A kitchen knife flashed in the morning sun, carving a lethal, flashing arc through the air.
Chi-Chi was in full, terrifying pursuit. Wielding a heavy cast-iron pot in her left hand and the knife in her right, her furious shouts echoed sharply across Kame House. Goku was currently doing what he did best in domestic crisis situations: staying exactly four meters ahead of the problem. It was the precise mathematical distance required to keep the peace while keeping his limbs attached to his torso.
Then, the sky died.
It didn't darken gradually like an approaching storm. One second it was a bright, cloudless morning; the next, the brilliant blue was swallowed whole from horizon to horizon. It was replaced by a churning, pitch-black abyss, as though a vast, cosmic entity had simply decided the sun was no longer necessary.
Chi-Chi violently slammed into a solid wall of muscle.
She stumbled backward, blinking in the sudden darkness, and found her footing. Goku had stopped dead. He stood perfectly still, arms hanging loosely at his sides, his head tilted back to stare at the black heavens. The homicidal momentum at his back must have been palpable, because without taking his eyes off the sky, he reached behind himself and wrapped one arm gently around his wife.
Chi-Chi froze. The knife was still gripped tightly in her fist, but she decided to leave it there for now.
"Shenron," Goku breathed.
The silhouette was unmistakable. An impossibly massive, serpentine body was coiling across the entire stratosphere, its emerald scales vaguely illuminated by flashes of golden lightning, large enough to be visible from pole to pole. Any warrior who had lived on Earth for more than a decade knew exactly what that apocalyptic sight meant. Somewhere on the planet, all seven Dragon Balls had been gathered. Someone had summoned the wish-granting god.
"Has it really been that long?" Goku shook his head, his voice tinged with genuine wonder. "Did Jordan already gather all of them?"
That fast. Really.
Chi-Chi felt the steady, drumbeat warmth of her husband's chest against her back. She let the kitchen knife lower, just a fraction. The boiling anger hadn't fully dissipated—it was still there, banked and waiting for its turn—but it was incredibly difficult to maintain a proper domestic homicide with a planetary-scale magical dragon eclipsing the sun.
"This... Jordan," she murmured. "Is he strong?"
Goku was quiet for a long moment.
"Yeah," he said finally. "Really strong."
The words came out simple and unvarnished, carrying the heavy honesty Goku only used when he had truly thought about a fighter's depth. "His energy... I can't even find the bottom of it. I'd have to train for a very long time before I could even hope to catch up to him."
Chi-Chi's eyes widened in the dark. She stepped back to look at him properly.
Her husband—the martial arts god who had shattered the Demon King, the man who stood at the absolute pinnacle of everyone she had ever known—was saying this about someone else. There was no qualification in his voice, no creeping edge of competitive ego. It was just the plain, awe-struck admission of a man who had looked out at a new horizon and realized it was infinitely further away than he'd expected.
Goku glanced down at her shocked expression and chuckled.
"It's okay," he said, gently patting her shoulder. "He's a friend."
Across the globe, anyone with the sensory capacity to understand what was happening looked up.
Skies turning black simultaneously in every time zone. The crushing electromagnetic pressure that preceded an entity large enough to be tracked from orbit. Golden lightning fracturing the dark in deliberate, pre-formed geometric patterns.
Every martial artist who had ever touched a Dragon Ball reached the exact same conclusion.
High above the world, balanced on the atmospheric edge between the sky and the void, Kami and Mr. Popo stood at the ornate railing of Kami's Lookout. They watched Shenron's impossibly vast coils stretch across their vantage point.
"Who do you think he will wish for?" Mr. Popo asked, his voice an unreadable monotone.
Kami said nothing for a long time. His ancient, dark eyes meticulously tracked the undulating shape of his own creation against the blackened sky. "I suppose," the old god rasped slowly, "we are about to find out."
Down in the primeval forest, the ambient noise of the wilderness had completely vanished.
Jordan stood in the center of the clearing as the blinding column of golden light dissipated above him. Shenron's full, majestic length threaded through the heavy storm clouds, his glowing crimson eyes—each the size of a sports stadium—staring down with vast, ancient patience.
F-boy stood silently at Jordan's side. The Stand's immaculately tailored purple suit ruffled in the displaced wind, its side-swept hair perfectly in place. Its expression was calibrated somewhere between professionally aloof and mildly fascinated by the giant lizard.
Then, F-boy moved.
It didn't speak. It didn't look at Jordan for permission. It simply decided to do something, and the psychic tether between Stand and User communicated the intent a millisecond before the action. It was a shared, pragmatic understanding that ran infinitely deeper than words.
Jordan gave a microscopic nod.
F-boy vanished.
With an A-rank in both Speed and Range, the Stand didn't just cross the distance; it deleted it. F-boy reappeared high above the treeline, hovering directly beside one of the dragon's great coils. Before the recent evolution, operating at this altitude and distance would have been completely impossible. Now, F-boy treated the spatial gap like a footnote.
The Stand pressed one flat palm flush against an emerald scale the size of a city block.
Element Pickup (Limit Break).
There was no flashy aura. No dramatic light show. Just physical contact, and the passive, predatory architecture of the Stand executing its primary function—reading the extraordinary biological data of whatever it touched, ripping fragments of the divine into the conceptual framework of the gacha, and forging a card.
Shenron's massive, antlered head slowly turned. One glowing crimson eye rotated like a searchlight, fixing directly on the suited phantom floating beside his flank.
For a breathless moment, the eternal dragon simply stared, running a cosmic calculation far beyond Jordan's ability to interpret.
Then, apparently satisfied, Shenron looked away.
Jordan felt the crushing, atmospheric pressure in the clearing subtly shift. Shenron had assessed F-boy, recognized the alien anomaly, and found it fundamentally non-threatening to his existence. The dragon had simply decided to politely ignore the cosmic pickpocket and wait.
A perceptive dragon, Jordan thought, his lips twitching into a smirk. I like that.
A few minutes passed. The Stand's cooldown timers ticked away. Deep in the forest, a few braver birds tentatively began to chirp again, apparently deciding that the sky-sized supernatural entity wasn't actively hunting them. Jordan stood casually with his hands buried in his jacket pockets, maintaining unbroken eye contact with a creature that could comfortably swallow Mount Everest for breakfast.
Finally, Shenron spoke. The voice didn't travel through the air; it manifested directly inside Jordan's chest, a sub-bass vibration that rattled his ribs before his ears could even process the sound.
"Your Excellency."
Jordan's brow rose. He caught the honorific instantly. Shenron wasn't addressing him like a desperate mortal supplicant begging for a favor. Something in the dragon's divine assessment of Jordan's soul, or perhaps the terrifying reality-warping nature of the Stand, had forced the god into a completely different, highly respectful register.
A genuinely clever dragon, Jordan revised. This is very promising.
High above, F-boy caught Jordan's eye and gave a single, crisp nod. The extraction was complete.
"Sorry about the wait," Jordan called out, his voice calm and conversational against the apocalyptic backdrop. "Thanks for your patience."
Shenron's massive jaw—large enough to crush a tectonic plate—shifted downward. The bloody red eyes regarded him steadily. "State your wish."
Jordan looked up at the sheer, terrifying scope of the power coiled above him, and said simply: "Shenron. Please grant me the absolute maximum number of Senzu Beans within the scope of your divine authority."
The great dragon froze.
The pause stretched so long that the forest birds immediately went dead silent again. Then, Shenron's colossal head dipped once in a slow, deliberate nod of acknowledgment.
"Understood. Your wish can be granted."
The crimson eyes ignited.
Blinding red light flared from the dragon's pupils, casting harsh, razor-sharp shadows across the clearing. The magical energy that had been slowly accumulating within the scattered Dragon Balls for the past year was violently released. It bled into the atmosphere, bypassing physics entirely, communicating with the fundamental substrate of reality in a programming language older than time.
Something materialized in the empty air between Jordan and the dragon.
It was a massive, old-fashioned earthenware jar. The kanji for 'Hermit' (仙) was painted in faded red strokes across its curved side. It descended slowly, trailing wisps of golden light. Jordan stepped forward and caught the heavy ceramic with both hands.
He popped the wax seal and looked inside.
Packed to the absolute brim were thousands upon thousands of small, dry, shriveled green beans. They didn't look like much, and they smelled like absolutely nothing. But based on the weight—roughly fifteen to twenty kilograms—Jordan was holding tens of thousands of them.
Compared to the pitiful handful Master Korin managed to cultivate every few months, this haul was mathematically obscene.
"Senzu Beans require soil and water of extraordinary mystical quality to cultivate," Shenron rumbled unprompted, his voice echoing in Jordan's sternum. "Even utilizing my divine authority, this volume is the absolute maximum I can manifest in a single grant. Please accept my apologies for the limitation."
Jordan hoisted the jar, feeling the lingering magical warmth radiating through the clay.
"This is more than plenty," Jordan said, looking up with genuine appreciation. "Thank you. Truly—thank you for the effort."
The dragon's jaw shifted once more, the massive facial scales rearranging into something that almost resembled a respectful bow.
"It was no trouble. Your wish has been granted." A heavy pause. "Farewell."
Jordan raised one hand in a casual wave.
A concussive boom of thunder answered him, expanding outward in a shockwave that flattened the tall grass. Shenron violently uncoiled, his endless serpentine body rocketing straight upward into the black vortex. The last thing Jordan saw was the spiked tip of the dragon's tail catching the golden lightning before the entity dissolved entirely.
The seven Dragon Balls instantly fell from the sky.
Seven distinct points of brilliant orange-gold light dropped from the clouds, scattering outward in completely different directions like sparks struck from a massive flint. In six seconds they would be gone—hurled toward the poles, the deep oceans, and the highest peaks. Their magical energy spent, they would revert to ordinary stone, their electromagnetic signatures going completely dark for an entire year.
Jordan was already moving.
He hadn't taken his eyes off one specific trajectory since the scatter began. He tracked the ball shooting low and northeast—the familiar, humming resonance of the four-star ball Goku had given him.
His boots kicked off the dirt, crossing the distance in a blur. His hand snapped out, closing tightly around the sphere right out of the air. It landed with a heavy, ordinary smack in his palm, the smooth glass divots of the stars resting under his thumb.
The luminescent glow was gone. The star inclusions were dull and lifeless. For the next 365 days, it was nothing but a heavy, decorative paperweight.
He turned it over once, dropped it into his pocket, and looked up.
The darkness was already shattering. It retreated far faster than it had arrived. The oppressive black clouds dissolved at a visible, accelerated speed, giving way to slate grey, then a soft pearl, and finally, brilliant blue. In under sixty seconds, the bright morning had completely returned, unhurried and pristine, as though the apocalypse had simply been a passing shadow.
Up on Kami's Lookout, the ancient Guardian exhaled a long, slow breath.
Mr. Popo turned away from the edge of the plaza. "I did not expect that to be his wish."
"No," Kami agreed softly. He stood in silence, processing the sheer tactical brilliance of it. Senzu Beans. The absolute most precious, game-breaking healing resource a mortal could possess. Instant, flawless recovery from any physical trauma short of actual death. Complete replenishment of all ki and stamina. A single jar of them was worth infinitely more in a planetary war than any weapon Shenron could have forged.
"It is a good wish," Kami decided, leaning heavily on his staff. "Practical. Highly appropriate for someone who fights, and fully intends to keep fighting."
He let his hands fall to his sides as the last wisps of supernatural darkness burned away overhead.
"I think," Kami murmured, "that we were worrying about something that did not need worrying about."
Mr. Popo watched the blue sky completely stabilize. "He does seem to plan ahead."
Down in the sunlit clearing, Jordan stared at the heavy jar in his hands.
The lid was already off.
He had been staring at the payload for thirty seconds without touching a single bean. For a man with a gacha addiction, exhibiting this level of restraint in the presence of legendary loot was honestly a personal best.
He reached in and pulled one out.
It sat in the center of his palm—small, heavily desiccated, the faded green of a dead leaf. It was entirely unremarkable in every single way a physical object could be unremarkable.
He had actually pulled a Senzu Bean from the gacha pool a long time ago. He had filed it away in his emergency inventory and completely forgotten about it, reasoning that a full-heal item was too valuable to waste on a test run.
He popped the bean into his mouth and bit down.
It was aggressively astringent. Chalky. It tasted exactly like eating a handful of dried, raw peas that someone had forgotten in the back of a sock drawer.
Then, the energy hit him.
It didn't digest; it detonated. The sensation erupted from the back of his throat like a second pair of lungs expanding—a violent, rushing pulse of something that wasn't quite heat, wasn't quite electricity, and wasn't quite blinding light, but operated as all three simultaneously.
Jordan's eyes flew wide open for a fraction of a second as the impossible, roaring vitality slammed outward through his chest cavity, flooding down his arms and racing all the way to his fingertips. Every microscopic trace of cellular fatigue he was carrying was instantly, violently annihilated.
Oh.
That's what that does.