I have been playing with the kids for a few days. It is nothing special, but they seem off. Maybe it's because I just spent over a month on a hill meditating? Do they think I will turn into some kind of monk? Who knows? Human imagination has no bounds.

I was too distracted to notice the obvious clues. I mean, kids are bad at keeping secrets. I even forgot that I was turning 5! If I spent a single second thinking, I would have realized it, but a second was far too precious for such minor things.

As the day continued more and more things stacked up, but I didn’t notice. It came to the point where I heard the phrase ‘celebration’ more than thrice in a single sentence.

Noon quickly approached and with it lunch. I went to the dining hall like usual. But I could not hear any chatter through the door. All I could hear was heavy and excited breathing. I opened the door and as soon as I did so, my ears were overloaded from the piercing shrieks of the children. From the cacophony of roars, I could barely make out the word ‘SURPRISE’.

And then I remembered. It was my 5th birthday. On top of that, there was a tradition, where one would celebrate his 5th, 15th and 55th birthday with his family, in this case, the other children. After passing that age your ‘status’ would change. Before turning five, you would be nothing more than a toddler. After that you would be a kid, a man and lastly elderly. There was a celebration held and you would receive simple gifts from your closest family and friends. If someone other than them gave you a gift, it would be the same as forcefully joining someone else’s family.

Why wasn’t I invited to the other’s celebrations? I mean, there are a few kids a bit older than me? Maybe because I never showed interest? Hmm…

There were sweets and there were cookies. I ate a few of them, while having to listen to all sorts of celebratory words.

I received a few gifts from the kids I hang out with more.

First was Tina, who gave me a lunch box, saying that I should bring it with me the next time I go out to train. It was made of wood and obviously hand made. There were a few decorations and a place to store some cutlery (they don’t use chopsticks here), three heat insulated boxes and a lid. It looked nice.

Second was Anim’s gift. He gave me a bracelet with a coin on it. It was silver and had two sides (duh). On one side it had a rhombus carved into it, while on the other, it was an ellipse. Simple but elegant. I could somehow tell he put quite a lot of effort into it.

The last gift was from a person I actually interacted with was from Aron. Anyone who saw his gift would be surprised. If they knew it was from a nearly 5 year old, they would be stunned. It was glorious. It was epic. It was… a rock. More specifically, it was a rock Aron found about a month ago. He grew obsessed with it and even slept. If I didn’t know the context, I would think of this as an attempt at my pride. But pride was something I discarded long ago. All those arrogant young masters were a good show of what excessive pride could do. But it was not fully gone. I still had some basic human decency, as everyone should.

With that done, the party started. It was just a few games I ‘made’ and we played them. My favourite exercise-related game was ‘exchange’. Simply put, kids would run in circles around the ‘guard’ who would give orders based on instructions. Like clapping his hands once meant 5 pushups, while a whistle would mean to run in the other direction. Anyone that was spotted failing to perform the instruction would be eliminated. And so we played.

[Author note: I don’t know what the game / roles are called. I just remember playing it when I was like 10. I remember it as being fun. Oh and in HxH people don’t use chopsticks (at least from what I saw in a few minutes of research)]

The day quickly passed and evening approached. The party was long over and the other kids were sleeping. I, however, continued to stay awake, thinking of a training plan. I wasn’t going to throw away years of my life.

Just as I was about to go to sleep, I saw a familiar figure approach me. It was Richard, a man who I haven’t seen for months. I could feel that he was tired, but determined.

He came to me and said hello. I responded with a reserved smile. He was nothing more than a stranger to me and he knew it. After some pleasantries, he broached the topic.

He told me that my father had a ‘gift’ for me or so he assumed. When he last saw my father Ian, he promised to take care of his child. With his last breath Ian gave Richard a strange looking pendant. He thought that it was a gift to his son and so here we are.

And so I received a strange gift. It was a shield-like object that fit in my hand. It felt somewhat strange and unnatural. I looked at it for a while, before I put it in my pocket. Seeing this, Richard had a wry smile. He knew that he was a stranger to the child, and sadly, so were his parents. He pulled out a sack of coins. He gave it to me saying that I should get myself some better food, given that I spend most of the time meditating alone. With a few words of goodbye, he left. I looked inside the pouch and saw quite a large number of coins. It was about 2000 units of the local currency (not jenny). It was a month’s pay for intense work.

***

The next day, I woke up and inspected the metallic ‘shield’ Richard gave me. It weighs about 250 grams, which was surprising. It was quite heavy for its size. I continued to inspect it with little progress. There were no mechanisms, no buttons, no nothing, just a plain metallic object. I couldn’t explain where the strange feeling came from. Or that was until I used my senses to inspect it. As soon as my aura touched it, it changed. The previous shield shape turned into a long knife. A very sharp one. It could slice wood apart with just a casual swing. The most frightening part about it was that it retained aura better than any other object I have seen. Even though I haven’t learnt [SHU] yet, it could easily use aura to augment itself.

After messing around with it for a bit, I remembered something. A character mentioned in the manga, Benny Delon. He was a serial killer and a blacksmith. According to Gon and Killua, his creations would emit aura. It meant that the guy was a nen genius. And it just so happened, that he would draw inspiration from his cruel acts to forge his creations, which he would drop at the site of the next murder. He lived 100 years before the plot, so the time should somewhat match (83 years left). Even Chrollo Lucilfer, the leader of the Phantom troupe, used his weapons. Interesting... A really good weapon.

It was time to continue training. From my analysis, it would be most efficient if I trained [REN] for 10 months and then start training advanced techniques. After all, I can’t train without a sufficient amount of aura.

And so I trained for almost a year.

***

So it turned out my analysis was wrong. If I spent 10 months training aura quantity only, I wouldn’t make any progress. From the experimentations I did, I noticed that continuous training in a single exercise resulted in diminishing returns. If I spent 10 months training this way, I could only progress by around 3 minutes at the end, which was worthless.

Taking this into consideration, I created a basic training plan and improved it over time. It was 33 days long, slightly longer than a month.

The cycle is split into three parts, each 10 days long with a day of rest after each part,

The first part is training aura quantity for 10 days. Without a sufficient amount of aura, one cannot execute techniques enough, resulting in slow progress.

The second is training nen types. Simply put, I do the basic exercises to train the types, like letter shaping for transmutation (???), smashing 1000 rocks with a single one for enhancement (& [SHU), creating a hovering ball of aura disconnected from you and keeping it active for 1 minute and so on.

The third and last part is training advanced nen techniques. This was both the hardest and the easiest part. On one hand, there were simple advanced techniques like [GYO], while on the other, there was [IN]. A nonsense technique if I ever saw one. How are you supposed to hide your aura? How is it supposed to make conjured objects invisible? How can [GYO] see it? It was extremely confusing. None of the explanations I came up with could even begin to describe it.

And so the 10 months passed with me achieving major progress. I wasn’t a nen genius, so my progress was relatively slow compared to monsters known as Gon and Killua, hell even Leorio was a god compared to me!

As I continued to train, I noticed that the world of hunters doesn’t care about the talentless people. But to be honest, why should they? From my experience, the exercises that were shown in the show might be effective for Gon, but they were terrible for me. I made little to no progress with them. I didn’t have the talent he possessed. I guess they were designed for talented people. From what I know, Netero despised weak people, so it isn’t too surprising. I mimicked the scenes exactly, but all I got was injured.

The bullshit shonen logic of putting your all into it and overexerting yourself day after day was detrimental for me. Even with the insane physiques of this word, constant overexertion was harmful. 10 days of training was my limit. Anything over it and I would have to recover for several days, wasting valuable time and slowing down my progress, while harming my future. As weird as it sounds, the most important part of training is rest.

[Author note: I am no specialist and this is not any advice. Always seek second opinions from credible and proven sources. NEVER FOLLOW ANY SHONEN (or Anime) TRAINING!!! YOU WILL RUIN YOUR BODY! I speak from experience. If you want to grow your strength as fast as possible, you should rest your body. To fully recover from light exercise, it takes a day of rest and for more intense exercise, it can take up to three. Any less and your muscles will not fully recover, decreasing your strength instead. Another important thing is to eat enough. Your body needs food, water and energy to regenerate! The training in this fanfic is unrealistic. If you try to do it, you will only harm yourself. I am making it possible only because it is a supernatural world. Do not try this in real life! Just putting it here because I don’t want to mislead people. Know your limits. Many people are harmed due to improper training. Take it seriously. END OF AUTHOR NOTE]

A major thing I discovered about training nen was intent. It was the only solution to the [IN] problem, as well as [RYU], [KEN], [EN], [SHU], [GYO] and [TEN]. They were all techniques that required varying levels of intent. For example, [KEN] was a defensive form of [REN], but how do you make aura defensive? It was through intent. I found out I had to exert my will upon the aura to follow orders like this. I could try to forcefully make it defensive, but that wouldn’t work. It would be like a shield that protected you from bullets but not knives. It was simply better to make the aura protect the user in any way it could instead of giving flawed instructions.

The same, as I found out, is with [IN]. One has to infuse the intent to hide, to suppress any aura leakage, to hide from others, to make things invisible. This was the only thing I could find out. All other theories and explanations were proven false.

A similar thing happens with [RYU]. [RYU] is an advanced technique where one distributes their aura throughout their body in changing percentages. While I can do the same forcefully, it would be harder than allowing my aura to do it naturally. The effort required is far lower and the end result is far greater.

So, I had to train my intent, but how do I do that?