Planet Sadala

In deep space, Bulma's ship cruised at sublight speed. Beyond the portholes, the river of stars looked like countless frozen silver threads, hanging motionless against the black curtain.

Ji Ming leaned back in the pilot's seat, flipping through the Frost Demon Clan Ancient Archive Fragment printed from Frieza's files. More than half of the book consisted of scraps—broken sentences, unidentifiable coordinate codes, paragraphs locked away by encryption algorithms. It read less like an archive and more like fragments salvaged from a fire.

He had already spent a full six days on it.

Over those six days, the ship had made only one short-range warp. The rest of the time, it had remained at sublight speed, scanning sector by sector with its detector array. The original coordinates had an error range of more than a dozen light-years. Given the ship's scan radius, finding Sadala was no different from digging a well in the desert with his fingers.

On the third day, Ji Ming found a footnote marked "invalid" at the end of Chapter Seven in Volume Four of the archive. The footnote itself was a line of ancient characters, and the translation module rendered it literally as—"Saiyan origin, gate of twin suns, opened by the blood key." Beneath it was a set of pulsar signal codes. Their format was incompatible with the universal standard navigation language and could not be read on ordinary star charts at all. Yet they resonated with the fluctuations of Saiyan ki—when Ji Ming wrapped the detector's receiver in his aura, the signal emerged from the static like a faint heartbeat buried for thousands of years.

After another two days of repeated comparisons, he locked the signal onto an obscure quadrant classified as "unclaimed space"—less than two light-years off from the coordinates deleted from Frieza's archives.

On the seventh day, the ship completed its final short-range warp.

Ji Ming steadied the ship and waited for the warp's white light beyond the portholes to fade. A dark-red planet floated silently straight ahead.

One star lay near, the other far away, dyeing its sky in an eternal twilight. Auroras stretched across the heavens like burning rivers, spreading layer upon layer from deep orange to dark purple to blood red, as though the planet's atmosphere itself were a flowing temple. There were no oceans on the surface. Instead, it was covered in jagged black mountain ranges. The mountains were extraordinarily dense, yet retained their towering outlines even under the pull of dual gravity. The atmosphere was close to Earth's, with slightly lower oxygen levels, but it was naturally breathable.

Sadala. The Saiyans' true homeworld.

The ship landed in a flat valley at the heart of the mountains. Ji Ming descended the ramp, his boots sinking into a layer of fine dark-red sand. The grains were coarser than Earth's, colored by the twin suns like cooled lava. He crouched and pressed his palm against the ground.

An incredibly faint trace of ki rose from deep underground. It was weak, but undeniably present—not the aura of some powerful individual, but ki fused with the entire planet, as though this land itself had not yet fully died.

He stood and looked past the rolling ridgelines. At the edge of his vision, the silhouette of a massive stone pillar pierced the horizon, faint carvings visible along its surface. Farther beyond it, there seemed to be more structures of the same kind, flickering in and out of sight beneath the aurora.

Ji Ming returned to the ship, turned the detector output to maximum, reactivated the translation module from the database Bulma had left behind, then slung the cloth bag Chi-Chi had stuffed into his hands over his back and flew low toward the nearest stone pillar.

The pillar complex was far more massive than it had appeared from afar. Every pillar stood hundreds of meters tall, with irregular prism-shaped shafts covered in ancient Saiyan writing. The inscriptions should have been dim in the twilight, but when Ji Ming's aura illuminated the pillars, some of the runes slowly lit up with a dark golden glow.

[In Sadala's left heart, the sleeper awaits awakening. Only Saiyan blood may open the source of the Saiyans. Price: one who surpasses limits must forsake limits themselves.]

Ji Ming reached out and touched the glowing inscription. A searing heat traveled up from his fingertips, and at the same time, an external force gently stirred the ki within him. It was neither an attack nor pressure—it felt more like a confirmation.

He withdrew his hand and continued deeper inside. After passing another two pillars, an almost invisible field of ki blocked the path into the complex's core. Ji Ming increased his aura output and could clearly sense the wall of ki, but no matter what angle he tried, it would not budge.

The translation module caught one final keyword from a damaged section elsewhere on the pillar—"blood key."

Ji Ming cut his fingertip and let the blood drip into a groove at the base of the pillar before the ki wall. The blood was instantly absorbed by the stone channel, and dark-golden patterns flared to life. The entire pillar complex rang out like an enormous bell, and the ki wall deep within slowly descended. A circular stone staircase leading downward was revealed before him, bottomless in the darkness. As air flowed in, blue flames along both walls ignited on their own, casting the spiraling stairs in a deep, eerie green.

He raised a hand and tested the air. It was dry and cool, carrying the scent of old minerals, but there were no toxins. Ji Ming did not hesitate any longer. He suppressed the white aura around him to its lowest level and walked down the stone steps.

At the end of the staircase stood a vast stone hall, silent in the darkness. There were no lights at its center. Only the ancient patterns on the floor and walls gradually lit up upon sensing his ki, bathing the entire hall in a faint glow.

At the center of the hall, a ball of crimson-gold light floated above a stone platform. It was only the size of a fist, but the energy density rolling within made Ji Ming's detector skip straight past its warning threshold and fall silent. It was not something combat power could measure, but an energy form governed by an entirely different set of physical laws.

He approached the platform, and the pulsing rhythm of the light suddenly synchronized with his heartbeat.

A massive humanoid condensed from pure ancient Saiyan energy slowly rose behind the sphere of light. Its entire body burned with a dark-red aura. It had no facial features, and its limbs were proportioned much like Ji Ming's, though it was nearly twice his size. It did not open its mouth. Its voice reverberated directly within Ji Ming's consciousness.

"Defeat me."

There was no preamble. The humanoid's fist blasted toward his face. Ji Ming's pupils shrank as he crossed his arms to block—the force of that punch sent him flying, smashing him hard into the hall's stone wall as rubble rained down over him. Before he could rise, the trialist's second punch was already upon him. Then came the third, the fourth—each one relentless, leaving no opening at all.

Ji Ming defended passively for more than a dozen exchanges. His left arm lost most of its feeling during the third round of impacts. He could feel his attacks being read in advance; the opponent's predictions, as though drawn from the same consciousness database, made every counterattack of his seem reflected back by a mirror. There was no gap at all.

After being knocked down in the seventh round, he struggled out of the rubble, spat out the blood in his mouth, and suddenly stopped all movements of resistance.

He thought of Master Roshi's morning training lesson—"Combat isn't about who thinks faster. It's about who can move without going through their brain." Back when he had studied Dragon Ball in his previous life, he had analyzed the principles of Ultra Instinct more than once, but had never experienced it himself. In this situation, technique and calculation had both failed completely. The only thing he had yet to let go of was control itself.

He closed his eyes.

The trialist threw another punch. His body leaned back half a beat late, the fist grazing the tip of his nose.

No thought. No prediction. No fear. He allowed his body to move on its own. As he turned aside from the second attack, the point of his elbow automatically rose into a blocking position without any conscious command. Defense, block, redirection—every movement seemed to make its decision before his mind did. The trialist's attacks could still break through his defense, but they became fewer and narrower in angle. He went from passive guarding to alternating blocks and deflections, then from deflecting to occasionally landing a counterattack.

He did not know how long it had been. After countless collisions, he caught the instant of rotational delay as the trialist withdrew its fist using only his ki senses. His body moved before his consciousness could react—he stepped in, slipped inside the arm, and struck the center of the trialist's core with his palm.

The Crimson-Gold Light Core rang out in response. The humanoid froze abruptly, its dark-red aura rupturing from the center into countless tiny motes of light. The trialist's form slowly dissipated before him, leaving only the Crimson-Gold Light Core descending from the air and stopping before his chest.

The hall fell silent once more. The Light Core slowly merged into Ji Ming's body. There was no explosion, no overwhelming rush of power. It simply sank quietly into the depths of his chest, like a time bomb with no countdown.

He stood where he was, eyes closed, sensing it for a long time. There was no sign of any "combat power increase" within him. His normal combat power remained completely unchanged. The Crimson-Gold Light Core had not granted him any new techniques he could use directly. It simply hovered quietly in the depths of his ki sea, like a sealed container awaiting the right condition to unlock.

After leaving the trial ground, Ji Ming stopped halfway up the stone staircase before a fan-shaped spread of carved stone murals. They recorded, in ancient Saiyan script, obelisk inscriptions recounting the final battles before Planet Sadala was abandoned. The translation module painstakingly rendered the broken characters into stiff modern language:

[The descendants of Sadala scatter among the stars; the source of the Saiyans is sealed here. One who returns to the origin in days to come shall bear humanity and transcend divinity.]

Ji Ming read the translation once more. Then he turned his gaze back toward the closed stone doors of the hall and did not look back again. On the seventh standard hour, the returning ship departed Sadala's dark-red atmosphere. The Crimson-Gold Light Core still slept quietly within him, but the pulse that had resonated with the planet was already fading rapidly. The next time he came, perhaps he would need a new key—or a new opportunity.