The chimera ant in the medical cabinet was attempting to sit up when its horn hit the glass.
It stopped. Considered its horn. Considered the glass. Reconsidered the sitting-up plan.
Gel crossed the room and pressed the release switch. The cabinet door opened with a soft hiss.
"This specimen was under full anesthesia," she said. "It shouldn't be able to move at all." She looked at the ant, then at the ceiling, then back at the ant. "How are you doing that?"
"Nen," said the rhino-type chimera ant, in a voice that was not a chimera ant's voice.
It climbed out of the cabinet and landed on the floor with the particular heaviness of a body that had not yet fully negotiated with gravity in its current configuration. It looked at its own hands with the detached interest of someone inspecting borrowed tools.
"Ignore the operations side of things," said the rhino-type chimera ant.
"Does your operations side include setting up surveillance in my research facility?" Cheadle said, with the precise flatness she used for questions she already knew the answer to.
The chimera ant's face arranged itself into what it probably thought was a disarming smile. "I have always been curious. Is the dog nose a costume accessory or the genuine article?"
Netero twisted his beard.
"Every time one of these ants activates its Star Mark to trigger a healing pulse," he said, "Liam feels it. He happened to sense that this facility had marked ants on the premises, and that I was here. So he found one and moved in." He looked at the rhino-type chimera ant with the mild approval he reserved for things he found professionally interesting. "Old ginger is spicier."
The chimera ant turned to him. "Since you're here, President, I have something that might interest you. I call it an attunement technique. The effect is similar to forcing open a person's aura gates, except the energy that flows through those gates doesn't come from the body itself. It comes from outside." A pause. "You're the first test subject. Honorary position."
Netero looked at the small vial Gel was holding, the one she had brought out during their earlier conversation. He picked it up and turned it in his fingers.
"It sounds mysterious," he said.
"You'll understand it better firsthand than I can explain it. The question is how long it takes to settle in the new body." The chimera ant looked at its own arms again. "With this one, I need to let it adjust before the attunement can work properly. Could be a minute. Could be a few days."
Cheadle said: "How long, more precisely?"
"Somewhere between one minute and four days. Probably not four days."
Cheadle wrote something down.
Netero set the vial down and stood, the specific unhurried movement of someone who has already decided on his next action and is simply connecting the current moment to it. "You think you can educate me, young devil. If you were born a hundred and fifty years earlier, perhaps you'd have something to show me."
"If the Ant King turns out to be more than you bargained for," the chimera ant called after him, cheerfully, as Netero moved toward the door, "I'm always available for a free upgrade, President."
He had reached the corridor.
The invisible hand arrived from somewhere behind him, carrying the specific force signature of a technique that Liam had seen deployed exactly once and had been thinking about ever since. It hit the possessed chimera ant across the room and into the wall. The wall developed a complex arrangement of cracks that radiated outward from the impact point in a pattern that Gel studied with the focused attention of someone updating their personal reference data.
Netero's footsteps continued down the corridor without pausing.
Cheadle looked at the chimera ant, which was now mostly inside the wall. "Has the attunement process started?"
A hand emerged from the cracked plaster. It gave a thumbs up.
From the moment he had moved into the chimera ant, Liam had been quietly drawing in natural energy. The concentration in the research facility was thin, far below what Misu Mountain had offered or what Wu Da's island had made available. Thin was not the same as absent.
He absorbed and noted, without much surprise, that the process ran cleanly. The chimera ant's body accepted the natural energy without resistance, as if its structure had been designed to receive it. He had suspected this might be true of Dark Continent-origin creatures. Everything about the environment the ants had come from implied higher ambient concentrations of natural energy than the known world carried. Their biology might simply be built around the assumption that this energy was available.
He filed the observation for later and continued absorbing.
At the pavilion on Misu Mountain, Liam opened his eyes.
The thing he had been thinking about in the interval between arriving at Gel's facility and returning fully to his own body was not Wu Da, as he had half expected, but Nanika. The entity that lived alongside Alluka in the Zoldyck household. The one that granted wishes without limit and collected equal debts in return, whose power operated on a scale that no conventional Nen system fully accounted for. He had been in the same room with Nanika and had understood, at the time, that what he was dealing with was something outside the framework he had been operating with.
He had not known, then, what natural energy was. He had not been able to feel it, let alone read its structure in another person. If Nanika's ability drew on natural energy rather than individual aura, he would not have recognized it. He still could not say with any certainty. But the possibility sat in the back of his mind with the particular persistence of things that were probably relevant.
He checked the internal panel.
Total aura: 230,000.
Death energy inventory: 0.
He held his hands in front of him, closed them, opened them. His aura was full in a way it had never been, a complete reservoir without sediment, without the specific cold weight that had been sitting in his chest since the chimera ant attacks. He had not realized how much of his baseline had been occupied by the presence of that backlog until it was gone.
Shizuku was sitting in the pavilion with a book on her lap, watching him with the patient attention she applied to things she was waiting for.
"Done?" she said.
"Done." He glanced at the panel again. "Death energy: zero. Total aura: two hundred and thirty thousand."
She put the book down. "And the natural system?"
"Forty-nine percent."
Her eyebrows moved upward. "Almost half. That's roughly a hundred and ten thousand natural energy units available."
"The number doesn't translate directly," Liam said. He walked out of the pavilion and his aura shifted under his feet, the transmutation that lifted him onto the water's surface. The pond spread out around him, still and clear. "The environmental concentration here is too low. I can draw on a hundred and ten thousand units in theory, but I can't draw them all at once from an environment this thin. The replenishment rate can't keep up with the demand if I try to use the full allocation simultaneously."
He walked to the center of the pond.
The air around him began to change. Shizuku narrowed her eyes, which helped nothing, and then redirected a thread of natural energy through her perception. The image resolved.
The technique built itself behind Liam's back, constructing from natural energy the way weather constructs from pressure. A shape. An enormous shape. Hands emerging from a central body, dozens of them, each one enormous, each one moving with the deliberate coordination of something that had not been assembled but had simply become present. The scale of it dwarfed the mountain. It occupied the sky above the pond with the patient, total completeness of something that had always been there and was simply now visible.
The 100-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva, assembled entirely from natural energy, raised its palms and struck.
The shockwave went sideways. The water in the pond flattened in rings, rippled, flattened again. The flower beds along the bank registered the disturbance and registered it again. The strike landed on nothing, poured itself into open air, and the air that received it simply became louder than air usually was for a moment.
Then Liam brought his hands together.
The Guanyin's face changed. Its mouth opened wide, and everything that had been distributed across its hundred hands gathered toward a single point, compressed, and went straight up. A column of natural energy rising into the clear mountain sky, Zero Hand in the version that natural energy made possible, broader than Netero's original by a factor that Liam had not yet bothered to calculate precisely.
He watched it dissipate above the treeline. He wondered, not for the first time, whether it would register against the Ant King's aura. He did not arrive at a satisfying answer.
The environmental shift had begun while he was still forming the technique. He noticed it as the Guanyin dissipated: the water in the pond had gone gray and turbid. The flower beds along the bank had wilted to dry stems. Three trees near the pavilion had shed their leaves in the past two minutes.
He stopped absorbing. Stepped back to shore. The natural energy in his body settled to 9% and held there as the ambient field around him began, slowly, to recover.
Shizuku looked at the dead flower beds with the expression she wore when she was thinking about something from an angle other people might miss.
"That effect," she said. "If you applied it deliberately, in the right environment, it would function like a plague."
Liam considered the wilted stems. "That's somewhat hurtful to contemplate."
"Effective, though."
He stepped back into the pavilion and sat down. The natural energy rebuilt itself in his system as the mountain's ambient field replenished, slower than it had depleted.
"Forty-nine percent," Shizuku said. "What happens at fifty?"
"I don't know." He looked at the water, which was beginning to clear. "Fifty is not where I am. Forty-nine point nine is where I am. I can feel the threshold from here, the way you can feel the top of a slope when you're one step away from it. Close enough to read the shape of it. Not close enough to know what's on the other side."
Shizuku thought about this.
"After the crest," she said, "will it be smooth going?"
"I don't know that either." Liam leaned back and looked at the sky where the Zero Hand had been. "Something will change. I'm certain of that much. Something fundamental."