A three-month cooldown was, Jordan reflected, an entirely reasonable price to pay.
Element Pickup (Limit Break) had bypassed the standard passive-collection radius entirely, reached straight into Goku's biology, and ripped out an SSR-tier racial bloodline from a living Saiyan. The system had evaluated the sheer weight of that transaction and slapped him with a ninety-day lockout for that specific target. By any gamer's metric, it was a fair trade.
What he hadn't expected was how incredibly underwhelming the physical metamorphosis would be on the outside.
He stood in the freezing shallows, facing the exact same horizon as before. The water hadn't changed temperature. The beach looked identical. To any outside observer, Jordan simply looked like a man who had enjoyed a full eight hours of sleep and decided to stand in the ocean for aesthetic reasons.
The only visible alteration was his hair.
He ran a hand through it. The strands felt denser, structurally reinforced. It wasn't a dramatic anime spike-up, but it carried a voluminous weight that simply hadn't been there yesterday.
My hair is slightly thicker, and my base stats just skyrocketed, Jordan observed internally, delivering the verdict to himself with the deadpan neutrality of a patch-note review.
He stood there for a moment, letting the damp morning breeze wash over him.
That's it. That's the tweet.
The internal experience, however, had been anything but neutral.
The millisecond the Saiyan bloodline grafted into his system, something vicious tore through his veins like a live wire desperately searching for a ground. It was an upwelling of pure, directionless, violent intent boiling up from the deepest, oldest parts of the brain stem. It wasn't localized anger. It was the structural, species-level bloodlust of an apex warrior race bred for generational genocide, aggressively trying to assert dominance over its new host.
It slammed into the reinforced bedrock of Jordan's psyche and was comprehensively crushed.
He had spent years surviving in the OPM universe. His mind was a fortress built from countless lethal encounters with monsters, villains, and Power users. The primal Saiyan violence found absolutely zero purchase against his mental load-bearing walls. It didn't even need to be suppressed; it simply crashed against his willpower and dissolved into mist, lacking anything fragile enough to attach to.
The Saiyan tail had mounted a separate rebellion. The new genetic code aggressively hunted for the base of his spine, mapped the surface of his skin, and commanded it to split.
It encountered tissue that flat-out refused to yield. Jordan's body simply declined the modification. The genetic instruction hit a biological firewall, assessed the impossibility of the task, and gave up.
What remained after the failed hostile takeover was perfectly clean: the Saiyan arsenal stripped of its psychological baggage. The Zenkai boosts, the slow accumulation of S-cells, the latent potential for golden transformations—all seamlessly grafted onto a body built to superior, localized specifications.
Like a half-blood, Jordan mused. All of Gohan's potential, none of the childhood trauma.
He stood in the biting surf, felt the terrifying, dense vitality humming beneath his skin, and found the results entirely acceptable.
Kame House had quietly emptied itself as the morning progressed.
Piccolo had vanished first, before anyone else was fully lucid. No grand announcements, no polite farewells—just the sudden, chilling absence of a massive Namekian presence. He had taken Gohan with him into the harsh wilderness, swapping the kid's four-star-ball tunic for heavy martial arts gi. Jordan, watching from the shoreline, had noted Piccolo aggressively pinching his nose in disgust during the departure. It strongly implied the terrified four-year-old had already suffered a severe biological reaction to his new demonic tutor. The training, apparently, had officially begun.
Bulma and Krillin had departed together in a capsulized hovercraft. Bulma was speeding back to Capsule Corp, desperate to dismantle and reverse-engineer Raditz's pod. Krillin was off to hunt down the rest of the martial arts crew, kicking off a brutal year of prep. He had waved from the hatch; Bulma was already too deep into a schematic on her datapad to look up.
Master Roshi was barricaded inside the Kame House. His turtle was floating somewhere in the deep blue.
Goku was out front on the sand, blurring through high-speed katas. His eyes held the focused, tranquil vacancy of a master actively syncing his mind back up with his muscles. Technically, Jordan had ordered him to rest for two full days to let his catastrophic injuries heal. Goku's Saiyan biology had apparently taken the physician's estimate as a personal insult.
Jordan watched him from down the beach, checking his internal clock. He gave his peaceful morning about twenty minutes before it was interrupted.
Fourteen minutes later.
"Jordan!"
Goku dropped out of the sky with the casual ease of a man who just remembered gravity was optional. He landed heavily in the shallows, kicking up a spray of seawater, entirely unbothered by his soaked boots. His trademark grin stretched ear to ear. "I'm fully recovered!"
Jordan narrowed his eyes, assessing him. Goku's ki signature was dense and stable. His physical mechanics were flawless. Whatever horrific internal damage the Special Beam Cannon and the subsequent healing had inflicted yesterday was completely gone.
"You're in peak health," Jordan confirmed dryly. "I'm not going to argue with the biology."
"Great!" Goku was already whistling, patting the air at his side with the familiarity of calling a golden retriever. The yellow mass of the Flying Nimbus zoomed down from the clouds, expanding and hovering dutifully beside him. "Then let's not waste any time. To the Lookout! It's your first time, so just stick close and follow my lead."
Several hundred kilometers away, in a quiet kitchen on Mount Paozu, Chi-Chi violently sneezed.
Jordan had zero objections and even less interest in wasting time. He stepped out of the water.
Goku was halfway onto the Nimbus when he froze, slapping his gi pocket in sudden realization. "Oh—here. Catch."
He lobbed a small, heavy object. Jordan snatched it out of the air.
A Dragon Ball. Four stars suspended inside a sphere of perfect orange crystal. It sat in Jordan's palm, exuding a strange, cosmic gravity that felt far more significant than its baseball-sized mass suggested.
"It's Gohan's hat decoration," Goku explained, settling cross-legged onto the cloud. "Piccolo gave him new clothes, so the old ones are junk. You mentioned wanting to make a wish, so it's yours. We can grab Bulma's Dragon Radar and hunt down the rest whenever you're ready."
Jordan stared down at the glowing sphere.
He didn't need the radar. He closed his eyes, turning his awareness inward. He isolated the precise electromagnetic signature humming off the crystalline ball, locked onto the unique frequency, and violently projected his senses outward in a global, omnidirectional pulse.
Ping. The resonance snapped back almost instantly. Six distinct signals, scattered across the curvature of the Earth, all broadcasting the exact same esoteric frequency. He mapped their geographical coordinates in less than two seconds and filed them away in his mind.
"Done," Jordan said smoothly.
Goku tilted his head, blinking. "Huh?"
"I won't need the radar," Jordan clarified. He mentally triggered the Stand.
Card Mastery. The four-star Dragon Ball in his palm violently dissolved into a vortex of crackling azure light, matter collapsing into concept, and concept solidifying into a card. What materialized between his fingers was the most violently vibrant orange border he had pulled to date—deep, warm, and pulsing with a golden, luminescent edge that felt distinctly alive.
[Fantasy Card: 4-Star Ground Dragon Ball] Type: Item Card • Rarity: SSR
Effect 1: Contains a fragment of the Earth Dragon's wish-granting authority. Gather all seven to summon Shenron.
Jordan admired the holographic shine for a split second before seamlessly slotting it into his spatial inventory.
Goku watched a legendary, indestructible mystical artifact get deleted from reality with absolute equanimity. At some point yesterday, the Saiyan had clearly decided that demanding explanations for Jordan's bullshit was a waste of perfectly good training time.
"Well, that's handy," Goku noted cheerfully, scratching the back of his head. "Alright—let's go!"
The vertical ascent through the upper atmosphere took longer than Jordan anticipated, and the stratosphere was significantly more hostile than basic temperature charts implied. The wind at this altitude wasn't just weather; it was a structural, lateral force of nature that demanded constant, grinding physical correction.
Goku rode the Nimbus through the freezing gale with effortless balance, his gi and thick hair whipping violently in the slipstream. He wore the serene expression of a man who took this exact commute regularly and found it relaxing.
Jordan flew parallel to him, but he wasn't fighting the wind. He had engaged his Herrscher spatial authority. The air simply bent around him, sliding off an invisible localized distortion field. For Jordan, the hurricane-force winds were purely a visual aesthetic, not a mechanical problem. He watched the white blanket of the cloud layer fall away beneath their boots.
Then, he hit the threshold.
It was subtle but absolute—like stepping through a permeable membrane that actively checked your credentials before letting you pass. It wasn't a physical wall or a psychic barrier. It was a spatial conditional. Passage Permitted or Passage Denied. A divine lock that only yielded to the god's explicit permission, or the god's direct company.
Above the clouds, the Heavenly Temple resolved into view.
It was a paradoxical piece of architecture—smaller than its impossible geometry suggested it should be, yet exuding a massive, overwhelming sense of completeness. The hemispherical underside was etched with intricate, labyrinthine patterns, floating against the deep blue of the upper atmosphere with the serene inevitability of an object that had sat perfectly still for centuries. Above the curved hull sat a pristine white marble plaza framed by lush, impossible vegetation. The central palace anchoring the plaza possessed the heavy, solid permanence of a structure that had never once required a repair.
It occupied a localized pocket dimension, Jordan realized. The barrier they had breached was the seam between realities. The Temple didn't just float above the Earth; it floated entirely outside of it.
Goku kicked off the Nimbus, engaging his own ki flight, and accelerated. Jordan matched his pace. They crested the marble lip of the platform together and touched down lightly on the white stone.
Two figures were already waiting at the heavy wooden doors of the sanctuary.
One was tall and painfully thin, a green-skinned elder who radiated the deep, bottomless calm of someone who had learned patience long before it was required. He wore the heavy mantle of divine responsibility, but none of its crushing weight.
Beside him stood a shorter, rounder figure in a turban and vest. Mr. Popo's expression was an unsettling mask of absolute neutrality—a face Jordan had only previously observed from a comfortable, wave-appropriate distance.
The Kami of Earth.
Goku blinked, his face lighting up. "Hey! You guys already knew we were coming?"
The ancient Namekian regarded them both with the specific, measured gaze of an entity who had watched the turning of the world from a high peak for centuries, and had long since forgotten how to be surprised by whatever crawled up to meet him.
"We did," he said, his voice carrying the dry rustle of old parchment.
His dark eyes slid past Goku and locked onto Jordan. Measuring. Digging past the surface, searching for whatever metric gods used to weigh mortals, and keeping the final tally strictly to himself.
"Welcome to the Lookout."
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