[Month One — The Lookout]
The gravity room was on the Lookout’s lower level, accessed through a door that Mr.
Popo unlocked with a key he kept on a cord around his neck and never explained the origin of.
The room itself was small — perhaps eight meters square — and unimpressive in appearance: bare stone walls, a padded floor that had seen decades of use, and a single mechanism in the ceiling that looked like a sophisticated water pipe assembly and was, in fact, something that Tien did not fully understand and decided not to ask about immediately.
The mechanism could triple the gravity in the room.
That was the baseline setting.
Mr.
Popo explained that it could go higher — up to ten times, at the far end — but that the baseline was where everyone started, without exception, and that beginning above the baseline was how people broke themselves.
“How long did Goku train here before the 23rd?” Tien asked.
Mr.
Popo regarded him.
“That is Goku’s information,” he said.
“Not mine to share.”
Tien accepted this.
He stepped into the room.
Triple gravity arrived as a full-body compression — the kind of weight that doesn’t feel like weight initially so much as it feels like the air has become something denser than air, something that presses on every exposed surface simultaneously.
He stood in it for thirty seconds and let his body tell him what it needed to tell him, which was that this was significantly harder than standing at normal gravity, that his ki was immediately working to compensate, and that the compensation was expensive.
Good.
Expensive meant training.
He began with the most basic movement — walking — and did it for twenty minutes.
[Month Two]
He was running in the gravity room.
Not at pace — triple gravity made running at pace a project for someone further along in this training than he currently was — but at the controlled, deliberate jog that was the gravity room’s equivalent of a sprint.
He had added the iron training rings back to his wrists and ankles, which at triple gravity meant he was moving against resistance equivalent to what no amount of surface-level weights could replicate.
His power level, at the end of month two, was approximately five hundred and fifty.
He had used four senzu beans in the period.
Each one had followed a genuine ceiling-push — a session in the gravity room where the combination of triple gravity, ki-intensive movement, and duration had driven him to the specific threshold where the body began to protect itself by shutting things down.
Each bean had cleared the shutdown and let him go again.
Each cycle had moved the ceiling.
The ki compression technique was holding for thirty seconds now, in the quiet morning sessions.
Not consistently — seven times in ten it collapsed before the thirty-second mark — but often enough that he could feel the shape of it becoming more familiar.
The crisis-state quality was beginning to be something he could approach rather than something that found him.
At night on the Lookout, when the sky was enormous and the stars did what they did here at this altitude, he practiced the third eye work.
Kami had given him a framework: it was less a technique than a withdrawal of attention.
Not the forward-reaching attention of combat or analysis, but a deliberate pulling-back from the two ordinary eyes and the ordinary senses, creating a kind of sensory vacuum that the third eye — inactive since adolescence, dormant but present, like a limb long not used — could begin to fill.
The early stages produced nothing visible.
What they produced was a faint, occasional warmth at the point between his eyebrows, and once, on the nineteenth night of practice, a brief impression of something that was not quite a visual but was adjacent to one: a pulse of ki awareness that extended perhaps two hundred meters beyond the range of his ordinary ki sense, picking up the signatures of Mr.
Popo moving in the Lookout’s kitchen and Chiaotzu sleeping in the room they’d been given, with a quality of specificity — a sense of the particular texture of each signature — that his normal ki sense didn’t provide.
He reported this to Kami.
Kami said: “Continue.”
[Month Four — The South Capital Open]
The tournament was held in the South Capital’s vast central arena, the kind of venue that materialized for the major circuit events and drew fighters from three provinces.
Tien had registered three weeks before, traveling down from the Lookout with Chiaotzu, leaving the gravity room for the first time in two months and feeling, in the open air of the world at normal gravity, the specific lightness of a body that had been living under compression.
He moved faster than he was used to moving.
Hit harder than his ki output alone should have justified.
His body had adapted to the gravity room’s demands and the normal world had become, correspondingly, easier.
The tournament bracket was thirty-two fighters.
He moved through it the way water moves downhill — not dramatically, not performatively, simply in the direction of least resistance, applying exactly what was needed and conserving the rest.
In the quarterfinal, he fought a school-trained fighter from the Central Capital circuit who was genuinely skilled — smooth, technically refined, operating at a level that would have given the previous year’s Tien a real match — and won in two minutes. New chapters come out on g.com first.
In the semifinal, he fought Yamcha.
It had been two months since Mishiro, and what those two months had done to Yamcha was visible from the first movement of the match: the footwork was slower than it had been, but the geometry was more automatic.
He was clearly in the deceleration phase Tien had described — working the angles at reduced speed, building the instinct — and the speed would come back later, cleaner and cheaper.
He fought smartly and gave Tien a genuine contest and lost in four and a half minutes on a ring-out that Tien produced by using, for the first time in a competitive context, a brief flash of the compression technique — three seconds of genuinely higher ki density that he released into a single push rather than a blast, more force than Yamcha had prepared for from someone at Tien’s apparent level.
Yamcha landed outside the ring and looked up at Tien with the specific expression of someone who has been shown something they didn’t know existed.
“That’s the compression,” he said.
“Beginning of it,” Tien said.
Yamcha stood, dusted himself off, and said: “Show me how to do that after the final.”
Krillin was in the final.
He was stronger than he’d been at the Paozu regional — meaningfully stronger, a training cycle clearly completed in the interim, the ki signature warmer and more settled.
He fought Tien with everything he had and the match lasted seven minutes and was the most genuinely competitive fight Tien had been in since the transmigration — Krillin’s defensive efficiency neutralizing the early pressure Tien applied, his speed making the geometry work in ways that required Tien to abandon the linear approach and use the footwork development, the whole fight a real exchange rather than a demonstration.
Tien won.
By less than he’d expected.
In the post-tournament dinner — the four of them, Tien and Chiaotzu and Yamcha and Krillin, at a long table in a restaurant near the arena, with the specific ease of people who have fought each other hard and clean and come out the other side still fundamentally glad the other exists — Krillin said: “Goku knows you’re here.
In the sense of — he knows you’re doing the circuit.
He’s heard.”
“What did he say?” Tien asked.
Krillin smiled — the specific smile of someone relaying something that captures a person exactly.
“He said, ‘Tien?
Yeah, I’d like to fight him again.
He keeps getting more interesting.'”
Tien felt something warm and slightly complicated move through him.
“Tell him when he’s ready,” he said.
[Month Six — Bulma]
She appeared at the Lookout.
This required some explanation, and the explanation, when it came, was characteristically Bulma: she had heard, through the circuit network and through Krillin, that someone was using Kami’s Lookout as a training facility.
She had determined that this was Tien.
She had, in the way that Bulma determined things, simply found a way up — a capsule aircraft had gotten her to altitude and then she had, apparently, knocked on the cloud road’s edge with the unshakeable confidence of someone who had learned that confidence was often sufficient substitute for permission.
Mr.
Popo had let her in because Kami had told him to.
She was exactly what the series had presented her as and exactly what that could not fully prepare you for in person: brilliant in a way that had physical presence, restless and direct, carrying the specific energy of someone whose mind was always operating two problems ahead of the current conversation.
She was twenty-four or twenty-five, dressed practically, her blue hair pulled back, a tablet device in her hand running calculations that she didn’t bother to close when she entered the training room where Tien was working through ki compression practice.
“You’re Tien Shinhan,” she said.
“Yes,” Tien said.
“Korin told me about you,” she said.
“He said you were doing something with ki compression that he’d never seen before.
He said it was worth understanding.” She looked at the tablet, then back at him.
“I’ve been trying to figure out if ki has a measurable electromagnetic component.
For a project.” She paused.
“Can I watch you train?”
Tien looked at her.
Bulma, he thought.
Bulma who builds things.
Bulma who, in the original timeline, built the gravity machine that Vegeta trained in.
Bulma who, in the right context, is the most valuable non-fighter ally anyone in this story ever has.
“Yes,” he said.
“On one condition.”
“What condition?”
“You tell me about the project.”
She looked at him for a moment with the assessing gaze of someone deciding whether a person is worth the information.
Apparently he passed, because she turned the tablet around and showed him a screen full of equations and a schematic that was, even at this preliminary stage, recognizable as the early theoretical framework for a ki-measurement device.
“I’m trying to build a scouter,” she said.
“Functional, not just theoretical.
Something that can accurately read ki levels in the field.” She paused.
“Korin has been helping with the theoretical model.
I need real-world training data to calibrate the detection sensitivity.”
Tien felt the information land with the weight of something that mattered more than she knew.
A scouter.
In the original timeline, the only scouters that existed came with the Saiyans — Raditz’s, Nappa’s and Vegeta’s, devices that gave the enemy a tactical advantage by allowing them to detect and quantify every power level in range.
The Z-fighters had been operating blind, unable to measure or compare ki signatures with any precision.
If Bulma built a functional scouter before Raditz arrived — if the Z-fighters had access to ki measurement technology—
Don’t get ahead of yourself, he thought.
She’s at the theoretical stage.
This takes time.
But it was worth every second of showing her whatever she needed to see.
“When can you start?” he said.
“Now,” Bulma said, and sat down cross-legged on the training room floor with the tablet in her lap, completely at home, and said: “Go ahead.”
[Month Eight — Power Check]
At the end of the first year’s first eight months, Tien sat at the Lookout’s edge in the early evening and did what he did at the end of every month: an honest internal assessment, no inflation, no optimism.
Power level: approximately eight hundred.
He had doubled his starting point in eight months.
The gravity room was the primary driver — consistent triple-gravity training, six days a week, with senzu recovery when the ceiling was genuinely breached.
The ki compression technique was now stable for ninety seconds in the quiet practice sessions, and he had successfully deployed it three times in competition — brief, three-to-five-second windows, but real.
The third eye cultivation had produced a ki-sense range of approximately half a kilometer, with a quality of detail that his normal sense couldn’t approach: he could feel the texture of ki signatures within that range, individual qualities, emotional states loosely inferred, not reading minds but reading the shape of what a person was doing with their life force in any given moment.
He needed to reach four thousand in approximately forty months.
At double per eight months — the current rate — he would reach eight hundred, sixteen hundred, thirty-two hundred, sixty-four hundred.
Three doublings from now: thirty-two hundred.
Two more eight-month cycles: sixteen months.
He would be at thirty-two hundred in sixteen months.
That’s ahead of schedule, he thought.
That assumes the rate holds.
It won’t hold exactly.
The ceiling gets harder to move as it rises.
But the rate held better than raw genetics suggested it should, because of the tools.
The senzu cycle compressing training time.
The gravity room adding a consistent physical multiplier.
The ki compression technique, when it was fully stable and deployable, would add an effective output multiplier on top of the base.
The third eye would add tactical value that didn’t appear in power level at all but would matter in a fight.
He was not going to be Goku.
He was not going to be Vegeta.
He had made his peace with that in the first week.
But he was going to be useful.
Genuinely, measurably useful.
And that was what he’d come here to be.
He sat at the Lookout’s edge and watched the sun go down and felt the thirty-two hundred power levels sleeping in his future, and let himself feel, for a moment, the specific quiet satisfaction of a person who is exactly where they intended to be.