the game and discovered that killing wild monsters took a lot of effort while only producing a small amount of sellable value, they gave up on the monster-fighting path altogether.
Then Ronin had another thought.
If creators like Dwun had added levels to the game, and those levels could be raised by killing monsters, then maybe more players would rapidly improve their strength inside the game.
But that made Ronin think of Morena.
Her Nen ability, Contagion: Love Etude, could infect others and allow them to increase their abilities by killing people.
The levels inside the game wouldn't need to increase a player's aura quantity. As long as they gave rewards in other areas, plenty of players would probably devote their energy to leveling up.
Ronin didn't believe Dwun and the other creators had failed to think of that.
But they hadn't done it.
That meant there was only one possibility: the original purpose behind creating this game had never been to help players grow stronger.