The study had not been used in some time. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held books on political theory, social structure, the history of revolutionary movements, the rise and fall of kingdoms. The library of a man who had spent years trying to understand why the world had the shape it did and had not arrived at an answer that satisfied him.
In the basement below, incense burned in the Kakin style of remembrance. The smoke was thick enough that the man sitting with his back to the door might have been mistaken for someone who had simply stopped moving and forgotten to leave. He was facing the wall, holding a phone, silent.
He had been there for a while.
The phone buzzed. The screen lit.
An email. The sender was Kobayakawa, a two-star Hunter whose listed specialty was detective work and whose practical specialty was finding things that preferred not to be found. Among the Hunters who hired him, he went by the Wu Horse, the seventh of the Earthly Branches: steady, persistent, built for a long road.
Halkenburg read the email.
His aura shifted as he read. It expanded from the surface of his body with the involuntary intensity of something igniting. It climbed and held, too hot for the small room, too hot for the incense smoke to politely ignore. Then, over the course of several minutes, it settled back down.
Then the phone rang.
He answered. He listened without speaking. At the end he said: "I will be there. Mother."
The screen's glow caught his face before the call closed. A square, plain face. The kind that had been keeping its own counsel long enough to have made a profession of it.
The first queen's voice came through one final time: "My beloved son. My ninth prince."
Halkenburg Hui Guo Rou set the phone down and looked at the two photographs on the memorial shelf. Benjamin, the first prince, on the left. Tserriednich, the fourth prince, on the right. His brothers. Not in any sense the official record would confirm, because the official record listed him as the second queen Duazul's son, as Camilla's younger brother, as a footnote to a different woman's lineage.
The blood ran otherwise.
"My brothers," he said, quietly. "This does not end here."
The fire in the abandoned building's ground floor had been going for two hours. Pairo had stopped adding fuel and it had settled into a steady low burn, more light than heat. It reminded him, in a way he had not been prepared for, of fires in the Kurta forest. Same color. Wrong everything else.
"You dealt with a prince?" He had stood up when Kurapika said it. He sat back down now, because Kurapika had told him to, with the patient authority of someone who had recently spent a great deal of time saying "sit down and focus." "A Kakin prince. Kurapika, you were alone."
"I wasn't alone," Kurapika said. He was watching the fire. "Someone helped. Helped considerably."
Pairo thought about the people he had seen in those first minutes after coming back. The room full of strangers, the palace, the wall of empty shelves where something had recently been. "Those people? The ones at the palace when I first..."
"Liam. His name is Liam." The name landed with a specific weight. "Without him, I don't know if I would have recovered all the eyes. I definitely couldn't have managed the resurrection. I certainly wouldn't be sitting here talking to you."
Pairo looked at his hands. They were his hands. They had always been his hands. He turned them over and back.
"I want to help," he said.
Kurapika looked at him.
"The others. The tribe. I want to bring them back too."
"You can't."
"Why not? I have Scarlet Eyes as well."
"No." Kurapika said it before Pairo could continue, without heat, the way you say something you have thought about carefully. "When you can perform Ten, Zetsu, Ren, and Hatsu reliably, I will explain the resurrection ability to you in full. Not before."
Pairo looked at him for a moment, then sighed with the specific resignation of someone who recognizes a firm position when they encounter one. "All right then."
He closed his eyes. He turned his attention inward, toward the thing Kurapika had been teaching him to locate: his own aura, the energy present in every living body that most people went through their entire lives without noticing. Under his focus, it began to stabilize. A thin, even pressure across the surface of his skin. Held.
Ten. The first of the four foundations.
What Kurapika had not expected, when he opened Book Six and brought Pairo back, was what the resurrection had left behind. Every single one of Pairo's pores had opened during the process. The reconstruction had been total, nerve by nerve, bone by bone, flesh and blood rebuilt from nothing inside the sphere of natural energy Liam had maintained. In retrospect, a body assembled from scratch arriving with its Nen pathways fully accessible was not surprising. What was surprising was that the first thing Pairo had done with the advantage was ask about helping the others rather than anything else.
Kurapika returned to the present and watched the Ten settle around his friend's body. Steady. Already cleaner than it had any right to be on the second day.
The chimera ant situation in Kakin was, by the standards of the past several months, manageable. Ordinary soldier ants, the queen's early baseline production, were being handled by Camilla's military. What required Kurapika specifically were the targets above that classification: the ones whose individual Nen capability turned conventional military responses into the tactical equivalent of shooting artillery at a fly that had already moved.
He had taken Pairo with him against every sensible argument for leaving him safely at the palace, because being away from Pairo for more than an hour produced a specific quality of dread he had not experienced since the years immediately after the massacre. The Kurta forest kept appearing at the edges of his vision. His Scarlet Eyes flickered without invitation. He had stopped arguing with himself about it.
Book Four, Revelation, appeared in his hand.
He channeled the 1,600 units of natural energy available to him through the divination ability and felt the ceiling lift immediately. Without the natural system, Revelation was a precise tool that demanded significant aura investment to operate at range. With it, the page opened into a full map of the surrounding area rendered in the chain-link notation that had become Kurapika's visual language for threat assessment. A scarlet marker pulsed on the page and moved toward their position from somewhere above.
He shaped a portion of the natural energy into a construct roughly his own dimensions and sent it up the stairwell.
Ten floors above, the gecko-type chimera ant had been moving through the corridors with the patient confidence of a predator that had learned its preferred prey tended to fight back. It registered the man-shaped thing behind it at the same moment five chain constructs came from the figure's extended hands and found its limbs.
The ant severed its own tail and dropped. Ten floors, a combat landing, already scanning. The construct was standing in front of it.
The ant looked up. On the floor directly above, Kurapika had Pairo's wrist and was watching from the railing. The construct spread ten chains wide, a net from every angle.
The military vehicle was already at the corner. Camilla's team moved with the efficiency of people briefed on exactly what to expect. Sedative injection. Restraint device. Transport case. The captain saluted, shook Kurapika's hand, got back in the vehicle, and left.
The construct dissolved. Kurapika absorbed it and exhaled slowly.
He had tried, before settling on this approach, to reproduce Jade from natural energy. Liam's sleeve construct was the ideal tool for this kind of work: silent, capable of collecting targets without damaging them and storing them indefinitely. The problem was scale. Jade required a natural energy investment well beyond what 1,600 units could sustain. He did not have Liam's reserves, and he did not have Liam's natural energy percentage. The construct would have lasted perhaps thirty seconds before releasing everything it was holding back into open air, which was not a useful outcome for anyone.
What he had instead was an Emission-type decoy built from the minimum viable natural energy to function, with chain Hatsu layered on top. It worked. It was his.
"Kurapika," Pairo said.
"Mm."
"Your face."
Kurapika looked at him. Pairo was choosing his words with the care of someone delivering news they were unsure how to frame. "Just now, while you were using the ability. Your face grew fur. And the shape changed, it was getting longer and more pointed, like an animal's. Then it went back to normal."
Kurapika took a slow breath and released the natural energy still circulating through his system. The sensation of it leaving was distinct.
"Don't worry," he said. "It's a side effect of the training. Nothing serious."
Pairo looked unconvinced.
Kurapika did not press the reassurance further, because there was a version of it that was technically accurate and a version that was not, and he had not yet determined which one applied.
Liam had told him, during instruction on the natural system, that the transformation effect belonged to the period before mastery. The body learning to interface with the ambient energy field would sometimes express that learning physically, the same way Shizuku's fox characteristics had emerged on the island. Once sufficient integration was achieved, the body settled. The transformation stopped.
Kurapika had achieved integration. The transformation had not stopped.
He was still turning this over when the phone in his pocket vibrated. A butterfly crossed the gap of light between two broken windows above them, unhurried, going from one side of the building to the other.
He answered the call from Queen Camilla.