[Month Twenty-Five — Eight Times Gravity]
The gravity room at eight times did not feel like a room anymore.
It felt like being buried.
Not in the claustrophobic sense — the walls were where they had always been, the ceiling unchanged, the pale stone floor still the same pale stone floor.
But eight times gravity compressed the air itself to a density that breathing required thought.
Not effort exactly — his body had adapted enough that it managed the raw respiration without crisis — but conscious management, a deliberate expansion of the chest that at normal gravity happened without any attention from the mind at all.
Here, every inhale was a small act of will.
He had been at eight times for six weeks, and he had used nine senzu beans in that period, more than any six-week span before.
Three of those had been for genuine ceiling-push sessions.
Two had been for technical ki work — the compression technique demanded a specific quality of internal attention that was harder to maintain at eight times gravity than at five, harder in the way that threading a needle is harder when your hands are shaking, the required delicacy working against the required force.
He had pushed those sessions until the pathways screamed and then taken beans and gone back the next day.
Four had been for Chiaotzu.
This was the part Tien had not fully anticipated: the gravity room at high settings was not simply a multiplier for power development.
It was a specific and somewhat merciless test of technique.
Chiaotzu’s telekinesis, which generated its force through a mechanism that was less ki-intensive than most combat techniques and more rooted in something Kami had described as will-pressure — the direct expression of psychic intent without the ki conversion step — did not scale with gravity the same way physical training did.
The gravity pressed on Chiaotzu’s body but did not press on his technique in the same proportional way.
What it did was reveal the technique’s architecture with a clarity that normal gravity obscured.
“You’re fighting the gravity instead of using it,” Tien had told him, at the end of the third week, after watching Chiaotzu’s telekinetic output fluctuate in ways it never had at lower settings.
“I know,” Chiaotzu had said.
He was sitting against the wall in the gravity room, small and slightly damp with exertion, his expression the composed one that meant he was thinking very hard.
“The gravity is trying to be part of my attention.
It keeps pulling my focus downward when my focus needs to be — outward.”
“What if you included it?” Tien said.
“Instead of blocking it out.
What if you let the downward pull be part of the telekinetic expression — incorporated it.”
Chiaotzu had looked at him.
“Like using the river’s current instead of swimming against it.”
“Yes.
Exactly that.”
Chiaotzu had tried it the next morning.
The result had been, at first, chaotic — the integration of the gravity pull into his telekinetic expression had produced a technique that was less controlled but considerably more powerful, the downward component adding a component of force that his purely lateral telekinesis hadn’t had.
It had taken two weeks of work to achieve the control at the new power level.
At the end of those two weeks, his telekinetic output had increased by approximately forty percent over his previous ceiling.
Four beans for that process.
Worth every one.
[Month Twenty-Six — Bulma’s Package]
The package arrived at the Lookout via a delivery drone — a small capsule aircraft that navigated by GPS and had no pilot, which was Bulma’s preferred method of sending things when she didn’t want to make the trip herself.
Mr.
Popo accepted it at the Lookout’s edge with the mild interest of someone receiving a parcel that contains something they were already aware of.
Inside the package: two devices, and a note.
The devices were small.
The first was a wristband — smooth black material, a single display element on its face no larger than a thumbnail, a button that activated the display.
The note described it as a personal ki measurement unit, accurate to within five percent at ranges up to fifty meters, updating in real time.
Bulma’s handwriting on the note had the characteristic energy of someone who had solved a problem they found genuinely satisfying: I know it’s not as good as I want it to be yet but it works and it’s yours.
The range issue is a power source problem I’m still figuring out.
Don’t break it.
— B.
The second device was smaller still — a disc, perhaps three centimeters in diameter, that attached to the inside of clothing via a strong adhesive backing.
The note described it as a passive ki signature recorder, logging the user’s power level output over time into an internal memory.
For calibration data.
Wear it during training.
I’ll collect it next time I come up.
Tien held the wristband and turned it over in his hands. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
He was holding a scouter.
Not the alien technology that Raditz would bring — not the model worn over the eye, not the device that exploded when it tried to measure Goku’s full power — but a functional ki measurement tool, built from Earth materials by an Earth scientist who had started from first principles and arrived, in two years of intermittent work, at something real.
He pressed the activation button.
The display lit with a number.
His own power level, measured from the inside of his own ki field: 2,240.
He looked at the number for a long moment.
That’s honest, he thought.
That’s the base, no compression, resting state.
That’s what I actually am right now.
He put it on.
It fit well — she had clearly estimated his wrist size correctly, or possibly had simply built an adjustable mechanism and not mentioned it.
He walked to the gravity room door, entered, and the display updated as the gravity setting changed the demand on his ki: 2,240 became 2,280 as his ki engaged to compensate for the increased load.
Not a power level increase — just the body’s management of an environmental condition, visible now in numbers.
This is how they’ll see us, he thought.
Raditz, Nappa, Vegeta.
They’ll have scouters and they’ll read us as numbers and the numbers will determine how seriously they take us.
The original Tien registered at approximately two hundred and fifty at the beginning of the Saiyan Saga.
They didn’t take him seriously.
I’m at two thousand two hundred and forty and rising.
He thought about Nappa’s power level.
Approximately four thousand.
The scouter reading would show him a human fighter at over two thousand and he would — what?
Adjust his assessment.
Not dramatically.
But he wouldn’t dismiss it the way he’d dismissed the original Z-fighters.
That changes things, Tien thought.
Not the outcome, necessarily.
But the approach.
Nappa won’t be careless.
He filed this.
It was a genuine tactical consideration that he needed to account for.
Then he found Chiaotzu and showed him the device and watched Chiaotzu’s face do the small, quiet version of impressed that was his closest equivalent to open astonishment.
“She built this,” Chiaotzu said.
“Yes.”
“From nothing.”
“From theory.
From our training data.
From two years of thinking about the problem.” He paused.
“She’s remarkable.”
Chiaotzu turned the second device — the passive recorder — over in his hands.
“Should we tell her what’s coming?”
Tien had been thinking about this.
The question of Bulma specifically was one he’d run from multiple angles over the past year.
She was not a fighter.
She would not be in the field when the Saiyans arrived.
What she needed to know was shaped by what she could usefully do with the information, which was building technology that helped the people who would be in the field.
“Not everything,” he said.
“But more than we have.” He paused.
“She needs to know there’s a timeline.
She needs to know that what she’s building needs to be functional by a specific date and not just eventually.” He paused again.
“Next time she comes up.
Chiaotzu nodded.
He attached the passive recorder to the inside of his training sash and went back to the gravity room.
Tien watched the number on the wristband — 2,240 at rest, updating every few seconds — and thought about the device’s implications, and about Bulma’s mind, and about the remarkable fact that the most important piece of technology currently being developed for the coming conflict had originated from a woman who had started with a theoretically interesting problem and a lot of curiosity and had simply refused to stop until the problem was solved.
She’s going to need to know, he thought.
Soon.
[Month Twenty-Eight — The Compression Fully Weaponized]
The session that confirmed it happened on a morning in late autumn, the sky above the Lookout thick with the gray of approaching weather, the air cold and specific in the way that late-autumn high-altitude air had a specificity that lower elevations couldn’t match.
He was sparring with Yamcha.
Full contact, both of them at genuine effort, the match already nine minutes in — longer than most of their sessions, both of them running hotter than usual, some combination of the cold air and the accumulated competition between two people who had been training alongside each other long enough to know exactly where the other’s ceiling was and how to find it.
At nine minutes, something happened in Tien’s ki that was different from what had happened before.
The compression was already active — he’d opened it at the three-minute mark, the now-familiar six-to-eight minute stability window well within range.
But at nine minutes, instead of the compression beginning its usual slow degradation — the crisis-state quality loosening as fatigue mounted — it deepened.
Became more complete.
As if the genuine effort of the fight, the real physical cost of nine minutes of full-contact sparring at high intensity, had produced exactly the crisis-state quality that the quiet practice had been building toward, and instead of the crisis-state collapsing the technique it had reinforced it.
He was aware of it happening with a quality of awareness that was different from the analytical observation that usually broke the compression.
The third eye was open — it had been open since minute four, the expanded ki-sense reading the fight in detail — and the third eye didn’t interfere with the compression the way the analytical mind did.
It observed without evaluating.
It perceived without editorializing.
It was exactly the kind of awareness that was compatible with the crisis-state rather than opposed to it.
He and the third eye and the compression were simultaneously active, for the first time, without any of them degrading the others.
What he did with it: nothing dramatic.
He didn’t end the fight in a single overwhelming strike.
He adjusted.
The quality of his movement changed — became more precise, more economical, the third eye’s spatial information integrated seamlessly into his decision-making, the compression’s higher output available without having to reach for it.
He moved inside Yamcha’s geometry, found the angle that Yamcha’s own improved footwork was trying to protect, and applied controlled force into it.
Yamcha hit the ground at the match’s nine-minute-forty-second mark, looked up at the gray sky, and said: “Something just happened.”
“Yes,” Tien said.
“It was all three at once.” Yamcha sat up.
He had felt the change through the contact of the match, the shift in Tien’s ki quality and output that had happened in the final forty seconds.
“The compression and the eye and the movement.
They were all the same thing.”
“Yes,” Tien said.
Yamcha was quiet for a moment.
Then: “How long can you hold that?”
“I don’t know yet,” Tien said honestly.
“That was the first time.”
“How often can you reach it?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Yamcha looked at him steadily.
“But it’s real.
It’s not a fluke.”
“It’s real,” Tien said.
“I’ve been building toward it for twenty-eight months.
It’s real.”
Yamcha stood.
He flexed his hands, feeling the residual impact of the match in his knuckles — they had both been hitting genuinely.
“Good,” he said.
“Because whatever is coming, we’re going to need that to be reliable, not occasional.”
“I know,” Tien said.
“That’s what the next year is for.”