Chapter 1: Rebirth as a Saiyan
"Ugh... where am I?"
Consciousness slowly returned, dragging him up from the depths of oblivion. But instead of waking up in his familiar bedroom or staring at a hospital's sterile white ceiling, his vision filled with a dark, apocalyptic sky. Blue lightning crackled across storm clouds, painting a scene straight out of the end of the world.
"AHHH!"
Before he could even process what he was seeing, excruciating pain exploded through every nerve in his body. It felt like he'd been thrown into a meat grinder and then stomped on by a giant for good measure. Every inch of him screamed in agony.
The pain was so intense that his thoughts began to scatter like leaves in a hurricane. He couldn't think, couldn't reason—all he could do was grit his teeth and endure. His throat went raw from screaming, the sound tearing through the dead air of the ruined world around him.
Time became meaningless. Seconds felt like hours. Hours might have been days. Finally, mercifully, his body's survival instincts kicked in. Numbness crept in to replace the pain, just enough to keep him from passing out completely.
He'd never known he could be this mentally strong. To remain conscious through that level of torture was almost impressive. Maybe people really don't know their limits until they're pushed past their breaking point.
Lying there on the shattered ground, staring up at that nightmarish sky, he actually managed a weak smile. Small victories.
As sensation gradually returned to his body, he moved his eyes to take in his surroundings. Collapsed buildings. Smoke and ash drifting through the air. Everything screamed battlefield. This definitely wasn't his slightly messy apartment back home. A chill of unease crept down his spine.
Slowly, painfully, he lifted his head to check his own body. His eyes went wide. His pupils contracted to pinpoints as they locked onto something wrapped around his waist.
A tail. A brown, furry tail, coiled around his midsection like a belt.
"This is... a Saiyan tail?"
The words came out in disbelief.
Before he could process that impossible reality, a flood of foreign memories slammed into his mind like a tidal wave. The sheer volume of information was too much for his already weakened state. His vision went black, and consciousness slipped away once more.
When he woke up again, his expression was complicated, to say the least.
"Turles."
That was the name embedded in those memories. His name now. The name of the body he inhabited.
It was strangely familiar—a character he'd only ever known from fantasy, from a movie he'd watched years ago. And now it was real. He was real.
Having spent years reading web novels, he understood what had happened.
He'd transmigrated.
No freak accident. No truck-kun. He'd just gone to sleep one night and woken up in a different world entirely. Specifically, he'd woken up in the Dragon Ball universe, inhabiting the body of a minor villain from one of the movies.
Turles. A movie-only character who looked exactly like Goku but couldn't be more different. Both were low-class Saiyan warriors, but their paths had diverged completely. While Goku had bumped his head as a baby and lost his Saiyan instincts, Turles had received the full memory implantation treatment on Planet Vegeta. He'd grown up as Saiyans were meant to—conquering planets, slaughtering populations, serving the tyrant Frieza.
After Planet Vegeta's destruction, Turles had stumbled across the legendary Tree of Might and its reality-breaking fruit. With that power, he'd grown strong enough to go rogue, wandering the universe and planting the tree on inhabited worlds to steal their life energy and grow even stronger.
Eventually, he'd invaded Earth to plant his tree there, which had led to his ultimate fate—getting obliterated by one of Goku's Spirit Bombs. A classic movie villain death.
And now, somehow, he'd become that character.
He honestly didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
A second chance at life should be cause for celebration, right? But in the Dragon Ball universe, where gods walked among mortals and planets got casually destroyed, that second chance came with some serious strings attached. Especially when his new identity was basically a low-class weakling.
Forget everything else—just comparing faces, Turles looked like a discount villain version of Goku. Same features, completely different vibe.
But appearance wasn't the pressing issue right now. Survival was.
His current situation was, to put it mildly, terrible.
The memories he'd inherited painted a clear picture. His instincts had been right—this planet was dying, and he was standing at ground zero.
What should have been a simple planetary invasion had gone catastrophically wrong. The target world's strongest fighter had barely topped 1000 in battle power. Turles, as squad leader, had measured in at 1200. Add in the Saiyan Great Ape transformation, and conquering the native population should have been child's play.
But the natives had possessed something unexpected—a mysterious seed passed down through their legends. In their final desperate hour, they'd planted it.
The seed had sprouted instantly, growing into a massive tree that bore fruit within hours. The planet's strongest warrior had eaten that fruit, and his power level had exploded past 5000.
After that, it had been a massacre.
Turles's entire squad had been wiped out. He'd only survived by running away at the last second, though he'd still taken a devastating energy blast that had nearly killed him. In a final desperate move, he'd created a Power Ball to trigger his Great Ape transformation and barely managed to crush the powered-up native. But the damage had been done. When he'd reverted to normal, his injuries had overwhelmed him completely.
That's when his soul had slipped in to take over.
The original Turles might have escaped this disaster in the movie timeline somehow, but right now, he needed to save himself. Because he'd recognized that fruit. It was the Spirit Tree's fruit—the same power-up that movie-Turles had used as his cheat code to relevance.
And Spirit Tree fruit grew by draining a planet's life energy completely. This world was already a dried-up husk, minutes away from total collapse. If he didn't get off this rock immediately, he'd die in the explosion. Even if he somehow survived that, Saiyans couldn't breathe in space. Either way, he was screwed.
He had to hand it to the Saiyan biology, though. Even as a low-class warrior with modest power, his body's natural durability was insane. Those injuries should have killed him instantly, but he was still clinging to life. And in just these few minutes of consciousness, he could already feel his body starting to heal.
Pushing his barely-recovered strength to its limit, he fumbled through his armor and pulled out a small remote. His fingers found the button, and he pressed it.
Less than ten minutes later, a white spherical space pod descended from the sky, completely intact. He had no idea why that powered-up native hadn't destroyed his ship, but he wasn't about to question his luck. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he dragged his broken body across the ground and hauled himself into the pod.
The hatch sealed shut. Through the viewport, he watched the planet's death throes. Massive dust clouds rose into the atmosphere, blotting out what little light remained. Lightning struck the ground in devastating bursts, each impact creating new craters. Oceans flooded inland as continental plates buckled and sank. Enormous fissures tore across the landscape like wounds, magma fountaining up from the planet's dying core.
He'd seen planetary destruction countless times in Turles's memories, but witnessing it firsthand hit different. It was a visceral reminder of what awaited him if he stayed weak in this universe. Without power, his fate would be no better than this doomed world.
In the Dragon Ball universe, strength was everything.
At least he'd figured out the timeline from those memories. According to the movie lore, Turles should be the same age as Kakarot—Goku. Right now, he was eighteen years old, which meant Goku was also eighteen, still training under Kami in preparation for next year's World Martial Arts Tournament where he'd meet and marry Chi-Chi. That put the timeline at six years before Raditz would arrive on Earth and kick off the main storyline.
Six years. That was all he had before the plot went into overdrive and Goku's power started climbing at that ridiculous, physics-defying rate that had made fans scream "that's broken!" for decades.
Six years to get strong enough to matter.
As his pod rose into the air, something caught his eye. His expression shifted from grim determination to excitement.
There, still attached to the withered husk of the Spirit Tree, was a single green seed.
He maneuvered the pod closer to the massive dead tree—the only thing left alive on this entire planet. The tree's once-lush canopy had withered away completely, leaving only the main trunk. But there, at the very top, that precious seed remained.
He extended the pod's mechanical arm and plucked it free.
Inside the sealed cockpit, he clutched that seed like it was the most valuable thing in the universe. In a way, it was. He'd never expected things to come full circle like this—the Spirit Tree seed that had killed the original Turles's squad had ended up in his hands anyway. Staring at that unassuming green seed, he felt something he hadn't felt since waking up in this nightmare.
Hope.
The pod's engines roared to life, accelerating hard. It punched through the planet's atmosphere, broke free of its gravity well, and shot into the void of space. Below, the planet began its final collapse.
Turles allowed his eyes to close. His body had reached its absolute limit. As the pod's auto-pilot engaged and the healing chamber activated, he let himself drift into suspended animation.
But before consciousness faded completely, one last thought burned through his mind:
"Goku. Vegeta. The Dragon Balls. I'm coming for all of it."