At three years and eight months old, Ryan sat on an old chair, his legs still too short to reach the floor.
He turned the pages of a folded newspaper his father had left on the coffee table before heading to the construction site that morning, carefully keeping his fingertips clear of its torn corners. To his parents, it was just a free handout they had picked up while buying cabbage. To Ryan, it was the first crack in the wall between him and the world.
"A Hunter Association delegation from the eastern district has arrived at Sky Harbor and plans to hold a new round of professional qualification assessments next month."
"Following the passage of a newly elected council member's proposal, a revised draft of the Special License Holder Activity Management Regulations will be completed before year's end."
Several key terms made Ryan's fingers pause. He blinked, silently memorized the lines three times, then looked at the picture in the lower-right corner. Five or six sharp-eyed men and women in trench coats stood before an airport passageway. Behind them loomed the tail fin of a massive aircraft, while rainwater gleamed on the ground.
The picture was blurry, the layout crude. But he knew what he was looking at.
They were Hunters.
Not a "fictional profession" from a TV cartoon, but an officially recognized group of fighters who truly existed in this world.
At that moment, he felt a thrill as something he had pieced together countless times in his imagination became real. It was as though a voice whispered in his ear, "You guessed right. This is the world you came to."
Yes. Even before he could speak fluently, his memories had led him to a staggering realization:
He had not been reincarnated into some random other world, some vague "starting point" for a journey across worlds. He had come to the world of Hunter x Hunter.
But he had been too young and too weak to confirm it. Even his behavior had needed constant instinctive adjustment. Now that old newspaper offered the most direct, undeniable proof.
He gently folded the page and hid it at the bottom of his wardrobe. Then he stitched a small pouch into an inconspicuous cloth pocket and sewed it shut with tight rows of thread.
It was the first piece of "evidence" he had saved in his record of the world.
That evening, he accompanied his mother to a shop on the next street to buy rice. As they passed a corner, a weathered advertising screen flickered to life. A huge glass tower pierced the clouds, an elevator slowly climbing its outer wall. Grand but restrained music played as words appeared across the screen:
"Heaven's Arena—challenge your limits, surpass yourself."
In the final shot, the tower's summit glowed in the dusk as the view swept upward from below. The elevator doors opened, and a figure stepped out slowly, their back to the audience.
Ryan stood at the shop entrance and looked up at the tower.
For an instant, his breathing faltered.
Not because he was awestruck, but because that tower had long existed in his memory. He remembered the battles in Heaven's Arena, its floor-by-floor rules, who had fought there, who had died, and who had reached the top.
He was not merely a spectator. He knew what was coming.
Yet none of it belonged to him now. He was not even four years old, a child his mother considered "quiet, precocious, and a little withdrawn." That tower belonged to the truly strong—to those who possessed Nen, who could kill without leaving a trace and shatter the limits of what seemed possible.
Ryan's fingers curled tight. He lowered his gaze to his hands—thin and soft, unable to lift even a brick.
Suddenly, he understood:
He had not come to this world to watch or to reminisce. He had come to climb that tower.
Even if every step was paved with blood, even if the story he remembered was torn apart as time went on, he had to make his way there and climb.
Because it was the only way he could prove he belonged.
He was not from this world, yet he had to find a place in it. He possessed memories of the future, which meant that if the future changed, the world would swallow him whole.
The only way to avoid that was to become part of the story himself and carve out his own place in it.
That night, Ryan returned to his usual training spot in the corner of the courtyard. But for the first time, he was not training simply to "build strength" or "improve his agility." He was training for a future fight—so that when he faced a Nen Ability user on some floor of the tower, he would not be utterly helpless.
The wind blew, tree shadows swayed, and his running feet left tracks on the ground.
But in that moment, he understood:
One day, the footprints that truly mattered would be left on the stone slabs at the tower's summit, however impossibly distant that day seemed.
Starting the next day, Ryan made the most important change of his life:
He stopped waiting for the world to give him clues and began building his own bridge into the world of Hunters.
He etched the fragments of that old newspaper into his mind, memorizing every word by its pronunciation and written strokes. He began searching through the old magazines on the bottom shelf of his father's bookcase. Most covered construction and urban development, but among their yellowing pages, he occasionally found phrases that hinted at the Hunter world:
"A mining area has been closed after a suspected ruins exploration team entered it by mistake."
"A level-three dangerous creature was captured in the northwestern wasteland. Its propagation has been confirmed to be unnatural."
He knew society had softened the language used to report such things. But in the world of Hunter x Hunter, these were traces of Hunters, Nen Ability users, and a system of extraordinary powers.
Reading became his "intelligence training."
He copied the reports into a small notebook and borrowed atlases and illustrated guides to wildlife from the children's section of the library. Piece by piece, he compared the scattered news with maps, species records, and border regions, building an "Afterimage Map of the World."
On the map, he circled "areas Hunters may frequent" in red, marked "high-level species habitats" in blue, and used green triangles for "places with historical reports of extraordinary phenomena."
He did it all without drawing attention. Whenever he flipped through a book, he looked like a child enjoying the pictures; whenever he wrote in his notebook, he seemed to be doodling. But to him, those strokes, colors, and symbols outlined the front lines he would cross in five years, ten years, perhaps even fifteen.
More importantly, he began to work out a "growth path model" again and again.
He did not daydream about when he might awaken Nen. He broke down, step by step, how to reach his goal.
He divided his growth into three stages:
Stage One · Path Beneath the Feet (ages 0–8)
Goals: Physical adaptation → language skills → social behavior model → general knowledge of the world → intelligence-gathering skills
Focus: Build a foundation, develop a response system, and avoid revealing anything unusual about himself
Core training: Improve his fitness through "play," observe rather than speak, and center his learning on reading and maps
Stage Two · Walking in the Shadows (ages 8–13)
Goals: Teach himself to sense aura → establish conscious control and a breathing rhythm → encounter "patterns of action beyond ordinary humans"
Focus: Shift from gathering information to modeling training methods, attempt to develop an inner sense of Nen, and build a concealed "combat persona"
Stage Three · Player in the Game (ages 13–18)
Goals: Awaken a Conjuration ability → develop Nen techniques → prepare for the Hunter Exam → rebuild his social identity
Focus: Enter the world legitimately under the public identity of a Hunter; build an unconventional style of ability centered on his effectiveness in actual combat
He wrote these three stages on the back page of a school notebook and drew a tower at the bottom in pencil.
It was not a realistic sketch of Heaven's Arena, but a symbolic tower. At its base lay his everyday life; in the middle, the system of knowledge and training he had designed. At the very top was a blank stone slab bearing one word:
"Hunter."
In that moment, he knew he was not training simply to "grow stronger." He was training to enter a world whose ending he had already seen.
This was not a game. He was not trying to reenact the story.
It was a deliberate plan to throw himself into it and break its course.
He was not a passive traveler between worlds, nor an outsider watching from the sidelines. From that day on, he stopped running, doubting, and waiting.
He was a boy who saw the tower where the world's strongest gathered as his nearest goal.
That tower was no unreachable myth. It was where he would begin to climb—and begin to change the future.
A faint dawn light filtered through the window and fell across a corner of the worn map.
Amid the chaotic coordinates of countless red dots, green lines, and blue circles, Ryan added a new note in black ink:
[Current location · Tower City, western district] [Stage One, Week 18 · Physical training: In progress] [Intelligence gathering · Initiated] [Objective · Keep a low profile. Climb higher.]
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