Above the Tower's Shadow

Ryan, three years and eight months old, sat in an old chair, his feet still unable to reach the floor.

He was flipping through a folded newspaper his father had casually tossed onto the coffee table before leaving for the construction site that morning, carefully avoiding the torn corners with his fingertips. To his parents, it was merely a free printout accepted along with a cabbage purchase; to Ryan, it was the first crack leading into the world.

"The Hunter Association Eastern District delegation has arrived at Sky Harbor and plans to hold a new round of professional qualification assessments next month."

"Following the passage of a proposal by the newly appointed council member, the <Special License Holder Activity Management Regulations> will complete a draft update before the end of the year."

Several keywords made Ryan's fingers pause. He blinked, silently recited those lines three times, then looked at the photograph in the newspaper's lower-right corner: five or six sharp-eyed men and women in trench coats stood before an airport passageway, with the tail fin of a massive ship behind them and rainwater reflecting off the ground.

The image was blurry, and the layout was crude. But he recognized it.

—Those were Hunters.

Not some "fictional profession" from a television cartoon, but an "official special combat group" that truly existed in this world.

In that instant, he felt the thrill of having a reality he had pieced together countless times in fantasy finally confirmed. It was like a voice softly whispered in his ear: "You were right. You came to this world."

Yes. Long before he could even speak fluently, he had pieced together a startling realization from his memories:

He had not been reborn into some random other world, nor some vague "starting point for transmigration," but into the world of—Hunter x Hunter.

He had simply been too young, too weak, unable even to control his own behavior without relying on instinct, so he had had no way to confirm whether this world was real. But now, that old newspaper was the most direct and irrefutable proof.

He carefully folded that page of the newspaper and hid it at the bottom of his wardrobe. Then he stitched a small pocket into an inconspicuous cloth pouch and sewed it shut tightly.

It was the first piece of "evidence" he had preserved for himself about this world.

That evening, he accompanied his mother to a small shop on the next street to buy rice. As they passed a corner, a weathered advertising screen that could still light up was playing a commercial—on it, an enormous glass tower pierced straight through the clouds, elevators slowly rose along its outer walls, grand yet restrained music played in the background, and subtitles gradually appeared:

"Heaven's Arena—Challenge your limits. Break through yourself."

In the final shot, the tower's peak glowed with twilight as its silhouette stretched toward the sky from a low angle. The elevator doors opened, and a figure slowly stepped out with their back to the audience.

Ryan stood at the entrance of the shop and looked up at that tower.

For a moment, his breathing became unsteady.

Not because he was awed, but because that tower had long existed in his memories. He remembered the battles at Heaven's Arena, the rules of its floors, who had fought there, who had died there, and who had reached its summit.

He was not a spectator. He was someone who knew.

But none of this belonged to him yet. He was only a child not even four years old, "quiet, mature for his age, and somewhat withdrawn" in his mother's eyes. That tower belonged to true powerhouses, to those who possessed Nen, who could kill without a trace and shatter the limits of ordinary rules.

Ryan's knuckles tightened. He lowered his head and looked at his hands—thin, soft, incapable of even lifting a brick.

He suddenly understood:

He had come to this world not to watch, not to reminisce, but to—climb that tower.

Even if every step of that tower was paved in blood, even if the plot he remembered could be torn apart completely as time passed, he still had to walk forward and climb upward.

Because this was his only "proof of belonging."

He was not from this world, yet he had to gain a foothold in it. He possessed "memories of the future," which meant that—if the future changed, he would be swallowed by the world.

And the only way not to be swallowed was to take the initiative and become part of the story, to rewrite a place that belonged to him.

That night, Ryan returned to train in the corner of the courtyard as usual. But for the first time, he was not doing it to "strengthen his body" or "improve his agility," but so that in some future battle, when he faced a Nen Ability user on one of the tower's floors, he would not be utterly helpless.

The wind blew, tree shadows swayed at an angle, and his running footsteps left marks on the ground.

But in that moment, he understood:

The "footprints" that truly belonged to him would one day have to land upon the stone slabs at that tower's summit, no matter how distant that day seemed.

Starting the next day, Ryan made the most important behavioral change of his life:

—He would no longer wait for "the world to give him clues," but would actively build a bridge into the world of Hunters.

He imprinted fragments of that old newspaper in his mind, memorizing every word through pinyin and stroke order. He began actively searching through the old magazines on the lower shelf of his father's bookcase—most concerned construction projects and urban development, but among the yellowed page footers, he occasionally found phrases that carried the scent of the Hunter world:

"A mining area has been sealed off after a suspected ruins exploration team entered by mistake."

"A Class Three dangerous creature was captured in the northwestern wastelands, confirmed not to be a naturally proliferated species."

He knew such information had been softened by social phrasing, but in the world of Hunter x Hunter, these were precisely the traces of Hunters, Nen Ability users, and supernatural systems.

Reading became his "intelligence training."

He recorded those passages in a small notebook, borrowed geographic atlases and biological encyclopedias from the children's reading area of the library, and compared those scattered news reports against maps, species classifications, and border structures one by one, building an "information afterimage world map."

On the map, he circled "areas where Hunters might frequently appear" in red, marked "high-level species habitats" in blue, and used green triangles to represent "regions where reports of supernatural phenomena had appeared in historical events."

He did all of it without drawing attention. Every time he flipped through a book, it looked as though he were studying illustrations; every time he wrote in his notebook, it looked as though he were doodling. But in his eyes, those strokes, blocks of color, and symbols were the outline of the front lines he would cross over the next five, ten, or even fifteen years.

More importantly, he began repeatedly designing a "growth path model."

He did not fantasize about "when I'll awaken Nen." Instead, he broke down step by step how he should advance toward his goal.

He mapped out three stages of growth:

Stage One · Path Beneath the Feet (Ages 0–8)

Objective: Physical adaptation → language ability → social behavior models → learning common knowledge of the world → intelligence-recording ability

Focus: Build a foundation, establish a response system, avoid exposing unusual traits

Training core: Advance physical training through "play," replace expression with "observation," and make "literacy + maps" the core of knowledge

Stage Two · Walking in the Shadows (Ages 8–13)

Objective: Self-study aura perception → establish consciousness control and breathing chains → come into contact with "non-ordinary human action structures"

Focus: Shift from gathering information to simulating training methods, attempt to construct internal Nen perception, and develop a disguised "combat persona"

Stage Three · Player in the Game (Ages 13–18)

Objective: Conjuration ability awakening → Nen technique construction → Hunter Exam preparation → social identity reconstruction

Focus: Use Hunter as an outward identity to enter the world legitimately; build an ability style outside conventional systems around a "real combat presence"

He wrote those three stages of growth on the back page of an exercise book and drew a tower at the very bottom in pencil.

It was not a realistic depiction of Heaven's Arena, but a symbolic "tower"—his real life at its base, the knowledge and training system he had designed in its middle, and at its summit, a blank stone slab bearing two words:

"Hunter."

In that moment, he knew he was not training merely to "become stronger." He was training to enter a world whose ending he had already seen.

This was not a game, nor was it a recreation of the plot.

It was a plan to throw himself into the world with the active will to break the plot.

He was not a passive transmigrator, nor an outsider observing the world. From that day onward, he no longer ran away, doubted, or waited.

He was a boy who saw the tower of the world's strongest as "the nearest goal."

This tower was not an unattainable myth. It was the starting point he would climb, the place where he would turn the future around.

The morning light filtered faintly through the window and fell upon the corner of that worn map.

Amid the chaotic coordinates formed by countless red dots, green lines, and blue circles, Ryan wrote a new note in black ink:

[Current Coordinates · West District, Tower City]

[Stage One, Week 18 · Physical Training: In Progress]

[Intelligence Expansion · Activated]

[Objective · Keep a low profile. Move upward.]