The town of Natarl existed at the tower’s base the way a tide pool exists at the base of a sea cliff — small and specific and organized entirely around the one enormous fact of its proximity.
The tower had been there, according to the oldest residents, for as long as anyone’s memory reached, and the town had grown up around the fact of it the way vegetation grows around a rock: adapting its shape to the immovable object’s presence rather than trying to change the object.
There was a visitors’ center of sorts — a squat stone building near the base that sold maps, water, dried food, and a modest line of merchandise featuring either the tower or Korin the Sacred Cat, depending on your level of credulity regarding the tower’s most persistent legend.
The man behind the counter was sixty or so, thin and durable-looking, with the kind of tan that comes from spending decades outdoors at high altitude.
“Climbers?” he said, when Tien and Chiaotzu came in.
“Yes.”
“Flight?”
“No.
We’ll climb.”
He looked at them with the slightly intensified attention that this answer produced.
“Not many people choose to climb it.
Most who have ki just fly.
Faster.” He pulled out a printed guide, one page, worn at the folds.
“The physical climb takes most people — most trained people, I mean, not civilians, civilians shouldn’t attempt it — between three and seven days.
There are rest alcoves cut into the stone at approximately five-hundred-meter intervals.
They have emergency rations and first aid.
You’re not supposed to use them unless you need them, but no one enforces that.”
Tien took the guide.
“What’s at the top?”
The old man gave him a look.
“You don’t know?”
“I’d like to hear your version.”
“My version is the same as everyone’s version.
A cat.
Very old, apparently very wise, though I’ve never met a person who’s actually made the full climb and come back with anything more specific than that.
Some say he has medicine.
Some say he has food that can restore a person completely.
Some say he just has advice.” He shrugged, the shrug of a man who has been next to a mystery his whole life and made his peace with not solving it.
“Whether any of that is true, I genuinely can’t tell you.”
“And the senzu?” Tien asked.
The old man blinked.
“The what?”
“Never mind,” Tien said.
“Thank you.”
They bought supplies — dried fruit, hardtack, jerked meat, two extra water skins — and walked to the base.
Standing at the tower’s foot and looking up was a different experience than standing at a distance and noting its existence.
At this range, the base was enormous: the tower’s circumference was perhaps forty meters, the stone dark gray and ancient, deeply worn smooth by the hands of decades of climbers.
The rungs — carved into the stone at regular intervals, each one a simple handholds and foothold pair — disappeared upward into a perspective so compressed by distance that the top of the visible section seemed to be a single point, and beyond that point was simply sky.
“I’ve climbed in the mountains,” Chiaotzu said, studying it.
“This is different.”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing to catch you.”
“No.”
Chiaotzu was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Okay,” he said, and began climbing.
Tien had expected the first day of climbing to be challenging and found it to be something else: meditative.
The rhythm of it established itself quickly — reach, grip, step, reach, grip, step — and became, within the first hour, sufficiently automatic that the conscious mind could release it and do other things.
He found himself thinking more clearly than he had at any point since waking in the Crane compound, the physical activity somehow freeing the analytical parts of his brain from the excess of their own motion.
He thought about power levels and timelines.
He thought about what Korin would be like.
In the series, Korin had been depicted as simultaneously playful and genuinely wise — a teacher who taught by making you work for the lesson rather than delivering it directly.
He had the Ultra Divine Water legend and the Senzu Beans and a tower full of atmosphere.
He had, in the original story, given Goku training that prepared him for the fight against the Red Ribbon Army and then later for Piccolo.
What would Korin make of Tien?
Tien was not Goku.
He did not have the Son Goku quality — the guilelessness, the physical joy, the inability to be anything other than entirely himself at all times.
He had a different set of qualities: discipline, intelligence, a willingness to be brutal with himself about his own weaknesses.
He had a three-hundred-year-old sacred cat’s worth of wisdom to work through, and he had maybe a week at the top before he’d need to move on.
I need the beans, he thought, his hands finding the next rung with the reliability of a system that had been working for an hour and had found its pace. This story is hosted at g.com.
I need them badly enough to be honest about why, or at least honest enough to be convincing.
He also needed something else from Korin.
Something he’d been turning over since the first day: the question of technique.
He knew techniques that didn’t exist yet in this world.
Not his own invention — he didn’t have anything so grandiose.
But he knew the principles behind techniques that would eventually exist.
He knew what the Kaio-ken was doing at a mechanistic level, at least insofar as the series had ever explained it: it was a multiplier, a technique that forced the body to operate beyond its natural ceiling by temporarily overriding the body’s self-limiting mechanisms.
The cost was physical damage — microfractures, organ stress, ki pathway burn — which was why it was dangerous to sustain at high multipliers.
In principle, that was not different from the Tri-Beam, which drew on life force rather than ki pathways.
The Tri-Beam was already doing something similar — it was already forcing output beyond the body’s sustainable level.
What if those principles could be cross-applied?
What if there was a version of ki compression that served as a partial Kaio-ken analog — not the full transformative technique, but a preparation step that increased the effective output of anything he fired afterward?
He didn’t know.
He needed to experiment.
He needed, ideally, someone who knew more about ki mechanics than he did to consult with.
Korin, as a sacred entity who had spent centuries watching martial artists develop, might have perspectives on this that would otherwise take years of solo research.
That’s the conversation I need to have, he thought.
If he’ll have it.
Above him, floating in his casual hover, Chiaotzu said: “The view is getting good.”
Tien looked out from the tower’s side.
The plain of Natarl spread below them, already foreshortened, the town a small cluster of brown and gray at the tower’s base, the fields beyond it patterned with the geometry of agriculture, the hills they’d crossed to get here a soft blue-green line at the distance.
The sky was enormous and slightly different at this altitude — clearer, the blue a shade more saturated.
He had been in big skies before, in the mountains, but this was different.
This sky had the quality of something you’d been traveling toward without knowing it, and had now arrived at.
It felt, for a moment, like the correct amount of space for what he was trying to do.
“It is,” he agreed, and kept climbing.
They reached the first rest alcove at dusk of the first day — a carved niche in the tower’s face, deep enough to shelter two people from wind, with a small ledge to sleep on and a cache box fixed to the back wall containing a sealed tin of hardtack, a water purification tablet, and a basic first aid kit in a metal case.
The hardtack was dated and they didn’t need it.
They ate their own food instead, sitting in the alcove’s mouth with their legs hanging over the edge, two hundred meters above the plain, watching the last of the light go out of the sky.
The stars, when they came, were extraordinary.
Tien had seen clear-sky stars from the mountains, but this was higher still, the air thinner, the absence of ground-level light allowing the full depth of the sky to reveal itself.
He could see the galactic arm — a faint smear of white across the dark, billions of points of light merged by distance into a soft luminosity.
Somewhere out there, he thought, Raditz is already on his way.
Vegeta and Nappa are already looking toward this planet.
Frieza is already conducting his campaign across the galaxy.
He ate a piece of dried fruit and let himself fully feel the enormity of it.
“Can I ask you something?” Chiaotzu said.
“Always.”
“The thing you’re afraid of — the enemies from outside — are we going to survive them?”
Tien was quiet for a long moment.
He looked at the smear of the galactic arm.
“Some of us will,” he said.
“Whether we’re in that group depends on what we do between now and then.”
“But it’s not certain.”
“Nothing is certain.” He looked at Chiaotzu.
“What I’m trying to do — what I’m trying to do by coming here, by being as strong as possible, by being present for what’s coming — is not to guarantee survival.
I can’t do that.
What I can do is make sure that if the worst comes, we don’t go down easily.
We don’t go down without taking something with us.
We make ourselves matter.”
Chiaotzu thought about this.
“You’ve always mattered,” he said.
“Not in the way I intend to.”
The stars wheeled slowly overhead.
The wind against the tower face was a low, continuous sound, like a distant, patient voice saying something they weren’t yet close enough to hear.
“I understand,” Chiaotzu said.
They slept in the alcove, taking turns keeping watch from old habit, and in the morning they woke to a sky the color of a bruise turning gold at its edges, and they climbed.
The tower changed above a thousand meters.
Not visually — it was still the same dark gray stone, still the same carved rungs, still the same vertiginous emptiness below and the same impossibly distant top above.
But there was a quality in the air, a density of something that was not quite ki and not quite atmosphere but that sat at the border of both, that began to make itself felt somewhere in the second day’s climbing. You are reading on novelping . com, the official source.
It pressed against him lightly, like being looked at by something very patient and very large.
Tien recognized it, or thought he did.
In the series, Korin’s Tower had been presented as a sacred site — not in a religious sense exactly, but in the sense of a location that had been the focus of a specific kind of intentional power for so long that the place itself had been changed by it.
Korin had been up there for hundreds of years.
Hundreds of years of a powerful being’s focused consciousness, meditations, ki cultivation, the cultivation of the beans that carried the distillate of that life force — it had seeped into the stone, made the very elevation somehow different from ordinary altitude.
He climbed through it and let it read him.
I’m coming with a purpose, he thought, directing it upward, which felt slightly absurd but seemed correct.
I know what I need and why I need it.
I’m not here to play games about it.
No response.
But the quality of the pressure shifted slightly, became marginally less like scrutiny and more like consideration.
That might be wishful thinking, he thought.
It might just be the altitude.
On the afternoon of the third day — their hands calloused past any new callousing, their shoulders adapted to the motion, the plain below now a theoretical concept rather than a visible one, lost beneath the cloud layer they’d passed through that morning — Tien looked up and saw the edge of the tower’s top.
Not the top exactly.
But the cloud cover of the upper reaches thinning, and a structure — a platform, a building, something — visible through the haze above them.
“We’re almost there,” Chiaotzu said from beside him.
“Yes.”
“Are you nervous?”
Tien examined the question honestly.
Was he nervous?
He was meeting a sacred entity who had trained martial artists for three hundred years, whose opinion of his worth would determine whether he got access to the tools he needed, and who had, in the original story, been perfectly willing to let people waste his time as a form of the test itself.
“Yes,” he said.
“Me too,” Chiaotzu said, cheerfully.
And then, without pausing: “Let’s go.”
They climbed the last hundred meters and arrived, hand over hand up the final section of rungs, at the edge of the platform that sat at Korin’s Tower’s summit.
Tien hauled himself over the edge and stood.
The platform was large — perhaps twenty meters across, circular, with a low railing around the edge and a modest structure in its center, open on all sides, a tiled roof supported by wooden columns over a stone floor.
Jars lined the interior walls.
Growing beds, tended and orderly, extended from the structure toward the east side of the platform.
The sky was enormous here, above the cloud layer, the light different — cleaner and bluer and somehow more direct, as though the usual atmospheric filtering had been removed and what remained was the light as it actually was.
And in the center of the structure, sitting on a cushion with a small cup of something warm in his paws and regarding them with eyes that were amber and very old and entirely alert, was an extraordinarily large white cat.
“You climbed,” Korin said.
His voice was higher than Tien had expected — slightly surprised, slightly pleased, the voice of someone who had seen most things but who still found certain things worth noting.
“It’s been a while since someone chose to climb.”
Tien bowed.
Properly, fully, the bow of genuine respect rather than social formality.
“We appreciate you receiving us,” he said.
Korin looked at him.
Those amber eyes moved across him with the careful attention of a person reading a text in a language they know very well.
“You’re interesting,” Korin said, after a moment.
“You’re not what I was expecting.”
“What were you expecting?”
“Someone younger, usually.
Or someone with more — open questions.
You don’t feel like someone who came here because they don’t know where else to go.” The cat tilted his head slightly.
“You feel like someone who came here specifically.
With a list.”
Tien looked at him.
At those old eyes.
“I have a list,” he said.
Korin was quiet for a moment.
Then the edges of his whiskers moved in what was, Tien decided, a smile.
“I like lists,” the cat said.
“Sit down.
Chiaotzu — there’s fresh senzu in the eastern bed if you want to look at them.
Don’t pick any.” He turned back to Tien.
“Tell me about your list.”