The Dragon Balls dropped.
Not all at once—Porunga's violent departure instantly completely collapsed the localized magical field that had been keeping them suspended in the air. Without the divine anti-gravity, they plummeted toward the churning ocean at the exact terminal velocity of heavy, inert rocks, which was exactly what they were now.
Jordan caught them a split second before they hit the boiling water. It was a casual, thoughtless extension of his psychic reach. He safely floated the massive stone spheres over to where Nail and Dende were hovering.
The blinding golden light was completely gone from their surfaces. The crimson stars had vanished. What remained was a matte, deeply uneven, grey texture. It was ordinary stone that had briefly housed the power of a god, and had now violently returned to its baseline state. It would be one hundred Namekian days before the magical power cycled back into them.
High above, the boiling black clouds shredded and dispersed, allowing the sky to return to its pristine, three-sun configuration.
Jordan stood dead center in what used to be a thriving island's interior, the raging seawater held back purely by spatial reflex, and turned his absolute attention inward.
The psychic Mind Network possessed a highly specific, granular interior setting.
He had utilized it before—the terrifying ability to aggressively focus the network's perception entirely inward, violently reading his own microscopic cellular activity the exact same way it read the biomagnetic fields of the outside world. What it showed him now was a biological chassis in the middle of a catastrophic, system-wide rewrite.
The S-cells were there. Millions more of them than before. The raw cell count had aggressively, exponentially climbed throughout the duration of Porunga's divine amplification, until it finally locked into a terrifying new plateau that sat massively above where it had started. He could physically feel the difference in his biology the exact same way a mechanic felt the difference between a depleted battery and one that was dangerously overcharged: it was the exact same physical structure, but there was an apocalyptic amount of violent potential violently waiting inside it.
He quickly ran the internal biological assessment.
Close, Jordan thought, analyzing the density. But still just a little short.
The S-cell threshold required to trigger the legendary Super Saiyan transformation was absolutely not just a single, static numerical value. It was a volatile, binary combination of raw cellular density and the correct, violent emotional trigger.
Porunga had flawlessly handled the first half of the equation, forcefully pushing the biological cell count well past what decades of calm, meditative training would have naturally accumulated. But the count currently sat at 'sufficient for transformation when violently triggered,' absolutely not 'sufficient for transformation spontaneously.' The divine wish had flawlessly executed its work right up to the exact biological line where the dragon's conceptual authority ended.
The rest of the process was entirely Jordan's problem.
He intimately knew the DBZ mechanics. The Super Saiyan transformation was fundamentally biological at its core—volatile S-cells violently reacting to an emotional intensity that spiked beyond a critical threshold. It was the primal, psychotic anger of the Saiyan nature forcefully converting into the staggering biological energy required to trigger the physical mutation. Gohan had eventually done it in agonizing grief. Goku had famously done it in apocalyptic rage, watching Krillin get murdered. The specific flavor of the emotion was actually significantly less important than the sheer, crushing magnitude of it.
The immediate tactical problem was that Jordan's emotions simply were not naturally extreme.
The primal Saiyan drives had aggressively tried to kick the door down during the initial integration, and had immediately found his psychological walls to be entirely load-bearing. They had violently tried again during Porunga's wish, and met the exact same immovable result. He was simply not a person prone to the kind of acute, blinding, overwhelming anger that Saiyan biology required as ignition fuel. His psychological architecture was vastly too stable, heavily layered, and far too thoroughly his own to ever be hijacked by the blind, instinctive aggression the legendary transformation usually demanded.
He needed something real. Something personal.
He aggressively cast backward through his own memory. He bypassed the edited DBZ highlight reels he had shown the Grand Elder. He bypassed his encyclopedic, abstract meta-knowledge of the power system. He dug straight down into his actual, lived memories. His past life on Earth. The specific, visceral things that had genuinely, truly moved him to quiet fury before any of this multiversal insanity started.
Something immediately arrived.
A webcomic. The kind of masterful, serialized work that took a dedicated creative team literally years of their lives to build—the painstaking storyboarding, the grueling art, the meticulous coloring, all of it. Distributed chapter by agonizing chapter to loyal readers who eagerly came back every single week simply because they deeply cared about what happened next. The kind of beautiful, fragile thing that only existed because specific, passionate people had poured an enormous amount of their souls into it.
And then... the piracy.
The leeches who took that painstaking work and aggressively uploaded it before the official release date. The people systematically stripping out the creator watermarks, illegally hosting the stolen art on ad-riddled aggregator sites that generated massive ad revenue from the stolen traffic, while the desperate people who had actually spent years making the art received absolutely nothing. The smug forum threads where the thieves coordinated the leaks.
That specific, parasitic category of person who somehow gained illicit access to a pre-release copy through some back-channel connection, and immediately asked, 'How do I share this to get the most clout?' Motivated by absolutely nothing except the hollow, pathetic desire to be the one who shared the stolen work first.
The people who looked at someone's careful, years-long creative soul... and simply saw 'content' to redistribute for engagement farming.
Jordan's fist slowly clenched.
That, Jordan thought, his eyes narrowing.
The anger arrived.
It wasn't the blind, roaring, instinctive Saiyan aggression—that was a foreign, primal thing violently trying to attach to a host that had already rejected it. This anger was entirely his own. It was cold. It was deeply personal. It was the specific, quiet, terrifying outrage of someone who had deeply loved creative work, and had been forced to helplessly watch it treated as if the human beings behind it were completely incidental.
It was enough.
The biological threshold was violently crossed.
His black hair moved.
The aura violently erupted upward.
It didn't build gradually—it detonated instantly, exactly the way legendary transformations happened when the cellular machinery had been fully primed and was simply waiting for the spark. Blinding golden fire violently climbed from the crushed bedrock where he stood. It was the specific, warm-gold, roaring energy of a Super Saiyan that Jordan had seen rendered in 2D animation a hundred times over, and was now terrifyingly experiencing from the inside out.
His hair violently spiked and flashed solid gold.
It wasn't stuttering or flickering this time. It was pure, blinding gold—all of it, except for the sharp bangs falling over his forehead—standing straight up with the rigid, gravity-defying quality that was apparently a hardwired biological feature of the mutation, rather than an artistic accident.
His eyes, already violently adapting to the apocalyptic energy flowing through his nervous system, shifted instantly from deep blue to the pale, piercing teal that biologically signaled: This system is currently running at maximum capacity.
The surrounding geography violently reacted to his existence.
The massive island segment directly below his boots, which was already partially sunk, completely gave up the ghost. The sheer, crushing gravitational force of his golden aura violently compressed straight downward through his boots, shattering the continental bedrock, completely annihilating the structural integrity of something that had been a stable landmass until approximately twenty minutes ago.
The millions of gallons of seawater that had been aggressively rushing into the void were now being violently repelled. The localized shockwave dynamics created towering, roaring columns of white water that exploded hundreds of feet into the air and crashed back down in the middle distance.
In the sky directly above him, the atmosphere violently destabilized. The ambient air aggressively ionized, supercharged by the terrifying static electricity his out-of-control cellular activity was currently generating. The atmosphere rapidly reached the critical point for spontaneous lightning generation, and the violent discharge began. Massive, jagged electric snakes aggressively crossed from cloud to cloud. Deafening thunder followed at rapid intervals.
Jordan floated upward.
The bedrock below simply wasn't structurally safe to stand on anymore, and hovering in the air actually utilized significantly less energy than trying to physically manage the localized destruction. He stabilized at a few meters of altitude and turned his absolute attention inward to analyze the terrifying sensation of what was currently happening inside his biology.
Fifty times base combat power, Jordan thought, his pale green eyes wide. So this is exactly what a 50x multiplier actually feels like.
It felt like a great deal of power.
It also felt like a great deal of power that was absolutely not particularly well-organized.
The raw energy was very real, and it was genuinely enormous, but it was also violently distributed completely at random. It was aggressively burning through his nervous system without a clear, tactical application, simply because he had violently triggered the mutation without having a specific combat target in mind to direct it at.
Every single passing second of maintaining this state was biologically costing him something massive. The roaring golden flames violently ripping off his body varied wildly in intensity—a visual indicator that clearly communicated: This is your very first attempt at maintaining this biological state, and your energy efficiency is exactly as terrible as you'd expect.
He thought, very briefly, of every single Z Fighter who had eventually achieved this legendary state, and the grueling, agonizing months they had spent desperately training just to maintain it efficiently without bleeding ki.
There was a very good reason that training was absolutely necessary.
First time, Jordan acknowledged internally, completely without shame. It will be significantly better the second time.
He held the blazing transformation for as long as he could hold it cleanly—meticulously monitoring the massive biological drain, watching the internal efficiency meter rapidly drop, and coldly recognizing the exact tactical point where the raw energy output was costing significantly more than the combat benefit.
Then, he seamlessly let the trigger go.
The roaring golden fire didn't extinguish dramatically. It simply faded out. The brilliant color bled smoothly back from gold toward black, the rigid height of his hair settling back into its natural state, the pale, piercing teal of his irises returning to deep blue.
He landed lightly on the remaining, jagged bedrock.
He exhaled a long, heavy breath.
He was, very much, incredibly tired. It was a highly specific, entirely novel kind of exhaustion—the complete, hollow depletion of a biological system that didn't normally deplete. It was the full expenditure of massive energy reserves that had previously been more than sufficient for absolutely everything since his transmigration began. His physical body had just aggressively run a localized operating system at fifty times its baseline capacity for ten straight minutes, and then politely asked the system to stop.
He took another deep breath, centering himself.
High above him, the Namekian sky was still violently dark with heavy storm clouds. Residual lightning aggressively crossed the distance between them with the slow, rumbling confidence of a meteorological process that absolutely hadn't been told the event was over yet.
Jordan casually raised one arm, drawing his hand across the darkened sky in a single, sweeping horizontal motion.
Herrscher Authority.
The heavy storm clouds instantly, violently split directly along the line of his gesture. It wasn't a physical application of concussive force; it was simply the absolute application of his spatial authority, politely informing the localized weather system exactly where the new geographical boundary was.
The gap tore open. Pure sunlight poured through. The massive gap rapidly widened, the heavy black clouds violently pulling back on both sides like a massive theater curtain. In exactly thirty seconds, the sky was completely clear, the three suns were present and bright, and the atmosphere had entirely returned to the agreeable, peaceful quality of a planet without heavy industry.
Total silence fell over the area, broken only by the sound of rushing water.
Nail was securely holding Dende. Dende was securely holding a dormant Dragon Ball with both hands. They were hovering over a stretch of pristine coastline several dozen kilometers away, safely relocated to where the planetary landscape had remained structurally sound.
Nail's green face showed almost absolutely nothing.
What it did show, if you were watching incredibly carefully, was the specific, terrifying internal calibration of an elite warrior aggressively updating his mental model of what was physically possible in the universe.
The Grand Elder had explicitly warned him. If that person were an enemy... ten of you would not be enough to even slow him down. Nail had officially filed that divine intelligence with the intellectual recognition it deserved, while maintaining the personal, arrogant certainty that it remained entirely theoretical. He had never been seriously outclassed in combat in his entire life. He had an incredibly difficult time mentally constructing what that kind of overwhelming defeat would actually feel like in practice.
He could construct it perfectly now.
"So that... is a Super Saiyan," Nail murmured quietly, speaking to absolutely no one in particular.
"It's amazing," Dende whispered, speaking with the raw, unfiltered simplicity of a child who had not yet developed the ingrained warrior habit of actively managing his reactions for diplomatic appearances. His dark eyes were exactly as wide as they had been when he saw the literal god of his people manifest. "The energy was so... so big."
"Yes," Nail agreed softly. "It was."
The elite warrior looked down at his own clenched fist. He looked back up at the distant horizon, where the massive landmass that had been there this morning... simply wasn't anymore.
He slowly unclenched his hand.
Jordan casually appeared beside them a few moments later. He materialized at a leisurely pace that strongly suggested he was tired enough to travel slowly, and was entirely fine with broadcasting that fact. His hair was jet black again. His expression was the pleasant, slightly-worn look of a man who had just had a highly eventful hour and was entirely prepared to discuss it over a beverage.
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