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"Where… am I?"
When Morin slowly opened his eyes, his head was still throbbing with pain.
"I remember… I was working overtime, sorting through my boss's encyclopedia of Doraemon's gadgets, and then…"
Morin tried hard to piece together what had happened.
His boss at work was a spoiled rich kid, an eccentric who loved Doraemon more than anything.
By chance, Morin himself was an anime fan. He could rattle off facts from countless famous manga without missing a beat. That caught his boss's eye, and the two of them hit it off right away.
Unlike most who were into the usual hot-blooded shonen series, this boss's all-time favorite was Doraemon—pure childhood nostalgia.
One day he gave Morin a USB drive designed to look just like Doraemon's four-dimensional pocket and asked him to compile and catalog every gadget from the series.
Morin had already spent who knows how many hours on it, and was just about to finish sorting through the thousands of items when—
His computer froze.
A flash of blinding light burst out, and everything went black.
When he came to, it was… here.
"Where… is this?"
All around him were mountains of trash, smoke, and toxic haze. Beyond that stretched a barren wasteland.
Not a trace of human life anywhere. Even garbage dumps usually had signs of people, but this place—this place was something else entirely.
Morin tried to stand up, but froze.
His body felt… smaller. His skin was soft, like that of a teenager again.
"What the hell happened to me?"
He stared in shock.
Then—
Boom!
A surge of blinding light exploded inside his mind, drowning out his consciousness. His body collapsed onto the ground again.
"M–my gadgets… Hunter x Hunter… Nen…"
Mumbling incoherently, Morin sank into darkness once more.
Not long after, a figure appeared from the distance.
It was small, wearing a protective suit that seemed slightly too big for the body inside.
"A human?"
The figure quickly spotted Morin lying unconscious on the heap of irradiated junk.
"No protective suit?"
She tilted her head. Anyone who collapsed in a radiation-heavy dump without a suit was basically already dead. Their body would be saturated with radiation—untouchable, destined to rot as landfill waste.
She hesitated, ready to just walk away, when—
"Huh?"
She noticed Morin's clothes. They looked… surprisingly decent.
Thinking it over, she carefully walked closer and used her suit's tools to lift him up.
"No radiation?!"
Her suit's scanner confirmed it.
She double-checked her gear—no malfunctions.
Her gaze lingered on Morin's young, handsome face for a few seconds.
Originally, she just wanted his clothes. But now…
After a moment's thought, she made a different decision.
.....
"Ugh… my head… it hurts…"
No idea how much time had passed when Morin finally woke again. The pain in his head was far worse than before.
Groaning, he sat up slowly, clutching his temples while trying to make sense of both his scattered memories and his surroundings.
He was lying on a rickety wooden cot inside what looked like a shack.
The place was barebones—nothing but a hammock, an old table and chair, and a battered oil lamp. The walls were cracked, and the whole house could barely be called a house at all. Still, it was tidy enough not to feel like a pigsty. Whoever lived here at least cared about cleanliness.
But Morin barely spared the room a glance.
His memories were rushing back, clearer and clearer, and his face grew more shocked with every detail.
"I… actually transmigrated into the world of Hunter x Hunter?!"
He let out a bitter laugh.
Out of all people, why him?
At least, he thought, he was an orphan. No family ties, no attachments.
And yes, Hunter x Hunter was his all-time favorite anime.
But liking it was one thing. Living here? That was another story.
On any list of dangerous worlds, Hunter x Hunter ranked near the top. Here, life was pure jungle law—the strong devoured the weak. Morality, laws, social order—none of it could restrain the monsters inside people's hearts.
And that was just within human society. Add in magical beasts, cursed ruins, dangerous unknown lands, and, worst of all, Nen—this world was a deathtrap where anything could happen.
"Good thing… I've already got the basics of Nen down."
Morin raised his small hand, and a thin, white aura wrapped around his fist.
Apparently, when he crossed over, some kind of mysterious "bonus" came with him.
That blast of light from his computer… it had reshaped his body, reverting him back to around twelve or thirteen years old—the prime age for training—and unlocked all his aura nodes.
More than that, the light had granted him a unique Nen ability.
"The… Four-Dimensional Treasure Pouch?"
Morin whispered, going over the description that surfaced in his mind.
"....."