Son Gohan had not prepared for this conversation today.
He had prepared for the possibility of dying in a losing fight against two unkillable machines. He had prepared for the probability that things would keep getting worse before they got better, which was the only trajectory he'd known for the last several years. He had not prepared for someone to point at him and say "god."
He looked at the Lookout, at the pale stone and the open sky and the absolute absence of anything as comforting as ground, and decided that his life had stopped making conventional sense a long time ago.
"You don't have to be dramatic about it," Mr. Popo said, apparently reading something in Gohan's expression. He had the gentle manner of someone who had watched many humans catastrophize at this threshold. "Being a Kami doesn't mean spending your entire life up here. The previous Kami chose the Lookout. It was a preference. You can come and go."
Liam patted Gohan on the shoulder. "What's the procedure?"
"A ceremony of succession. Normally the previous Kami presides over it." Mr. Popo's eyes moved briefly upward, toward nothing in particular. "In the absence of the previous Kami, I can perform it. If you'll follow me, Son Gohan."
Gohan held up one finger. He turned to Bulma. "The physical data. You need samples from Trunks and me first, right?"
Bulma was already pointing at the trailer. "In."
Trunks went through the door at a run, rolling up his sleeve before he'd cleared the threshold. Gohan followed, and for the next twenty minutes Bulma ran them through everything: blood draws, structural scans, full-body imaging, a sequence of instruments that had no business fitting in a capsule and yet did. Gohan, somewhere in the middle of it, offered to just cut off a finger.
"That would give you a lot of tissue to work with," he said helpfully. "It'll grow back."
Bulma removed the suggestion from consideration with the efficiency of someone who had met Saiyans before. "I have what I need. Go become a god."
Gohan gave Trunks a thumbs-up through the trailer window and followed Mr. Popo through the deep gate of the temple.
Baba had vanished sometime during the examination process, drifting upward and fading out, presumably returning to whatever card game she'd abandoned in the Other World. She left behind the impression of someone who had delivered her news, collected her satisfaction, and departed.
Liam sat in the doorway of the trailer, watching Bulma work. Three monitors, cascading data, structural models of two Saiyans rotating in wireframe. She moved through it the way people moved through problems they'd been carrying for years and had finally found the right angle of attack on.
He thought about Akane's Butterfly Hatsu.
The fortune-teller had said the future changed when she looked. Which meant something about his presence here had weight. He wasn't a ghost passing through without friction. He had changed things already: Gohan's arm, the Star Mark, the S-Cell theory, and now this. A new Kami of Earth, created years ahead of whatever schedule fate had originally planned.
Or had fate always planned this, and he was just the tool it was using to get there?
He had been inside the Dragon Ball world long enough to know that narrative gravity was real and forceful here.
Akane settled on his shoulder, swinging her legs over the edge.
"Does our world have a place like that?" she asked. "A place where people go after they die?"
Liam thought about it seriously.
In principle, if the afterlife was a Nen construct on a massive scale, it would have to be Specialization. Conjuration could build architecture, but only Specialization could create something with its own rules, its own internal logic, its own cycle. A system that persisted and processed souls across generations, without a continuous user maintaining it, pointed to Specialization of a scale that was simply incomprehensible.
Or the souls of the dead provided their own residual Nen to sustain the structure. Post-mortem Nen, the last attachment of the dying, accumulating for millions of years.
He thought about Kite.
Kite's Hatsu, Crazy Slots, had a specific weapon in its rotation: an ability that could catch a soul at the moment of death and preserve it, deliver it to a new body already forming. A private afterlife contained in a single Nen construct. One person's attachment to life, shaped into something with reincarnation mechanics.
If one Nen user could build that, then an entire civilization's accumulated post-mortem Nen, sustained across thousands of years...
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe."
Akane seemed satisfied with that. She watched the clouds.
Then, from somewhere that wasn't anywhere, a voice said: "Hi there. I'm Goku. How is everyone?"
Bulma's hand came down on the keyboard so hard the entire trailer shook.
She sat very still for a moment. Then she stood up, walked off the bus, and stood on the pale stone of the Lookout, and she was smiling, and there were tears on her face, and she seemed entirely unbothered by the contradiction.
"You," she said. "You absolute idiot. You've been dead for years and you couldn't find a minute to say hello?"
"Ha!" The laugh resonated directly in Liam's skull, warm and completely without self-consciousness. "That's the thing about being dead. You lose track of the urgency. Gohan just showed up and told me everything. Krillin, Yamcha, Piccolo. I had no idea."
Gohan's voice broke in, vibrating with an excitement he wasn't bothering to suppress. "Aunt Bulma, we're talking through King Kai's telepathy. I found Dad. He's at Grand Kai's planet. He's been training." A pause. "Liam was right. He's strong. The Androids wouldn't stand a chance."
Trunks looked at Liam, and for a moment his twelve-year-old face just looked twelve.
"We've already contacted the Namekians," King Kai's voice said, taking over, calm and businesslike. "Son Goku and I were on Grand Kai's planet when Gohan arrived. I found their location quickly, coordinated with the other Kais. They've summoned the Dragon." A pause. "Ah."
The telepathy hummed.
Then Gohan's voice came back, and the excitement had gone somewhere quieter. "The Namekian Dragon says Dad died of heart disease. Natural causes. Second death from natural causes can't be reversed."
Goku's voice returned immediately, completely untroubled by this news. "It's fine! I'm having a good time here. Gohan, you can surpass anyone. I've always known that."
Bulma lit a cigarette. She took one long, slow pull, and when she exhaled, the expression that came with it was not grief but something more resolved. She had carried the question of whether the Namek Dragon could have saved Goku for a long time, through years of not knowing, running the possibility through her head in quiet moments. Now she had an answer. It wouldn't have worked. Even then, it wouldn't have worked.
Some knots, when you finally untie them, just fall away without ceremony.
"Others can still be resurrected," King Kai said, and there was the particular briskness of someone who had moved efficiently from the closed door to the open one. "We've been compiling a list."
The light changed on the Lookout.
Two figures materialized on the open stone, tall, green-skinned, white-robed. They stood with the slightly disoriented quality of people who had just traveled between states of existence and were reorienting to having bodies again.
The second-generation Piccolo looked at his hands. Then at the Lookout. Then at Gohan with an expression that contained about four years of suppressed things and was doing its best to contain them further.
The former Kami stood beside him, older-looking, quieter, taking stock of the sky above the temple that had once been his.
Trunks stared.
Gohan was already moving.