The ancient stone room was quiet. It wasn't the hollow, ringing quiet of an empty space, but the heavy, settled stillness of a place that simply hadn't needed to be loud for a very long time.
The Grand Elder waited.
Jordan had noted, the exact second he crossed the threshold, that the massive alien's dark eyes hadn't fully opened since his arrival. It absolutely wasn't inattention. It was the exact opposite. The Elder was present in the terrifying, omnidirectional way of a being who had long since learned to read the universe through infinitely more complex channels than basic eyesight.
"I can clearly feel the kindness resting in your heart," the Grand Elder rumbled. His voice was incredibly slow, carrying the heavy cadence of a ruler who had delivered world-altering sentences for centuries and no longer needed to carefully frame them. "But I would know more. What specifically brought you across the vastness of the universe to our quiet home, Jordan of Earth?"
Jordan casually raised a hand. Dragon Clan Magic. A simple, sturdy wooden chair materialized out of thin air with a soft chime of light. He set it down at a highly respectful distance from the throne and took a seat.
"Earth has Dragon Balls," Jordan said simply. "And Earth's Guardian is a Namekian."
The Grand Elder's massive body flinched.
It was a microscopic movement, but in a being this ancient and still, it was roughly equivalent to a violent physical recoil. The heavy, wrinkled eyelids slid open just a fraction more—opening them fully required too much physical effort—but a profound, seismic shift rippled across his alien features. It wasn't quite raw surprise, because at his staggering age, almost nothing qualified as a genuine surprise anymore. But it was the closest an immortal ever got to it.
"Dragon Balls... on Earth." The Grand Elder repeated the words slowly, meticulously testing the weight of the syllables against centuries of hoarded cosmic knowledge. "And a Namekian Dragon Clan." A heavy, rattling exhale. "But how? How did a lone member of our isolated race end up on a world so impossibly far away?"
"It's a very long, very bloody story," Jordan said, keeping his voice perfectly level. "Would you be willing to see it directly? I can safely share the memories."
The Grand Elder's hand was massive, heavily wrinkled, and incredibly frail. When he finally extended it, the physical motion was agonizingly slow, executing the deliberate, grinding economy of movement that belonged to someone who had completely stopped spending biological energy carelessly.
Jordan reached out and met the massive green hand with his own.
The Elder closed his eyes and reached into Jordan's mind.
What Jordan actually shared was not, technically speaking, his own memories.
He had spent a significant portion of his ten-day hyperspace transit meticulously editing a psychic highlight reel.
The raw source material was Dragon Ball Z—specifically the brutal Saiyan Saga and the apocalyptic Namek Saga, pulled directly from the version of events Jordan had spent a previous life watching on a screen, rather than physically living through. He had reviewed the timeline internally, aggressively cut the filler, compressed the narrative timeline, and stitched it all together into something terrifyingly coherent. It was a rapid-fire sequence of visceral scenes designed to tell the Grand Elder exactly what he needed to know about the incoming nightmare, and exactly why Jordan had crossed the galaxy to stop it.
He presented the psychic data package under the strict, conceptual label: One possible future I have personally observed. Which, from a certain multiversal angle, was technically true, and practically sufficient for the current diplomatic objective.
The scenes violently unfolded within the Grand Elder's spiritual perception like a story told in screaming, bleeding images.
Piccolo and Goku standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the dirt against Raditz. A wildly uneasy alliance between two mortal enemies who would vastly prefer to be killing each other, but were violently forced to cooperate because the alien alternative was infinitely worse.
The frantic, desperate year of training.
Vegeta and Nappa descending on Earth, radiating the cold, psychopathic confidence of elite soldiers who had literally never expected to lose a fight in their lives.
Then, Namek.
The Grand Elder was violently forced to watch his own peaceful planet burn with the specific, agonizing quality of attention that only comes from intimately recognizing every single geographical detail. The pristine islands. The blue-green sky. The quiet agricultural villages.
Frieza's massive, hovering warship violently breaching the atmosphere.
Village after village systematically slaughtered. The gentle Namekian families who bravely answered the door, the Dragon Balls violently ripped from their dying hands, and the planetary genocide that immediately followed.
The Grand Elder's physical face during this psychic sequence remained locked in the rigid expression of a ruler who had centuries of practice holding unspeakably difficult things without showing them. And he was currently holding something unspeakably difficult.
Nail—the absolute strongest warrior on the planet, the loyal son currently standing guard just outside this very room—fighting Frieza's elite enforcers and losing. He wasn't losing by a small, respectable margin. He was losing by the kind of humiliating, catastrophic margin that violently communicated the fight had never actually been real.
Jordan had mercifully edited out some of the absolute worst gore. But not all of it.
The Grand Elder slowly withdrew his trembling hand.
A suffocating silence filled the stone room.
"Katas," the Grand Elder finally whispered.
The ancient Namekian name slipped out carrying the crushing, unbearable weight of a centuries-old grief. It was the specific, hollow sadness reserved for people who had been lost to the void long before they could ever realize what an incredible legacy they had accidentally started. "His lost son... he somehow survived the cataclysm and ended up on Earth. That is how they managed to forge Dragon Balls on their own." He fell entirely quiet, staring blindly at the floor. "I had always wondered what became of him."
Jordan let the heavy, mourning silence sit for a respectful moment before gently breaking it. "Grand Elder. None of the atrocities you just witnessed have actually happened yet. The Saiyan invasion is currently en route to Earth. And Frieza will absolutely, inevitably turn his psychotic attention toward Namek's Dragon Balls shortly after. That is exactly why I am sitting in this chair."
The Grand Elder slowly raised his head to look at him.
"You crossed the stars to warn us."
"I came to actively work with you," Jordan corrected firmly, leaning forward. "Earth and Namek are about to face the exact same apocalyptic threats. If we pool our intelligence and aggressively coordinate our tactical response, both of our worlds are infinitely better positioned to actually survive this. I can tell you exactly what is coming. I can help prepare your strongest warriors. In exchange, I am formally requesting immediate access to Namek's Dragon Balls, and your absolute trust."
The Grand Elder was impossibly old, and he had spent a terrifyingly long time expertly reading the fundamental nature of living things.
He remained entirely quiet for several more minutes, running the cosmic calculus. Jordan waited calmly, without fidgeting or pushing.
"The future you just showed me," the Grand Elder finally rumbled, his voice thick. "It is not a certain, locked timeline."
"No," Jordan agreed instantly. "What I just showed you is the default timeline. It's exactly what happens in the version of reality where no one knows the nightmare is coming." Jordan paused, a cold, dangerous smile touching his eyes. "We are currently operating in a vastly different version."
The Grand Elder considered this carefully.
Then, he nodded. It was a slow, incredibly heavy motion, carrying the absolute gravity of a planetary ruler officially ratifying a treaty that actually mattered.
What followed was several intense hours of the most brutally practical, tactically dense conversation Jordan had engaged in since arriving in the Dragon Ball multiverse. It was two highly intelligent entities who both fundamentally understood exactly what was at stake, and neither of whom had any remaining patience for diplomatic ceremony. They meticulously worked through the grueling logistics of a mutual-defense arrangement that would need to seamlessly function across interstellar distances, over the span of the next twelve months, in desperate preparation for a galactic tyrant who hadn't even mobilized yet.
When the summit finally reached its natural conclusion, the Grand Elder slowly reached behind his massive head and lifted the massive, one-star Dragon Ball from the back of the throne. He held it out.
"This one is yours," the Grand Elder said. "Nail will assist you in collecting the remaining six from the village elders. One of our Dragon Clan who intimately knows the native summoning ritual will assist you when you are fully ready." He settled heavily back into his stone chair, looking exhausted but deeply relieved. "The Namekian Dragon Balls can grant three wishes. I beg you, use them wisely."
Jordan stood up and accepted the massive, heavy crystal sphere with both hands.
"Thank you, Grand Elder. Truly."
The ancient Namekian waved the gratitude off with the gentle, tired dismissal of a man who had moved entirely past the concept of 'thanks' and was solely focused on 'action.'
He was just about to telepathically call Nail back into the room when a secondary thought suddenly crossed his wrinkled face. It was the kind of casual, hospitable afterthought that usually surfaced as formal diplomatic meetings wound down.
"Jordan... there is one more thing. I possess the unique biological ability to unlock the latent, dormant potential hidden within others. I have successfully utilized it on virtually every Namekian currently living on this planet at one point or another." He paused, looking at the human curiously. "Would you perhaps like me to try?"
Jordan actually had to stop and seriously think about this.
His terrifying power scaling since violently arriving in this multiverse had been, by any rational metric, absolutely not the result of natural, grinding martial arts progression. He possessed a reality-warping Stand that aggressively automated his biological acquisition. He was currently sitting on a massive, hoarded pile of SSR gacha cards covering everything from Saiyan Zenkai physiology to literal spatial manipulation. He had shattered his physical limiters multiple times over. And he was currently piloting a biological chassis that had been aggressively rewritten by Hashirama's Sage genetics, Spider-Man's complete mutation suite, and the integrated, overlapping energy systems of three entirely different fictional universes.
The idea that there was any meaningful, untapped 'potential' still sitting dormant in his cells, just waiting for a magical alien to casually release it, seemed incredibly optimistic.
But it seemed deeply impolite to point that out.
"If you're willing to expend the energy," Jordan said politely, "then yes, absolutely. Let's try it."
The Grand Elder smiled warmly and gestured for Jordan to extend his hand a second time.
In the ordinary, traditional process, unlocking a warrior's potential required the Elder to place his massive hand directly onto the subject's head. It was an incredibly direct, intimate spiritual conversation between the Elder's guiding power and the subject's own locked biological reserves.
However, the Grand Elder had just spent several hours in intense, psychic conversation with Jordan, and had developed a highly accurate, terrifying sense of the human's internal architecture. Attempting to physically touch Jordan's head uninvited, the Elder had correctly concluded, would be both highly presumptuous, and roughly equivalent to trying to pour a glass of water into a raging hurricane.
He gently touched Jordan's outstretched hand instead, and activated the ancient ability.
Total silence.
The Grand Elder waited. His guiding spiritual power reached outward, actively hunting for the hidden biological vault where raw potential was traditionally stored—the deep, untouched reserves that most mortal beings never managed to access in their lifetimes.
In a standard Namekian, the potential usually felt like a heavy wooden door. In a standard human from Earth, like Krillin, it usually felt like a stuck window. In Nail, when the Elder had performed the ritual years ago, it had felt like a massive, reinforced steel vault that simply required the correct combination.
Inside Jordan, it felt exactly like trying to find a load-bearing wall inside a building that had absolutely no walls, no ceiling, and no floor.
The Elder's guiding power traveled outward through Jordan's system, and simply kept traveling. There was no biological ceiling to press against. There was absolutely no dormant reserve left to locate and release. The Elder pushed his energy deeper, reaching further into the human's soul.
He simply found infinitely more of the exact same terrifying, bottomless void.
The ancient unlocking technique produced absolutely nothing, because there was physically nothing discrete left to produce. The human's potential was not locked away. It was not latent. It had not been contained by any biological structure that a magical release could possibly affect.
The man sitting calmly across from him was not an unpolished gem waiting to be cut. He was, in the most literal, terrifying sense the Grand Elder could conceptually construct, already entirely, perfectly realized.
The Grand Elder slowly withdrew his trembling hand.
A very long, very awkward pause settled over the room.
"I... may have fallen slightly out of practice in my old age," the Grand Elder murmured, maintaining his dignified composure with immense effort. "Please, allow me to try one more time."
Jordan kept his facial expression locked into polite neutrality.
The Grand Elder gathered himself, executing the technique much more deliberately this time. The guiding power visibly rose, a faint, pulsing outline of white energy aggressively flaring around his massive body. It was the intense, focused kind of effort he strictly reserved for incredibly difficult subjects with impossibly dense reserves.
He reached into Jordan's system again. Pushing with everything he had.
Jordan remained exactly as he was. Completely unchanged.
The Grand Elder slowly looked down at his own hand. Then he looked up at Jordan. Then he looked back down at his hand.
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