The Path of Training

"All right."

Between the five-year-old boy's small palms, a ball of white light invisible to the naked eye condensed.

Then, like flowing water, the white light wrapped around his slender arms from his hands, swept down over his shoulders, torso, legs, and feet, and rose to envelop his head...

This white light was, naturally, Aura.

Strictly speaking, the Aura had been enveloping the boy's body from the start. It was only because he had begun to sense its existence more vividly in his mind that it seemed to clearly "appear" around him.

Everyone possessed life energy—Aura. Ordinary people simply allowed it to leak away from the tops of their heads.

The first step in Nen Ability training was to stop that leakage. Gathering and solidifying the Aura naturally escaping from one's body was one of the Four Great Principles of Nen Ability training: "Ten."

Ten: wrapping Aura around the body. A rather direct summary of its essence.

Jing Yang estimated that, by feel, he had mastered Ten within a minute.

For someone like him, who could already skillfully use Nen Abilities, taking a full minute might actually have been slow.

He looked up. The noon sun was truly scorching.

This was the first day he had spent in the Hunter World, and he had not expected it to be this hot. Considering that the newspaper he had found aboard the ship yesterday was dated late November, he might be somewhere near the tropics—or at least definitely farther south than the Kakin Kingdom...

Jing Yang wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was currently training alone in a clearing within the woods. Nearby, Wu Er—the huge tiger covered in pale moon-white fur without a single visible stripe—lay on the ground, staring at him without blinking. Perhaps out of some feline curiosity, he could not quite understand what Jing Yang was doing.

As for the Wild Wolf, Jing Yang had already sent it out to carry out an order.

He had ridden Wu Er for half a day without encountering a single person, nor had he found any villages or towns. He had no idea whether this place was simply enormous or whether he had merely gotten lost.

Not wanting to waste his efforts, Jing Yang gave up blindly traveling once the temperature began to rise.

Using materials from the forest, he made several simple bird traps with snacks such as biscuit crumbs as bait and set them up at several spots nearby. He then gave the Wild Wolf a manipulation command, ordering it to patrol continuously between the traps. The moment it found that one had caught a bird, it was to immediately scratch its own leg with its claws.

The Star Mark on the Wild Wolf's body would immediately activate to heal it once it was injured. And once the Star Mark fully activated, it was like an old QQ message window suddenly coughing in the background, alerting Jing Yang.

Meanwhile, Jing Yang began training his Nen Abilities where he stood.

After spending a minute mastering Ten, Jing Yang immediately moved on to the next principle: "Zetsu."

As its name implied, Zetsu was similar to "erasing one's energy signature" in Dragon Ball. A Nen User actively closed every Aura Node in their body, completely sealing their Aura inside. This could utterly erase one's presence and prevent enemies from detecting them, but at the same time, it left one completely defenseless. It was extremely dangerous.

Therefore, being able to use Zetsu skillfully and switch rapidly between Zetsu and Ten was also an important measure of one's training results.

It was said that powerful Nen Users could maintain Ten even while sleeping, enter Zetsu to erase their presence, then return to normal in less than a second.

The Four Great Principles of Nen Ability training were: Ten, Zetsu, Ren, and Hatsu.

Hatsu referred to the various derived techniques of Nen Abilities, such as Jing Yang's own Manipulator Nen Ability, Song of the Earth. Jing Yang considered himself fairly proficient with his techniques. What he lacked most now was a solid foundation and a greater total volume of Nen aura, so for the time being, he focused his training on the latter.

As for Ren, the remaining principle among the Four Great Principles, it was essentially releasing one's Aura at maximum output—like the state in Dragon Ball where fighters shouted as they powered up in battle.

Put simply, the essence of the Four Great Principles came down to one core: how to use Aura.

Jing Yang calmed himself and repeatedly switched between Ten and Zetsu, varying the duration each time... He knew that his current total Aura was limited. If he trained Ren, he would probably collapse from exhaustion in less than a minute or two, delaying his other training. So for now, he saved Ren for the end of each training session.

As a transmigrator, his greatest advantage was his familiarity with the various rules of this world. Jing Yang knew perfectly well many pieces of knowledge and lessons that were relatively secret to most people in this world, passed down only between renowned masters and outstanding disciples.

Even training alone, he could make the right plans. At the very least, he would not go wrong in the broad direction.

What did it mean to go wrong in the broad direction?

Nen Abilities in the Hunter World were divided into six major types: Manipulator → Emitter → Enhancer → Transmuter → Conjurer → Specialist → Manipulator, forming a hexagon connected end to end.

And every Nen User had their own affiliated type.

Likewise, under normal circumstances, each Nen User could only achieve 100% efficiency and effectiveness in training their own type. Training in other types often yielded half the result with twice the effort, or even less.

If someone knew nothing about this principle, which was practically a law of physiology, and poured enormous effort and misguided training methods into painstakingly studying a type fundamentally different from—or even completely opposite to—their own, it would not merely cost them several times more time and effort. More absurdly, even after spending all that extra time and effort, the final result would still be far weaker than the power a Nen User naturally belonging to that type could wield.

Taking Jing Yang himself as an example, he was a Manipulator. His training efficiency—or rather, his upper limits—for the six major types were:

Manipulator 100% → Emitter 80% → Enhancer 60% → Transmuter 40% → Conjurer 60% → Specialist 0% → Manipulator 100%

(Specialists were relatively unique and had no fixed pattern, so they were all treated as 0%.)

In other words, if Jing Yang and another Transmuter began training the same Transmuter Nen Ability at the same time, and they possessed equal talent, Jing Yang would have to put in more than twice the effort to master it. And in the end, the power of that identical ability would be at most 40% of the other person's—purely a case of exhausting himself for no reward.

Based on this principle, Shingen-ryu, led by Hunter Association Chairman Netero, proposed a "mountain"-shaped training philosophy. In one's Nen Ability training, one's primary type should be the main focus, while the two adjacent secondary types served as support. Though they required extra effort for techniques with diminished effectiveness, they could still greatly enrich one's tactical reserves and diversify one's combat style, significantly increasing one's odds of victory in real combat.

Thus, Manipulators like Jing Yang and ordinary Conjurers were at a slight disadvantage. Both types bordered Specialist, which normally could not be independently developed or trained at all. Only those born as Specialists, or those who underwent major changes and mutated into Specialists, could train it... It was as though they had been born missing an arm.

All in all, once a person's Nen Ability affinity was determined, their future training path was determined along with it.