That wasn't a beam of light. It was a green torrent five meters in diameter.
Wherever it went, space seemed to twist, warping the light along with it. Even time grew sluggish and sticky.
The Armor-Rock Giant Elephant's thick hide, tough enough to withstand a warship's cannons, was as fragile as paper before that torrent. It was torn apart and vaporized.
There was no explosion, no scream—only the faint sizzling sound of matter breaking down.
A second later, the green torrent vanished.
A bottomless circular hole now pierced the rocky mountain. Its smooth rim was polished enough to reflect a human silhouette, and a faint dark-red heat still lingered around it.
The passage cut straight through the entire mountain. Far away, daylight shone in from the other end.
As for the giant beast that had ruled this region for centuries, not even a scrap remained.
Broly lowered his hand, and the green glow around him slowly faded.
He walked to the edge of the hole and crouched, breaking off a small, crystallized piece of meat from the melted rock.
It was one of the very few parts of the giant elephant that hadn't been completely vaporized, baked under intense heat and pressure into a strange "food" somewhere between rock and barbecue.
He took a bite, chewed, and swallowed.
His face showed no emotion, as if he were mechanically completing some step necessary for survival.
When he finished eating, he looked up at the sky.
Through the thin atmosphere, the star was slowly sinking westward, spreading a strange red glow across the sky, a mix of blood and rust.
Farther away, the stars began to appear, one by one.
One of them lay in the direction of Planet Vegeta.
Broly narrowed his eyes slightly.
For the first time, a ripple stirred deep in those green eyes.
"Another day gone..." he murmured, his voice so hoarse it sounded like grit scraping against metal.
Yesterday, that brief but vivid dream had once again dragged him back to a world called "Blue Star," back to the self he had once known as "Zhang Yang."
In the dream, sunlight flashed off the glass of skyscrapers, streams of traffic flowed along broad roads, and the din of the crowds, the hum of electronic devices, even the aroma of coffee on some afternoon from his memories... It had all felt so real, yet so far away.
And then there were all those Dragon Ball fanfics he had stayed up late reading over the years. Their authors always wrote with absolute conviction, describing how transmigrators used their foreknowledge to grow stronger, toyed with the original characters, and rose to invincibility... Now that he was living through it himself, those fantasies seemed laughably naive, and even cruelly ironic.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed the bitterness he hadn't tasted in so long.
Then he moved.
His crossed legs slowly unfolded, like a giant python emerging from its bindings.
As he shifted, the enormous black boulder beneath him let out a faint groan, as if it could barely bear his weight.
Broly rose to his feet. His movements were unhurried, yet steady as a mountain in motion.
For forty-one years, he hadn't merely survived on this hellish planet. He had also tempered his Saiyan body through methods as brutal as they came.
Vampa's scorching heat, radiation, thin and poisonous atmosphere, and endless savage beasts had long since become ordinary parts of his life.
He didn't even need to focus to "sense" his surroundings. His body's instincts—or the combat talent in his Saiyan blood—let him clearly "see"—no, "touch"—everything within a thousand miles. Every poisonous scorpion hiding in a crack in the rocks, every step and heartbeat of a giant beast wandering in the distance, the contraction of its muscles, even the blood and energy flowing through its body... It was all laid out like a painting and reflected directly in his consciousness.
Twelve thousand.
The number flashed through his mind. It wasn't a record, just a reflexive tally.
That was the total number of beasts he had killed with his own hands on Vampa.
When he first arrived, the monsters had mistaken him for prey that had suddenly appeared. They had rushed him in packs, their fangs and claws eager to tear his flesh apart.
And what happened? One slaughter after another.
Broly's fighting had gone from clumsy at first to more and more efficient, more and more deadly.
His fists could shatter the hardest skulls, and one blast of ki could vaporize a giant beast into ash.
Blood seeped into the sand at the bottom of the valley, only to be quickly dried by the heat and baked into layer upon layer of dark-brown crust.
After countless failures, the surviving beasts finally had fear etched into the depths of their genes.
Beneath his bronze skin, his muscles were taut as steel wires, harboring the strength to split mountains and shatter stone.
He looked up at the ever-burning star, his expression complicated.
There was indifference toward the fate of his past life, and the weight of everything he had endured in this one—but more than anything, he was coolly assessing the future.
A divine bloodline from the very start was a gift from heaven, but also a curse.
The road to the summit he had imagined was bound to be more treacherous than the sands of Vampa.
At this point, Zhang Yang just wanted to spit viciously and curse, "To hell with transmigration being good! To hell with it being wonderful!"
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