I'm extremely interested in Nen abilities.

That’s not right either…

This requires a prerequisite: you must first set the star icon to the opponent's vital points.

Otherwise, if the star is placed on the opponent's palm, even if their palm is smashed to pieces, a one-hit kill won't be achieved. While the healing ability granted by the star is erased, the opponent is also freed from its control. That momentary lapse in judgment might give the enemy an opening to counterattack…

While contemplating his Nen ability, Jingyang gestured for Wu Er, who was peeking in from the doorway, to come and help.

Although Wu Er still has his own rose-gold star mark on his abdomen, as long as the star mark remains in a dormant state and is not actively activated by Jing Yang, the operation mechanism will not be triggered.

In other words, it wasn't due to the operation of the star marker or Jing Yang's order; rather, Wu Er volunteered to help. Upon hearing this, he immediately strolled into the room, picked up Mu Se's corpse, and followed Jing Yang out.

Meanwhile, "Jinglang" cleaned up the bloodstains along the way.

Stepping out of the cabin onto the breezy deck, I noticed that the distant horizon was already tinged with white.

Just as Wu Er was about to push Mu Se's body into the sea, Jing Yang suddenly said, "Wait."

The tiger stopped, flicked its tail, and looked back at him.

"Jinglang," dragging a heavy object, also ran out. Jingyang tied the object to Muse's corpse with a rope, and then Wu Er pushed it all into the sea. With a "thud," the corpse sank into the sea along with the object. The waves rose and fell, everything as usual. Jingyang leaned against the railing, gazing at the sea. He wondered if it was because he had experienced too many shocks since transmigrating, but he could handle a corpse so calmly; it was truly remarkable.

With little sleepiness left and seeing that it was already past midnight, Jingyang didn't plan to go back to sleep. He turned around and went into the cabin to prepare for his departure.

Logically speaking, a five-year-old boy like himself, who was not strong to begin with, should have been exhausted both physically and mentally after fighting against the wolves and Mu Se one after another from last evening until late at night. Moreover, based on Jing Yang's experience in his previous life, after a sudden strenuous exercise and a deep sleep, it was normal for him to be sore all over the next day and unable to even get out of bed...

Jingyang touched the star mark behind his neck. Thanks to its healing ability, he woke up after a night's sleep with no aches or pains at all. He felt more than just refreshed; he felt incredibly invigorated.

If used in spiritual practice...

Jing Yang couldn't help but laugh. Wasn't this just like carrying around a low-end version of Bisky's "massage girl"?

Fortunately, he remembered that this was not a place to stay for long, otherwise he would have loved to start systematically cultivating his spiritual abilities right there and now.

"Let me see what I need to prepare... a bundle of rope, fuel, just fill a bottle, a few lighters, a wad of coarse cloth, a kitchen knife, yeah, Tiger, can you help me out by standing on my tiptoe... hmm, a kitchen knife. Do you have a shovel? Yes, great. And... clean water, all we have left are some compressed biscuits, that'll do."

Jing Yang, along with Wu Er, split up with "Jing Lang" and searched the entire ship's hold, inside and out. They found many usable supplies, but they were too inconvenient to carry, so they had to give them up. In the end, they only picked out a few essentials. Bottles and bags, like the rope, were hung on the big tiger's body, causing Wu Er to look at Jing Yang with an innocent expression.

"The capable should do more work, right?" Jingyang patted the tiger's head, then took a moment to go to the ship's bathroom, sat on the wolf's back to brush his teeth and wash his face. Looking at his completely new self in the mirror, he said, "Let's go!"

……

A tiger and a wolf leaped ashore.

Jingyang stood on the bow of the boat and checked that he had his hunter's license and cash with him.

He looked towards the shore, "Hopefully we can find a town soon... Wu Er, can you stop staring at me from the shore and come back to carry me up?"

As dawn broke, the stripes on the Moon Tiger no longer shone with a jade-like luster, apparently only visible at night. Hearing this, it leaped down again, and after Jing Yang climbed onto its back, it nimbly darted back to the shore. Jing Yang recalled the direction from which the gunshots he had first heard the night before and gestured for Wu Er to run in that direction.

……

With Wolf's Nose's help, Jing Yang quickly followed the scent of blood to find his target, who was probably the person Mu Se had shot.

A flock of black crows gathered around him, but upon sensing Jing Yang's approach along with the wolf and tiger, they all spread their wings and flew away.

"Birds? Birds are good things..."

Jing Yang watched the flock of crows fly away and muttered to himself. Then, he rode his tiger to the corpse and examined it carefully for a while, but still couldn't tell whether this long-dead fellow was the owner of the hunter's license he had seized. But one thing was certain: since Mu Se was the villain who was hunting down "his side," then the fellow killed by Mu Se was obviously a fallen "ally."

Jingyang asked Wu Er for help to move the man's body onto the wolf's back, and then, based on the location of the small cruise ship on the shore, he headed towards the place where he had woken up the day before.

……

Upon arriving at the location, Jing Yang picked up a kitchen knife and began cutting grass, chopping down a clump of grass that looked out of place and strangely taller than a person. Meanwhile, "Jing Lang" dragged the corpses out of the grass clump one by one, and together with Wu Er, they tied the corpses together in circles. Then, the two beasts worked together to drag the large clump of corpses away and throw it into the sea, which was not far from here.

When they returned, "Jinglang" took Wu Er with him and used the coarse cloth they brought from the ship to violently wipe away the very obvious bloodstains along the way, while also deliberately rubbing them in many other places.

Jingyang didn't know if doing this would work, or if he was just outsmarting thin air. In any case, he would do his best and leave the rest to fate.

After cutting down more than half of the grass, Jingyang was already panting heavily, and Wu Er helped with the rest using its claws.

Sitting on the ground, watching Wu Er busy cutting grass, Jing Yang suddenly said, "Hey Tiger, when this patch of grass grew wildly because I absorbed death energy, you were around here, weren't you?"

After Wu Er finished cutting the weeds, he walked over with a low growl and nudged his big head.

"No, if you only witnessed something like that, there's no reason why you, the king of beasts, would treat me so well." Jing Yang stroked the tiger's head, then suddenly examined it closely. "Were you injured yesterday? And did your injuries heal because I absorbed the energy that leaked out after I fell into a coma due to the death energy?"

"Roar~" Wu Er, of course, didn't speak, but just continued to nuzzle Jing Yang affectionately.

Jingyang thought for a while, then shrugged and said, "Whatever."

He manipulated the wolves to gather all the weeds together and then poured fuel on them.

Jingyang took out a lighter, and suddenly a thought struck him, realizing a problem he had overlooked.

My Nen ability is supposed to allow me to control targets by applying "stars," but why... can I control my hair and blood with my Nen?

Hair and blood are not marked with stars.

"Of the four basic techniques of Nen training—'Entanglement,' 'Zetsu,' 'Refinement,' and 'Shoot'—I've only ever used the 'Shoot' technique..." Jingyang toyed with his lighter, pondering to himself. "I don't know 'Zetsu,' let alone 'Refinement,' and my perception of ki is actually rather vague and half-baked. The only technique I'm really good at is 'Shoot,' which is the practical application of Nen..."

What's so special about that? You're so gifted that you learned to fly before you even learned to walk.

If that's the case, then manipulating hair, blood... is essentially a part of one's own "hair." In other words, it's also an extension of one's Nen manipulation abilities!

It's like two sides of a coin.

The front is a rose-gold pentagram, used for control through marking; the back is pure Nen, used to control things by enveloping them in Nen...

Jing Yang tried to recall the feeling of controlling his hair with his psychic energy. He enveloped the lighter in his hand with the warm, invisible, liquid-like 'energy'. Soon, the lighter floated up from his hand, but before it could fly a few centimeters away, it fell to the ground with a thud. Jing Yang felt as if he had been drained dry in an instant, and his arm went limp.

He rubbed his hands, picked up the fallen lighter, and seemed to understand the difference between the two operating skills.

①Star Mark Operation. Only when you mark the target will your Nen energy be consumed once. All subsequent operations will consume the target's own energy.

② Nen manipulation. The amount of Nen required for this method depends on the volume and mass of the object being manipulated. He hadn't felt this when manipulating the hair and blood beads, but manipulating a lighter just now left him feeling instantly drained... This type of manipulation seems to be continuously exhausting, but after canceling the manipulation, some of the remaining Nen would return to him, which at least allowed Jingyang to regain some strength.

In that case, calling my manipulative Nen ability a star rating is no longer quite accurate... it should be renamed...

Jingyang manually lit the haystack with a lighter, watching the flames roar as the oil touched the fire, pondering a new name for his ability. He considered making it Golden Spirit or Dark Will, but then changed his mind and abandoned those ideas. In the end, he settled on "Song of the Earth" for his manipulation ability.

Jingyang carefully put away the lighter, threw the coarse cloth into the fire, turned around, and had the wolf carry the body that appeared to be that of a professional hunter back on its back, and...

Jingyang looked at the last remaining body, the remains of a woman who was probably the mother of his current body.

“I really feel bad about leaving you to rot in the wilderness like this,” he said. “You should at least be buried in peace.”

Jingyang carried the woman's body on Wu Er's back, along with another body carried by Wild Wolf, and left together, with the flames still burning behind them.

After moving a little further away from the "crime scene," Jingyang remotely controlled the wolf to dig a hole with a shovel, since it wouldn't tire him out... When the wolf got tired, Wu Er came to help. To be honest, getting two wild animals to use shovels, even with Jingyang's assistance, was quite difficult, but it was still much more efficient than Jingyang doing it himself.

It took nearly an hour to dig a hole, put the suspected professional hunter's remains inside, and finally filled it with soil, compacting and smoothing the surface layer as much as possible.

Then, carrying a shovel—a wolf carrying a shovel—they randomly chose a direction, walked a distance, and the man, tiger, and wolf repeated the process, spending nearly an hour digging an even deeper pit.

The woman's body was placed at the bottom of the pit. Soil was piled up to fill the pit, and the ground was smoothed. Jingyang was drenched in sweat, covered in dirt and ash, and utterly exhausted.

He patted the ground and muttered to himself, "Asking me to treat you like my own mother is indeed asking too much."

"However... finding a godmother is still no problem!"

Jing Yang knelt down and kowtowed three times, so tired that his legs almost gave way and he couldn't stand up straight. He leaned against Wu Er's back to catch his breath.

Looking up at the sun, which was probably already seven or eight o'clock, Jingyang felt a cool breeze carried by the sea. Behind him was the sea, and ahead were trees, seagulls, and early birds, their calls rising and falling in waves… Jingyang took a deep breath and smiled, “Goodbye, I’m leaving!”

Having said that, he flipped himself onto the tiger's back and rode away, with a wolf following closely behind.

Chapter 9 The Way of Cultivation

"All right."

Between the five-year-old boy's small palms, a ball of white light, invisible to the naked eye, condensed.

Then, like flowing water, the white light enveloped his not-so-thick arms and shoulders, swept down his torso, legs, and feet, and then up to his head...

These white lights are naturally "qi".

Moreover, strictly speaking, these energies had been enveloping the boy's body from the beginning. However, as he became more and more aware of the existence of these energies, he had the illusion that they were clearly "emerging" around him.

Everyone has life energy, or qi, but ordinary people let it flow away from the top of their heads.

The first step in cultivating Nen is to stop this loss. Gathering and solidifying the naturally flowing Qi throughout the body is one of the four major practices in Nen cultivation: 'Entanglement'.

"Entanglement" refers to the act of binding qi around the body, a very direct and essential summary.

Jingyang estimated that, based on his physical perception, he should have mastered the "Entanglement" technique within a minute.

For someone like me who is already proficient in using Nen, mastering it in one minute might still be considered slow.

He looked up and saw that the midday sun was really hot.

This is my first day in the Hunter world, and I didn't expect it to be this hot. Considering the date on the newspaper I found on the ship yesterday—late November—I'm probably in a near-tropical region, or at least somewhere further south of the Kingdom of Kakin…

Jing Yang wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was currently cultivating alone in a clearing in the woods, while Wu Er, a large tiger with moon-white fur and no visible stripes, was lying nearby, staring at him intently. Perhaps out of some feline curiosity, Wu Er was a little confused about what Jing Yang was doing.

As for the wolf, he has already sent it out to carry out orders.

He rode Wu Er for half a day without encountering a single person or finding any villages or towns. He didn't know if the place was too big or if he had simply gotten lost.

Not wanting to waste his time, Jingyang gave up on blindly rushing on his way as the temperature gradually rose.

He used whatever he could find in the woods, such as biscuit crumbs, as bait to make several simple bird traps. He set them up in several nearby locations and gave the wolf commands to patrol between the traps. Whenever the wolf spotted a trap that had caught a bird, it would immediately scratch its own leg with its claws.

The star on the wolf will activate immediately to heal it when it is injured. Once the star is fully activated, it's like a QQ message running in the background suddenly being coughed, alerting Jingyang.

Jingyang, on the other hand, began to cultivate his spiritual abilities on the spot.

After spending a minute mastering "Entanglement," Jingyang immediately moved on to the next one, "Absolute."

The term "Zetsu" (絵) literally means "to eliminate one's aura," similar to the "ki-elimination" technique in Dragon Ball. The Nen user intentionally closes all the pores in their body, completely sealing their aura within. While this completely eliminates their aura, preventing detection by enemies, it also leaves them completely defenseless, making them extremely dangerous.

Therefore, the ability to skillfully use the "Absolute" technique and switch between "Absolute" and "Entanglement" at extremely high speeds is also an important reference for assessing the results of one's cultivation.

It is said that powerful Nen users can even maintain the "Entanglement" state while sleeping, enter the "Zetsu" state to eliminate their own aura, and then switch back to normal in less than a second.

The four practices of cultivating mental abilities are: entanglement, severance, training, and release.

"Hit" refers to various derivative techniques of Nen abilities, such as Jingyang's own manipulator-type Nen ability, "Earth Song." Jingyang considers himself to be quite proficient in techniques, but what he lacks most right now is a solid foundation and a greater total amount of Nen energy. Therefore, he is temporarily focusing his training on the latter.

As for the remaining "training" of the four major elements, it is actually about releasing one's own energy at maximum power, just like the state in Dragon Ball where one shouts and unleashes their energy during battle.

To put it bluntly, the essence of the four major banks boils down to one core principle: how to utilize Qi (vital energy).

Jingyang calmed himself down and repeatedly switched between 'entanglement' and 'absolute', each time for an unequal duration... He knew that his current total amount of qi was not much, and if he were to practice 'training', he would probably be exhausted and lying on the ground after only a minute or two, which would delay his other training. Therefore, he temporarily placed 'training' at the end of each training session.