Bisky rested her hands in her lap. "A doctor I know told me a story once." The rustle of leaves high above faded as the group shifted their attention toward her. "A young man survived a car accident. After his recovery, he began insisting his parents were impostors. He claimed they looked exactly like his parents, moved exactly like them, and shared the identical voices, but they were not actually them." She raised a single finger. "He was not confused about their identities in general. The confusion only triggered upon visual contact. Over the phone, relying solely on their voices, he was absolutely certain he was speaking to his parents."
Killua's brow furrowed.
Shizuku tilted her head. "Different processing pathways for vision and hearing?"
"Exactly." Bisky extended a second finger. "The crash damaged the specific region of the visual cortex responsible for linking facial recognition to emotional memory. The neural bridge that fires the signal declaring 'I love this face' had been severed. His auditory processing remained perfectly intact. He could hear his mother's voice and experience the appropriate emotional warmth. But looking at her face produced absolute nothingness. She was a stranger."
She lowered her hand.
Liam stared at the dappled sunlight shifting across the dirt. "Capgras syndrome."
"Yes." Bisky looked up into the dense green canopy. "Dopamine. Serotonin. Oxytocin. Endorphins. A negligible volume of brain chemistry and a highly specific pattern of neural connections dictates the difference between looking at your mother and feeling overwhelming love, versus looking at her and feeling absolute apathy. A microscopic lesion in the cerebral cortex. A handful of severed synapses. That is all the universe requires to surgically erase a human being's love for their biological parents." She let out a slow breath. "Does that not strike you as terrifying?"
Killua chewed on the inside of his cheek. "A bit."
Bisky dropped her gaze back to the group. "When I was first training under Netero, a Taoist teacher frequented our circle. He repeated a specific phrase I have turned over in my mind ever since. He claimed all sensory experience is ultimately an illusion. But false illusion, utilized as a practice ground, can still cultivate a true self."
Netero exhaled a short, raspy breath through his nose. "That old man passed away the following year. I remember him well."
Shizuku tapped her chin. "So the cultivation process involves taking the false, constructed self and developing it until it becomes real?"
"That is the trajectory," Liam murmured. "You practice using the illusory self, the one molded and chained by physical biology. Driven by dopamine, serotonin, and the specific neural architecture currently operating the machine. You refine it until the self-consciousness can function entirely independent of that hardware. No physical limitation can touch it. Whatever you are, at that final stage, can no longer be reduced to trace chemicals and firing synapses."
A heavy silence settled over the damp soil.
"That is Pe's exact argument," Liam continued, his voice dropping slightly. "Upload the consciousness into a digital network to completely escape physical constraints. It is the same destination approached from a different path."
"Is it?" Bisky challenged. "If a consciousness is uploaded into a digital infrastructure, it still relies on a material substrate. Electrons. Fiber optics. Processors. It is simply a different variety of physical machinery." She crossed her arms over her chest. "It remains entirely material."
Liam stopped. The realization worked its way through his mind, slow and heavy.
Netero spoke before Liam could articulate the thought.
"Material and consciousness are not opposing categories," Netero said, his voice carrying a dry, resonant weight. "They are two faces of the exact same coin. Yang and yin. Neither can exist in a pure, isolated state without the other. Aura stems directly from the flesh, but if aura lacked a spiritual dimension, what exactly would we be practicing? A Nen practitioner directing their aura toward a specific goal is not merely funneling raw heat or kinetic force. The underlying intention is the core mechanism. Strip away that spiritual attribute, and what remains is mindless output. Mere pressure. It is no longer Nen."
"The yang and yin framework," Liam said. "Which implies..."
"The natural energy accumulating in the environment over millennia," Netero interrupted smoothly, "carries the yang component. The raw, physical power. What it lacks is the yin. The spiritual attribute bleeds away as the life that generated it fades. The physical body rots, the genetic code breaks down, and what lingers in the soil and the air is the raw energy devoid of a soul. It is overwhelmingly yang. Severely lacking in yin."
Bisky nodded. "This explains why the vast majority of Nen users who attempt to draw upon environmental energy can only achieve it under highly specific conditions. Ancient forests. The crushing depths of the ocean. Locations where the ambient concentration is incredibly dense, ensuring the faint, lingering traces of yin are sufficient to latch onto. They are, completely unknowingly, borrowing the diluted spiritual residue of millions of dead things."
"And if that yin attribute were entirely absent," Shizuku added, her eyes tracking the logic flawlessly, "the natural energy would become completely unusable. A human attempting to circulate it would be akin to forcing high-voltage electricity through a block of rubber. A massive, inert force with absolutely nowhere to flow."
Liam stared down at his open palms.
"According to your framework," Liam said, shifting his focus to Netero, "what we are doing should be fundamentally impossible."
"According to that framework," Netero agreed. "Yes."
"And yet." Liam lifted his hands. The dense ambient field surrounding them responded instantly. It rushed inward, circulating through his channels, bending to his silent command. Behind his shoulders, the towering, translucent architecture of the 100-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva materialized out of thin air, woven entirely from natural energy. He held the massive construct for a single heartbeat, then let it dissolve back into the breeze. "Not only am I doing it effortlessly, but you are now doing it as well."
Liam maintained strict eye contact with the old man. "Are we going mad? Is this what a practitioner looks like when the internal yin-yang balance completely fractures?"
"That assumption," Netero replied, entirely unbothered by the display, "relies on the premise that the framework applies to both of us in the exact same manner."
The old man paused, letting the wind rattle the branches above them.
"The baseline I described assumes a human practitioner. A biological entity whose self-consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical vessel that grew it. Neural pathways, chemical balances, the meticulous construction of a body built over decades of simply being alive." Netero slowly turned his head. His dark eyes locked onto Nanika, who stood quietly behind Killua. "But not everyone present fits that specific description."
Killua's spine snapped rigid. His shoulders squared, shifting his weight forward onto the balls of his feet.
"Ease your tension, boy," Netero said, keeping his gaze fixed on the entity. "We encountered a great many of her kind on the Dark Continent. I am not easily alarmed."
Killua's jaw clenched. He did not relax a single muscle.
"My point," Netero continued, turning his attention back to Liam, "is that the ambient natural energy is dangerously yang-dominant. For a standard human practitioner, absorbing this field introduces catastrophic instability. The human spirit desperately needs to maintain its delicate equilibrium. Forcing it to merge with a violently lopsided energy source creates unbearable friction. A rare few can manage a trickle. But a practitioner capable of absorbing it freely, at massive scales, without tearing themselves apart? Their own internal spiritual component would need to be highly irregular. Not balanced in the traditional human sense. They would need a spirit already heavily weighted toward the yang-dominant natural field. Or, hypothetically, a spirit born directly from it."
He flicked his gaze toward Nanika once more.
"A gaseous life form originating from the Dark Continent does not rely on a human neural network. Her self-awareness, whatever form it takes, did not sprout from neurons and dopamine pathways. She is, quite literally, constructed from the very environment she breathes. The natural energy is not a separate tool she wields. It is a continuous extension of her own existence."
Bisky spoke softly, letting the realization settle over the group. "The reason you bypassed the instability and mastered the natural system so rapidly is because your spirit was fundamentally different from the very beginning. Not just distinct from ordinary humans. Distinct from all humans." She paused, her voice barely rising above the rustling leaves. "Your self-awareness was always far less tethered to your physical body than ours. It is more transcendent. It is precisely what the old Taoist teacher would have labeled the true self."
Liam sat in absolute silence.
"This is why you perceive the ambient field without suffering the psychological degradation," Bisky continued. "And why you can flood your channels with a severely imbalanced energy source without breaking. Your very existence is already built upon that exact same imbalance. You are not forcing a foreign substance into a fragile, balanced system. You are a consciousness operating far outside normal biological parameters, seamlessly drawing upon an energy source that shares those exact same parameters."
She cast a brief, sidelong glance at Nanika.
Netero stroked his beard. "Liam. Your unyielding desire to journey to the Dark Continent. Is it truly just a strategic maneuver? Or could it be something deeper? A biological instinct? A calling to return home?"
Liam opened his mouth to reply.
Bisky's fist slammed solidly into his shoulder before the first syllable hit the air.
Liam snapped his mouth shut.
Bisky lowered her hand, casually redirecting her attention toward the tree line.
A profound quiet reclaimed the clearing. Deep within the foliage, a single sparrow chirped, testing the air to see if the immediate danger had passed.
Liam rubbed his shoulder, parsing the logic. For Shizuku, Bisky, and Netero, utilizing the natural system induced a temporary state mimicking the old teacher's concept of the true self. It offered a fleeting, partial liberation from their physical constraints. It was inherently temporary, demanding relentless focus to maintain.
But for Liam, the underlying premise suggested he had occupied that state his entire life.
Which left one glaring inconsistency: if that were true, why was his progression hard-locked at forty-nine percent?
Shizuku, who had been quietly processing the entire exchange with the meticulous attention she afforded any complex mechanism, finally spoke up. "When a practitioner's natural system exceeds the fifty percent threshold, does this temporary true self become a permanent state? Is that the significance of the barrier?"
The sparrow, deciding the clearing was sufficiently safe, fluttered down to rest on a low-hanging branch.
"Surpassing fifty percent," Netero mused, "would likely strip a person of the right to call themselves human. I have occupied this particular flesh and bone for over a century. I have zero interest in renegotiating the terms of my existence."
"Is that attachment merely the physical body desperately trying to preserve its own continuity?" Shizuku pressed. "Pure biological instinct masquerading as a personal preference?"
Netero offered a thin, genuine smile. "Perhaps. Almost certainly, in fact. I do not particularly mind either way."
"Why not?" Shizuku asked. It was a sincere inquiry, completely devoid of judgment.
Bisky interjected before the old man could respond. Her voice carried the weight of someone who had wrestled with the concept for decades, arriving at a conclusion she found deeply satisfying, even while acknowledging its flaws.
"If the self is simply an organized fiction generated by the brain to manage the body, then the real self is the entirety of the vessel. Every individual cell. The genetic code mapping our construction. That code shifts, agonizingly slowly, from generation to generation, molded by the crushing pressure of the world it navigates. That is the literal definition of evolution. From a macro perspective, a species is constantly rewriting its own blueprint. From a micro perspective, every single person becomes someone slightly different as they hoard new experiences. The young and naive slowly harden into the old and rigid. A person's accumulated history is their identity. A self that ceases to change, that stops accruing scars and lessons, that refuses to adapt against new friction..." She offered a small, dismissive shrug. "That is just a fixed procedure. A machine running a loop. Nothing more."
Liam tilted his head. "Is that conclusion also just a biological instinct? Your physical body generating a philosophical justification to remain exactly as it is?"
Bisky's eyes narrowed into a dangerously sharp glare.
Liam immediately raised both hands in surrender before the violence could escalate.
Up in the canopy, a second sparrow fluttered down to join the first.
Liam lowered his hands, letting the damp forest air fill his lungs. The philosophical debates were interesting, but they remained entirely theoretical. The only concrete method of discovering what awaited at one hundred percent was to shatter the threshold and look. He had been stalled at forty-nine percent for weeks. Eventually, the bottleneck would crack under the right pressure. Until that moment arrived, the reality of what existed past the barrier remained an open question.
He looked forward to finding the answer.