Hx H: Not A Nen Exorcist by Ember Hollow at Inkitt

001 - Malice

'Finally...'

In the quiet, dim room, Kieran looked down at his palm, the soft glow reflected in his eyes.

White light hovered over his hand, unstable and wavering.

This was aura: the life energy that naturally leaked from the human body. People who had never awakened it could not sense it, so they let it spill away without ever knowing it was there.

Sensing aura, releasing it, holding it in.

None of it came easily.

Kieran had spent nearly a year feeling his way forward by trial and error before finally gaining the barest control over his aura. Now, at last, he had crossed the threshold into Nen.

But another achievement mattered even more than that first step.

'I expected to get a handle on Ten eventually. More importantly... my soul is finally in sync.'

He let out a slow breath, his mood turning complicated.

He murmured to himself, "It's already been a year. Time really does move fast."

A year ago, he had been driving home when a dense bank of fog appeared ahead of him near the mouth of a highway tunnel. Visibility dropped to almost nothing.

He had reacted quickly enough, tapping the brakes and switching on his fog lights.

But the moment car and driver plunged into the fog, the world spun wildly. When he came back to himself, his soul had already settled inside the body of Kieran Veyr.

Along with it came countless broken memory fragments.

Back then, Kieran had been stunned. He had no idea what had happened.

Worse, those fragments did not help him understand his situation quickly. Instead, they left him with a string of persistent mental and physical problems.

Everything around him had been unfamiliar at first.

Fortunately, the body's original owner seemed to have fallen unconscious after a blow to the head. That gave Kieran an excuse: amnesia. With it, he was able to slowly learn his way around.

Over the following year, he stayed indoors, overcoming the body's issues while studying, reading, and training.

Between obsessive reading and the memory fragments he managed to digest, he eventually realized he had transmigrated into the world of Hunter x Hunter. From there, he began trying to sense aura.

Today, that effort had finally borne fruit.

Now his whole body felt light, as if he had been born again.

'Still nowhere near enough...'

He focused and pictured the life energy leaking from his body wrapping around him instead.

Once he realized this was the world of Hunter x Hunter, his first thought had been to learn Nen.

For him, Nen was protection. A foundation. Something he could rely on. He had to master it properly.

In the dark room, the white glow drifted around him, rising and falling like a wave.

As time passed, that unstable light gradually smoothed out at a visible pace.

That meant he had taken his first real step into Ten. He could keep his aura wrapped steadily around his body.

'That's fast.'

Looking down at the calm flow of aura around him, he was surprised despite himself.

He had thought it would take a long time to go from wavering aura to a steady flow. Instead, it had taken less than ten minutes.

Was his training this efficient now because the rejection between soul and body had vanished?

There was no way to know.

Kieran did not dwell on it.

Once that wrapped state stabilized, his next goal was to turn it into instinct.

At that point, it would be like wearing a transparent suit of armor around his entire body at all times.

And by holding in the aura that would normally leak away day and night, he would also slow the loss of his life energy. Living a long life would no longer be some distant fantasy.

Resolve rose in his chest as he looked out into the night beyond the window.

It was time to embrace this new world.

'Hm?'

His gaze caught on something strange near the windowsill.

'What is that...?'

He narrowed his eyes.

A wisp of black aura floated above the sill like drifting fluff.

'Black aura. Very faint.'

He stared at it.

He recognized it at once. It was aura left behind after a human death. It could be called post-mortem Nen, death energy, obsession, lingering spirit, or even malice.

In this world, Nen left behind after death was not especially rare.

But the Nen left behind by ordinary people after death was usually extremely weak. Its presence barely registered, and it could not affect reality.

Only Nen soaked in powerful emotion at the moment of death had enough strength to produce actual phenomena.

Even then, post-mortem Nen left by an ordinary person generally posed no threat to a Nen user.

Oddly enough, in a world where anyone could learn Nen step by step, most Nen users had no ability to purge lingering malice, even when it posed no danger at all.

Only a small group of Nen users, known as Nen Exorcists, possessed the ability to remove Nen completely.

This wisp of black energy was Nen stained by intense emotion.

It had always been there. Kieran simply had not been able to see it before.

Now that he could open his aura nodes and had mastered Ten, the aura wrapped around his body let him see the kind of resentful Nen invisible to the uninitiated.

'Why would there be malice in the temple? Unless...'

He raised a finger to his chin, his thoughts moving quickly.

This body's home was a temple built on a mountain inside a scenic area. It also came with a monk for a father who had no problem with meat or alcohol.

As for what made the temple special, there were the fortune slips, the incense offerings, the coins visitors tossed into the release pond in front of the main hall while making wishes...

And the keepsakes.

One of the temple's customs was to place the belongings of the dead on an offering table together with their final wishes.

In that case, this wisp of malice had most likely been born from that pile of keepsakes.

He rose and walked slowly to the window, observing the black strand from up close.

It was weak. So weak it looked as if it would scatter at a touch.

To an ordinary person, it was harmless for all practical purposes. To someone like him, who had just crossed the threshold into Nen, it was even less of a threat.

'Huh?'

He looked down toward the base of the malice.

He discovered that the wisp was not rootless. A thread of black aura, even finer than the wisp itself, extended from its base.

'A thread?'

His eyes narrowed. Following the black thread, he looked past the window into the courtyard.

From his angle, he could see the blue-gray stone courtyard in front of the main hall. At its center was the release pond, roughly half the size of a basketball court.

It was called a release pond, but there were no living things in it. Only water, and coins spread thickly across the bottom.

At that moment, his attention locked onto the pond.

Under the moonlight, the pond's still surface had, at some point, become covered in a swamp-like layer of sticky black malice. Its aura made his heart clench.

Cold.

Violent.

Filled with absolute hatred.

The instant he took in the sight, the threat hit him like a physical weight.

'You've got to be kidding me...'

His eyes widened.

A chill shot up his spine, spreading through his entire body in a heartbeat.

Why would such an ordinary temple have so much malice pooled inside it?

This was not something a pile of keepsakes could create.

At that level of intensity, an ordinary person would probably die the moment they brushed against it.

Yet he had been here for a full year after transmigrating, and he had never noticed the huge mass of malice gathered in the release pond.

And the tourists who came to the temple to burn incense and toss coins into the pond had never suffered anything at all.

Question after question flashed through his mind.

The dangerous aura radiating from that mass of malice forced him to retreat. He wanted distance from it. Immediately.

Whether his gaze, his retreat, or the aura wrapped around him had provoked it, he could not tell.

The sticky black mass contracted all at once, as if it had a will of its own. Then it launched itself through the air at him.

It was terrifyingly fast.

In an instant, it crossed dozens of meters and arrived before him.

Cold slammed through him. He only had time to release as much aura as he could in defense before the mass struck him.

He lost consciousness on the spot.

The black malice did not continue attacking.

It simply hovered in the air.

The room went quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Outside the window, the moonlight silently disappeared. The night darkened like thick ink, and everything in sight became oppressive.

This small temple standing at the top of the mountain seemed to be hiding secrets no one knew.

About three seconds passed.

The black malice hovering in midair coiled to attack once more.

But just as it lunged toward him, a circular opening spread across the surface of the release pond, like a hatch opening in the water.

In the center of that circular opening floated a red forward arrow.

The instant the hatch-like opening appeared on the pond, the black malice froze in midair.

Then an invisible force seemed to seize it, dragging it toward the circular opening on the water's surface.

The malice struggled wildly.

It was useless.

Within moments, the force pulled it into the opening, and it vanished without a trace.

Once the black malice disappeared, the circular opening shrank into a black dot and vanished from existence.

The room fell silent again.

After a while, a small black dot appeared on the wall beside the window. Its edge shimmered faintly with aura before it expanded into a pitch-black circular opening more than a meter across.

In the center of that lightless opening floated a green forward arrow.

Silently, the green light grew hazy.

Then two figures, one large and one small, emerged from that blurred green glow.

The larger figure was a bald middle-aged man with a full beard and no eyebrows.

He was Hawk Veyr, the father of this body's original owner.

The smaller figure was a strange mouse about the size of a soccer ball.

The mouse had no nose or mouth. Its round eyes took up almost half its face, and its ears had no visible inner folds, only tight spiral patterns.

A three-dimensional forward arrow sat on its forehead. At the tip of its long, thin tail, aura had gathered into an angry-face symbol about the size of a baby's fist.

Hawk was wrapped in bright aura. After stepping out of the green-arrow passage, he quickly moved to Kieran's side.

The strange mouse followed behind him, its steps completely silent.

Hawk crouched and examined Kieran. After confirming the boy was not badly hurt, he let out a breath of relief.

"Kieran, you brat..."

Hawk studied his face, his expression odd. "You knew nothing about Nen, yet you awakened it on your own under the suppression of Divine Script. Was it a fluke, or are you really that talented?"

He paused, then sighed. Worry surfaced on his face.

"Before we fully resolve the cost, awakening Nen is not good news for you."

The next morning.

Soft dawn light poured through the window, filling the room.

Kieran's eyes snapped open.

By reflex, he sprang upright from the bed.

'Bed...'

Realizing he was lying in bed, he immediately kept Ten active.

Then he jumped down, put his back to the wall beside the window, and carefully glanced toward the release pond.

Thin morning mist drifted through the courtyard. Sunlight threaded through it, making the scene look almost dreamlike.

The huge mass of malice he had seen last night was gone.

He sensed no trace of it.

'It's not there...'

Kieran frowned and murmured, "Was it a dream?"

He withdrew his gaze and carefully checked his body. There was nothing wrong with him. Not even a speck of dirt.

But the pain he had felt at the instant of the attack had been too vivid.

If he had really been struck by malice of that level, he should not have come through unharmed. Some kind of injury should have been inevitable.

Yet his body was perfectly fine.

Not a single wound.

That was strange.

'Maybe I was too tired.'

He shook his head slightly.

If that mass of malice had truly existed and was rooted in the release pond, it could not have vanished so completely. His body was unharmed, so he had no choice but to write last night off as a nightmare.

He headed toward the bathroom.

Water rushed out as he turned on the faucet.

He cupped water in his hands, washed his face, and looked into the mirror.

The wet glass reflected a young face with fair skin and delicate features.

Thirteen years old.

That was the age of this body.

The body was young, but the face was unfairly good-looking.

He had not lacked attention in his old life, either. Still, compared with this face, there was no contest.

Sometimes, after looking in the mirror for too long, he could not help wondering whether Hawk was really this body's father.

Just as that thought crossed his mind, a voice rang inside his head without warning.

[Your appearance is exceptionally striking. The Gaze is satisfied. Nen exorcism count +1.]

'What?'