Before the Threshold

The March chill had yet to leave Tower City. Rain had washed the paving stones bright, and the locust trees at the street corners dripped with dampness.

Ryan sat by a window on the fourth floor of the east wing of the municipal library. Spread out before him was an old book—<Old City Hunter Gazette: Collected Records of Boundary Missions>.

The cover paper had yellowed, the page corners curled, and the typeface looked dated, yet its contents made his eyes gleam.

In those pages, he encountered "real hunter missions" for the first time: some had stumbled into traps in ruins due to incomplete information; some had misjudged friend-or-foe signals and gotten teammates badly injured; some had known the enemy was powerful, yet escaped in the end through precise judgment.

None of them had been about "winning beautifully."

They had been about "surviving."

That was exactly what he wanted to learn.

Ever since the fight in which he subdued the thug at the grocery store, an inescapable shadow had settled in his heart:

What if the bag of lime had not happened to be there? What if the other man had carried a knife instead of a club? What if... he had been a Nen Ability user?

It was not that he lacked confidence. He was simply clearheaded.

No matter how great one's strength was, it could not handle the "unknown" and the "unstable." Strategy could.

From that day on, besides his daily training and meditation, he added a new item to his schedule: mission case analysis × tactical model simulations.

He wrote this section into his personal training notebook and named it:

[Tactical Cognition Growth System · TCS]

Every evening, he screened useful cases from the public databases on hunter websites, oddity columns in city newspapers, and the library's hunter anecdote archives, then organized them as follows:

[Mission ID: HX-019]

Mission Type: Ruin investigation × target of hunt unknown

Cause of Failure: After entering the ancient well area, the team failed to set guide markers, lost their coordinate chain, and ultimately went missing.

Key Reflection:

Ignoring "path retraceability" was a severe beginner's mistake.

Behavioral anchors should be set during operations, allowing coordinates to be quickly reestablished if one became disoriented.

Extended Training:

→ Set a "marker axis" in the simulated training ground and return by the original route within five minutes to test spatial awareness accuracy.

[Mission ID: UR-103]

Type: Urban interception mission

Method of Success: The hunter used cement pipes in an abandoned building to mislead the enemy with sound sources, causing the enemy to run into a trap.

Tactical Key:

When the disparity in strength was vast, "misdirected paths × spatial construction" was the core of increasing one's odds of victory.

Corresponding Training Module Expansion:

→ Stack tires and pipes to create a simulated "echo field," training perception for exploiting auditory illusions.

He even sketched possible "enemy behavior prediction models" for the missions: Which enemies would pursue recklessly? Which would pause? Which would probe? Which could be provoked? Which would turn one's own tactics back against them?

For every type of personality, he established a minimum response template—

"Assess the enemy type in three seconds; devise a dispersal strategy in five."

One day, his mother pushed open the door and found him scribbling and drawing under the bedside lamp again. She asked softly, "You're already eleven. Shouldn't you be a little more playful?"

Without looking up, he merely answered, "I'm reading stories."

"What kind of story needs you to write so much?"

"A story about... how to win." He smiled softly after saying it.

His mother froze, giving him a complicated look before leaving him alone.

That night, he wrote in his training notebook:

[Strength is the skeleton; wisdom is the blade]

Strength could only protect him from familiar crises;

But "wisdom" could keep him alive in the unknown.

A true hunter was not the one who could fight best—

It was the one who saw the situation first and remained standing last.

He knew the awakening of his Nen Ability was drawing near.

But without wisdom to lay its Foundation Establishment, it would merely be "a bullet that could not fly."

The wind brushed over the tires in the corner of the training ground, producing a low hum, as though alert to a rhythm about to arrive. Dusk deepened, and the utility poles along Tower City's old streets resembled the skeleton supporting the sky, casting mottled shadows beneath the dim yellow lamps.

That evening, Ryan did not follow his usual training routine. Sitting in the corner, he opened his notebook and wrote down his goal for the day in a single line:

"Combat-style simulation: multi-enemy pressure structure × no frontal offense × single-line countermeasure + evasive relocation."

Then, he entered the Stillness Field.

The obstacle course he had built from scrap materials had long ceased to be merely a place "to train physical fitness." He had divided it into a Simulation Space, a stage where he continually experimented with cognition, prediction, and combinations of action.

He flipped into the field, set up five cardboard human-shaped targets, and quickly reviewed in his mind the "enemy behavior type" represented by each number.

This time, before training began, he did something he had never done before:

He drew a deep breath, closed his eyes for five seconds, then imagined with all his heart—these were not dummies, but real enemies.

He set an "activation sound" for himself: a sheet of iron hitting the ground.

Clang—

He moved.

First step: he rolled low along the ground, avoiding the imagined rushing charge of an "impulsive enemy."

Second step: he hid a prepared reflective shard behind a wooden board, using a flashlight to reflect light into the imagined "misdirection-type enemy's" visual blind spot and lure it into misjudging his hiding place.

Third step: he backed away, using a slanted tire rack as a passage to guide the imagined "spreading-type enemy" into a narrow path, slowing its movement pace.

Fourth step: he deliberately made a faint sound, creating the illusion of a "false retreat" in the tiled area behind him, luring the imagined "ambush-type enemy" into exposing itself with an attack before sliding into a counterattack position.

Fifth step: he remained motionless for five seconds in a cramped corner, simulating the utmost endurance and adaptive judgment required when facing an unpredictable hunter.

No step took more than three seconds. Every route had to be reconstructed on the spot. He repeatedly pushed his cerebral cortex to its limits between speed and judgment. By the time the entire sequence was complete, sweat slid from the back of his neck down his spine, soaking the hem of his shirt.

He crouched behind a broken log like a beast that had ambushed its prey and was waiting to catch its breath.

The air was silent, and the night grew darker.

He slowly closed his eyes and entered meditation.

Not to relax, but to anchor the lingering sensations from every movement he had just made.

Every exertion of force, every turn, every error in judgment became layers upon layers of echoes, gradually merging in his mind.

He did not guide his aura. He simply listened to his body during the review.

—At that very moment, he felt an extraordinarily subtle change:

From a point in his lower abdomen, a thread of warmth like ripples on water slowly rose. At first it had neither weight nor direction. It was merely like a flowing line, gradually seeping out from within, and then—

It began to rotate.

Not quickly, not intensely, not even noticeably, yet it truly existed—

Like that faint "external pulse" he heard between his heartbeat and eardrums in absolute stillness, only this time it surged from within him, slowly circling his spine, shoulder blades, elbows, finger joints, hollows of his knees, ankles... before finally returning to his chest.

Ryan did not open his eyes. He simply "felt."

This was not an illusion. This was aura.

It was no longer the Pre-Nen Membrane Layer floating outside his skin, but the flow of life born from the depths of his body—an "energy of consciousness" autonomously awakened beneath tactics and pressure.

At that moment, he finally understood:

"Nen" was not something poured in from outside. It was not light. It was—born from within.

It was like, after you had looked deeply and long enough into the world, the world had finally looked back at you.

And that "look" was the first gate of awakening.

When the meditation ended, he opened his eyes. The night was already deep.

There was no one in the Stillness Field. Only the sheet of iron beside the broken tires still swayed gently—the "activation sound" he had thrown down when training began.

Now, it rang again.

But this time, it was not reminding him to begin. It was declaring:

You had completed your first threefold fusion of "tactics × spirit × energy."

Back in his room, Ryan wrote:

[The Eve of Awakening: Inner Aura Rotation · Initial Consciousness Control]

Status Identification:

Entered meditation autonomously after training.

Aura activated from within → rotated slowly → formed an internal loop.

Characteristics:

Not guided aura flow, but spontaneous.

No emotional fluctuations, a slight rise in body temperature, muscles not tensed.

Estimated Mechanism:

The three axes of "tactical pressure × cognitive activation × consciousness stability" aligning in parallel were the key trigger.

Subsequent Training Adjustments:

· Add a mandatory post-combat meditation integration phase.

· Construct a two-way system of "dynamic simulation → static awakening."

· Prepare theoretical input on the foundational structure of "Zetsu × silence × gradual release."

He paused for a long time after finishing.

The night wind tapped lightly against the window frame, and moonlight spilled across the paper, making that line of tiny writing incredibly clear.

It read:

Next time would be the day of true awakening.