They left on a Thursday, in early spring, with the snow still deep on the upper mountain and the lower valleys running with snowmelt.
The decision of where had taken three days to fully work out, and Tien had spent most of those three days doing two things simultaneously: training with an intensity that Chiaotzu had noted and not commented on, and running calculations in his head about geography, timing, and the optimal sequence of events for the next four years.
He needed, in rough priority order:
First: a place to train that wasn’t here.
That offered variety of terrain, isolation when needed, and access to the world rather than separation from it.
Second: contact with Korin.
The cat sage who lived at the top of Korin’s Tower and cultivated Senzu Beans.
The training ground around the tower’s base was real — it was where Goku had trained, multiple times — and more importantly, the beans themselves were an extraordinary resource.
A single Senzu Bean could heal any injury and restore full ki.
In the context of intensive near-limit training, the ability to push past your limits and then fully recover in seconds rather than days was the difference between six months of progress and a week of it.
Third: eventually, Kami’s Lookout.
He knew Kami was up there.
He knew Kami had trained Goku before the 23rd Tournament.
The Lookout’s gravity training room — not the Room of Spirit and Time, but the regular training facilities that Mr.
Popo managed — could be enormously useful.
Getting access would require convincing Kami that he was worthy of the invitation.
Fourth, and most important: the battle with Raditz.
He needed to be present.
He needed to be useful, not symbolic.
He needed to contribute.
“You’ve been making a list in your head,” Chiaotzu said, on the first morning of their walk down the mountain.
Tien glanced at him.
They were moving along a narrow switchback trail, loaded packs on their backs — not heavy, by their standards, but enough: the iron training rings, the rope, changes of clothing, a week’s worth of dried food, their money, which was not much but was enough.
The pine trees were thinning as they descended, the air becoming gradually less cold, the smell changing from the dry, clear cold of high elevation toward the richer, wetter smell of the foothills.
“How can you tell?” Tien asked.
“Your face goes very still when you’re calculating,” Chiaotzu said.
“Your eyes don’t track things.
You do it during sparring too, sometimes, right before you change approach.”
Tien had not known that about himself.
The body’s knowledge was extensive, but self-knowledge had limits.
“I’ve been thinking about the next few years,” he said.
“Where we’re going?”
“Where we’re going, and then what.”
Chiaotzu hopped a root that crossed the path and landed without touching the ground, hovering a centimeter above the earth for a casual moment before he walked again.
It was habitual, barely conscious, the way some people drum their fingers.
“Will you tell me?”
“I’ll tell you what I can,” Tien said.
And then, after a moment: “There are things I think I know that I don’t entirely understand how I know them.
Like — like a sense of the future that I can’t fully explain.
I want to be careful not to act on it in ways that will create more problems than they solve.”
Chiaotzu absorbed this with his characteristic depth.
He walked in silence for a hundred meters, watching the trail.
“You said there would be stronger people,” he said.
“When you woke up.
You said the world was bigger and more dangerous.”
“Yes.”
“How dangerous?”
Tien looked at the valley below them, at the small distant squares of farmland and the thread of a river catching the morning light.
At the ordinary, beautiful, fragile world that was going to be visited, in four years, by two alien warriors who would destroy cities for sport.
“Dangerous enough that everything we have won’t be enough if we don’t use every year between now and then the right way,” he said.
Chiaotzu was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Okay,” he said.
Which was what he’d said in the room.
Which was, Tien was coming to understand, Chiaotzu’s version of I trust you.
The weight of that trust settled on him — genuinely and fully, not as a burden but as something more like a clarifying weight, the way a backpack properly loaded is easier to carry than one improperly packed.
He had Chiaotzu.
He knew the terrain.
He knew the timeline.
Don’t waste it, he thought.
They came down out of the mountains by afternoon and found a road, a real one, packed gravel running east-west through foothills that were already fully into spring — green and loud with water, crows working the fields where the frost had just released.
They walked east for an hour before a farmer’s truck stopped beside them, the driver, a broad, sunburned man with the look of someone who’d been up since before dawn, leaning over to look at them through the passenger window.
“Where are you headed?” the farmer asked.
“East,” Tien said.
“Eventually south.”
The farmer looked at their packs.
At Chiaotzu, whose appearance always produced a brief recalibration in people who encountered him for the first time.
“You’re fighters?”
“Yes.”
“Crane School?”
A pause.
“We were,” Tien said.
“We’re independent now.”
The farmer considered this.
“I can take you as far as Yonar town.
It’s two hours.
Not going any further today.”
“We’ll take it,” Tien said.
They climbed into the cab, Chiaotzu settling onto the bench seat between Tien and the door, his feet not quite reaching the floor.
The truck moved off down the road, the mountain receding behind them in the side mirror — smaller and smaller, until it was just a mass of white and gray and green against the sky, and then gone around a bend.
Tien watched it go.
He did not feel what he might have expected to feel: no particular grief for the compound, for Shen, for the life he’d been trained into in this body.
What he felt was cleaner than that.
What he felt was a decision taking hold.
The farmer had the radio on, a talk station discussing something bureaucratic and unimportant, the voices tinny and cheerful.
Outside, the foothills rolled past.
In the bed of the truck, secured under a canvas, their packs shifted slightly at each bend.
“There’s a martial arts training hall in Yonar,” the farmer said, making conversation in the way of people who find silence on long drives uncomfortable.
“Not much.
But they have weights and a good floor.”
“Is there a tower anywhere in this region?” Tien asked.
“A tall one.
Distinctive.”
The farmer glanced at him sideways.
“You mean Korin’s Tower?”
“If there’s one by that name, yes.”
“It’s south.
Way south, toward the interior.
Nobody goes there much.
There’s a story — my grandfather said his grandfather said there was a cat at the top who had medicine that could cure anything.
But.” He shrugged, the shrug of a man who has filed a thing under local folklore and not my concern.
“Long climb, from what I hear.”
“How long?” Chiaotzu asked.
The farmer thought about it.
“Days.
Maybe more.
It’s a very tall tower.”
Chiaotzu looked at Tien.
Tien looked back at him.
“Then we should train our endurance on the way there,” Tien said.
The farmer looked at them both with the expression of a man who has picked up, he was now realizing, something slightly unusual on the road.
Then he turned back to driving, and the radio talked about grain prices, and the spring hills rolled past, and the first day of what would become years of deliberate, meticulous preparation for an apocalypse that only one person in the world currently knew was coming rolled forward under the wheels of the truck.
Tien Shinhan — both of him, the original and the passenger, beginning now to genuinely merge, the division growing less clear by the hour as the body’s habits and the passenger’s knowledge found their joint rhythm — watched the road unspool ahead of them.
He was going to need Korin’s Senzu Beans.
He was going to need access to the Lookout.
He was going to need to be present at the fight with Raditz and alive through the aftermath.
He was going to need to be in the wilderness when Vegeta and Nappa arrived, not because he could fight at their level but because he could fight — genuinely, meaningfully fight — at a level that would make him a factor rather than a casualty.
He was going to need, most of all, to not make the mistake of assuming that knowing the story meant he could simply wait for the story to unfold correctly.
The story was already different.
He was in it.
Four years, he thought.
Let’s not waste a day.
Outside the truck window, the world rolled past — green and loud and full of a future that he alone could see, and that he was already, quietly, beginning to shape.