"So, you are also a part of the development team for this game?" Liam asked, breaking the silence.
He looked around the strange, enclosed space they found themselves in. It felt like a small, isolated pocket of reality, separated from everything else by an invisible glass wall. Liam, Shizuku, Bisky, the giant tiger Lumos, and the small bird Jaku were all standing within it. Beyond the transparent barrier, the outside world had become a smeared, blurry mess. He knew other players caught in this anomaly, like Hisoka or the Bombers, were likely experiencing the exact same visual distortion.
Finally, Liam turned his attention back to the blonde, middle-aged man who had suddenly materialized in front of them to explain the situation. It was Alain Blanchett, the direct disciple of Ging Freecss, the very same man Liam had briefly encountered at the absolute beginning of his journey.
"Alain Blanchett", Liam mused, testing the sound of the name.
Before Liam could finish his thought, the blonde man offered a tired, polite smile. "Yes. I am the letter A in the name GREED ISLAND."
Liam crossed his arms, a lingering question burning in his mind. "Then is the letter N meant to stand for the president of the Hunter Association, Netero?"
"I really do not know," Alain answered, shaking his head.
"You are literally one of the core game designers," Liam pointed out, his voice rising in disbelief. "How could you not know the names of your own team?"
"I am just one of the designers," Alain corrected mildly. "I simply played my specific part, finished my assigned work, and left the project."
"It seems he is not part of the core, like-minded group Ging put together", Bisky noted, observing the man with sharp eyes. "He was likely brought in simply because he belonged to the suitable ability group. They just needed his specific Nen to make the game function."
"Do you know him personally?" Shizuku asked, looking down at Bisky.
"I do not," Bisky replied, shaking her head.
"He is a Professional Hunter," Liam said, looking at the tiny blonde girl. "Do you really not know him?"
"There are hundreds of registered Professional Hunters out there in the world", Bisky said, "letting out a short, dismissive snort. How could I possibly know every single one of them? He clearly does not know me either, so it goes both ways."
"You are quite confident, Auntie," Liam replied, a small smile touching his lips. He knew she was telling lies. There was actually a dedicated fan club for Bisky hidden deep within the ranks of the Hunter Association. It seemed that a cute, powerful girl in a frilly dress was wildly popular no matter what world you lived in.
"Putting that aside", Bisky said, steering the conversation back to the immediate problem. She raised a small hand and pointed directly upward. Suspended high above their heads, separated by a thin layer of frozen, mirror-like space, was a massive, imposing icosahedral die. "What exactly is that thing?"
"I was just about to explain that", Alain said, looking up at the massive object with a complicated expression. "At the very end of the game's development cycle, everyone on the team felt that the final product was absolutely perfect. But Ging disagreed. He felt there was still something crucial missing. He said the game was just a little short of being recognized as something truly special. It lacked a real miracle. He ended up disappearing completely on his own, only to return a full month later carrying that thing with him."
Alain pointed a finger up at the mysterious, giant twenty-sided die.
"The unknown," Alain murmured, recalling the wild, excited look on Ging's face from years ago. He spoke slowly, his voice echoing in the quiet space. "Because we were the developers who built this world from the ground up, we already knew the game too well. We were intimately familiar with every single mechanic, secret, and detail. Because of that, we had completely lost any sense of genuine curiosity or excitement about the unknown. Ging did not want to leave that kind of regret behind in his creation. So, he found this die. He officially named it DICE, elevating it to become one of the eleven core designers of the game. It is the entity that actually runs the entire underlying core of the island. DICE is solely responsible for supporting and calculating the probability, randomness, and unpredictable elements across the entire game."
Liam blinked, quickly doing the math in his head. "In other words, before DICE was brought into the picture, there were actually only ten people involved in the design process?"
"That is correct", Alain nodded. "It was only because DICE was added at the last minute that Ging decided to use the first letters of all our names to form the official title of the game on a whim. During the actual development phase, we had just randomly named the project GOING."
"You still have not explained our current situation clearly," Bisky interrupted, her patience wearing thin. She pointed an angry finger at the massive DICE hovering above them. She could feel a deep, unsettling premonition twisting in her gut. "You mentioned something earlier about a hidden level and a random number of people being pulled in. That does not sound like a good thing at all."
Shizuku tilted her head, staring blankly at the floating object. "Why does a simple die have such terrifying power? Who created an item like that using Nen?"
"Based entirely on the unpredictable randomness of DICE's control, some of us on the development team built hidden levels to account for possible extreme situations within the game," Alain explained. "But over the years, DICE seems to have actively learned this set of logic. It has evolved to the point where it will now generate completely special levels or events entirely autonomously, as long as someone manages to trigger the right conditions."
Alain shifted his gaze, looking directly into Liam's eyes. "As for why it can be triggered in this specific way, and why it possesses such incomprehensible power, I asked Ging a very similar question a long time ago. Ging's answer to me was quite simple."
Alain paused, letting out a heavy sigh before quoting his master. "Things related to the Dark Continent need to be weird in order to be considered normal, right?"
The Dark Continent.
Bisky's eyes widened in genuine, secret shock, her breath hitching in her throat. Shizuku simply looked back up at the die, her face an unreadable mask of mild curiosity.
Liam stood completely still, his mind racing. He could not help but secretly wonder if Ging had somehow managed to trigger a special, autonomous event within DICE just to randomly generate a son for himself.
"Even with my highest level of administrative authority, I cannot actually stop DICE once it has been fully triggered," Alain confessed, his shoulders slumping slightly. "The delay process I initiated has already reached its absolute limit." He cast a long, unreadable look at Liam. "I have no idea if you possess anything directly related to the Dark Continent. But in short, I have tried my absolute best to heavily edit and cut out the dangerous game flow that DICE is currently trying to create. I tried to alter the parameters to help you avoid a situation of certain death. Anyway, please take care of yourselves."
The exact moment Alain finished speaking, the small, mirrored sandbox space containing them violently shattered into a million invisible pieces.
High above their heads, the massive, imposing icosahedron began to slowly rotate. It sounded exactly like the grinding of heavy, ancient gears turning for the first time in centuries. A loud, mechanical voice suddenly echoed directly into the ears of every single player who had been dragged into the anomaly.
Opening hidden level.
At that exact same moment, every player across the island who had seen the die and heard the mechanical voice, from Hisoka to the remaining Bombers, felt a heavy, inexplicable aura suddenly wash over their bodies.
Bisky's face turned completely solemn. She had heard the subtle shift in the air at the very last second. She quickly turned her head to look at Liam. She saw that Liam had already forcefully released his massive aura, summoning the ethereal Taoist nun Nen beast to his side. Two glowing paper talismans shot out from the wide right sleeve of the jade-masked nun, flying rapidly through the air toward Bisky and Shizuku.
The sound of rushing wind filled their ears.
Liam, Shizuku, Lumos, Jaku, and Bisky all instantly dissolved into five distinct masses of glowing aura and vanished completely into thin air, exactly like smoke blowing away in the wind.
The frozen scenery of the island slowly began to recover its natural movement, the vibrant colors bleeding back into the world as the time freeze lifted. Alain stood completely alone under the bright blue sky. He looked up at the empty air, remembering another specific question he had asked Ging on that fateful day.
He had asked if Ging's true, underlying purpose from the very beginning was simply to find a place to safely seal away this highly dangerous, unpredictable artifact.
"What in the world are you talking about?" Ging had replied back then, giving Alain a look of genuine, utter surprise. "The only reason I brought it here is because it happens to be incredibly convenient to use for the game's core engine. I originally thought that if finding an artifact did not work out, I would have to waste a lot of time and work incredibly hard to develop a similar Nen ability myself."
Liam felt a sudden, blinding flash of white light sear across his vision. The rushing sensation of teleportation vanished instantly, depositing him heavily onto solid ground.
He had arrived in an entirely different space. To be precise, he found himself standing in the middle of a very warm, spacious, and completely unfamiliar room. The floor was covered in a soft, thick carpet, and the entire space was heavily decorated with a sense of pure, childlike innocence.
Liam quickly glanced to his side. Jade was floating silently right next to him. The teleportation had happened so incredibly fast that the nun had been dragged along with him before she even had the chance to lower her right sleeve from throwing the talismans. At the very last possible moment, he had only managed to buy enough time for the Nen beast to throw two Seventy-Two Transformations talismans to Bisky and Shizuku to ensure their safety. That was all he could manage.
Liam closed his eyes and concentrated deeply, trying to tap into the underlying network of his Nen. To his deep concern, he could not clearly pinpoint the exact physical locations of Shizuku, Lumos, or Jaku's Star Marks. He only possessed a very vague, distant sense of their general direction. The only thing he knew for certain was that his companions were currently located extremely far away from him.
Liam let out a slow breath, opening his eyes to properly scan the unfamiliar room.
"What the hell kind of hidden level is this?" Liam muttered quietly to himself.
He had originally assumed this was going to be some sort of dangerous, infinite loop survival game based on DICE's mechanics. But looking around, there was absolutely no floating text, no mechanical voice, and no mission prompt of any kind. He supposed the entire structured mission process really had been successfully castrated and removed by Alain's last-minute interference.
The quiet room was heavily cluttered with a massive variety of expensive children's dolls, plush animals, and wooden toys scattered across the carpet. He looked at the walls and noticed there was not a single window in sight. The air felt slightly stale and heavily insulated, giving the space the distinct, unmistakable feeling of a deep underground basement.
Why does this specific room look more and more familiar the longer I look at it? Liam frowned, a deep sense of unease settling into his chest.
Finally, he turned his body around to investigate the incredibly weak, almost non-existent presence that he had felt quietly staying in the corner of the room since he had arrived. When he took a closer look through the dim lighting, his eyes widened in sudden, absolute shock.
Damn it, where exactly did you throw me, buddy? Liam thought, his heart skipping a beat.
Sitting quietly among the pile of plush toys was an incredibly exquisite child, dressed neatly in clothes resembling a little girl, with long, straight black hair framing a pale face.
"Who are you" the child asked
"Liam" Liam casually answer
The child slowly lifted their head, locking eyes with Liam. They stretched both of their small, pale hands out toward him, their face completely blank and innocent.
"Liam, give me your eyes," the child requested, their voice soft and hollow.
Thousands of miles away, on the towering peaks of Kukuroo Mountain, the heavy, oppressive atmosphere of the Zoldyck family estate remained entirely undisturbed.
Down at the absolute base of the mountain, Zebro, the aging groundskeeper charged with watching the main entrance, was sitting quietly in his small security booth, boredly flipping through the pages of a morning newspaper.
But high above his head, in a place he could not possibly notice, a sudden, terrifying change occurred.
Resting at the very top of the towering, monolithic stone wall of the Testing Gate, the two massive, lifelike dragon head sculptures suddenly began to tremble. The heavy stone cracked and shifted as the ancient carvings miraculously came alive. Their carved, blank eyes suddenly flared with a brilliant, piercing red glow.
The massive stone heads twisted backward on their thick necks, opening their jagged stone jaws wide to spray two blinding, continuous beams of crimson light directly toward the dark, heavily forested depths of Kukuro Mountain in the distance.