Korin’s tea was made from something that grew in the small kitchen garden on the tower’s north face, a low-spreading plant with dark leaves that, when steeped, produced a liquid the color of amber and a smell that was simultaneously familiar and wrong in a way Tien couldn’t quite locate.
It tasted clean and faintly sweet, and somewhere in the first cup he noticed that his hands, which had been aching from three days of continuous climbing, were not aching anymore.
He noted this without commenting on it.
Korin noticed him notice it and said nothing either.
They sat across from each other on the platform’s stone floor, Tien cross-legged with the cup in both hands, Korin on his cushion with the preternatural stillness of a cat who has decided to be completely present for something.
Chiaotzu was at the eastern edge of the platform, kneeling beside the growing beds with the careful attention of someone who has been told not to touch and is taking that instruction seriously while still looking as closely as possible at everything.
The senzu plants were unremarkable to look at.
Low-growing, the leaves the blue-green of sea glass, the beans hanging in small pods.
Nothing about their appearance announced what they were.
“Tell me about your list,” Korin said.
Tien had been thinking, during the climb, about exactly how to have this conversation.
About how much to reveal and in what sequence and with what framing.
He had run several approaches and discarded most of them.
What he’d arrived at was the simplest version, which was also, he suspected, the one that would work best with someone who had been reading people for three hundred years.
“I need three things,” he said.
“In order of importance.” He paused.
“The senzu beans.
Access to them — not a gift of them, not a one-time supply.
A relationship with this place and the resource you cultivate here, so that over the next four years I can train at a level that requires them.” He looked at Korin directly.
“The kind of training I intend to do will regularly bring me to the edge of my physical limit.
Without senzu recovery, the kind of progress I need is either impossible or it kills me.”
Korin’s whiskers moved slightly.
“And the second thing?”
“Knowledge.
You’ve watched martial artists train for a very long time.
I want to understand ki mechanics at a deeper level than any school’s formal doctrine covers.
Specifically — I want to understand the relationship between ki output and life force, and whether there’s a technique for temporarily exceeding your base power level that doesn’t require drawing on life force the way the Tri-Beam does.”
A silence.
Korin regarded him with those amber eyes.
“You’re describing something that doesn’t fully exist yet,” he said.
“I know it doesn’t fully exist,” Tien said.
“I’m asking whether the components exist.
Whether the underlying mechanics allow for it.
And whether you know enough about those mechanics to help me develop it.”
Another silence.
Longer.
Korin took a slow sip of his tea.
“And the third thing?”
“The third thing,” Tien said, “is for you to point me toward Kami’s Lookout when the time is right.”
The quality of the silence changed at that.
It became something more weighted, more specific.
Korin set his cup down on the platform with a small, precise sound.
“You know about the Lookout,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Most people don’t know about the Lookout.”
“I know.”
“How?”
He had no clean answer to it — no answer that was both honest and complete — and so he had decided to give the honest partial version and let Korin read what he would into it.
“I have foreknowledge,” he said.
“I don’t fully understand its source.
What I know is that it’s reliable, and that I’ve been moving according to it since I woke up four weeks ago with a certainty I can’t fully explain.” He met the amber eyes.
“I know that there is something coming in approximately four years that will threaten everyone on this planet.
I know that the people who will be at the center of stopping it need to be as strong as possible.
And I know that I need to be useful in that conflict, not merely present.” He paused.
“I also know that you have the capacity to be a genuine ally in what I’m trying to do.
If you’re willing.”
Korin was very still.
Outside, the wind moved across the platform with the high, clear sound of altitude.
Chiaotzu, at the eastern edge, was examining a senzu pod with the intensity of a jeweler examining a stone.
“You said this foreknowledge arrived four weeks ago,” Korin said.
“Yes.”
“Before that, it wasn’t there.”
“No.”
“But the body it arrived in had been here before.
In this world.
Training.
Living.”
“Yes.”
Korin picked up his cup again.
“So you are and are not Tien Shinhan,” he said.
It was not a question.
Tien felt the precision of it like a key finding a lock.
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s the closest formulation.”
Korin drank his tea.
Somewhere below them — impossibly far below, the world a theoretical abstraction beneath the cloud layer — ordinary things were happening.
Farmers.
Trucks on roads.
Children playing games with sticks.
The world proceeding on its ordinary terms, unaware that a white cat and a three-eyed martial artist were having a conversation that was quietly beginning to adjust what those ordinary things would become.
“The threat you’re describing,” Korin said.
“I want you to tell me what you know of it.
Not everything — I can see you have reasons for what you share and don’t share, and I think those reasons are mostly sound.
But enough that I understand what we’re talking about.”
Tien thought about what to say and how to say it.
“Warriors from space,” he said.
“Powerful ones.
The kind of powerful that makes everything that currently exists in the martial arts world — including Piccolo, including the strongest techniques of any living practitioner — look preliminary.” He paused.
“They’ll come in stages.
The first one will be connected to Goku in a way that’s personal and complicated and that I think Goku needs to confront on his own terms, without me redirecting it.
The second group will be more dangerous.
The second group is what I’m training for.”
Korin absorbed this in silence.
“And Goku,” he said.
“Goku will be the primary force against them.
“He has a ceiling that doesn’t exist in the same way that the rest of us have ceilings.
What’s going to happen to him in the course of confronting these enemies will be part of how he accesses that ceiling.
That needs to happen on its own terms.”
“You’re not trying to make him stronger.”
“I don’t need to.
He’ll get there.
What I’m trying to do is make sure that when Goku needs time — when he needs the people around him to buy him time, to hold the line long enough for him to do what he does — that those people can actually do it.
Not symbolically.
Actually.”
Something in Korin’s expression changed — settled, maybe, or arrived at a conclusion.
“The senzu,” he said.
“I grow them here because they serve a purpose.
That purpose is the continuation of things worth continuing.” He looked at Tien steadily.
“They’re not common.
They take time and specific conditions to grow, and I don’t give them to people who will waste them or misuse them.” He paused.
“But what you’re describing — preparing for a real threat, building genuine capacity, not collecting power for its own sake — that’s not a misuse.”
“No,” Tien said.
“I’ll need to see your training,” Korin said.
“Not now.
Over time.
I’ll need to see that what you say you’re doing is what you’re actually doing.
That the foreknowledge isn’t making you arrogant, or making you take shortcuts that skip the real work.”
“That’s fair,” Tien said.
“And I’ll want to talk with Chiaotzu.
Separately.” He glanced toward the eastern edge, where Chiaotzu had now discovered that looking very closely at a senzu pod was less satisfying than he’d hoped and was sitting back on his heels looking at the sky instead.
“He has his own path in this.”
“He does,” Tien agreed.
“And it’s his to decide.”
Korin picked up his cup, found it empty, set it down.
He stood — small, unhurried, with the absolute authority of something that has never in three hundred years needed to establish its authority by performance.
“Stay for a few days,” he said.
“Rest from the climb.
Then we’ll begin.” He turned toward the structure’s interior.
“The second thing — the ki mechanics question.
That conversation will take more than one session.
We’ll start tomorrow.” He paused, one paw on the door frame.
“The third thing.
The Lookout.
When the time is right, I’ll send word to Kami myself.” A beat.
“He already knows you’re here, incidentally.
He’s been aware of you since you started the climb.”
Tien absorbed this.
“What does he think?” Tien asked.
Korin’s whiskers moved again.
“That you’re interesting,” he said.
“Same as me.” And went inside.