In the early spring of the third year of the New Calendar on Zeno's Planet, the Grand Priest sent Ji Ming a brief message that made him read it three times. It was not a warning, not a mission request, nor any emergency that required battle. The message contained only one sentence: "All known ancient seals across the multiverse have been fully inspected. Their conditions are stable. This is the first time since records began."
Ji Ming reread the message three times before setting down his wristband and taking a sip of the cooled sencha on the stove. Outside, the pine forest on Mount Paozu rustled in the morning breeze. A thick layer of pine needles covered the boulder in the yard, where Son Goku sat cross-legged, polishing the Power Pole over and over until its shaft was shiny enough to reflect a person's image. The golden light of Kami's Lookout flickered between the clouds; Dende was probably conducting graduation assessments in healing techniques for another batch of students. The expansion project in New Vegeta City was nearing completion, and the radishes in the old god remnant settlement had already been harvested for the third time. Yesterday, Chi-Chi had used them to stew a huge pot of pork rib soup, and Vegeta had drunk three bowls of it—a first for him.
Peace. True peace, needing no qualifier. Ultra Instinct had already become Ji Ming's normal state, and the fusion of the Crimson-Gold Light Core and silver-white aura had reached the point where it could remain stable without deliberate maintenance. But Whis had said that Ultra Instinct itself had no endpoint; even Gods of Destruction, after training for hundreds of millions of years, were still making their way down that road. Crimson-Gold Ultra Instinct was merely the highest form Ji Ming