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Ji Ming was dead.

Dead as a doornail.

One second, he was staying up late in his rented apartment, catching up on Dragon Ball Super and trembling with excitement at the silver glow of Ultra Instinct on his screen. The next, everything went black. His consciousness was stuffed into a washing machine, spinning wildly, tearing apart, and reassembling.

When he opened his eyes again, the sky was an unfamiliar blue.

No—not the sky's blue. It was a strange, oppressive blue, chopped into fragments by the canopy overhead. The air smelled of dirt and grass, with a strong stench of blood. His own blood.

Pain shot through every inch of his body. Every bone was screaming.

"Ugh—" He tried to move, but all that came out of his throat was a babyish whimper.

Babyish?

Ji Ming's pupils shrank. He lowered his head and looked at his hands. They weren't the well-defined hands that had spent ten years hammering away at a keyboard. They were the hands of a little child, smeared with blood, bruised and swollen, as small as leaves.

His heart stopped.

A chill more terrifying than the pain in his body shot up his spine. He desperately twisted his neck, scanning his surroundings. A purple hat with the character "飯" on it lay in the grass not far away.

"Meal."

Dragon Ball.

Son Gohan.

Four years old.

Raditz's invasion of Earth.

Fifteen words exploded in his mind like fifteen bolts of lightning. Ji Ming—no, he was Son Gohan now—lay frozen in a pool of blood, his eyes nearly splitting open.

"Fuck..."

In the distance, the roar of energy blasts rolled toward him like the heartbeat of the earth. His father, Son Goku, and King Piccolo were locked in a death struggle with the Saiyan Raditz.

The original plot. He knew it better than anyone.

In the original, this four-year-old boy would unleash astonishing fighting potential, headbutt Raditz's Scouter to pieces, and turn the tide of battle. But that was the original. That was a manga. It was a story on paper, behind a screen, something that could be casually brushed aside with the words "plot device."

What about now?

The suffocating sensation of broken ribs digging into his lungs was real. The metallic taste of blood in his mouth was real. And the murderous aura radiating from Raditz, so powerful it could crush a person into meat paste, was a hundred million times more real than any 4D experience.

Ji Ming's mind raced—or rather, Son Gohan's brain, fused with Ji Ming's soul, was burning at a speed far beyond that of a four-year-old. Extreme fear, the absurd experience of transmigrating into another world, and more than twenty years' worth of knowledge accumulated as a Dragon Ball fan all twisted together into a cold, razor-sharp thread.

Survive.

He had to survive.

The "plot" was his only trump card. He knew Raditz's combat stats. He knew the weak points in Saiyan armor. He knew Scouters measured energy levels, not true changes in fighting strength. He knew the Special Beam Cannon could pierce Raditz's defenses.

But knowing was one thing.

What could a four-year-old with three broken ribs do with that knowledge?

"Ha... haha..." Blood-flecked spit dribbled from his mouth, but he laughed. His smile was twisted, yet his eyes gleamed with a frightening intensity. The veteran Dragon Ball fan who had argued over three thousand words of power-scaling analysis on the forums had opened his eyes inside this child's body.

In the distance, Raditz planted a foot on Son Goku's chest and laughed wildly. Piccolo lay nearby, his right arm severed at the shoulder, purple blood staining half his body. Raditz's Scouter beeped incessantly, displaying the two "insects" before him as having fighting powers of barely four hundred.

"You really are a disappointment, Kakarot." Raditz lifted his foot and ground it into Goku's wound. "Look at how pathetic you are. You're an embarrassment to the Saiyans."

Son Goku's face was pressed into the dirt. He let out an unwilling growl, but couldn't even lift a finger.

Despair.

Utter despair.

Raditz savored it, then turned to Piccolo. "Namekian, you're next. Once I've dealt with you, that brat—" He raised a hand and pointed his thumb in the direction where Ji Ming lay. "That little runt with a fighting power of 1. Crushing him will be easier than crushing an ant."

On the Scouter, the number representing the child's fighting power was 1.

That number stabbed straight into Ji Ming's nerves like a needle.

Then something surged up from the depths of his heart, something he couldn't tell was humiliation or fury. It was the fighting spirit innate to Saiyan blood, driven into a blazing inferno by a modern man's reason and pride. He couldn't feel the pain anymore—or rather, the flames had burned it into fuel.

The body of a four-year-old began to tremble in the pool of blood.

Not with fear.

It was the trembling of power about to erupt, pushed to its limit by an iron grip of reason.

Ji Ming controlled his breathing. He closed his eyes and sank his awareness into his body. He wasn't Son Gohan. He was Ji Ming. He had seen every muscle line Akira Toriyama had drawn, and he knew the principles behind the flow of ki in the Dragon Ball world—the theoretical model fans had analyzed countless times. Now, he would use this body to test it.

He imagined ki arising from his core and flowing along his meridians into every part of his body.

Compress it.

Compress it further.

Gather it into a ball, then detonate it.

"Ugh—aaahhhhhh!!"

A shrill cry burst from the throat of the four-year-old. It wasn't Son Gohan's angry roar. It was Ji Ming, using this body to unleash his first howl at this damned world.

Raditz's Scouter blared a piercing alarm.

Beep beep beep beep—

The fighting-power reading jumped wildly: 1...5...10...71...200...534...710!

"What?!" Raditz spun around, astonishment flashing across his face for the first time.

A purple-black aura burst from Gohan's body, and the pressure crushed the grass into a perfect circular crater. Rocks and dirt flew in every direction, smacking against tree trunks with sharp cracks. Gohan rose into the air—not through flight of his own, but because the out-of-control ki lifted him bodily. His eyes were half-open, but his pupils glowed like burning coals, churning with a terrifyingly calm killing intent that didn't belong in a four-year-old.

Piccolo's eyes widened. His mouth hung open, and he forgot the pain of his severed arm.

Son Goku lifted his head from the dirt and stared at his son, unable to believe what he was seeing.

"Impossible! A mere brat—" Raditz's trembling lasted only a moment before anger and humiliation took over. He abandoned Goku beneath his foot and charged toward Gohan. "A fluctuation like that has to be snuffed out before you grow up!"

The ground cracked beneath his feet, each step landing like an artillery shell. Raditz moved so fast he became a blur, but when he was ten meters from Gohan, the boy floating in midair did something that sent a chill through him.

Gohan raised his head.

Then the corners of his mouth pulled back into a smile.

It wasn't the innocent smile of a child. It was the smile of a hunter who had spotted his prey, brimming with excitement and cruelty.

"Just in time," Ji Ming said in Gohan's voice.

Raditz's fist was already swinging, the force of it whipping the air into a cutting gale. But Gohan vanished, leaving behind only a slowly fading afterimage of purple ki.

Raditz's fist struck empty air, and his pupils shrank.

His Scouter frantically called out the target's changing position—upper left, lower left, behind him, directly overhead—so fast even the machine struggled to lock on.

Impossible.

A four-year-old couldn't possibly understand combat movement.

But the one facing him was no ordinary child. The instant Ji Ming took control of this body, he had started calculating how to fight. The body was too small, and its strength too limited. Going toe-to-toe with Raditz was suicide. But Ji Ming knew every one of Raditz's weaknesses, including the Saiyan's most fatal dependency—the Scouter.

"Where are you looking?"

The voice came from directly overhead.

Raditz jerked his head up, only to be met by two tiny fists packed with all the boy's strength. Gohan dropped like a cannonball, slamming both fists into Raditz's face.

Boom—

The ground erupted into a deep crater. Raditz was driven into the dirt, his nasal bone breaking with a crisp crack as blood sprayed everywhere.

"Gaaah—you little brat!" Raditz swung his arm at Gohan in a furious backhand, but hit nothing again. Gohan had already used the recoil to spring away, landing steadily on a boulder ten meters off. The rise and fall of his chest betrayed the limits of his stamina.

That one strike had cost him most of his ki.

Raditz climbed out of the crater, blood covering his face and his expression twisted like a vengeful ghost. He stared at the boy on the boulder, no longer looking down on him.

There was something wrong with this child.

Very wrong.

"You're no ordinary Saiyan brat." Raditz wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, his gaze sinister. "Your fighting power, your combat skills—what the hell are you?"

Ji Ming panted, every part of his body screaming with pain and exhaustion. Yet his mind had never been clearer or more exhilarated. He looked at Raditz's battered state. The Saiyan who had once appeared only on a screen or in reference books now stood right before him, bleeding and afraid.

This was the world of Dragon Ball.

This was where he had to survive.

"Me?" The small figure cast a long shadow in the setting sun.

"Just a high-level player passing through."

His voice was soft, but Raditz's Scouter blared another shrill alarm.

It was warning that the threat had reached the "extreme danger" level.