The Reason for Silence

Dawn had yet to break, and the residential district on the lower floors of Heaven's Arena was still steeped in the silence before sunrise. Ryan's steps home were heavier than usual. His left shoulder throbbed faintly, and a grimy stain of blood and dust marred his dark coat, standing out even more after drying. He had intended to slip inside and tend to his wound quietly, but the old wooden floorboards in the hallway ultimately betrayed his slight stumble.

"Creak—"

The sound startled his mother, who was still busy preparing breakfast in the kitchen, like an alarm bell.

"Ryan, is that you?" His mother's voice cut through the half-awake dawn light, weary yet uneasy.

He had no choice but to answer. "Yeah, I just got home."

His mother came out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of hot porridge. She had been planning to scold him as usual for coming home too late, but the instant she looked up, her pupils contracted—she saw the torn fabric at his shoulder and the bloodstains on the hem of his coat. Though he had treated them hastily, the wounds and damage were still glaringly obvious.

"What happened to you? Is that blood?" Her tone abruptly rose, and she hurried forward, spilling some porridge from the bowl.

Ryan instinctively stepped back, then forced himself to stay calm. "It's nothing. I took a detour past the construction site on my way home yesterday, tripped, and hit an iron pipe."

He tried to keep his voice steady, believing he could brush the matter aside with that explanation.

But his mother was no naive woman without life experience. In her younger years, she had accompanied her husband between construction sites and home and had seen all kinds of injuries. She looked at the unnatural stiffness in Ryan's left shoulder, the faint pattern of abrasions visible beneath the bandages, and the traces of gray mud and weeds on his pant legs—those were not marks left by a simple fall. They looked more like the disheveled aftermath of someone who had fought on the ground and received rough treatment afterward.

"Did you go off alone to do that nonsense you call 'self-training' again?!" she demanded, the corners of her eyes reddening with worry. "You're still just a kid. Do you know how dangerous that is?"

Ryan fell silent. He knew that further explanations would only make things worse. He did not want to tell a bigger lie, but he could not reveal the truth either. Even if he did, all he would gain was a sleepless night for his parents and their constant fear afterward. He neither wanted them to think he was consumed by some mad obsession nor wanted to lay the "truth of the world" before two ordinary people.

"I... really just fell," he repeated quietly, his gaze settling on the old boiler heating water behind his mother, as though it were the safest refuge he could focus on right then.

His father came out as well. Older, his eyes carried the exhaustion and experience of years of labor. He did not rush to question Ryan. He merely glanced at the injury on Ryan's shoulder, his brow furrowing deeply. Yet instead of scolding him, he sighed and said softly, "Eat something hot first, then put on some medicine. Whatever it is, we'll talk after you eat."

At that moment, the air seemed to grow heavy.

His mother, still anxious, turned back to the kitchen to get the first-aid kit. His father silently sat at the dining table and laid out the bowls and chopsticks, but he never looked his son in the eye. He only shook his head slightly.

Throughout the meal, all three of them were burdened with their own thoughts. His mother stopped pressing him, his father did not say a word, and Ryan merely kept his head down and ate, as though every extra mouthful could swallow all the pain and mud from the night before.

And that silence instead became the only tenderness they could preserve together at that moment.

His injuries had not healed, but Ryan did not stop moving forward. He knew that a few days of rest could heal his body, but not the gaps in his understanding that had been exposed. He had always been used to reviewing his battles, yet this time—this was the first time he could not find a clear reason for his victory.

In the end, his victory that night had relied on the environment, planning, the initiative, and a little of his enemies' stupidity. He had dodged blunt weapons, countered their pursuit, knocked down an isolated opponent, and escaped the encirclement. But he had not defeated anyone head-on. He could not even explain why, when his opponent swung a club, he had been able to predict its trajectory and react so quickly—what he had relied on was neither skill nor muscle memory, but a vague "intuition."

"That wasn't a reaction I should have had," he murmured.

At that moment, he realized that he had not controlled anything. Rather, something had awakened an instinct within him. When adrenaline flooded his senses, he had vaguely perceived the movement of the air around him, the flow of his enemies' aura, and even an indescribable "pressure" radiating from the motion of their raised clubs.

It was something he had never experienced before.

He began to think.

This world was not an ordinary one. The kind of "power" that could shatter rocks, control flames, and turn playing cards into weapons was not merely a performance broadcast on television to attract viewers. Since childhood, he had repeatedly caught that word in clips from the Hunter Exam, rumors from his father's coworkers at construction sites, and notes he had casually flipped through in the library—

"Nen."

He did not know what it was, and no one had ever told him. But he could clearly feel that all the battles, training, endurance, and physical strength he had experienced and honed had reached a critical point.

He began searching for answers.

He dug through the old stacks of books at home and went to the library to search for books on "aura," "inner force," and "meditation." He even pulled up fragmented recordings from old Hunter Channel broadcasts—those powerful fighters battling in the upper floors of the arena, those people whose eyes held both sharpness and calm. Every movement they made surpassed ordinary humans.

During a late-night meditation session, he suddenly felt a faint returning warmth in his breathing—like some gas pumped outward by his heart had briefly gathered along the surface of his skin before being absorbed again. He immediately broke off his meditation and opened his eyes, staring at his empty hands. He saw nothing. Yet the memory of that flow was real.

He knew it was not an illusion.

That "aura" had always been inside him; he had simply never mastered the method of using it. What he lacked now was a path, a system of knowledge that could give concrete form to chaotic power.

"I'm going to find out what it is," he said firmly. "Not imagine what it is."

This time, he was not going to guess. He was going to verify it.

He stopped practicing imaginary weapon swings and stopped simulating those fictional battle routes. He began trying to control that aura: using his breathing as a guide, combining it with muscle movement and focused concentration, trying to "call forth" the fluctuations of that presence.

Of course—most of the time, he failed.

But he was no longer anxious. He knew this was not a matter of willpower, but of understanding the method. What he needed was guidance.

Then he remembered.

He remembered how, in the original story, Gon and Killua had come to Heaven's Arena to earn money and train.

But what had truly changed their fate was what happened when they reached the 200th floor—the Nen pressure, like killing intent, released by the floor guardian had nearly made them lose consciousness.

It was neither fists nor skill, but some kind of power they had never heard of and that nevertheless truly existed.

It was after that that they met the bespectacled Wing.

From him, Gon and Killua had first formally encountered the concept of Nen. They learned Ren, Ten, Zetsu, and Hatsu, and through Water Divination, discovered which type they belonged to.

Ryan remembered that scene with perfect clarity.

"Water Divination." He wrote the words in his notebook, his handwriting twice as heavy as usual.

He was not seeking the truth of Nen merely to grow stronger—if he did not understand it soon, he might not even be able to handle ordinary thugs. Nen was no longer just some legend from the Hunter world. It was a real line of survival.