Above the Wilds

At first light, Ryan entered the forested outskirts of the city with a pack on his back. This woodland lay five kilometers beyond Heaven's Arena's rear mountain. On the map, it was merely a patch of green marked "Undeveloped Ecological Reserve," but its complicated terrain and lack of human traffic had made it a wild corner where city youths came to test their courage and homeless drifters sheltered from the wind. It was not his first time here, but it was the first time he had entered with a clear training plan—not to challenge others, but to challenge himself.

The forest was heavy with moisture, and the soil still held the sticky dampness of last night's rain. Ryan crouched down, brushed aside a layer of fallen leaves beneath a bush, and touched the surface soil with his fingertips to judge whether any animals had recently passed nearby. This was a technique he had developed through the Low-Cost Wilderness Survival Guide and practical experience: soil retaining body heat would be roughly two to three degrees warmer than its surroundings, but humans could only detect it within fifteen minutes. He quickly identified a shallow set of tracks, likely a wild rabbit's, heading southeast.

He did not begin tracking it right away. He understood that in the wild, the ones eager to act were often not the hunters, but the hunted. He silently stepped back three paces, leaned against an old moss-covered tree, removed his pack, and took out only a dagger and some cord, leaving everything else where it was. Only then did he slowly circle around the tree toward the target's direction.

Sunlight filtered through the branches and spilled across the forest, scattering mottled shadows everywhere. Every step was a trap.

While hunting the rabbit, Ryan deliberately stepped into traps more than once. He had set up six detour routes, each marked with bait signs such as bird feathers, bite marks, and overturned soil. Behind them, he hid several kinds of homemade small snares and springing branches. Without letting the rabbit turn back, he repeatedly forced himself onto the escape routes it "should" have taken, correcting his thinking as he judged exactly how this rabbit was clever.

In the end, he tracked it to a patch of dense grass atop a low hill. At that moment, the rabbit seemed to sense someone behind it. It suddenly shot out of the brush and dashed toward the front left. Ryan's eyes sharpened, and he flicked a preloaded slingshot pellet from his right hand like lightning. At an extremely low angle, it struck the rock to the right of where the rabbit's front paws were about to land.

"Bang!"

Stone chips flew. The rabbit leaped into the air, lost its balance, and fell into the shallow pit he had dug beforehand. Its ankle was pinned down. After twitching several times, it was finally unable to break free.

Ryan jogged over, dropped to one knee, grabbed the back of its neck with his right hand, and accurately drove his dagger into its carotid artery with his left. Clean and swift. He showed no pity whatsoever. This was not the first life he had taken, nor would it be the last. A hunter could not be a prisoner of emotion, especially when faced with choices of life and death.

He did not rush to eat. Instead, he hung the prey from a tree, collected animal droppings and grass from the surrounding area, and tested the local water source for contamination. He then dug out a small patch of low ground, laid down filter stones, fine sand, and cloth, waited for rainwater to flow in, and then boiled it. His homemade stove could only heat a single pot of water, but that was enough to sustain him for one night.

As the sky darkened, he built a second temporary camp. He used bamboo poles and rope to make a triangular frame, covered it with a rain tarp, and lined the ground with dry grass and an old blanket. The tent was only large enough for one person to lie down in. Its entrance faced west by northwest, which repeated experiments had convinced him was the best direction for keeping watch: it allowed sound to carry better, and the rising sun would not shine directly into his eyes.

After nightfall, insect cries filled the forest, coming in waves like serrated blades scraping across his eardrums. Ryan sat beside the campfire and divided the rabbit meat into three portions: one for that night, one to dry and store, and one roasted half-cooked as emergency rations. The smell of a fire in the wilderness would draw wild beasts, and he knew he could not linger for long. He let the fire die down until it was only half-warm, covered it with mud and leaves to conceal the remaining heat, and planned to make simple warning markers before sleeping.

But his most important training was not hunting or making fire. It was pushing his reactions to the limit in the dead of night.

He deliberately tied several thin cords between trees without any pattern, then moved through the forest with his eyes closed after dark, avoiding the lines as a simulation of an "enemy ambush." His shoulders and forearms were covered in scratches, the price of his misjudgments. He did not get angry or blame himself. After every scrape, he simply reorganized his route and muscle responses before beginning another round.

"I want my body to learn how to survive before my eyes do," he whispered to himself.

In the forest wind, his shadow flickered at the edge of the firelight, like a young beast just awakening to its hunting nature but still sharpening its claws and fangs—lying dormant in solitude, growing beneath the night.

On the night before he left, the sky above the forest was far from quiet. Wind swept through the air currents between the rocks, lifting scattered dead branches and fallen leaves from the ground and forming a ring of rotating shadows around the tent. Ryan sat beside the dying fire, his elbows resting on his knees, his unfocused gaze fixed ahead. He carried the mingled scent of fresh grass and prey blood, a mark of the wild that also resembled a medal of growth.

He was in no hurry to leave the mountains. Compared to the rigid routines and utilitarian ranking system of the city, everything here felt more real—he had to carefully judge paths while hunting, consider wind direction and humidity while pitching a tent, estimate slopes and plant types when gathering water, and rehearse night-attack scenarios several times before sleeping each night, simulating escape routes under the worst conditions. He liked this state of holding his fate in his own hands. Even if he was lonely, even if he was exhausted, every morning he woke up, the world before him was a little safer and a little more controllable because of the previous night's efforts.

This was his ideal way of training.

But he also knew that this kind of training alone would ultimately be far from enough.

He needed battle, not training.

Not merely hunting herbivores, but fighting people who had also mastered "power" in the true sense. Only through such collisions could he confirm which path he was standing on, and whether he truly possessed the qualifications and talent to reach Nen.

He looked toward the foot of the mountain, where the city's lights had begun to flicker into view. That was where his next goal lay.

Heaven's Arena.

It was not as though he had never considered the risks. Even if he started from the bottom, he might be knocked down, humiliated, or even injured in an accident. But he understood that once he chose this road, any comfort zone would become shackles. Only by entering a battlefield where true experts gathered would he be worthy of speaking of Nen.

He had once read a line in an old Hunter handbook at the city library:

"To understand Nen, you must get close to where it exists."

And Heaven's Arena was one of the places he knew that was closest to Nen.

What moved him even more was a blurry battle recording he had once seen on an underground forum, marked with the location "Heaven's Arena · Floor 32." In the footage, a thin, bespectacled man entered the arena alongside a quiet young man. The techniques they displayed belonged neither to traditional martial arts nor to simple bursts of strength. Instead, they were like a layer of power armor attached outside their bodies—an attack method that was "neither contact nor harmless, yet deadly", with no clear name in his understanding.

Someone in the comments had written: "Were those Shingen-ryu people training a disciple or something...? The young man lost in the end, but the mentor never stepped in."

Another user wrote: "That seemed to be from a few years ago. The Ta management department mentioned at the time that they weren't there to compete, only borrowing the venue for training. Too bad no one saw them again afterward."

Ryan gathered these scattered pieces of information in his notebook and added a page of notes:

"School unknown. Combat method closely resembles manifestations of Nen. Could it be an Enhancement-type close-combat aura-manipulation school? Unconfirmed. Mentor should possess a Nen Ability; young man has not yet acquired Nen."

He would not naively assume that going to Heaven's Arena would let him meet those people, nor did he hope for some so-called "chance encounter guidance"—that only happened in stories. Battles in the real world gave no one time to catch their breath. So-called master-disciple relationships and teachings were usually not built on fate, but on whether one was "worth it."

He had to make himself worth noticing.

That was his true reason for going to the Ta—not to meet anyone, not to take shortcuts, but to earn a place through battle.

He dismantled the camp completely, even filling in the fire pit again. He gathered up the branches used to smoke the rabbit meat and burned them all to prevent lingering charcoal ash from attracting wild dogs. He put on his hat, packed the dried meat, knife, medicine, and notebook back into his backpack one by one, and checked the zipper with meticulous care.

He did not want any regrets, nor would he allow himself to leave behind any "openings."

The sun had just risen when its first ray of morning light fell across his profile, casting a faint shadow. He slung his pack over his shoulders, gave the forest one final look, and then slowly headed toward the city.

This time, it was no longer a simulation, no longer training, but—

He would step onto the first floor of Heaven's Arena under his real identity.

On that stage, he was not a student, not a child, and no longer the silent young man who trained alone with his head bowed. He was a new arrival in the world of Hunters, a challenger who had chosen to strike first in order to prove his own existence.

No matter the outcome, he would leave his name there—even if it was only an anonymously registered number, it would eventually become, through his battles, the first touchstone on his path to Nen.