[Months 36 Through 44 — Compressed]
What followed was the most productive period of the entire preparation, and also the most relentless.
The wearable gravity device changed the arithmetic of training at a fundamental level.
Tien wore it at 2.5 gravity for sixteen hours of every day — sleeping at 1.5, training at 3.5 and occasionally 4.0, the device cycling through settings with the discipline of a person who had designed a program and was executing it without sentimentality.
The body adapted in two-week waves — a period of brutal demand followed by a period of catching up, each cycle ending slightly higher than the one before.
He used senzu beans at a pace that required three trips to Korin’s Tower in eight months instead of the quarterly schedule he’d been running.
Korin received him each time with the expression of a person watching something they’ve invested in produce returns, and gave him beans with the specific precision of someone who knows exactly what they’re for and exactly how many are needed and not one more.
The gravity room at the Lookout remained his primary formal training space — now running at ten times, the maximum setting, the sessions two hours long, three times a week, each one a genuine ceiling breach that required a senzu to recover from fully.
The wearable covered the rest.
The combination was not elegant or comfortable.
It was effective.
Month 36: 2,550.
The wearable’s first full month of all-day use.
The jump from 2,300 to 2,550 in three weeks was the fastest single-period growth since the early Lookout days.
Month 38: 2,890.
Two months of all-day wear plus the ten-times gravity room sessions.
The ki compression technique was now stable indefinitely in training conditions — he had stopped tracking the stability window because it had ceased to be a useful metric; the question was no longer can I hold it but how much output can I produce while I do.
The third eye had become so integrated into his ordinary perception that he had stopped thinking of it as a technique.
It was simply how he saw now — the ki world and the physical world overlaid, constantly, the information from both processed simultaneously in a way that had become as unremarkable as breathing.
He occasionally forgot that other people didn’t see this way, which produced moments of mild confusion when he referenced something he’d perceived through the third eye and the other person looked at him with incomprehension.
Month 40: 3,180.
He sat with that number for a long time the morning it appeared on the wristband.
3,180.
He had been targeting 3,200 as the arrival baseline.
He was there, eight months before Raditz, which meant the remaining eight months were margin — room to push further than he’d planned, room to develop the simultaneous-systems state from something he could reliably produce to something that was simply his baseline mode of operation.
He sent a message to everyone in the network.
The message was three numbers: 3,180.
On target.
Keep going.
Krillin’s response came back within the hour: 1,040.
Four months out.
Yamcha: 980.
Ahead of where I thought I’d be.
Goku’s response came via Krillin, who was in contact with him more regularly than Tien was at this stage, Goku having thrown himself into the wearable device training with the commitment of someone for whom having a real target had removed all ambiguity about how hard to push: He says: getting interesting.
Tien smiled at that.
Getting interesting.
He could feel Goku’s signature from the Lookout now — had been able to for several months, the third eye’s range having expanded to approximately forty kilometers at full extension — and the signature was different from what it had been at the coordination meeting.
Larger, warmer, the specific quality of it more complex, more layered.
He couldn’t give it a precise number from this distance, but the trend was unmistakable.
He’s going to surprise everyone, Tien thought.
Including himself.
Month 42: 3,520.
He had exceeded his own projection by three hundred and twenty points.
The margin had turned into genuine additional development, and the simultaneous-systems state — compression, third eye, refined movement, all operating together — was becoming something he reached automatically in high-intensity conditions rather than something he reached for.
The crisis-state quality was no longer a special mode.
It was, increasingly, just how he fought.
This was what Korin had been pointing at, three years ago, in the conversation about Goku.
He achieves it through the quality of his engagement with the moment.
The goal had never been to produce the crisis-state as a technique.
The goal had been to make it a permanent mode of engagement, the baseline from which everything else operated.
He was not fully there yet.
But he could see where there was, and the distance to it was small.
Month 43: 3,680.
He received a message from Bulma: the scouter was complete.
Field-ready, range of one-point-two kilometers, measurement ceiling of twenty-two thousand.
She would bring five units to the Lookout the following week.
He sent back: Exceptional.
Bring six.
She sent back: Who’s the sixth for?
He sent back: Gohan will need one eventually.
Build the sixth now while you have the components aligned.
A long pause.
Then: You’re going to get that child into trouble.
He sent back: He was always going to be in the middle of this.
I’d rather he have the tool.
No response.
But three days later she confirmed: six units, ready to deliver.
[Month 43 — Gohan]
The visit to Paozu Province was the second since the device delivery, and the difference in the household was visible from the road.
Not dramatic.
Not revolutionary.
But the specific small changes of a place where a person has been working harder than usual for a sustained period: the training area behind the house had new scorch marks on the far treeline from ki blasts, the boulder Goku had been precision-training with was reduced to a partial hemisphere, and Goku himself came out of the house when he heard Tien arrive with the slightly wired quality of someone operating at a higher energy expenditure than their baseline and finding it suits them.
Gohan was on his back in the garden, looking at the sky with the focused attention of a twenty-three-month-old who had found a cloud interesting.
Tien sat beside him.
The child looked at him, recognized him from the previous visit and the visit before that, and went back to the cloud with the serenity of someone who has concluded that this particular visitor is acceptable and requires no further processing.
“How is he?” Tien asked.
Goku settled onto the grass on Gohan’s other side.
“Good.
Smart.
Chi-Chi has him reading already — not fluently, just the basics, but still.
He’s two.” He paused.
“His ki is—” He looked at his son.
“I noticed it a few months ago.
When he gets upset, it pulses.
Not controlled.
Just — there.
A lot of it.”
“Yes,” Tien said.
“I felt it when I held him.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means he’s his father’s son,” Tien said.
“In the most literal sense.
The potential is there.
What happens with it depends on what he goes through and who shapes it.” He paused.
“He needs to know some basics.
Not combat training.
Just — awareness.
How to feel the ki.
How to know what it is.
If he grows up knowing it’s a natural part of him rather than discovering it suddenly in a crisis—” He paused.
“He’ll have a better relationship with it.”
Goku was looking at Gohan.
The specific expression on his face — complicated, layered, the face of someone who is also a father and has been since the series began and has never been depicted fully coming to terms with what that means — was the most serious Tien had seen him.
“Something happens to him,” Goku said.
Quietly.
Not a question.
Tien was careful.
“And he rises to them.
That’s who he is.” He looked at Gohan.
“What I’m hoping is that this time, with more of us present and stronger, the cost is lower.”
Goku nodded slowly.
Then: “Teach him to feel the ki.
I’ll talk to Chi-Chi.” A pause.
“She’ll be difficult about it.”
“She loves him,” Tien said.
“That’s why she’ll be difficult.”
“Yeah,” Goku said.
“I know.” He looked at the sky.
“What’s my number?
Best estimate.”
Tien extended the third eye.
He had been doing this increasingly — using the expanded sense to track the power levels in the network, calibrating his estimates against the wristband readings he could verify and extending the model.
Goku’s signature at close range, fully readable:
“Four thousand two hundred,” he said.
“True ceiling, not resting.”
Goku was quiet.
“In eight months,” Tien continued, “with what you’ve been doing — I’d project somewhere between seven and nine thousand.
Maybe more.”
“Seven to nine thousand,” Goku said.
He said it in the way he said numbers that were very large and also not large enough.
“Against eighteen.”
“Against eighteen,” Tien confirmed.
“But the path opens.
King Kai.
The Kaio-ken.
The base you build now is what the multiplier works on.”
“And between now and then,” Goku said, “every person in this group is going to be fighting at levels that—” He paused.
“Even if they’re not at my level.
Even if the Saiyans are stronger.
Every one of them matters.”
“Yes,” Tien said.
“That’s the whole thing.
That’s been the whole thing.”
Gohan had abandoned the cloud and was now sitting up and looking at Tien with the deliberate attention that preceded, in Tien’s experience of the child, a question or an investigation.
He reached out and placed his small hand flat against Tien’s forearm, and through the third eye Tien felt the child’s ki — large and warm and completely unorganized, a fire that had not yet found its shape — respond to the contact with a faint, instinctive pulse.
Recognition.
Not conscious.
Deeper than that.
You know what ki is, Tien thought.
You always have.
You just don’t have the language for it yet.
“Hello, Gohan,” he said.
Gohan said: “H’lo,” with the careful enunciation of someone deploying a recently acquired word, and then he climbed into Tien’s lap with the total confidence of a child who has decided a lap is available and therefore his.
Goku watched this with a smile that was warm and unguarded and entirely genuine.
“He likes you,” he said.
“I know,” Tien said.
And felt, in the small weight of the child sitting unselfconsciously in his lap while the wristband on his arm read 3,680 and the third eye extended forty kilometers in every direction holding the signatures of everyone he’d spent three years building toward this moment — felt something that was not quite peace, it was too loaded with what was coming to be peace, but was adjacent to it.
Something like the still point inside a storm.
Eight months, he thought.
And then everything changes.