If Only He Could Take Huang Rong Along

To complete his collection, Barros left the island again, throwing the entire Condor Heroes martial world into turmoil.

He stormed the imperial palace in Bianjing alone. In front of the assembled officials and a thousand imperial guards, he clamped a hand around the Song emperor's throat and ordered him to summon every physician in the Imperial Medical Academy and send them all to Peach Blossom Island.

He also entered Shaolin Temple, which had been sealed off for a hundred years, its halls silent of Buddhist chants. With a flick of his finger, he brought down half of Mount Shaoshi, forcing the abbot to personally present the temple's supreme classic, the Muscle-Tendon Change Classic. Then, right under the monks' noses, he pulled the original Nine Yang Divine Art from between the pages of the Lankavatara Sutra.

After that, he flew straight to the snowy western regions and punched through the main peak of Great Snow Mountain, capturing seventeen of the highest-ranking lamas alive.

Time flew by, rushing ever onward.

Before long, three months had passed.

The Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, the Jade Sea Tide Melody, the Muscle-Tendon Change Classic, the Nine Yin Manual, the Nine Yang Divine Art, the Dragon-Elephant Prajna Art...

Whether driven by a youthful dream of the martial world or simple curiosity, Barros had spent those three months devouring the world's finest martial arts, digesting them, and making them his own.

To be safe, he made no distinction between righteous and wicked, black and white. He captured hundreds of martial artists in succession to test his techniques—using the vast, surging ki of the Dragon Ball World to force open all 108 acupoints in their bodies, simulating the circulation of martial arts in this world.

The results far surpassed everyone's expectations!

When the three martial artists who had miraculously survived first tried channeling their strength and testing their moves, Huang Yaoshi and the others were stunned into silence.

At the same Xiantian level, Huang Yaoshi and the others could only smash stones and break steles with their full strength. Even at their highest leap, they could manage no more than a dozen zhang.

But these three stirred wind and thunder with every gesture, crushing mountains as easily as brittle branches. When they darted about, their energy filled the air; one step took them a hundred meters in an instant, as if they could shrink the earth beneath their feet!

By comparison, Huang Yaoshi and the others' cultivation was like fireflies beside the bright moon—a gulf between heaven and earth!

One of them casually performed a set of Grand Ancestor Long Fist on the beach outside Peach Blossom Island. Wherever his palm wind passed, the sea exploded into a deep trench more than ten zhang long and over two meters wide, exposing the pitch-black bedrock below. Huang Yaoshi and the others saw it with their own eyes and were utterly horrified.

Later, Ouyang Feng could no longer restrain himself and stepped forward to spar. With just one move, he was jolted so badly that his organs shifted; he spat blood and flew backward.

Toad Skill against Grand Ancestor Long Fist, the Western Venom against an ordinary martial artist—and he had been beaten without the slightest chance to fight back!

The advanced primordial energy from the vast universe of the Dragon Ball World was more than a little superior to this world's so-called "internal energy"—the two weren't even on the same level!

Time was endless, but the span of one's cultivation was not.

At last, Barros had fully grasped every practical technique in this world, from extending the breath within to holding his breath and concealing his spirit. It was also time for him to leave.

There was no need to mention the joy of mastering so much.

Over the past few months, he had also finally understood why Huang Yaoshi and the others, despite having reached the Xiantian realm and possessing battle power in the hundreds, could only smash stones with their bare hands and couldn't even leap over a roof.

At its root was the gulf between the foundations of the two worlds—

The ki of Dragon Ball was an energy torrent capable of burning stars and annihilating universes. This world's internal energy was no more than the dim glow of a candle.

The difference was like that between an interstellar annihilation bomb and a matchlock rifle. Both were weapons, but their destructive power was worlds apart.

More importantly, the human meridians in this world were incredibly frail.

Of the hundreds of martial artists who tested his techniques, only three survived. Once Barros's immense, violent ki entered their bodies, their fragile meridians and internal organs burst in an instant, reduced to dust.

Of course, this world had its merits, too.

In contrast to the Dragon Ball World, where people relied solely on the body's instincts to stimulate ki and increase their battle power, this world had superior arts such as the Muscle-Tendon Change Classic and the Nine Yang Divine Art, which could absorb the energy of heaven and earth.

If he brought these techniques into the Dragon Ball World and used ki as a guide, with their methods as the framework, his cultivation speed would surely crush that of his peers, who grew stronger only through grueling physical training and the slow passage of time.

Still, Barros wasn't sure how viable the idea really was.

After spending day and night together for months, Barros had grown thoroughly familiar with Huang Yaoshi and the others.

Perhaps because he had appeared out of nowhere and taken away the three "test subjects" who had miraculously survived, Ouyang Feng and Qiu Qianren's obsession with the Nine Yin Manual and being the greatest under heaven had quietly faded.

Over the past few months, Barros had studied diagrams of acupoints and dissected martial arts techniques. But what had pleased him most was eating dozens of meals prepared by Huang Rong herself!

They were so fresh they enchanted the soul, so fragrant they made him dizzy. More than once, Barros had wondered: If only he could take Huang Rong along, too.

Cooking that could put even the head chef of the imperial kitchens to shame was practically tailor-made for a Saiyan with an appetite like a black hole!

With his departure drawing near, he made no announcement and informed no one. He quietly incapacitated the three men, closed his eyes, focused his mind, and silently called out to the wheel—return!

The light and shadows before him flashed. Barros had returned to the planet he had conquered.

Three limp figures lay at his feet: the unlucky trio he had just "invited" along.

They hadn't even had time to open their eyes and look around this unfamiliar star system before Barros swept them with a cold gaze. A dark blue energy sphere began to hum in his palm.

But just as the murderous intent was about to burst from his fingertips, his heart stirred. He vanished in a flash, returning to the Condor Heroes world once more!

Boom!!

The instant he appeared, three muffled explosions rang out in succession.

Barros kicked all three men into the air, then fired three ki blasts, sending waves of explosive force surging as their clothes were torn to shreds!

The Dragon Ball World did have an Underworld, but who could guarantee that these three mortals would really enter its cycle of rebirth after death? To be safe, he would rather make another trip and take them back to the Condor Heroes world before killing them.

The next instant, before Huang Yaoshi and the others could hurry over at the sound, Barros had already sped away, vanishing without a trace.

Rumble—!!!

A long howl split the clouds, a dragon's roar shook the heavens!

Above the entire planet, countless golden-scaled dragon phantoms surged and coiled. Their majestic might stretched across heaven and earth!

If Hong Qigong and the others had been there, they would have been so shocked their jaws would have hit the ground—

Because the technique Barros had used was none other than the Beggars' Sect's signature art: the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms!

But compared to the version in Hong Qigong's hands, how many times more powerful was this palm strike?

At first, Barros had learned it out of pure curiosity and had never intended to use it in real combat.

But the more he practiced, the more astonishing it seemed. This supreme art, hailed in the Jin Yong martial world as "the king of palm techniques, unrivaled in sheer force," was far more powerful than he had expected.

Especially after he combined it with ki blasts—every ki blast he fired came wrapped in a roaring dragon shadow. More astonishing still, the "stacking force" that had made the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms famous remained completely intact!

Once combined with ki in this world, "stacking force" gained a new name: charging up!

Barros knew the course of events in the Dragon Ball World by heart, so he naturally remembered that scene early in the Z saga: Demon King Piccolo's battle power of 408 had soared to 1,330 by charging up the Special Beam Cannon, a threefold increase that had killed Raditz and Goku in one stroke!

He still couldn't stack all eighteen palm strikes and turn them into a ki blast eighteen times as powerful—an astonishing feat that would shake the world—but he had already mastered the technique of tripling the force.

The ki blast tore through the air like a true dragon's roar, ripping through space. Barros simply gave it a name: Frenzied Dragon Sky-Shattering Wave.

In the blink of an eye, six months passed.

Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!

Hundred-zhang peaks and sheer cliffs a thousand ren tall collapsed under Barros's palms. Stones rained down, and dust clouds blotted out the sun.

The planet he had been ordered to conquer had already been leveled. Not a trace of its rugged mountain ranges remained; all that met the eye was scorched earth and wasteland, as if a giant had plowed across it.

For half a year, he had trained day and night, finally forging the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms into a unified whole.

With his body of steel and iron, every hand raised carried the essence of the palm technique, every fist thrown the force of a crushing blow. Every gesture contained the might of eighteen layers of stacked force!

If an opponent with battle power equal to his had suddenly appeared, they wouldn't even have time to narrow their eyes before a single palm strike shifted their organs, snapped their tendons and bones, and killed them on the spot!

Through his relentless training, the fusion of the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms and ki blasts had also surpassed the sevenfold amplification threshold.

On the surface, his battle power had risen from 49,000 to 56,000—a respectable increase;

but his actual battle power had undergone a complete transformation—

With all 56,000 points of battle power channeled into a Frenzied Dragon Sky-Shattering Wave, he could instantly reach 392,000!

At present, with the exception of Frieza and his son, Barros had practically no equal.

Even more crucially, his long immersion in the training of eighteenfold stacked force had also raised his mastery of the Dragon Elephant Prison-Suppressing Art, quietly bringing it to the very peak of perfection!

As the days passed, Barros thoroughly grasped both the acupoints throughout his body and the Dragon Elephant Prison-Suppressing Art, studying each in light of the other.

The Dragon Elephant Prison-Suppressing Art was already an extraordinary technique that pushed body cultivation to its limits. Tempering the acupoints was naturally an exceptionally difficult and profound process!

Each acupoint he condensed marked another limit of his physical body, and another measure of the heights he might one day reach!

After nearly a year of repeated deliberation, he finally made his decision: he would temper his acupoints with the stars of the myriad heavens!

But to "condense stars in his acupoints," he needed one thing—

A star core!

He had heard of them and read about them in records. He knew they formed deep within planets, but he had never learned how to extract one.

With no other choice, a year later Barros returned to Planet Vegeta to ask the veteran space scientists how to extract a star core!

If that failed...

He would have to head for Earth, or go straight to Namek!

Twenty-One

After spending a full fifteen days on the journey, Barros returned to Planet Vegeta.

The few self-cleaning machines at home were still working diligently. Though the place had been empty for months, the floor gleamed, the windows sparkled, and not even half a speck of dust could be found in the corners.

He played the voice message Xuesaiya had left behind. After listening, he tugged at the corner of his mouth and silently shook his head.

He wasn't surprised that Xuesaiya and the others had evacuated Planet Vegeta. As for their safety, he hadn't given it a second thought.

If Frieza really sent the Ginyu Force to ambush them, then as long as either Xuesaiya or Xuesaili completed her Great Ape Transformation under the moonlight, that elite squad, once feared across countless star systems, would be buried forever in the cold silence of space.

After a shower and a sound sleep, he felt refreshed.

The next morning, Barros took off and flew straight toward the depths of Planet Vegeta, where the star core research institute was located.

A star core.

As the name suggested, it was the very lifeblood of a planet!

When the universe first came into being, every newly born planet quietly condensed a star core at its heart. It sustained gravity, magnetic fields, geothermal energy, life...everything that kept a world from falling apart.

It was pure, concentrated, and eternal—the most fundamental and irreplaceable soul of an entire planet.

Yet it was almost impossible to find.

Destroying a planet was as easy as snapping one's fingers. The universe was full of powerful beings and divine weapons capable of crushing planets;

but pinpointing a star core? That was harder than reaching the heavens.

It lay hidden in the darkest depths of a planet's core. It neither glowed nor emitted energy, and it responded to none of the usual detection methods. Its sole purpose was to stabilize the planet's very breath and heartbeat.

For that reason, even when a planet exploded into dust and its civilization was wiped out, the star core often remained intact. It simply fell silent, like a forgotten heart, beating slowly amid the ruins.

And because the energy it held was so vast it was almost violent, countless top scientists had spent millennia studying it, hoping to unravel its structure. Many martial arts fanatics had also risked everything to refine one for their own use and reach the pinnacle in a single leap.

Unfortunately, once a star core was separated from the planet sustaining it, its energy would instantly spiral out of control, like a wild horse or boiling magma. The slightest mistake could turn the experimental chamber and the entire surrounding star system into a vacuum, consumed by its backlash!

The instant a star core of any planet was detonated, every living being, building, mountain, river, and atmosphere...even time itself would be completely erased within 0.1 seconds, leaving no trace.

Over time, star cores gradually fell out of use in combat.

These days, their only "legitimate use" was as the core of planet-destroying bombs made by top military-industrial agencies—weapons designed to hunt down beings who stood above entire star systems.

No one dared swallow one as a supplement anymore, and no one dared burn one as fuel.

A month and a half later, Barros accepted a high-level bounty and quietly left Planet Vegeta.

He had gotten what he wanted.

Though the white-robed scientists hadn't been able to teach him the arcane art of "spotting a star core at a glance," they had given him another way—a desperate method, but the only one available to any of the advanced powers in the Milky Way:

First, pierce the planetary core and trigger the planet's self-destruction countdown.

In the final three minutes before the planet exploded completely, the star core would briefly "appear" due to the loss of balance. Its energy would become chaotic, its spectrum would spill out, and with a specially designed resonance detector, he could lock onto its location!

However, out of reverence for the nature of star cores—and with a deep understanding of the terrifying shock wave that tore through space as a planet collapsed—the old scientists had repeatedly warned him:

He had to evacuate two minutes before the explosion!

Even if a Saiyan's spherical spacecraft was a million times faster than a meteor, one second's delay would be enough. The destructive storm that swept across the entire sky could crush anything that failed to escape the stratosphere in time—molecular structure and all—into a blankness cleaner than nothingness.