Time Is Running Out

Goten dropped onto the ground. The battle had drained every last bit of strength from him.

He raised his right hand. A red mark where the Red Armillary Sash had struck his arm stung fiercely.

But his heart was filled with an even stronger shock—not fear, but the exhilaration of having proven himself.

Yet he didn't feel discouraged. Instead, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction, like a blacksmith who had worked all day, exhausted but pleased to see the piece in his hands taking shape.

Zhi Zun Bao poked his head out from behind the mountain gate. He had watched the whole fight. It wasn't that he hadn't wanted to help; he knew this wasn't a battle he could take part in.

And for the first time in his life, he wished he had greater power.

Zixia came over and crouched beside Goten, checking the injury on his arm. "It's all right—just a superficial wound." She looked toward the direction where Nezha had disappeared, her expression complicated. "What he said just now..."

"I know."

Goten looked at the fist that had flashed with golden light. "He meant that Sun Wukong had once been in that same position—facing someone stronger than him, getting knocked down, and then getting back up."

Zixia fell silent.

She suddenly realized that ever since Goten had come to this world, people had been telling him the same thing in all sorts of ways: Sun Wukong is you, and you are Sun Wukong.

It wasn't about blood. It was something more fundamental—the part of him that always got back up after being knocked down.

Just then, Zhu Bajie came out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of hot soup. "Finished fighting? Then come over and have some soup."

Goten couldn't help laughing. "You were making soup while I was fighting?"

"Of course," Zhu Bajie replied matter-of-factly. "I couldn't have helped even if I'd gone out there. At least making soup was useful."

Sha Wujing followed behind him, carrying a large plate of steamed buns.

He said nothing, quietly set the buns on the table, then walked over to Goten and handed him a damp towel.

Brief and direct. That was his way.

Zhi Zun Bao came out too and sat down on the stone steps beside Goten. "That punch just now—it was so fast Nezha couldn't react. What was it?"

Goten lowered his eyes to his fist.

He remembered that dusk at the training ground, when he'd practiced the punch that stirred the air. He'd pushed the Origin Energy in the air outward, forming a shock wave.

But just now, he hadn't pushed it through the air. He'd compressed that shock wave into his fist.

It wasn't an Origin Energy shock wave. It was an Origin Energy shock wave wrapped in Saiyan ki, compressed into his fist, then detonated against Nezha's Universe Ring.

"I think...I invented a new move."

"What's it called?"

Goten thought for a moment. "Haven't decided yet."

Patriarch Bodhi sat in the pavilion at the mountaintop. He hadn't come down.

He had watched the whole battle from there.

From beginning to end—from Nezha's first strike to Goten's final punch—he'd watched a boy make the leap from "learning" to "putting it into practice" in the space of a single incense stick.

It wasn't because he had taught him well. Goten had opened that door himself.

He stood, brushed off his robes, and turned to walk into the cave.

A faint smile touched his lips.

That night, Goten sat cross-legged beneath the Old Locust Tree.

He wasn't training. He was simply thinking back over his fight with Nezha that day.

The more carefully he thought it through, the clearer it became that he still had a long way to go before he truly knew how to use his abilities. He hadn't planned that punch. When he'd been pushed to his limit, his body had chosen that path on its own.

If he hadn't spent those seven days running up and down the mountain with a boulder on his back, learned to sense Origin Energy, and struggled with that leaf all morning, his body wouldn't have been able to do it. None of it had been wasted.

He stood and walked to the pavilion at the mountaintop. Patriarch Bodhi wasn't there.

But on the pavilion's stone table lay a leaf.

It wasn't an ordinary leaf. It was from the Old Locust Tree, identical to the first leaf he'd used to practice the Object Manipulation Art. Beneath it was a note:

"That tree has lived for eight hundred years. Nezha's Red Armillary Sash has never struck it."

Goten looked at the note and grinned. Carefully, he tucked the leaf into his robes.

He turned and headed down the mountain. He didn't notice that, at the very moment he turned, a golden light had flickered faintly on the distant eastern horizon, in the direction of the South Heaven Gate.

The Heavenly Court was assembling a force greater than the twelve hundred Grass-Head Gods.

The countdown, which had been set at anywhere from one to three months, had already ticked down sixteen days. He didn't have much time left.

But tonight, he just wanted a good night's sleep.

Tomorrow's problems could wait until tomorrow...

Still, he knew he didn't have much time left.