The heavens were silent. Only the roar of that primordial beast thundered in his ears, its foul breath washing over him and nearly drowning out Lin Fan's faint, insignificant scream.
Its cavernous maw had already opened, teeth like a forest of blades, thick drool dripping from its jaws. In the next instant, it would swallow his naked body whole and crush him into pulp.
Lin Fan's pupils shrank. Despair drenched him like ice water. The spark of indignation he'd felt moments ago was instantly snuffed out by primal fear.
He instinctively squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the excruciating pain to come.
At the critical moment, a teeth-grating creak came from the steep cliff beside him.
The beast's violent charge and stomping must have loosened a massive boulder.
The boulder rocked twice, broke free of the mountainside, and came crashing down with unstoppable force!
CRASH!
It struck the exact spot where the dinosaur's long neck joined its head!
Even with its thick, scaly hide, the beast let out a pained howl from the heavy blow. Its enormous body staggered and toppled sharply to one side, its huge head slamming into the nearby cliff with a dull boom. Loose stones showered down.
An opening!
Though Lin Fan had no idea what was happening, his instinct to survive took over.
He jerked his eyes open. The beast was dazed and bellowing, too distracted to bother with him.
He scrambled away on all fours, rolling and crawling, with no idea which direction he was going. All he knew was that he had to get as far from the terrifying creature as possible. He plunged into the deeper, darker forest.
He ran until he didn't know how far he'd gone. Only then did the horrifying roars and tremors behind him finally fade away.
Now Lin Fan's lungs tore at him like a pair of bellows, and his legs felt as heavy as lead. His strength gave out, and he pitched forward onto the ground, covered in mud and fallen leaves, gasping desperately.
Once he'd caught his breath a little, relief at having survived barely had time to surface before deeper bewilderment and fear took its place.
He sprawled on the cold earth and stared up at the unfamiliar sky, a sight that chilled him to the bone.
Around him stood towering trees unlike any he'd seen before. The ferns were enormous, and the air was thick with the raw vitality of a primordial world, yet danger lurked everywhere.
That beast hadn't been a hallucination. Neither had this savage landscape... Where on Earth could a place like this exist?
"Transmigration..."
The absurd notion was the only thing that could explain what he'd seen, and it appeared in his mind before he could stop it.
He remembered the strange, ever-shifting streak of seven-colored light that had flashed before his eyes just before he died. His heart sank.
If he really had transmigrated, what kind of world was this?
Why was it so dangerous?
He'd started out naked in the wilderness, with a dinosaur chasing him?
This was a downright hellish difficulty setting!
Just as his mind reeled, his stomach growled, and his battered body neared total despair, a strange rumbling drifted from somewhere in the distance, completely out of place in this primordial world.
Vrrr... vrrr...
The sound drew closer, its rhythm unmistakably mechanical. It seemed to be... an engine roaring?
Lin Fan jolted. Struggling to lift his upper body, he strained to listen, and a faint, almost unbelievable hope stirred within him.
Someone?
Signs of civilization?
Following the sound, he crawled and stumbled forward.
He pushed through a dense patch of bushes, and the view suddenly opened up. A rough dirt road stretched before him, worn down by vehicle tires.
On the road, a dusty, old-fashioned open-top jeep bounced toward him, trailing clouds of dust.
A man sat inside. He wore rough-spun clothes, had dark skin and an ordinary face, and seemed to have a blade of grass between his teeth. He looked like a farmer straight from the fields.
A person!
An actual person!
Lin Fan nearly burst into tears of joy. He didn't care how shocking his nakedness must look. His desperate will to survive sent him staggering into the middle of the road, waving his arms and shouting with all his might, "H-help! Please help me!"
The jeep slammed on its brakes. Its tires screeched against the dirt road, and it stopped a short distance in front of Lin Fan.
The man was clearly startled by the wild-looking figure who'd suddenly burst out from beside the road, covered in mud and blood, and completely naked.
He stared at Lin Fan from head to toe. First came surprise, then an odd expression mixed with wariness. He didn't look as though he'd seen some kind of monster. If anything, he looked like he'd found something rare and worth inspecting.
Under the man's gaze, Lin Fan felt deeply uncomfortable. Embarrassment belatedly washed over him, but he couldn't afford to care. Gasping, he said urgently, "Sir, I've been in trouble. A wild beast chased me, and my clothes... Please, do me a favor. Give me a ride and something to cover myself with. I'll repay you!"
The man's wariness eased a little, but he didn't answer right away. Instead, he felt around inside the jeep and pulled out an unusual device.
It looked like a single-lens monocle, with complicated electronic wiring attached to one side. He slipped it expertly over his right eye.
A strange red light flashed across the lens, followed by a soft beep.
Looking at Lin Fan through the device, the man seemed to see right through him.
Lin Fan was still wondering what it was when the man's strange expression suddenly intensified, turning into exaggerated, undisguised astonishment.
"Pfft—hahahaha!"
Pointing at Lin Fan, the man burst into unrestrained laughter. He doubled over, nearly laughing himself to tears. "F-five... Your battle power's only five! Hahaha! I've been roaming this wilderness for years, and this is the first time I've seen a living, breathing 'battle power of five'! You're killing me! How've you managed to stay alive this long, kid? Did you run around naked with a fernthorn beast on your tail? Hahaha!"
Battle power? Five? Worthless?
The unfamiliar words pierced Lin Fan's ears like icicles, freezing him in place.
A chill he'd never felt before, worse than the one that had swept over him when he faced the dinosaur, suddenly engulfed him. It was as if his blood had frozen.
He jerked his head up and fixed his eyes on the strange device over the man's right eye. Its shape, its function... A word buried deep in his childhood memories exploded in his mind like a thunderclap.
The Battle Power Detector!
The Dragon Ball World!?
That's right! The beast... the strangely familiar wilderness... the detector... and that merciless taunt, "battle power of five"...
The clues instantly fell into place, weaving into a clear and brutal truth. He hadn't just transmigrated—he'd landed in Dragon Ball, a terrifying world where planets could be destroyed and battle power inflated to despairing heights!
And he, an ordinary office worker from a peaceful world, had become something of a universal unit of measurement in this one.
A battle power of a mere five. The lowest of the low, utterly insignificant... a battle power of five!
Despair, like a boundless tide of darkness, instantly swallowed the sliver of hope that had just risen within him.
Worse than learning he'd transmigrated was landing in a world whose dangers he knew all too well—and arriving in the most wretched, ant-like state imaginable.
The farmer kept laughing without a care, as if he'd just witnessed the funniest thing in the world. "Well, I'll be. With skills like yours, you probably couldn't even beat a piglet. And you still dared to wander around out here? Get back to your beginner village, kid! Don't feed yourself to the beasts!"
Every word was a blade, cutting deep into Lin Fan's heart.
His naked body was exposed to the man's contemptuous gaze and the cold air. Humiliation, fear, bewilderment, and despair that threatened to buckle his spine wound around him like poisonous vines, tearing at his mind.
He stumbled backward. Loose stones rolled underfoot, and he nearly fell.
The world seemed to lose its color, leaving only shades of gray.
The anger and indignation he'd felt when he first arrived seemed utterly ridiculous and powerless in the face of this absolute disparity in strength and this cruel assessment.
A battle power of five... In a world crawling with Saiyans and where Frieza was less than a dog, how was he supposed to survive?
How was he even supposed to stay alive?
The farmer seemed to have laughed enough. Perhaps he'd lost interest, or perhaps he simply couldn't be bothered with this "useless" man. He shook his head and started the jeep. The engine roared again.
"Good luck out there, kid! Hahaha!"
With one last mocking remark, the jeep kicked up a cloud of dust and drove off, soon disappearing at the end of the dirt road.
Lin Fan was left alone in the middle of the desolate road, naked and dazed, as if the whole world had abandoned him.
A cold wind swept past, stealing away the last of the warmth in his body.
Ahead lay a primordial beast, behind him nothing he could call home. His battle power was as insignificant as dust. Where... was there any hope?
He slowly raised his head and gazed at the sky of this other world. The corners of his mouth twitched into a smile more painful than a sob, while his eyes remained dull and gray.
There was no greater despair than having a battle power of five.
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