April brought a gentle warmth to Mount Paozu, melting the last of the winter frost and breathing life back into the sprawling forests.
For a normal four-year-old, it would be the perfect weather to chase butterflies or play in the mud. For me, it was the perfect weather to figure out why I was currently gasping for air on my hands and knees, feeling like I had just tried to sprint a marathon while breathing through a wet straw.
Six months had passed since Raditz had become a permanent stain on the bottom of the ocean. Six months of pushing my family's training to the absolute brink.
But right now, I was alone in my designated clearing, wrestling with a frustrating biological bottleneck.
Kōga-jutsu.
Compressing my Ki onto a localized striking surface—like a fist, a shin, or a knee—was easy. It created an invisible, hyper-dense armor that turned my limbs into sledgehammers. But in a real fight against multiple opponents blocking one attack whilst another hits a different part of my body wasn't good and even then I couldn't keep switching spots where I used it at.
One of the downsides to Kōga-jutsu was that it took time to switch where it was focused too so even if I saw an attack coming from one end, setting it up on that side would result in a hit with full damage if it wasn't quick enough.
I needed to apply Kōga-jutsu to my entire body simultaneously as an omnidirectional defence.
I pushed myself off the dirt, shaking out my trembling arms. I took a deep breath, widened my stance, and pulled my Ki tight.
Instead of routing it to my arm or other parts, I blanketed my entire body in energy and violently compressed it. The air around me cracked, a sharp, vacuum-like pop. My skin didn't change color, but the sheer atmospheric density around me warped the light slightly.
I was a walking fortress.
Then, my lungs burned. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird, and the structural integrity of my Ki began to violently fray. I held it for exactly 60 seconds before the compression shattered, blowing outward in a gust of wind that flattened the grass for thirty yards.
I collapsed onto my back, staring up at the blue sky, chest heaving.
'Too much leakage, huh?' I hadn't thought about that, but if maintaining the technique drained a bit of Ki then cloaking my entire body in it would drain me far far more.
When I applied Kōga-jutsu to just my fist, I was taking a small cup of water from a massive pool and freezing it into a diamond block. Easy. But wrapping my entire body meant trying to freeze the whole damn pool all at once, perfectly evenly, while the water was still actively sloshing around.
The moment one square inch of my skin had a fraction less compression than the rest, the pressure differential caused the whole system to violently destabilize, forcing my core to pump out massive, wasteful amounts of Ki just to plug the structural leaks.
'Great. Just great,' I thought, wincing as a sharp ache throbbed behind my temples. 'I'm supposed to be the analytical mastermind here, and I'm currently being laid out by my own energy. How embarrassing.'
I actually felt the hints of a blush dusting my cheeks at how this felt. It was a humiliating reminder that for all my Ki Control—how I eclipsed my family by leaps and bounds in the skill of manipulating Ki so much so I accidentally created Kōga-jutsu—I wasn't anywhere near the level I thought I was.
That thought sat in my chest like a stone while I lay on my back, staring at the sky and trying to convince my lungs to stop filing complaints with my brain. The grass beneath me was flattened in a wide circle from the strain of the failed technique, and the breeze felt almost insulting now that the pressure had gone. My heart was still pounding, my temples still ached, and my whole body had that prickly, overworked feeling that came after I'd pushed too hard and discovered a wall I had not, in fact, already demolished.
Which was annoying.
No, that was unfair. It was more than annoying. It was humiliating. I could compress Ki into a limb, shape it, harden it, make it hit like a hammer wrapped in a thunderstorm, and I had somehow convinced myself that making it cover my entire body would be easy because I was already good at it. That logic had lasted all of about sixty seconds before my own energy had turned around and shoved my face into the dirt.
The worst part was that it had felt right for a while. Not perfect, not even stable, but close enough that I'd almost fooled myself into thinking I was done improving. I had gotten used to Ki obeying me quickly. Too quickly, maybe.
It was easy to get cocky when the world kept rewarding your experiments with results.
But Ki wasn't a machine, not really. It was closer to a living thing that happened to listen when I treated it well enough. If I got lazy, it dragged its feet. If I got sloppy, it leaked. If I tried to force it into the wrong shape, it bit back.
I knew, I always had known that. It was life energy at the end of the day. Energy that reacted to my emotions, energy that reacted to my doubts, to when I'm not being true to who I was. Energy that was a part of myself as a living, breathing being.
The trees, the animals, the plants.
All of it produced this life energy as well.
I rolled over and pushed myself up onto my knees again, letting the ache in my arms settle instead of fighting it. My breathing was still uneven, but it was getting there. I could feel the aftershocks of the compression hovering around my skin like static, a residual pressure that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
It was gone, but not gone enough. That was the problem. My Ki didn't just disappear when I failed to maintain the structure; it burst outward and wasted itself in a single violent release. All that effort, all that control, and the moment one seam gave way the whole thing collapsed like a badly stitched bag full of water.
My eyes drifted shut. I took another breath. Then another.
Okay. Think.
I knew how to make Ki denser. That part wasn't the issue. I knew how to keep it moving. I knew how to keep it from spilling out in ridiculous, inefficient bursts. I knew how to lace it over a fist, a shin, a shoulder, a backstep, even over the edge of a technique if I wanted something to hit with a little more bite. What I did not know, apparently, was how to keep the whole thing balanced all at once without making my own bloodstream feel like it wanted a divorce.
The answer had to be somewhere in the middle. Not harder. Not more. Better.
I pressed my palms into the grass and stood up slowly, feeling the exhaustion settle into my legs like warm lead.
The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed that I had approached it as a pure expansion problem.
I had assumed that if I already knew how to compress Ki on a small scale, the solution was simply scaling it up. That was the kind of mistake I would have mocked someone else for making.
Beginner...
The answer had been found.
I had to do like a beginner and go back to the basics of Ki Control, the most basic of basics.
Meditation.
I dropped back into the dirt, crossing my legs and letting my sleeves settle over my knees. The mountain air hummed in my ears, but I ignored it. I ignored the birds, the rustle of the leaves, and the lingering, mocking warmth of the afternoon sun.
If macro-management was failing me, it meant my foundations had structural micro-fractures.
In terms of sheer raw efficiency, I knew where I stood. If a standard martial artist on this planet had a control rating of a flat ten, and my father—with all his brilliant, instinctual genius—was sitting comfortably at a three hundred, my own analytical mind had pushed my personal rating into the tens of thousands.
But an equation was still a rigid thing. And right now, that rigidity was the problem.
Closing my eyes and letting my awareness sink beneath my skin I came to understand what I had been failing in.
I had been treating my body like a container, a very precise engine almost; however an engine still experiences friction. It still loses energy to heat and vibration.
I stopped trying to manipulate the Ki. I stopped trying to force it into a compressed layer. Instead, I just watched it.
Inside my core, my energy was a vast, swirling sea of white-hot silver. It was beautiful, dense, and terrifyingly massive. But as I looked closer, zooming into the microscopic level of my own spiritual anatomy, I saw the jagged edges. Every time a wave of Ki moved through my nervous system, it rubbed against my physical cells. It was an incredibly subtle form of internal friction, something so minutely small that even my father wouldn't notice it, but to me, it was a glaring design flaw.
I began to breathe, matching the rhythm of my lungs to the pulse of my heart.
In. Out.
Slowly, deliberately, I began to smooth the edges. It wasn't about squeezing the energy anymore. It was about harmonization. I tried to pull the energy so close to my physical body that the dividing line between my muscle tissue and my spiritual life force completely vanished.
It was excruciatingly tedious work.
Imagine trying to thread a microscopic needle while riding a rollercoaster. Every time my heart beat, the sudden rush of blood through my veins threw off the alignment. A single millimeter of variance, and the micro-friction would flare up again, sending a sharp, pins-and-needles sting radiating through my nervous system.
'Ow. Okay, let's not do that again,' I thought, grit teeth holding back a hiss. 'Focus. Don't fight the blood flow, ride it. Move the Ki with the pulse, not against it.'
Hours bled away into the afternoon. I sat entirely motionless. I wasn't brute-forcing anything.This was a game of absolute, unyielding precision. I had to become an artisan of my own soul.
Five weeks passed by of slow, excruciating progress; I didn't stand out her motionless all the time. I went home, ate, drank water, studied, trained with them, then I meditated for hours at a time, before I went to bed for the night.
It was on Gohan's and I's fifth birthday that I made a breakthrough.
After celebrations and studying: I had left to do my training and got right back into meditation.
It took a while until... I isolated a single stream of Ki traveling down my right meridian line. It was jagged, tumbling through my pathways like rough gravel down a chute. I breathed in, focusing on that lone current. I smoothed the outer layer, shaving away the microscopic burs and turbulence until it glided through the vessel like liquid silk.
The relief was instantaneous. The dull, ambient ache in my right arm vanished, replaced by a cool, humming vitality.
I had finally managed to get this to work. However, that was just one of thousands.
The sheer scale of the task ahead would have made anyone else throw in the towel and go have a snack yet I made the decision to continue on getting straight to work on the next pathway. Then the next. Then twelve more simultaneously.
It was a maddening exercise in multitasking. I had to divide my conscious mind into separate, independent nodes, each one responsible for monitoring and smoothing a different network of energy channels. My brain felt like it was actively melting inside my skull. The cognitive strain was far worse than any physical beating I'd ever taken. Sweat didn't just bead on my forehead; it practically poured down my face, stinging my eyes, but I didn't dare blink. I couldn't break the focus.
'Come on. Move left. Align with the capillary. Smooth the edge. Hold it there.'
In a few hours, I had cleared the major pathways.
The gravelly, turbulent friction that had plagued my system was gone, replaced by a vast, interconnected web of perfectly smooth energy. The internal heat was gone. The wasteful vibration had vanished. My Ki was no longer rubbing against my physical cells; it was nesting within them, resting in the spaces between atoms with a terrifying, silent docility.
Then it happened.
The moment the final microscopic pathway slotted into perfect alignment, the internal resistance within my body hit absolute zero.
And the universe screamed.
Or rather, my perception of it did.
Without the internal friction acting as a natural dampener, my Ki didn't just flow—it erupted, expanding outward with a sudden, violent elasticity. But it wasn't a physical explosion. It was entirely sensory. My mind was violently yanked out of my physical body and cast across the globe in a fraction of a second.
'Woah! What—what is this?!'
My eyes snapped open, but I couldn't see the clearing. I saw everything.
I felt the frantic, buzzing energy of West City halfway across the world. I felt the cold, jagged, spiteful spike of a certain Namekian freezing his ass off in the arctic. I felt so much further as well, feeling the bright, blazing energy of the solar system's star.
It was a torrential downpour of information, a hurricane of overlapping voices, heartbeats, and spiritual signatures slamming into my brain all at once.
My breath hitched. My physical body started to tremble, the sheer weight of the sensory input threatening to crush my consciousness. My Ki began to spiral, threatening to lash out and level the entire mountain range out of pure, unadulterated reflex.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced my chest however as quickly as it came I breathed in then out letting my mind focus on the immediate. Allowing my senses to be reined in and soon, I found myself used to the new feelings. I just had to take a deep breath and exhale to calm myself.
I looked down at my hands. Something was fundamentally different. My Ki didn't feel like a resource I had to draw from anymore. It felt like an extra limb. It was so light, so impossibly responsive, that just the thought of moving it caused the energy to shift before my physical nerves could even send the signal to my muscles.
It felt as natural as breathing was.
'Let's test that.'
I stood up, the grass rustling softly beneath my boots. I didn't widen my stance. I didn't brace myself. I just formed the intent.
Instantly, my Ki wrapped around my entire body like a second skin. I compressed it, pulling the energy impossibly tight until the air around me gave that familiar, sharp vacuum pop.
But this time, there was no burning in my lungs. My heart didn't hammer in protest. The energy didn't waver, leak, or fight me. It sat perfectly still, a flawless, hyper-dense armor of invisible force blanketing every single inch of my body.
I raised my arm, inspecting the invisible distortion warping the starlight around my skin. I threw a test punch. The air cracked like a whip, the kinetic force carrying perfectly without shedding a single ounce of wasted Ki. I transitioned into a high kick, then a rapid sequence of blocks and evasions.
'Kōga-jutsu: Zenshin (Full Body Steel Fang),' I decided, a massive grin splitting my face.
I needed to push it. Standing still and shadowboxing was a sanitized environment. Real combat was chaotic, messy, and fundamentally unpredictable.
I dropped into a sprinter's stance, my boots sinking slightly into the soft earth, and fired myself forward.
The immediate difference was jarring. Normally, when I accelerated to hypersonic speeds, the sheer kinetic transfer would crater the ground beneath me, kicking up a massive shower of dirt and shattered rock. It was a flashy, unavoidable consequence of having this much power in a tiny body. But this time? The grass barely rustled.
Because my Ki was no longer grinding against my physical cells, the transition from zero to maximum velocity was entirely frictionless. I didn't launch myself; I simply existed at a different coordinate.
I tore through the dense forest at the base of Mount Paozu, deliberately choosing the most obstructed path possible. Thick oak branches, hanging vines, and jagged boulders rushed toward my face. I didn't dodge.
Crack. Snap. Shatter.
The moment the physical obstacles made contact with the invisible, hyper-dense layer of my Zenshin armor, they disintegrated. A massive redwood branch struck my shoulder and instantly exploded into fine sawdust, the kinetic energy completely neutralized by the compressed Ki. I felt absolutely nothing. No impact, no jarring feedback, not even a slight shift in my center of gravity.
I was a ghost wrapped in a vault door.
I rocketed up a sheer cliff face, my feet finding purchase on the vertical stone without breaking the rock, and launched myself into the night sky. Hovering a mile above the earth, I finally dropped the technique. The invisible pressure faded, and the crisp mountain air rushed against my skin.
I checked my internal state. My breathing was perfectly even. My heart rate was at a resting baseline. The catastrophic drain on my stamina that had left me gasping in the dirt just hours ago was completely gone, effortlessly offset by my natural recovery rate.
It worked.
Before I could celebrate my victory, a soft, ambient hum drew my attention back toward the house. Right, might as well go home.
—At the Son Household—
I touched down gently on the grass outside our home, the quiet crunch of the soil beneath my boots a stark contrast to the absolute silence of my frictionless flight. The porch light was on, casting a warm, amber glow across the dirt yard.
Even though I had suppressed my energy back down to its standard, unassuming baseline, my perception was still buzzing with that bizarre, hyper-sensitive elasticity. It was like someone had taken the sensory dials of my brain and cranked them past the maximum limit.
However, I am used to it now.
I could feel Mom inside, her energy a steady, rhythmic warmth as she folded laundry in the living room. I could feel Gohan upstairs, his sleeping Ki soft and pillowy, fluctuating gently with every rise and fall of his chest. And Dad...
Dad was sitting on the roof.
I didn't need to look up to know he was staring right at me.
I floated upward, my toes tapping against the sloped clay tiles of our roof with a sound no louder than a falling leaf.
Dad didn't turn around immediately. He was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, his chin resting on his arms as he stared out into the vast, star-speckled darkness of the Mount Paozu sky. The wind rippled through his messy black hair, but his energy was uniquely tranquil. It felt like a warm hearth fire that had been dialed down to a comfortable, smoldering glow.
I walked over and sat down beside him on the sloped tiles, crossing my legs. The clay was still faintly warm from the afternoon sun, a comforting contrast to the cool night breeze.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything. We just sat there, two martial artists watching the stars.
"You've been pushing yourself pretty hard lately, Yuzu," Dad said softly, not breaking his gaze from the star-lit horizon. His voice carried that calm, grounded weight that always made me feel like everything was under control, no matter how chaotic the world got.
I leaned back on my hands, looking up at the same sky. "I had a wall to climb. It was bothering me that I couldn't get it right."
Dad smiled, a small, knowing chuckle escaping him. He turned his head to look at me, his dark eyes bright in the moonlight. "I felt you earlier. Out in the clearing. For a second there, it felt like you were everywhere at once. It was like the whole mountain just decided to breathe with you."
"You noticed that, huh?" I scratched my cheek, feeling a little sheepish. Even with my suppression slammed back on, the sheer echo of that breakthrough had still reached him. "I was trying to fix the leakage on my full-body armor. Every time I tried to force the energy to compress all over me, it would bite back and tear itself apart. I realized I was treating my Ki like a wild animal I had to wrestle into a cage."
It wasn't exactly like that, but it was what it was. I had so much control that I put a lid on it, like a caged animal, only letting my Ki out when I was training.
Dad nodded slowly, shifting his position to cross his legs properly, facing me. He didn't look like a guy who didn't understand complex things; he looked like a master craftsman listening to an apprentice talk about their tools.
"Ki doesn't like being caged if you try to lock it in a room, it's just gonna kick the door down," Dad said, resting his elbows on his knees. "I used to think of it like a muscle when I was a kid. You tense it up, it gets hard, and you hit harder. But Master Roshi taught me that it's more like water. If you try to hold water in your hands by squeezing it as hard as you can, it just leaks out between your fingers. You gotta let it sit there. Let it flow where it wants to go."
I stared at my boots, letting his words sink in.
Leave it to my old man to simplify what I had done like that.
It was funny, honestly. My brain had gone through this massive, complicated journey of identifying 'micro-friction,' separating meridian pathways, and dividing my consciousness into independent computing nodes just to solve the equation. And here was Dad, summing up the entire grand breakthrough in a couple of sentences about a cup of water.
He didn't need the textbook terminology. He just knew how life worked.
"Yeah, I guess I had to learn that the hard way," I said, pulling my knees up to my chest to match his posture. The cool night air felt amazing against my face, a total contrast to the burning heat that had been trapped inside my chest a few weeks ago. "I was basically using a giant, imaginary vice grip to force my Ki to stay glued to my skin. I thought if I just squeezed it hard enough, it wouldn't leak. But the harder I squeezed, the more it fought back."
"And tonight?" Dad asked, tilting his head with a curious grin.
"Tonight, I stopped squeezing," I summarized, keeping it simple. "I realized the energy was bumping into my own body because I was treating it like an outside tool. So, I just smoothed out the rough edges. I let it run through my veins like it belonged there, matching the beat of my heart. Once the friction stopped... the leaking stopped, too. It just sits flat against me now."
Dad looked at me for a long moment, his expression shifting from casual interest to the sharp, focused gaze of a master inspecting a flawless piece of work. He reached out a hand, hovering his palm a few inches from my shoulder.
"Let me see it," he murmured. "The full-body one."
I smiled. I didn't drop into a stance. I didn't flare my aura or shout. I just formed the mental intent, and my Ki instantly slid into place.
Dad pressed his palm forward. The moment his skin made contact with the outer edge of my Kōga-jutsu: Zenshin, his hand stopped dead in the air. He pushed harder, channeling a localized burst of his own heavy, warm Ki to test the barrier.
The energy didn't clash. It didn't explode. Dad's force simply slid right off the frictionless surface, completely redirected into the empty air around us. His dark eyes widened in genuine fascination.
"Wow," Dad breathed, pulling his hand back and looking at his palm. "It's completely quiet. Usually, when someone hardens their skin for a block, I can feel their energy vibrating."
"Exactly," I said, letting the technique drop with a soft exhale.
Dad stared at his palm for a few more seconds, flexing his fingers as if trying to catch the phantom memory of the encounter. A slow, brilliant grin spread across his face, the kind that usually meant he had just figured out a completely new way to enjoy a fight.
"That's really something, Yuzu," he said, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the moon. "When most people get ready to take a big hit, their energy bunches up. It gets loud. Even if you can't see them, your skin can feel the weight of it pressing against the air. But yours? It's just... blank. If I closed my eyes, I'd think I was trying to punch a smooth rock."
"A smooth rock that throws a mean liver hook," I joked, letting out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding.
"It makes you hard to read," Dad continued, his tone shifting into that quiet, analytical space he only entered when dissecting a martial arts concept. "In a real match, fighters watch each other's energy to guess where the next strike is coming from. If your Ki isn't vibrating, your opponent won't know you've blocked until their fist bounces off your face."
"That's the idea," I agreed, resting my chin on my knees. "It saves a ridiculous amount of stamina, too."
Dad chuckled, reaching over to ruffle my hair. "You always find the most complicated ways to do things, but you always get there."
I rolled my eyes playfully, though a warm spark of pride flared in my chest.
The heavy wooden door opened, and Mom stood there in the warm light of the hallway, a stern look on her face that instantly melted into a soft smile when she saw the two of us.
"If you two are quite finished playing philosophy on the roof, we still have to celebrate Yuzu's and Gohan's birthday."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Yes, mom."
Dad and I muttered in unison, sharing a quick, knowing smirk as we walked inside.