Liam's training plan crystallized with brutal clarity:
Primary focus: Manipulation. Home advantage. 100% efficiency.
Secondary focus: Emission. Adjacent category. 80% efficiency. Respectable returns.
Tertiary focus: Enhancement. Two steps away. 60% efficiency. Garbage math but better than nothing.
Ignore completely: Specialization. 0% efficiency. Genetically locked. Not happening.
Work smarter, not harder. Focus the build.
He kept cycling Ten and Zetsu, getting faster, smoother. The transitions felt less like manual gear-shifting and more like breathing.
This isn't hard. Why did I think this would be hard?
Confidence growing, Liam tried the next technique.
Gyo.
Not one of the Four Major Principles—more like a DLC ability unlocked after mastering the basics. The concept was simple: concentrate aura in a specific body part.
Most common use: eyes.
Channel aura into your eyeballs, and suddenly you could see aura. Other people's Nen. Invisible attacks. The whole supernatural layer of reality normies couldn't perceive.
X-ray vision but for magic. manga rules.
Liam focused. Felt his aura shift. Pulled it from his arms, legs, torso. Condensed it into his eye sockets.
The world sharpened.
He looked down. Saw his own aura coating—thin white gas wrapping his body. Looked at the forest. His vision had enhanced. Details jumped into focus. Individual leaves fifty meters away. Bark texture. A beetle crawling on a branch.
He turned to Lumos.
The tiger lounged in the shade. From ten meters away, Liam could count individual hairs on the beast's face.
Holy shit. This is basically free prescription glasses.
Less than a minute to learn. Just like Ten. Just like Zetsu.
Either these basics are genuinely easy, or I have idiot savant syndrome for Nen.
Given my luck, probably both.
Time for the hard part.
Ren. Or more accurately, Ken—maintaining maximum Ren output continuously.
The concept: open every aura node in your body. Release at maximum power. Maintain indefinitely.
The reality: this is going to suck.
Liam took a deep breath. Opened the floodgates. Let his aura explode outward at full throttle.
It felt like sprinting uphill. Muscles burning. Lungs screaming. Every cell in his body protesting the sustained effort.
Ten is jogging. Ken is an all-out sprint. Except you can't stop.
He gritted his teeth. Started counting.
One. Two. Three. Four—
Focus. Breathe. Don't pass out.
His aura flickered at sixty seconds. Started to sputter like a dying lightbulb.
Seventy seconds. Sweat poured down his face. The aura shell around him began shrinking.
Eighty seconds. His whole body ached. Muscles cramping. Aura barely covering his skin.
"Ninety-seven... ninety-eight... ninety-nine..."
His aura guttered. Two weak flames struggling against wind.
Then: nothing.
Thud.
Liam collapsed. Lay flat on his back. Gasping like a landed fish.
"That's... it..." He stared at blue sky through tree branches. "My total aura... is only... one hundred..."
One. Hundred.
The numbers from the manga scrolled through his oxygen-deprived brain:
Gon and Killua after Greed Island: ~3,000 aura. Could maintain Ken for 55 minutes. Considered competent mid-tier Nen users.
Gon after Bisky's training: 21,500 aura. Could theoretically maintain Ken for 6 hours. Became a powerhouse.
Bisky's "minimum to not die immediately": 1,800 aura. Equivalent to 30 minutes of Ken. Below that, any serious Nen user could kill you through raw stat advantage.
Liam's current total: 100 aura.
Could maintain Ken for 100 seconds.
Less than two minutes.
I'm not even on the chart. I'm below tutorial-level.
The math got worse.
Maximum Ken output ran at about 1/12th of total aura. Biological limitation. You couldn't dump 100% of your stamina into one sprint—the human body didn't work that way.
So Liam's max Ken output: ~8-9 aura.
And since he was Manipulation-type, his defensive Ken—pure Enhancement territory—only hit 60% efficiency.
Actual effective defense: ~5 aura.
Gon at his weakest could output 250+ aura in Ken. I'm outputting 5.
I'm fifty times weaker than the protagonist at his tutorial phase.
This is fine. Everything is fine.
Lumos's face appeared above him. The tiger nuzzled Liam's cheek. Concerned.
"I'm not dead." Liam managed a smile. Scratched behind the tiger's ear. "Just resting. And contemplating my insignificance."
He lay there for ten minutes. The Star Mark worked overtime, flushing fatigue toxins, repairing micro-tears in his muscles, restoring his aura production.
Ten minutes to recover from two minutes of exertion. That's a 5:1 ratio.
Without the Star Mark healing, it'd be what? Hours? Days?
And if I had Bisky's Krueger Piano Massage, I could cut that recovery to minutes. Train all day. Exponential gains.
Liam sat up. Wiped his face. "Alright. New goal. Small, achievable, totally reasonable."
He looked at his hands. At the thin aura coating barely visible even with Gyo active.
"Increase total aura to one thousand."
From 100 to 1,000. Only a 10x multiplier. Gon did a 7x jump in one month with Bisky's help.
I can do this. Probably. Maybe.
Definitely going to suck.
Liam stood. Took another deep breath. Released his aura at maximum output.
The Ken shell formed. Flickering. Unstable. Pathetic.
He started counting again.
One. Two. Three—
Kakin Empire. Royal Palace. Azian Continent.
First Prince Benjamin Hui Guo Rou stared at his palm.
A new pentagram glowed there. Rose-gold. Freshly formed.
It had appeared last night. While he slept. Burned into existence without warning.
Each star represented a soldier under his command. Each one bound by his Hatsu—Benjamin Baton—to bequeath their Nen abilities to him upon death.
This star belonged to Musse.
Dead.
Benjamin's expression remained neutral. Carved from stone. A prince didn't show emotion over acceptable losses.
But Musse had been good. Competent. Loyal. One of his top twenty operatives.
The woman and her bastard are more dangerous than anticipated.
He picked up the phone on his desk. One call. His voice flat, inflectionless.
"Send Babimyna over."
[Benjamin Batom = When a Nen user who has sworn fealty to Benjamin dies, the First Prince receives their Nen ability. For him to inherit the ability, the Nen user must have graduated from Kakin's Royal Military Academy and be part of Benjamin's private army. The ability manifests on the palm of his right hand as pentagram.]