[Month Sixteen]
Power level: sixteen hundred.
It had held, roughly, the doubling rate.
The gravity room was now operating at five times, not three — Mr.
Popo had adjusted it at the beginning of month thirteen, after watching Tien move through the triple-gravity setting with the ease of someone doing maintenance work rather than training.
The adjustment had been significant: five times gravity was not a modest step from three, it was a different category of demand, and the first week at the new setting had been the hardest week of training he’d subjected himself to since arriving in this world.
He had used three senzu beans that week alone.
He had emerged from it with a training adaptation that pushed his growth rate from its existing pace by approximately thirty percent.
The ki compression technique was stable for six minutes now.
Not the quiet meditative practice — in active movement, in the context of actual physicality.
He had tested it in a sparring session with Yamcha, who had been living at the Lookout intermittently between circuit tournaments, and had held the compression for a full minute while exchanging genuine strikes, both of them at full effort.
The effective output during that minute had been, by his best internal estimate, approximately double his base.
This was the number that mattered.
Not what his power level was in the base.
What it was while the technique was active.
At sixteen hundred base, with the compression active, his effective output was approximately thirty-two hundred.
I’m already there, he thought, with a precision of satisfaction that came from having aimed at a specific target and found it.
In base I’m not.
But in compression I’m competitive with what Nappa will bring.
The caveat was immediate and honest: six minutes was not indefinite, and he couldn’t guarantee maintaining it under the pressure of a real, desperate, life-or-death fight rather than a controlled training session.
The crisis-state that the compression required was, paradoxically, easier to achieve when the crisis was real — Korin had said as much, and he’d experienced it in glimpses.
The challenge was maintaining it deliberately rather than accidentally.
He needed to train toward that specifically.
[Month Eighteen — The Third Eye Opens]
It happened between one breath and the next.
He was in the quiet practice session, in the early morning on the Lookout’s eastern face, the sun not yet fully up, the sky that particular deep blue that existed only in the minutes before the light fully arrived.
He had been doing the practice for fifteen months.
The withdrawal of attention from the ordinary senses, the creation of the sensory vacuum, the waiting.
He had stopped waiting, somewhere in the past several weeks.
That was the thing he noticed afterward — the shift had occurred when he’d stopped actively trying to produce the state and had simply done the practice as a practice, without an agenda for what the practice should produce.
The moment the expectation dropped, the thing that the expectation had been obstructing had room to arrive.
The third eye opened.
It was not dramatic.
It was not a flash of light or a sensation of power or anything that a story would engineer into a transformation.
It was simply a shift in perception — the world becoming, instantaneously, larger.
Not visually larger.
Informationally larger.
The ki sense that had been extending to two kilometers in range via the partial development snapped, suddenly, to a range that he couldn’t immediately measure because it was too large to find the edge of.
He could feel Korin on the tower — specific, warm, the signature of three hundred years of focused cultivation unmistakable.
He could feel something enormous and peaceful far to the north that took him a moment to identify as a Dragon Ball, one of them, the latent energy in it a specific hum against the expanded sense. The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
And he could feel Goku.
In Paozu Province, which was a hundred and forty kilometers away, Goku was training in the morning, and through the third eye his ki was visible as clearly as a bonfire in a dark field — not just present but detailed, the quality of his engagement apparent, the way his ki moved and was managed and expressed carrying more information than any power level number could contain.
The third eye felt this for three seconds and then the ordinary eyes reasserted themselves and the expanded range contracted again, back to its two-kilometer partial state.
But the door had been opened.
Once opened, it could be opened again.
He sat very still in the morning and let himself be with what had just happened.
Then he went to find Kami.
Kami listened to his account without expression until he was finished.
Then the Guardian of Earth was quiet for a long time.
“You’ll be able to open it intentionally now,” he said.
“It will take practice to hold it open, and more practice to use what you perceive while it’s open — there is so much information in a fully-open third eye that untrained fighters are overwhelmed by it and can’t act effectively while it’s active.” He paused.
“The training from here is integration.
Making the expanded perception compatible with movement, with action, with the demands of a real fight.” He looked at Tien.
“This is the most important training you’ll do in the next year.
More important than the gravity room.”
Tien absorbed this.
“Because?”
“Because power level is a number.
The third eye is a different kind of weapon entirely.” Kami looked at him with those deep eyes.
“In a fight between opponents of similar strength, the one who can see more wins.
Not always.
But more often than chance would suggest.” He paused.
“And in a fight between opponents of very different strength, the one who can see more survives long enough to matter.
Which is what you’re actually aiming for.”
Yes, Tien thought.
Exactly that.
[Month Twenty-Four — The Network, State of Play]
Two years in.
He stood the Lookout’s edge at night, the stars spread above him in their generous excess, and surveyed what he had built.
Korin: fully allied.
The senzu supply was a genuine relationship now — he returned every three months, spent two or three days on the tower, talked through ki theory and the compression technique’s development, and left with beans calibrated exactly to the training cycle he was running.
Korin had become, in some sense, the most valuable ally of all — not because of the beans alone but because of the accumulated knowledge in those conversations, the three hundred years of observation being shared in pieces that were always precisely what he needed and never more.
Kami: allied, cautious, increasingly engaged.
The third eye training had deepened their relationship — Kami had a genuine investment in its development that went beyond simple helpfulness, something more like the interest a craftsman takes in a technique being used correctly.
He had shared things about ki mechanics and Earth’s history and the nature of what was approaching that had expanded Tien’s understanding of the situation beyond what the series alone could tell him.
Yamcha: training partner, network node, committed.
He was at approximately five hundred and fifty now, the footwork deceleration work done — he had moved back through full speed over the past four months and emerged cleaner, cheaper, and geometrically more complete than he’d been at Mishiro. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
He was not going to reach the numbers that would make him central to the Saiyan confrontation, but he was going to be genuinely useful in ways the original timeline had not allowed him to be.
Krillin: adjacent ally, Goku’s world, honest and sharp.
He was at approximately six hundred — growing fast, the Turtle School independent work proving itself.
He had visited the Lookout once, been introduced to Mr.
Popo, been given one senzu bean and told its significance, and had handled the information with the quiet seriousness that was his best quality.
He understood something was coming without knowing its full shape.
Goku: known, trusted, aligned in the loose way that Goku aligned with anything — not through commitment or agreement but through the simple animal fact of recognizing another serious fighter and deciding they were worth engaging with.
They had trained together four times in the past year.
The sessions were extraordinary — not because he learned specific techniques from Goku, you couldn’t learn techniques from Goku, his techniques were expressions of his specific nature and not transferable — but because training with someone who operated in the crisis-state as a permanent condition meant that the crisis-state became, for the duration of the session, achievable for Tien too.
His best times for compression stability were always in the days after a session with Goku.
Bulma: the wildcard and potentially the most transformative.
She had visited the Lookout three times now, each time with more refined instrumentation, each time leaving with calibration data that she was feeding into the scouter project.
The device was, by her last report, functional at short range — it could measure ki signatures within twenty meters with approximately eighty percent accuracy.
She was working on extending the range and improving the accuracy.
She was also, Tien had learned in their third conversation, working on something else entirely: a gravity modification device for personal training use.
Smaller than a room.
Wearable.
Wearable gravity enhancement, he thought.
If she builds that—
He had not pushed her on it.
He was careful, with Bulma, not to push.
She went where her interest took her and arrived at remarkable things, and the fastest way to slow that process was to direct it from the outside.
He had simply, in their conversations, mentioned what would be useful, in the spirit of here’s what fighters need, and let her mind do what her mind did.
Power level: approximately two thousand.
The third eye was stable for up to eight minutes now, with the expanded range fully available and the information managing—mostly.
He could fight with it open at the two-minute mark.
After two minutes, the information volume became difficult, required active management, cost attention that should be going elsewhere.
He was working on it.
The compression technique: reliable in training, reliable in sparring, stable for six to eight minutes in high-intensity conditions.
Effective output at full compression: approximately four thousand.
Two years in.
Two years to go.
He was where he needed to be.
Don’t slow down, he told himself.
Two years of this produced two thousand.
Two more, with the techniques compounding on each other, with the gravity room at seven times now and moving toward ten, with the third eye integration deepening—
He breathed.
Let the stars be what they were.
Don’t slow down.