High above the world, standing on the smooth white tiles of the Kami Lookout, the old guardian leaned heavily on his hammer-headed cane. He stared down at the exact spot where Jordan had just looked up and waved directly at them.
Anyone who knew what to look for could easily see his Namekian heritage. He had the green complexion, the calm, ancient eyes, and the particular quality of a spiritual aura that had spent centuries settling into itself like deep river sediment. If someone put him standing right next to Piccolo, the physical family resemblance would be absolutely unmistakable. But where Piccolo constantly radiated a contained, violent ferocity, a specific pressure of power that had never learned to be anything other than aggressive, the old Kami felt like a pool of still water. He was deep, unhurried, and close to something natural and patient in a way that only centuries of quiet observation tended to produce.
But right now, a bead of cold sweat was sliding down his wrinkled cheek.
"It appears," Kami said, his voice quiet in the thin altitude, "that this young man discovered us some time ago, Mr. Popo."
Popo nodded slowly beside him, still nervously mopping his damp forehead with his sleeve. "It certainly appears so, Kami."
The old guardian bowed his head. His tight grip on his wooden cane did not loosen a single fraction. "Then we can only sit here and hope that he has come to our world with good intentions."
"Probably," Popo agreed, though he spoke with the strained tone of a man who was simply trying to do his best to stay positive.
Far below the Kami Lookout, near the top of Korin Tower, a large white cat was currently sitting curled up in a compact, miserable ball of anxiety. Korin was hugging his wooden staff tightly to his chest with both paws, his whiskers trembling slightly in the breeze.
"Why do terrifyingly powerful beings keep showing up on this planet?" Korin murmured into his fur. "The universe is absolutely terrifying."
Jordan, for his part, gave the divine spectators up in the sky no further attention.
His Mind Network was open. It was not just the quiet, passive scan he usually maintained out of habit, but a fully active deployment stretching across the entire globe. Every biomagnetic signature on Earth organized itself in his awareness all at once. The sheer, overwhelming scale of it arrived like the sudden difference between peering through a tiny keyhole and throwing the front door wide open. He felt entire continents. He felt every bustling city and every quiet forest. Every living thing above a certain threshold flared in his mind, each one bearing a distinct energetic signature as unique as a human fingerprint.
He began filtering the noise systematically. He easily eliminated the two elevated signatures he had already accounted for, the divine presences hiding up in the sky. Then he quickly sorted through the massive remainder, searching for anything that specifically matched a highly trained martial artist's field. He looked for something contained, tightly coiled, and carrying the distinctive density of someone who had been deliberately shaping their inner ki for years.
One specific signal immediately stood out from everything else on the planet's surface.
It was almost exactly equal to Piccolo in raw power. It was also moving fast. It was traveling at a very high speed over the open ocean, heading steadily northeast.
That has to be him, Jordan concluded.
Goku, or Kakarot. The exiled Saiyan who had grown up genuinely believing himself to be a normal Earthling. The man who had bumped his head on a rock as an infant, forgotten his violent original programming, and somehow become something the ruthless Saiyan race had never once anticipated producing. And right now, he was currently flying about thirteen thousand kilometers away.
Jordan mentally tracked the fast-moving trajectory. He followed the flight path forward and quickly found the ultimate destination. It was a very small, isolated island featuring a pink resort-style structure. Red painted letters on a white sign were perfectly visible through the Mind Network's terrifying precision, even from halfway across the world.
Kame House.
Master Roshi's real name, according to official government records, was technically Kame-Sennin. The eccentric old man had been successfully making every single one of his students call him Master for decades, entirely on the strength of a perfectly ordinary ID card and an absolutely unshakeable sense of self-assurance. Jordan privately found the old man's dedication to the bit highly admirable.
"Found him," Jordan said aloud.
Then he looked up and said the exact thing that made Piccolo violently flinch.
Piccolo had approximately half a second to register the heavy, invisible force settling over his broad shoulders before his vision completely blurred.
And then, the rocky plateau was simply gone.
Open sky replaced it. The sharp, clean smell of ocean salt and warm coastal wind hit his face. The horizon stretching out in every direction was nothing but endless blue water, the light quality entirely different and far brighter than the muted, landlocked plateau they had just been standing on. His boots had not moved a single inch. The planet had essentially shifted entirely around him.
Jordan stood floating casually in the air right beside him, completely unbothered by the sudden displacement of space.
Directly below them sat a small, incredibly green, and compact island. It featured a distinctive pink and white building and that bright red-lettered sign. And approaching the island very rapidly from the northwest was a golden cloud no larger than a standard bed pillow. It was moving with the specific, purposeful speed of a vehicle going somewhere it had been many times before.
Riding on the yellow cloud were a man and a small child.
The man's jet-black hair was aggressively structural, with each thick spike fully committed to its ridiculous angle with the stubborn stability of a geological rock formation. He had a strong, athletic build, his clean muscle lines clearly visible under his bright orange martial arts uniform. He held the small child easily and securely in one arm, pointing cheerfully forward toward the island with his other hand.
The child looked to be about four or five years old. He wore a round yellow hat, a green embroidered tunic, and he had a small, brown, furry tail curling behind him that he was currently letting trail happily in the rushing wind. The four-star Dragon Ball secured to the top of his hat caught the bright afternoon sunlight and scattered it back in four clean, brilliant points.
"Gohan! Look over there, that's Grandpa Roshi's island!"
The ocean wind carried Goku's voice clearly across the gap as the cloud began to descend. His tone was incredibly warm, friendly, and completely unguarded. It was the easy voice of someone who found the entire world reliably interesting and had no problem saying so out loud. The small child excitedly craned his neck forward in his father's secure grip to get a better look at the house.
They dropped toward the water fast and smooth, the magical somersault cloud intuitively adjusting its angle exactly like a living creature. And then, about forty meters out, Goku's cheerful expression completely changed.
He had sensed Piccolo.
Jordan watched the tense sequence happen in real time. He saw the immediate flash of recognition, the sudden, hard tension arriving in Goku's broad shoulders, and his protective grip instantly tightening around little Gohan. Then Goku's ki scan swept further upward. It reached the massive, bruised, unconscious figure hanging limply in the air beside Jordan, and the reading came back entirely wrong. The alien was far too strong. He was noticeably stronger than Piccolo. Worse, the energy was laced with something cold, violent, and completely alien that did not match a single thing in Goku's extensive mental catalog of known enemies.
Then, Goku's frantic scan finally reached Jordan. And it found absolutely nothing.
For a brief, highly confusing moment, Goku looked exactly like a man who had confidently added up a simple column of numbers and somehow gotten a result that physically could not be right.
He looked up at the sky.
There were three people floating up there. But there were only two ki signatures. The basic math simply did not balance.
Jordan smiled and offered a friendly wave.
"Hello, Son Goku. I am Jordan."
Piccolo, hovering right beside him with his arms tightly crossed and his green jaw set in a hard line, stubbornly turned his face away from his old rival.
Goku's finely tuned warrior instincts and his naturally polite manners staged a very brief, intense internal conflict. His good manners ultimately won out. He reflexively raised a hand and waved back.
Then his brain finally caught up to the danger.
"Hold on, get away from him!" Goku shouted, his voice echoing over the crashing waves. He pulled Gohan tight against his chest, his entire physical stance violently shifting from a friendly greeting to a hardened, defensive guard. "That is Piccolo! He is dangerous!"
"Piccolo is not exactly the main concern right now," Jordan said calmly. He casually nudged the floating Raditz with his foot. The heavy, armored alien swung back and forth with the slow, resigned momentum of a very large pendulum. "This guy is."
"Dad."
Gohan's small voice was thoughtful and curious rather than alarmed. He was looking closely at Raditz with the intense, focused attention of a smart child who had just noticed something unusual and was not quite sure what to do with the new information yet. "That big man has a tail."
Goku blinked in surprise. He looked closely at Raditz. He looked at the thick, brown tail hanging completely limp behind the unconscious man's armor. Then he looked down at his son, whose own matching tail was currently curling slowly in the ocean wind.
"He really does," Goku said, his voice dropping in shock. A long pause followed. The complicated math was running through his head again, this time pointing in a completely different, deeply personal direction. "But how is that even possible? I thought I was the only one in the world."
"He is your older brother," Jordan said simply. "Which means your son here technically has an uncle."
The heavy silence that followed that statement had a very specific, suffocating quality to it.
Piccolo's tightly crossed arms loosened just a fraction of an inch. It was an involuntary physical reaction as even his demonic brain struggled to process the sheer weight of this sudden familial revelation.
Goku just stared blankly at Raditz. He stared at the tail. He stared at the strange, cracked combat armor.
"I don't have a brother," Goku said firmly, all the usual warmth completely gone from his voice.
"It is a very long story," Jordan said gently. He casually gestured downward toward the sandy beach of Kame House. "Your brother can tell it to you himself whenever he finally wakes up from his nap. Shall we head down first so we can actually talk?"
Goku's intense gaze was still locked firmly on Raditz. He was clearly working through the impossible information, trying to find a lie and failing.
"Alright," Goku finally agreed, his tone serious. "Let's go down."
He turned his hard gaze to the green Namekian. "I don't know exactly what you are doing here, Piccolo, but I am going to be watching your every move. Don't even think about trying anything funny with the people down there."
Piccolo's answering glare could have sharpened broken glass. "You really think you could stop me?"
"I think I would like to find out," Goku replied, not backing down an inch.
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