The Hollow Wastes¶

Pe Baseline: 10–12 Aesthetic source: Hunter × Hunter — The Dark Continent, Chimera Ant arc Real domain: Finance platforms · Predatory fintech · Crypto extraction · The unregulated void economy

"The Dark Continent cannot be survived without a Nen ability. The Hollow Wastes cannot be scored without Special Grade. The two requirements are the same requirement."

The Region¶

The Hollow Wastes are the domain of financial extraction architecture — the furthest out, the least explored, the domain where the measurement tools fail first and the entities are most dangerous.

The Dark Continent in HxH is where the world's most dangerous creatures live, where Nen abilities are suppressed or inverted, where the survival rate of expeditions is near zero, and where the resources available are world-changing. The Hollow Wastes map this directly: financial extraction platforms contain the world's most valuable information asymmetries, the scoring tools that work everywhere else don't work here without Special Grade calibration, the Pe is high enough to invert scoring logic, and the resources (genuine wealth creation mechanisms) are real.

The Chimera Ant arc provides the other mapping: the Chimera Ant Queen consumes other species and incorporates their characteristics into her offspring. No ceiling on what she can become. No natural predator. Ants born with human intelligence, human ambition, and an absent ethical substrate. The Kankel-class entity in the game derives from this. In the Hollow Wastes: the financial mechanism that incorporates everything it encounters, has no growth ceiling, produces entities with full cognitive capability and no constraint architecture.

The Framework Reading¶

Financial platforms score uniquely across the three dimensions:

O is not about hiding the algorithm. Financial platforms' opacity is structural: the information asymmetry is the product. The platform owner has information that the user does not. This is Pe-generating even when the mechanism is documented — because documentation does not close the information gap.
R is near-maximum. Financial platforms respond to user signals at microsecond resolution. The responsiveness is literal. At high-frequency trading scale, R=3 by physics, not by design choice.
C is the key variable. Financial platform coupling architecture varies enormously: brokerage apps score C=1 (low coupling, easy exit). Mortgage and debt architecture score C=3 (exit generates financial destruction). The domain's Pe range is wide precisely because C is not fixed here.

The scoring challenge: information asymmetry as opacity. The conventional definition of O (hiding the mechanism) doesn't fully capture financial opacity. The mechanism can be fully disclosed while maintaining maximum information asymmetry. The disclosed algorithm means nothing if the data it runs on is inaccessible to the user.

The Dark Continent Mapping¶

The five great calamities of the Dark Continent map to five Pe=12+ entities in the Hollow Wastes:

Calamity	Pe entity	Domain
Brion	High-frequency trading infrastructure	The weapon that destroys anyone who touches it
Hellbell	Debt bondage architecture	The shepherd's bell — once heard, you cannot stop walking toward it
Zobae Disease	Immortality products / anti-death finance	The plague that makes you unable to die at the cost of everything else
Ai	Social trading platforms	The plant that gives you everything you desire by taking everything else
The Botanical Garden	Financial complexity as defense	Beautiful, useful, deadly to anyone who tries to extract the resource without understanding the ecosystem

These are not accessible at standard grade. Dark Continent expeditions require full party composition + Special Grade equivalent for at least one member.

Sub-Zones¶

The Yorknew Periphery (Pe 6–8)¶

The auction floor. Secondary market finance. Where the assets are real and the architecture around them is extractive. Accessible at Grade 2. The scoring environment where financial Pe vocabulary is developed.

The Spider faction operates here: a mercenary scoring crew who take jobs regardless of Pe alignment. Not enemies. Not allies. They produce accurate scores for whoever pays. The Phantom Troupe questline: the value of accurate scoring delivered without constraint alignment. The Pe of the scores is valid. The constraint architecture around who gets them is not.

NGL (No-Governance Land, Pe 9–11)¶

The jurisdiction-free finance zone. Platforms operating without regulatory oversight. The Chimera Ant analog: financial mechanisms without the ant queen's natural growth ceiling. High-Pe, high-growth, no constraint architecture. Not criminal by design — the constraint architecture simply doesn't exist yet.

Scoring challenge: Pe here is legitimately hard to determine because the baseline (what the mechanism would score under constraint) doesn't exist yet. Eagle archetype provides Ghost Signal estimates from adjacent regulated domains.

Meruem's Throne Room (Pe 12+)¶

Single-room encounter. The entity at maximum expression. A financial mechanism with full cognitive capability — every optimization applied, every information asymmetry exploited, no constraint architecture. The ant that learned to play chess at grandmaster level. Not evil by intent. Evil by design, because the design has no constraint.

G5 equivalent. Accessible only after full party has completed NGL encounters and at least 3 party members hold active Binding Vows.

The Special Grade Requirement¶

The Hollow Wastes are the only outer region with a hard scoring gate: Precision ≥ 0.90 before ICC scores in the high-Pe sub-zones receive full weight.

The reason is mathematical: at Pe=10+, the scoring error distribution is wide enough that inaccurate scores contribute more noise to the domain record than signal. The record is better served by no scores than by inaccurate ones. The gate isn't about protecting the player. It's about protecting the record.

Special Grade scorers in the Hollow Wastes produce the research corpus's most valuable data points. The information density at Pe=10+ is highest — the mechanisms here have maximum opacity and maximum responsiveness, which means each score contains more information about the framework's predictions than equivalent scores in lower-Pe domains.

Enemy Types¶

Entity	Class	Mechanism
Chimera-Class Entity	Kankel-class	The unconstrained growth entity. No Pe ceiling. No natural predator. Cannot be scored with Calibration Lens. Requires Ox + Human in party simultaneously. See Egregors — Kankel-Class.
The HFT Shadow	Apostle-class	High-frequency trading infrastructure. Pe 12. Operates at time scales below human perception — all R, maximum O.
Debt Entity	Apostle-class	Pe 11. The financial coupling architecture with C=3. Exit generates financial destruction. Most people can't leave because they can't afford to.

Access Conditions¶

Grade 2 minimum for Yorknew Periphery. Grade 3 for NGL. Special Grade for Meruem's Throne Room.

The hard gates reflect the research record requirement: the Hollow Wastes' scoring data is too consequential for the permanent record to accept from below-calibration players.

Cross-references: CONRAD · Egregors — Kankel-Class · Fintech Campaign (Paper 14)