The Crane School compound had three training grounds.
The main ground was the largest — a rectangular packed-earth surface roughly forty meters long and twenty wide, bordered on two sides by low wooden fencing and on the other two by the main hall and the equipment storage shed.
This was where formal instruction happened, where sparring matches were observed, where Master Shen had stood for thirty years and watched students and found most of them wanting.
The surface was worn smooth by countless feet and bodies and falls, the earth hard as wood in summer and iron in winter.
The secondary ground was smaller and rougher, behind the kitchen building, half-hidden by a stand of old pine trees.
This was where Tien had always preferred to practice alone.
The trees made the light strange and broken, and the unevenness of the ground — rooted, slightly tilted, requiring constant micro-adjustments to maintain balance — had always pushed him harder than the flat, forgiving surface of the main ground.
The third was not a ground at all but a cliff face, twenty minutes up the mountain by a path that most students never discovered and that Tien had found at fourteen and kept largely to himself: a vertical face of exposed granite forty meters high, naturally striated with horizontal ledges, perfect for the climbing and wall-running drills he’d invented for himself after reading an account of an ancient training method from a martial arts text Shen kept in his private library.
Tien had read it without permission and had never told anyone.
He started there, alone, before the sun had fully cleared the mountain.
The granite was cold under his hands — cold enough that the first few grips were genuinely painful, the kind of cold that burns.
He ignored it.
He moved up the face in a rhythm that was entirely muscle memory, the body knowing the route better than his conscious mind yet did, carrying him up through holds and transitions that he understood, in a remote way, that he had worked out over years of incremental refinement.
Near the top — at a ledge wide enough to stand on, with the valley spread below him and the morning light coming in at a low angle that turned the whole world amber and violet — he stopped and sat and looked out and let himself have, for a few minutes, the luxury of the full terror of his situation.
He was dead in his own world.
Had to be.
The body was too complete, too present, too thoroughly occupied — there was no sense in which the original Tien was still in here, waiting in some corner for his life back.
Tien Shinhan had not been evicted; he had been replaced.
Dissolved, maybe.
Whatever had happened at the metaphysical level was above his ability to reconstruct, and dwelling on it was not useful, and so he made a deliberate choice not to.
His family — his mother, who’d complained about his Dragon Ball merchandise taking up too much shelf space.
His colleagues.
His small, untidy apartment.
The life he’d assembled for himself, imperfect and ordinary and entirely his.
Gone.
He let himself feel it for exactly as long as he needed to.
He was not, by nature, a person who handled grief by suppressing it; he had always found that approach to be counterproductive, a debt that compounded.
Better to feel it honestly and move forward.
The sun climbed.
The valley below brightened.
Somewhere down the mountain, in the compound, he could hear the distant, thin sound of Chiaotzu practicing his telekinesis — the subtle creak of stone blocks lifting and setting down, lifting and setting.
Okay, he thought.
Work.
He closed his eyes and reached inward.
This was not something he had done in his previous life — he hadn’t had ki to reach for — but the body knew how.
He followed its knowledge carefully, the way you might follow a path through an unfamiliar building in the dark, hands on the walls, trusting.
He found it: the ki, his ki, coiled at his center like a slow-burning coal, patient and warm.
He cupped it mentally, examined it.
Strong.
Very strong, by human standards.
He was, in the original timeline, at this point in history, one of the two or three most powerful human fighters on earth.
That was genuinely something.
But he already knew — he had always known, watching the series, watching the numbers scale to absurdity — that “one of the most powerful humans on earth” was not going to be enough when Nappa arrived with power levels in the four-thousands.
He needed to know the exact number.
He needed a baseline.
He had no scouter.
He had no one who could reliably scan and report a ki reading to him.
What he had was an internal sense of his own ki and, buried in the body’s memories, a vague, relative understanding of his own strength compared to others he’d fought.
At the 23rd Tournament, he had estimated Goku’s power level at roughly equal to his own — maybe slightly above.
This tracked with the official numbers he remembered from his previous life: at the tournament, both were somewhere in the three-to-four hundred range.
Piccolo had been somewhat higher.
The Saiyans who would arrive — Raditz, first, at a power level of approximately 1,200.
Nappa at approximately 4,000.
Vegeta at approximately 18,000.
He sat with those numbers for a long moment and let their implications fully unfold.
To be useful against Nappa — not to win, he was not building a fantasy here, but to meaningfully contribute, to buy time, to not simply be an obstacle that Nappa swatted aside — he needed to be in the same order of magnitude.
Three to four thousand, minimum.
To do real damage.
To be a factor.
He was currently at perhaps three to four hundred.
He had four years.
I need to multiply my power level by ten, he thought.
In four years.
He opened his eyes and looked at the valley.
In the manga, in the anime, characters’ power levels increased dramatically through training — but they also increased through experience, through near-death experiences, through the biological miracle of Saiyan zenkai.
He didn’t have zenkai.
What he had was something else: he had information.
He knew where the Dragon Balls were.
He knew about Kami and Mr.
Popo.
He knew about the Hyperbolic Time Chamber — the Room of Spirit and Time — which technically existed right now, accessible through the Lookout, though at this point in the story only Goku had ever entered it.
He knew about the Namekian Dragon Balls and what wishes they could grant — though that was years off and required a spaceship and a full-scale interplanetary crisis to access.
He knew, perhaps most valuably, about King Kai.
The Gravity Room doesn’t exist yet, he thought.
Capsule Corporation won’t build that until Vegeta demands it, after the Saiyan Saga.
But King Kai’s training—
King Kai.
The North Kai.
His planet sat at the end of Snake Way on the Other Side, which was technically only accessible to people who were dead.
But his techniques — the Kaio-ken, the Spirit Bomb — had been taught to Goku after his death, during the year he spent running Snake Way.
I can’t die on purpose to get there.
Even if I came back with the Dragon Balls, there are only so many wishes, and I need them for other things.
He needed to be systematic about this.
Prioritized.
Every opportunity.
He pulled the body’s training knowledge forward and examined it like a mechanic examining an engine: what was already tuned, what needed work, where the genuine limits were and which of those limits were real limits versus assumed ones.
His strongest techniques: the Tri-Beam — the Kikoho — which he could already fire at a level sufficient to seriously hurt opponents well above his base power level, at the cost of his own life force.
The Solar Flare.
The Dodon Ray.
The Multi-Form technique, which split him into four copies but quartered his power.
Flight.
The ability to extend ki as a shield.
What he didn’t have yet: any technique that multiplied his base power the way the Kaio-ken multiplied Goku’s.
No transformation.
No equivalent to the Saiyan zenkai mechanic.
But there was something.
He thought about it carefully.
In the series, Tien’s Tri-Beam — his Neo Tri-Beam, the version he used against Cell’s Semi-Perfect form — had held back an entity operating at a power level immeasurably above his own, for several critical seconds.
How was that possible?
The show had never fully explained it, but the implication was clear: the Tri-Beam was not simply a function of base power level.
It drew from the user’s life force, their fundamental vitality, and that pool, while not infinite, was deeper than the ki that could be consciously cultivated.
It was a technique that could, in theory, temporarily output power well beyond what the user’s ki level should permit.
That’s the key, he thought.
Not to equal the Saiyans in base power.
To develop a technique that can temporarily exceed my base power level by a factor significant enough to matter.
And then to raise the base high enough that that multiplied output puts me in the game.
The math wasn’t fully worked out — it couldn’t be, at this stage — but the direction was clear.
He stood, faced the cliff face, and began to climb down, methodically, letting himself feel every handhold and foothold, cataloging the body’s knowledge for future use.
He had work to do.
Master Shen was in the main hall when Tien came down from the mountain at midmorning, and the quality of the silence that spread between them when Tien entered to retrieve something from the storage cabinet was the kind of silence that has a texture, that you can press against and feel resist.
Shen was seated at a low table near the window, a cup of tea at his elbow, a scroll of some kind open before him.
He was thin and sharp, Master Shen — the cranelike quality wasn’t just in the name; it was in the geometry of him, the long neck, the precision of his gestures, the stillness he maintained between movements that was less like rest than like a heron standing in shallows, waiting.
His white hair was long and tied back.
His face was deeply lined but the lines were the sharp lines of a face that had held specific expressions for a long time, not the soft crumpling of age.
He did not look up.
“You were on the mountain early,” Shen said.
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
The tea cup was raised and lowered with the kind of precise, unhurried movement that is its own form of communication — a deliberate performance of unconcern.
“Chiaotzu tells me you spoke of leaving,” Shen said.
Tien felt the body’s memories supply, without being asked, the specific register of tension that Shen’s voice in this mode created — the quiet of it, the measured quality, the sense of a man accustomed to being obeyed managing the fact that he was no longer being obeyed, and not handling it entirely gracefully.
“We’ll be leaving within the week,” Tien said.
He kept his voice flat and even.
“I wanted to tell you directly.”
Now Shen looked up.
His eyes were dark and very steady and they held Tien with a kind of assessment that Tien recognized — the eyes of a man who had spent fifty years gauging other people’s ki and will and finding the places where they could be broken.
Tien met them without effort.
Something shifted in Shen’s face — too small and too controlled to be called surprise, but something.
“You have invested thirty years in you,” Shen said.
“Both of you.”
“I know.”
“And you believe Goku’s path is worth more than that investment.”
Tien considered his answer.
He thought about the original timeline — about the 23rd Tournament, about the moment that Tien had watched Goku and understood, on a level that no amount of master’s doctrine could reach, that there was something Goku had that training alone could not produce.
Some relationship with fighting itself that was joy, pure and inarguable, and how that joy produced, in the end, a kind of power that calculation and ruthlessness and thirty years of Shen’s methodology could not match.
“I believe,” Tien said carefully, “that the world is larger and more dangerous than either of us has been treating it.
And that if I stay here and keep doing what I’ve been doing, I won’t be ready when it matters.”
Shen was quiet for a long moment.
“Ready for what?” he asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Tien said.
Which was a lie, but a necessary one.
Shen set down his tea.
He looked out the window, at the training ground where Chiaotzu was now doing precision ki-blast exercises, his small hands producing tight, controlled spheres of pale energy and then dissolving them again in careful sequence.
“He’ll go where you go,” Shen said.
Not reproachfully.
Stating a fact.
“Yes.”
Another silence.
Then: “Take the climbing ropes from the secondary shed.
The set you made yourself.
And the iron rings.
They were never mine.”
It was, Tien understood, the closest Shen would ever come to a blessing.
“Thank you,” he said.
He took his things from the storage cabinet and walked back out into the morning.