Raditz left Number Twenty-One in the protective custody of the Time Nest, entrusting her safety to Chronoa and the Time Patrollers. Then, without ceremony or fanfare, he departed alone for the lower realm to confront the encroaching darkness head-on.
Only he possessed abilities comparable to Grand Zeno's cosmic authority. But despite his newfound power, despite the one hundred thirty billion years of growth and communion with universal will, uncertainty gnawed at him. He wasn't truly Zeno—he hadn't been born as the avatar of creation itself. Would his approximation of that divine power be enough?
The moment Raditz arrived at the boundary between light and shadow, the sheer magnitude of the dark side's presence stole his breath.
It was vast—an ocean of absolute negation stretching beyond sight in every direction. The darkness moved like ten thousand stampeding horses across an endless plain of annihilation, each churning wave of shadow carrying the weight of cosmic entropy. Where the black tide touched matter, reality simply... ceased. No explosion, no transformation—just instant, absolute erasure. This was indiscriminate destruction in its purest form, a fundamental force of negation that consumed everything in its path.
Raditz steeled himself, drawing upon the power he'd cultivated across eons. His will expanded outward like an invisible shield, pressing against the advancing darkness. Two titanic forces collided—positive and negative, creation and destruction, existence and void. The fundamental conflict between opposite fates played out on a cosmic scale.
Stop!
The dark side's advance halted. Raditz's strength created an invisible barrier that the roiling black mist could not penetrate. The darkness churned in place, shapes forming and dissolving in the stagnant tide as if the void itself was roaring in frustration.
Raditz allowed himself a small, relieved breath. At least he could hold them back. That was something. But stopping the advance was only the first step—the easier step. Restoring balance to a fundamentally disrupted multiverse would be exponentially more difficult.
The only true solution would be to venture into the darkness itself, to free Grand Zeno and the Angels, to defeat Sarga at his source of power.
But Raditz harbored no illusions about his chances in direct combat. If Zeno, the Grand Priest, and all the Angels combined had failed to overcome Sarga, what hope did he have alone? The odds of success were microscopic at best.
While he contemplated his limited options, a powerful surge erupted from the negative side—a deliberate, focused assault. The dark side exploded with renewed fury, black mist whipped into a frenzy by intelligent will. It smashed against Raditz's barrier, and this time the defense cracked. The darkness broke through with even more ferocious momentum than before.
Someone on the other side had discovered Raditz's interference. Someone was now actively directing the negative energy against him.
"Damn it! How can I not even hold them back?!" Raditz gritted his teeth, cursing as he watched the undiminished advance continue. Panic threatened to overwhelm his cosmic calm.
Then it struck him—the Dragon Balls! He still had one unused wish! While Shenron's power couldn't directly control the negative world, the Eternal Dragon might know a solution. After all, if Sarga's ultimate purpose was to connect the two worlds as Number Twenty-One had suggested, then perhaps the entity that had brought Raditz to the Dragon Ball universe in the first place could provide answers.
Raditz vanished from the battlefield, instantly teleporting to the Palace of Zeno.
There, arranged in a perfect circle high above the pristine floor, the seven Super Dragon Balls rested. Each sphere radiated warm orange-red light, the star outlines visible from every angle. They had drawn close together, attracted by some magnetic force, humming with barely contained power. The "buzzing" resonance filled the entire palace with sound like distant thunder.
The lower realm teetered on the edge of annihilation. Raditz wasted no time. He recited the summoning incantation in the language of the gods, his voice ringing through the empty halls.
The Dragon Balls flickered. Once. Twice.
Golden light diffused outward, covering the entire palace in luminous warmth. But the expected transformation didn't occur. No magnificent dragon materialized. No cosmic serpent coiled through the air with eyes like galaxies.
Just... light. Pure, radiant, all-encompassing light.
"That's strange," Raditz muttered, confusion replacing his urgency. "Maybe it's because of the incomplete summoning last time? We gathered them but never made a wish..." He'd never encountered anything like this before. Looking around, he saw only golden radiance filling every corner of the divine palace, the Dragon Balls themselves beginning to dissolve into that brilliance.
The golden light enveloped Raditz as well, and suddenly he felt the world shift around him—as if stepping through a doorway into another layer of reality entirely.
Since when did the Dragon Balls have this capability? Terror crept into Raditz's heart. Too many things were spiraling beyond his understanding, beyond his control.
"Raditz."
A voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere—majestic and thick, resonating with the timbre of ancient dragons and the weight of cosmic eons.
"I am Zalama, the Dragon God."
Raditz's eyes widened in shock. So the Dragon God truly existed! Not just a legend or myth, but a real entity—the creator of the Dragon Balls themselves, a being of such power that even creating artifacts capable of granting any wish was merely one of his achievements.
Yet within the space filled with golden light, Raditz could see no form, no body. Only the voice echoing through the void, omnipresent and absolute.
"Don't search for me," Zalama's voice surrounded him, emanating from every mote of light simultaneously. "I am the incarnation of every particle here, present in all places and none. I am the one who summoned you to this world, Raditz. You bear an unusual fate upon your shoulders."
Of course, Raditz thought with bitter amusement. Everyone who gets chosen apparently has some grand destiny or burden. He'd heard this rhetoric before—the "chosen one" narrative that seemed universal across stories and realities. He remained quiet, listening, waiting for what would inevitably come next.
"Only you can change the current situation," Zalama continued. "This was destined from the very beginning. Only you possess the potential to alter what has been set in motion."
"If you have such tremendous power," Raditz finally spoke, "why can't you stop this yourself?"
"I cannot interfere directly with this world," the Dragon God explained, and something in his tone suggested genuine regret. "When I created the Dragon Balls to maintain universal balance, I reached the limit of what I'm permitted to do. These artifacts are my sole avenue of influence."
Raditz smiled bitterly, shaking his head. "I tried holding back the darkness. But the opponent is too powerful. Even my strength isn't enough to make a difference."
"Which is why I will guide you," Zalama's voice suddenly crystallized with purpose, the echoes focusing into perfect clarity. "Unite all universes into one!"
All universes... into one?
The concept exploded in Raditz's mind like a supernova. His eyes widened with sudden understanding.
"Yes," Zalama confirmed. "Combine each independent universe—every timeline, every parallel world, every fragment of space-time—and merge them together to form a singular 'unique' existence. Such unified reality may possess enough density, enough concentrated existence, to resist the void. But understand—this solution is only temporary. In the end, you must still defeat the one who manipulates everything behind the scenes."
The one who manipulated everything. Sarga, naturally.
Raditz considered Zalama's judgment carefully. The Dragon God wasn't wrong. With Zeno and the Grand Priest trapped in the negative world, and all the Angels presumably fallen or captured, Raditz remained the only being with any hope of confronting Sarga on equal footing. In the end, this conflict would be resolved through battle—it was inevitable.
The truth was, Raditz had already prepared himself mentally for this outcome. To truly stop the negative world's invasion, he would need to face the mastermind directly. A fierce, decisive battle awaited him at the end of this path.
"I will grant you one wish as well," Zalama's voice began to grow distant, as if the Dragon God were already withdrawing to whatever realm he truly inhabited. "Everything now rests in your hands, Raditz. Do not fail."
The golden light suffusing the entire space slowly receded like an ebbing tide. The seven Super Dragon Balls, suspended in the air above, began to descend—but their descent was strange, accompanied by profound transformation.
The Dragon God's tremendous power activated fully. Through the transparent ceiling of Zeno's Palace, Raditz could see the stars themselves shifting positions across the cosmos. Constellations rearranged. Galaxies moved. Vast concentrations of light began to coalesce.
The four remaining universes—Universes 2, 6, 7, and 11—were merging. Their dimensional barriers, which had kept them separate since creation, dissolved like morning mist. The universes drew together, edges meeting and fusing, their respective realities bleeding into one another until boundaries became meaningless.
But the transformation extended far beyond just physical space.
Time itself was changing. Every fragment of divergent history, every parallel timeline created by divergent choices, every branch universe spawned by quantum possibilities—all of them began converging under the guidance of Zalama's divine might. Like countless transparent layers being pressed together until they became opaque, separate realities superimposed and merged. Gradually, inexorably, a single unified universe took shape.
In the Time Nest, Chronoa gasped and staggered backward, nearly falling.
She could feel it—a power beyond anything she'd ever encountered was affecting space-time itself. Something was mixing countless temporal fragments, merging parallel histories that should remain forever separate. This was forbidden. This violated every law of temporal mechanics she'd spent eons maintaining. This should be impossible.
Yet that force transcended all conventional limitations, reshaping reality according to rules that superseded even her authority over time.
Back in Zeno's Palace, Raditz watched in horrified awe as the Dragon God's supreme power unified existence itself. The energy of primordial chaos merged universes with the ease of combining drops of water into a single ocean.
Then the seven descending Dragon Balls transformed. They grew smaller and smaller, compressing into seven orbs of pure condensed light that scattered radiance like miniature suns. The spheres floated toward Raditz with purpose, and one by one they merged into his body!
Golden light flooded through him—warm, nourishing, transformative. The sensation was beyond description. Then the light faded, absorbed completely into his being.
Had the seven Dragon Balls themselves entered his body? Or was it Zalama's divine power that now resided within him?
Raditz remembered the Dragon God's final words: "I will grant you one wish as well." Perhaps that meant he could now make a wish at any time, without needing to gather the balls or perform summoning rituals?
But deep in his gut, Raditz felt a certainty he couldn't explain—an intuition born from his communion with cosmic will.
That would be his final wish. His last chance to reshape reality. Whatever he chose to ask for, it would need to count.