The interior of the continent was different from the northern mountains in every quality: lower, warmer, more humid, the landscape shifting from pine and granite to broad-leafed forest and red clay road and the occasional vast field of something agricultural that Tien could not identify but that smelled sweet and green in the spring warmth.
The road they followed was an actual road — maintained, signposted, with rest stops at reasonable intervals — and they shared it with farmers’ carts, the occasional delivery vehicle, and, in one memorable afternoon, a convoy of three large trucks transporting capsule-stored construction equipment that took up most of the road’s width and forced them to the verge while the drivers gave them cheerful, unapologetic waves.
Capsule Corporation technology.
He had known, intellectually, that the Dragon Ball world used pocket-sized capsule containers for almost everything, but seeing it in daily practical application was still slightly startling — the way many things here were slightly startling, the familiar made immediate.
They walked twenty-five kilometers most days, sometimes more if the road was good and the weather was clear.
They trained during the walking — not formally, but in the ways that a martial artist does without quite deciding to: carrying the iron training rings on their wrists and ankles, the weight subtle but consistent; practicing ki control while in motion; using the variations in terrain — hills, water crossings, rough verges — as impromptu training obstacles.
In the evenings, they camped when they could, found inexpensive accommodations when the weather demanded.
Chiaotzu cooked, because he was better at it and because he found it satisfying in a way that Tien found slightly mysterious.
Tien built fires and gathered firewood and kept watch and, in the quiet hours of early evening, worked on the ki compression.
They talked.
This was new, or new in quality if not in kind.
They had talked at the Crane compound — they had spent their lives in close proximity and conversation was the texture of that proximity — but those conversations had mostly been about training, about technique, about the small territorial politics of the compound’s daily life.
These conversations, the walking conversations and the campfire conversations, were different.
Larger.
The road opened something.
It was on the fourth day of walking, crossing a stretch of lowland forest where the road was canopied by old oaks so dense they made a green twilight of the midday, that Chiaotzu said, without particular preamble: “At the twenty-third, you were going to sacrifice yourself.”
Tien kept walking.
“Against Nappa,” he said.
“Yes.” A pause.
The oak leaves filtered the light into moving coins of brightness on the road.
“You threw yourself at him.
The Self-Destruct technique.” Another pause.
“And it didn’t work.”
“No,” Tien said.
“It didn’t work.”
He felt, through the body’s memories, the full weight of that moment — the desperation of it, the cold recognition that there was nothing else he had to offer, the decision made in a heartbeat with a kind of anguished clarity.
The impact.
The flash.
The absolute worst part: not the dying, but the returning to consciousness on the ground, injured and spent, and finding Nappa completely unharmed and faintly amused.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Chiaotzu said.
“So have I.”
“You’re training harder than you ever have.
You’re thinking about the future differently.
The dream you had, the one you won’t fully explain.” He looked up at the oak canopy, then forward at the road.
“You know something about what’s coming.
Something real.
And it’s something that includes us dying.”
Tien did not deny this.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” Chiaotzu said.
Which was true — he had demonstrated this with a directness that had shattered Tien’s heart in the original timeline.
“But I don’t want to die for nothing.
I don’t want to die and have it not matter.”
“It won’t be for nothing,” Tien said.
“And I’m trying to make it matter more.”
“How much more?”
He thought about how to answer this.
He had a policy, vague but firm, about what he would and wouldn’t reveal — partly because he wasn’t certain how much deviation from the original timeline was desirable and partly because some things were simply too large to explain in a form that was useful.
Telling Chiaotzu that alien warriors were going to arrive in four years and try to kill everyone was the kind of information that could be received in many ways, and not all of them productive.
But Chiaotzu was not someone who managed well with partial truths from people he trusted.
“There are going to be enemies,” Tien said carefully, “unlike anything we’ve faced.
Not stronger fighters from other schools.
Not Piccolo.
Something from outside, from much further away, that operates at a level that will make everything we’ve done so far look like children fighting in a schoolyard.” He paused.
“I don’t know all the details.
But I know it’s coming.
And I know that the difference between being useful and not being useful is the next few years.”
Chiaotzu was quiet for a long time.
The oak canopy thinned and the afternoon came back, bright and blue above them.
“And Goku will be part of it,” Chiaotzu said.
Not a question.
“Goku will be central to it.”
“So we’re going to need to be near him.”
“Eventually.”
Chiaotzu nodded slowly.
“Okay,” he said.
But he said it differently this time — not the simple, complete trust of the room in the compound, but a more considered version, the okay of someone who has taken in information that is difficult and has chosen, after genuine reflection, to carry it.
To carry it alongside the person who gave it to him, without requiring that person to carry it alone.
Tien looked at him.
At the small strange face, the round pale cheeks, the eyes that were old in ways that had nothing to do with age.
“Thank you,” he said.
Chiaotzu glanced up at him.
“Don’t die before I do,” he said.
“I’ll be very annoyed.”
Tien laughed — a real laugh, sharp and sudden, the body’s laugh, which was lower and rougher than he was used to his laugh being.
It felt good.
It felt like something settling into place.
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
On the eighth day they saw Korin’s Tower.
They were coming over a long, gentle ridge, the road unwinding ahead of them into a broad plain that was yellow-green with new grass, and there it was: a thin vertical line against the sky to the southeast, impossibly tall, tapering slightly at its visible top where it vanished not into cloud but into simple distance, the atmospheric perspective making the upper section hazy and indefinite.
Tien stopped.
He had known it was there.
He had been orienting toward it for eight days, taking the road south by intention.
But seeing it was different from knowing it was there.
It was different in the way that all the things in this world were different — it was real, and its reality had weight.
“Is that it?” Chiaotzu asked.
“That’s it.”
Chiaotzu studied it.
“It’s very tall,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How long will it take to climb?”
In the original story, Goku had climbed it as a child, motivated by the promise of food.
It had taken him — the exact time was not specified, but the implication was days.
Goku, even as a child, had been extraordinary.
They were grown martial artists at a power level considerably above child Goku.
But the tower was designed, according to the body’s fragmentary cultural knowledge about it, to be climbed rather than flown — there was something about the original climb, the physical dedication of it, that was part of the point.
“I want to climb it,” Tien said.
“Not fly.
Climb.”
Chiaotzu looked at him, then at the tower.
“Why?”
“Because the distance matters.” He tried to find the right words for something he was still working out.
“There’s something up there that we need.
But it’s not just — you can’t just fly to the top and demand it.
The approach is part of it.”
This was his best approximation of a truth he felt more than fully understood: that in this world, certain forms of power required a kind of devotion to obtain, and that the devotion was not merely symbolic.
It was demonstrative.
It told the world, or the relevant part of it, what you were willing to do.
Chiaotzu accepted this with his characteristic equanimity.
“How far to the base?”
“Three days, maybe four.”
They looked at the tower together for another moment, this thin impossible line against the spring sky, patient and immense and entirely indifferent to their plans, and then they started walking toward it.