The darkness inside the tree was not the darkness of night or the absence of light. It was the darkness of something possessing actual physical weight, a suffocating mass pressing inward from every conceivable angle. The sky and the ground shared the exact same texture: heavy, dim, and impossibly vast. The horizon, if one even existed, lay too far away to distinguish.
Liam inhaled slowly.
The natural energy here was staggering. It was thick, chaotic, and entirely alien compared to the thin, ambient field of the outside world. Since the island, he had been carefully siphoning environmental energy, finding it sparse and demanding extreme patience. This was the absolute inversion: the natural energy crushed against his skin from every direction, frantic, concentrated, aggressively seeking any open channel to flood. His internal percentage, hard-locked at 49.9% for weeks, ticked upward with his very first breath.
He shifted his gaze, scanning the gloom for Shizuku and Bisky.
The pocket space appeared to be physically distributing them based on their degree of integration with the natural field. He could track their specific locations: Bisky several dozen yards behind him, and Shizuku significantly further back. The deeper a practitioner's natural system percentage, the harder the environment dragged them toward its absolute center.
Far in the distance, a massive shape shifted.
He moved toward the disturbance, his mind arriving at the correct conclusion a fraction of a second too late to intercept the collision. It was not Bisky's King Kong form, but something else entirely. The creature was colossal and heavily segmented, its thick carapace bearing the distinct texture of something buried deep underground for centuries. It moved with a slow, grinding certainty, completely devoid of speed because it relied entirely on overwhelming patience. Its massive body coiled tightly around Bisky, who was currently wrestling with the immediate problem of not being crushed into paste.
He heard the sharp, sickening crack of bones snapping under the pressure.
Bisky's natural energy output, once she dropped all pretense of restraint, was anything but modest. The 100-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva erupted from the natural energy directly behind her the instant she shattered the creature's suffocating grip. It was not Netero's flawless, mathematically precise iteration, but a functional, terrifyingly brutal replica boasting three thousand arms and a relentless, sweeping sequence of crushing palms. The colossal segmented beast disintegrated under the barrage. The shattered carapace rained down onto the dark wasteland, the severed pieces twitching violently against the dirt.
"That is what took my arm last time," Bisky stated, her boots hitting the ground as she surveyed the twitching fragments. Her voice lacked any trace of panic. She sounded entirely grounded, processing the return of missing tactical data.
She turned her head, catching Liam's expression.
The severed chunks of the massive caterpillar were actively crawling across the dirt, dragged along by thin, pulsing threads of dark energy anchoring each fragment directly to Bisky's flesh. The lines pulled tight, as though the shattered beast intended to violently reassemble itself inside her body rather than returning to its original form.
She felt the shift the exact moment she saw the realization hit Liam's face. The magnetic pull existed entirely independent of the creature. It was a slow, crushing pressure radiating from deep within the pocket space, completely indifferent to the caterpillar's destruction. The space had merely used the beast as a temporary delivery vehicle, not the source.
Directly behind Liam, the beetle materialized.
It tore out of the darkest section of the wasteland. Its massive pincers, easily the width of a standard doorframe, snapped shut with the cold, mechanical certainty of an entity deployed specifically to capture, not hunt. The jaws clamped down hard, meeting Liam's pre-emptively formed aura shell. The shaped barrier absorbed the devastating kinetic impact just before the pincers breached his skin.
Liam instantly activated the Moon Mark.
"Shizuku. Monsters?"
"Wolves," she replied. "They should not be an issue." Her voice filtered through the mark, carrying her usual flat, detached tone. "Where are we, exactly?"
The space was segregating them by their depth of natural integration. Bisky, sitting at 41%, was dragged significantly deeper than Shizuku's roughly 20%. Liam, at 49.9%, was pulled the furthest. Whatever lurked at the absolute center of this void had weaponized its gravitational field around that exact variable.
He rapidly cross-referenced Bisky's initial encounter. During the Greed Island dice scatter, her natural system integration had been an absolute zero. The space had violently rejected her, deploying a creature to physically expel her while amputating her arm in the process. The amputation wasn't an act of malice; it was the environment's baseline physical reaction to an intruder lacking the natural energy required to trigger its gravitational pull. A total absence of natural energy served as the only viable protection against this specific domain.
He mentally filed the revelation under intelligence that would have been vastly more useful thirty seconds prior.
The towering natural energy Guanyin slammed its massive palms down onto the beetle from above. The pincers shattered. Liam dropped free, his boots hitting the dirt as he snapped his gaze toward the center of the void.
He had been staring at the shape since he arrived without comprehending the visual data. The structure was so impossibly massive it registered to his brain as a geographic feature rather than an object. As he closed the distance and the details finally sharpened, he understood why.
It was a hand.
Its scale defied reason. Five colossal fingers stretched upward, each one easily capable of spanning an entire valley. It breached the dark wasteland, reaching toward the suffocating sky with the terrifying, absolute stillness of something that had been growing for millennia without the slightest need to hurry. Its sheer size bypassed the primal fear generated by a massive predator, instilling instead the profound, crushing awe of standing at the base of a towering mountain. It was the exact sensation an ant must experience staring up at a human boot.
The colossal hand was constructed entirely of the dead.
It was not a metaphor. It was not a Conjured Nen construct. The horrifying architecture revealed itself at close range: thousands upon thousands of skeletal forms, fused and compressed into thick, shifting layers. Some skeletons bore standard human proportions, while others boasted terrifying, alien physiology—massive horns, elongated tailbones, and jagged structural remnants belonging to entities birthed in the nightmare ecosystem of the Dark Continent. Every single refugee who had failed to cross the threshold had been anchored to this endpoint for fifteen hundred years. They were all still here, their accumulated spiritual residue hopelessly concentrated within this singular domain rather than bleeding off into the global ambient field.
This was the true burial site. This was what the ancient misery had mutated into.
Swarming the intermediate zone between their current position and the base of the colossal hand, the monstrous entities grew denser, larger, and far more grotesque. Several of the beasts remained perfectly still, their glowing eyes fixed entirely on the intruders, evaluating the fresh meat with cold, calculating assessment rather than mindless hunger.
Bisky closed the distance, coming to a halt directly beside Liam's shoulder, her eyes locked on the impossible structure.
"Jingyang," she murmured.
"Mm."
"I am being pulled."
"I know. So am I."
The sensation lacked violence. It operated exactly like gravity: a heavy, constant, unyielding pressure entirely indifferent to their resistance. The closer they drifted toward the colossal hand, the more aggressively the malevolent natural energy crushed inward, forcefully augmenting their internal absorption regardless of their actual physical capacity. Their natural system percentage no longer felt like a metric they controlled. It felt like a lethal invitation accepted entirely against their will.
Bisky unleashed two dozen natural energy chainsaws simultaneously, perfectly replicating Shizuku's established Hatsu to sever the dark threads still anchoring the shattered caterpillar to her flesh. The dark lines snapped. Instantly, fresh threads materialized from the gloom further out, surging toward her skin.
Far behind them, Shizuku finally breached the gloom. She had successfully dismantled the wolf pack and was advancing with slow, deliberate steps, marching directly toward the epicenter because retreating was simply not a physical option.
Liam focused his aura, reaching inward for Jade.
The sleeve construct rapidly assembled in his open palm. The dense aura took the familiar shape of the wide-sleeved figure, the impassive jade mask staring blankly above the flowing robes. He leveled his hand toward Bisky and Shizuku. If he could drag both women into the dimensional sleeve before the crushing gravitational pull overpowered them, they would remain safely locked outside of time and this pocket space's influence until he could tear open an exit.
Then the colossal hand twitched.
It pulled.
The movement possessed the terrifying, absolute finality of an entity that had waited centuries for a highly specific variable, and that variable had finally arrived. The unfathomable mass of compressed natural energy saturating the dark space—every single strand of yin-heavy, ancient misery hoarded over fifteen hundred years—violently converged upon the colossal hand in a single, catastrophic sweep.
The sleeve construct hovered in Liam's palm, entirely unformed, when the massive wave of energy slammed into his chest and blew past him to engulf Bisky and Shizuku.
He was ripped upward into the void.
A suffocating, warm light swallowed him.
He was reduced to an infant floating within it. The sensation bypassed physical warmth, manifesting instead as the absolute cessation of all sensory input. No friction against his skin. No gravity anchoring his bones. No discernible boundary separating his own flesh from the endless, glowing void. Every single memory, trait, and experience that comprised his identity still existed, but they drifted within the light like sugar dissolving in boiling water. The raw components remained, but the structure holding them together was rapidly unwinding.
Love.
Hate.
The concepts floated through his unraveling consciousness, entirely disconnected from any actual feeling. He recognized the words, understanding they held profound significance, but he could no longer recall what they actually meant or who they applied to.
Stop thinking.
Natural System: 50%.
A faint, lingering echo suggested he had a critical objective to complete.
Natural System: 52%. 53%.
There were people. Several people. They were supposed to be standing in a highly specific location.
Natural System: 60%.
The fleeting thoughts failed to anchor. The warm, suffocating light felt incredibly soothing. Surrendering to the dissolution offered the path of absolute least resistance, presenting the only remaining choice that carried any actual weight.
Natural System: 71%. 75%.
A jagged obstruction snagged the unwinding thread of his mind.
It was not a concrete memory or a coherent thought. It was a raw, deeply buried emotion. It felt incredibly ancient, carrying the distinct texture of something locked away and deliberately ignored for a very long time. It mirrored the agonizing shape of deep regret—the suffocating weight of something left entirely unfinished, words swallowed and actions abandoned in the world he had occupied before waking up in a mass grave. He could not isolate the specific details. He could only feel the jagged edges tearing at his chest.
Natural System: 80%. 87%.
The buried regret actively blocked the final dissolution. It acted as a cruel, specific anchor, violently forcing a small fraction of his consciousness to remain intact while the rest of his identity begged to completely dissolve into the light.
Natural System: 99%.
Why was his soul agonizing over a life he had lived on a planet completely absent from this reality, in a timeline he could no longer even access? The logic failed entirely. He had existed in the Hunter World for over two decades. He had meticulously forged a life far more valuable and complex than the scattered fragments of his previous existence. He had no idea what the lingering regret demanded, or how to possibly satisfy it.
Natural System: 99.9%.
The jagged thorn remained buried deep in his chest, refusing to yield.
He hung suspended at 99.9%. The final fraction of his integration remained agonizingly incomplete, tethered by a ghost he could not name, while the warm, suffocating light waited with absolute, terrifying patience.
He forced his eyes open.
Suspended high above the dark wasteland, trapped within the colossal palm forged from the ancient dead, two other figures drifted in the gloom. Both Bisky and Shizuku remained perfectly still, their bodies radiating the distinct, terrifying aura of entities nearing total assimilation. The suffocating dark energy saturating the hand was actively breaking them down, and at the current rate of decay, the process would reach absolute completion in a matter of minutes.
He could not let that happen.
He desperately searched the void for an anchor.
Deep within the suffocating darkness, a microscopic point of light flickered.
He dragged his consciousness toward it.
A pentagram. Rose-gold. Intensely familiar.
He forced his mind against the glowing mark, and a sudden, violent rush of data slammed into his unraveling brain. Shizuku. Seventeen years of observing her navigate the world, understanding the exact tilt of her head, decoding her micro-expressions, and recognizing precisely why her existence held immense value. The pentagram flared violently against his touch, and the jagged pieces of his own name snapped back into place.
It was not enough to break the pull.
He stretched his awareness further into the dark.
Another glowing pentagram flickered into existence. Then another. The wounded residents huddled on the cots inside the Meteor City church. The hundreds of desperate people he had coated in flying star bubbles while Menchi stood in the heavy wooden doorway, offering a silent nod of approval. Nameless faces, strangers completely ignorant of his identity, all permanently tethered to his soul by the faint, rose-gold marks he had scattered into the ambient field.
He slammed his consciousness against every single mark. Each contact violently injected a fragmented memory back into his dissolving mind—a face, the smell of a specific room, the distinct weight of a fleeting presence. Thousands of microscopic tethers anchoring a man who had spent two decades building a life within a world entirely worth protecting.
Still not enough. He could feel the crushing pressure of the margin closing in.
Not enough.
Thousands of miles away, on the sweeping balcony of the Kakin Royal Palace, the queen stared down at her open palm.
She had felt the violent, unnatural shift through the natural system the exact fraction of a second the colossal hand began its sweep, feeling the connection snap taut like a heavy iron chain. The Moon Mark she carried kept Liam's anchor accessible, but the current output was drastically insufficient to halt his dissolution. The situation did not require overwhelming strength. It required overwhelming numbers.
She thrust her palm toward the sky and released the floodgate.
The natural energy erupted from her skin in a blinding, vertical streak, hitting its apex high above the palace before violently fracturing. The single beam shattered into hundreds of individual glowing arcs, each one carrying a microscopic thread of the exact mark Liam had planted on her during the Kakin operation. The arcs rained down upon the sprawling palace complex. The initial impacts produced tiny, brilliant flashes of rose-gold light as the marks forcefully anchored into the nearest guards and servants. The infected hosts immediately surged toward the closest unmarked individuals. The marks propagated like a violent, unstoppable plague, completely bypassing a single point of origin, exploding outward from hundreds of new vectors simultaneously.
The rose-gold light flooded the royal palace corridors. It bled into the bustling city streets. It swept through the crowded open-air markets and the dense residential blocks, swallowing the capital in a sprawling, interconnected web of glowing pentagrams.
Rose-gold light flared at every single intersection.
Deep within the colossal, dark palm inside the ancient tree, thousands of new, brilliant points of light erupted into existence. They flooded his consciousness from a direction he hadn't been searching, originating from a highly familiar continent. The new anchors were still rapidly multiplying as he desperately slammed his mind against them.
Natural System: 99.9%.
He locked his consciousness around the number, halting the progression entirely.
He snapped his eyes fully open.
He floated in the center of the colossal palm, entirely submerged in the suffocating warm light, locked at 99.9% integration. The final fraction of his identity remained stubbornly intact, heavily anchored by the staggering, accumulated weight of every single person he had ever marked, supported by every microscopic connection that defined his existence in this world. The jagged, ancient thorn of regret still bled in his chest. He was completely, undeniably himself.
He stared through the gloom at the dormant bodies of Bisky and Shizuku. He looked up at the unfathomable mass of ancient, suffocating darkness looming above them, then down at the thousands of brilliant, rose-gold anchors still flooding his mind from Kakin. Finally, he focused entirely on the single, microscopic fraction separating his existence from total, irreversible dissolution.
He actively refused to close the gap.
He immediately began analyzing the exact physics required to drag everyone back out.