Goten sat in front of Five Finger Mountain for three days and three nights straight.
His hand stayed pressed against the stone without moving—the Origin Energy continuously washed over the crack Sun Wukong had left behind.
The crack had widened from the width of a hair to the thickness of a needle. At dusk on the third day, Goten's fingers glimmered faintly.
It wasn't the light of Origin Energy. A faint layer of gold appeared, completely different from his Saiyan energy. It was the power Sun Wukong had left behind in the crack, responding to him.
He opened his eyes and saw that his hand was glowing. It wasn't him that was glowing, but something inside the mountain.
Light shone through the crack, growing brighter and brighter—a golden radiance.
Goten didn't take his hand away. He pushed his Origin Energy to its limit, and the mountain began to tremble.
Zhi Zun Bao jumped down from the rock and took several steps back. The mountain shook harder and harder, and rocks tumbled from the peak, smashing into the ground and leaving craters. "It's going to collapse!"
"It's not collapsing—" Zixia's voice trembled as she stared at the glowing crack. "The Golden Cudgel is responding to him."
The mountain's trembling reached its peak. Boom! A muffled roar rose from deep within the mountain, and the crack widened twice as much.
Golden light burst from the crack, illuminating all of Five Finger Mountain as if it were broad daylight.
Goten didn't let go. Amid the light, he sensed an aura—not the Golden Cudgel's, but Sun Wukong's actual body.
The Great Sage Equal to Heaven from A Chinese Odyssey had separated his soul and reincarnated as Zhi Zun Bao, but his original body—the monkey king's form from Havoc in Heaven—had been sealed in the deepest part of Five Finger Mountain.
The Golden Cudgel wasn't stationed here, waiting for Goten to pull it free. It was here to protect this body, so Tathagata wouldn't discover that its soul had left.
He held his breath. The aura sleeping in the mountain's deepest reaches showed no signs of consciousness. It wasn't a person—it was a shell.
A shell emptied of its soul, with only its residual power remaining.
Yet that power—even just the lingering force emanating from the shell—was enough to make the entire mountain tremble.
The light lasted three breaths, then dimmed.
The mountain stopped shaking.
Goten's hand remained pressed against the stone, but the crack no longer glowed. It hadn't disappeared—it had contracted, once again suppressed by the runes' pressure.
But Goten had felt it just now. Deep inside the mountain, the shell had been stirred by his Origin Energy.
It hadn't awakened. It was an unconscious reaction, like a lamp extinguished for years whose wick briefly flickered when a breeze passed over it, then went dark again.
It wasn't Sun Wukong responding to him. The residual power within the shell had resonated automatically.
"Did you feel that?" Goten turned to look at Zixia.
Zixia's face had gone pale. She nodded.
She had felt it. In five hundred years, she had never sensed the lingering power so clearly—not as a memory, but as the aura of the body he had left behind, sleeping deep inside the mountain like an empty shell.
The Violet-Azure Treasure Sword had trembled not because Sun Wukong was still alive, but because the power sealed inside that shell was so immense that even the sword instinctively feared it.
Zhi Zun Bao stood not far away. He said nothing, but his hand trembled as he gripped the wooden staff.
He had felt it too.
The feeling was impossible to describe, like someone had shown you your face reflected across a body of water. That face was yours—and yet it wasn't.
The power sleeping deep inside the mountain was his body, the empty shell he had left behind five hundred years ago, containing all of the Great Sage Equal to Heaven's cultivation. It was calling to him.
Zhu Bajie broke the silence. "What do we do now?"
Goten stood and looked at the crack. It was more than twice as wide as it had been three days ago, but it still wasn't enough.
The Golden Cudgel was wrapped too tightly in the Seal. He needed more power to tear an opening through the runes.
"Keep pushing."
Goten continued to wear down the Seal.
He hadn't slept in four days, but he didn't feel tired. The Origin Energy inside him circulated in a way it never had before, like an engine pushed to its limit, squeezing out every last bit of energy and forcing it into the crack.
Under the strain of this extreme expenditure, his Saiyan energy and Origin Energy were being forced to fuse even further. He wasn't doing it on purpose; his body was making the adjustment automatically just to survive.
On the night of the fourth day, his Origin Energy and Saiyan energy finally merged completely within his meridians. They were no longer two forces running alongside each other, but a whole new power.
The instant the fusion was complete, his body released a powerful surge of energy without him meaning to.
His black hair lifted slightly in the wake of the energy. Golden flames burned at the tips—not quite gold, but no longer purely black either. A faint golden glow tinged the ends.
The Super Saiyan power, suppressed for so long by the world's rules, had finally awakened again.
He hadn't deliberately reached out to "touch" that threshold. He already possessed this power.
Back in the Dragon Ball World, with Trunks by his side and Uncle Piccolo training him, he had long since learned to transform into a Super Saiyan at will.
But after coming to this world, its rules had suppressed that power. This wasn't his first transformation; it was the first time he had recovered after being suppressed.
The long-familiar sensation made every meridian in his body sing with joy, like a river frozen for ages finally thawing.
His hair turned gold—not the faint gold from before, but the true gold of a Super Saiyan.
The transformation lasted only three short breaths, but the instant his golden hair appeared, every rune across Five Finger Mountain lit up.
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