Chapter 283: Don't Leave After School
When he came out of the meditative state, he had no sense of how long had passed.
He opened the laptop. Stared at the time.
"Twenty-two hours. Longer than last time." Last session had been about sixteen hours. This one had eaten most of two full days. The subjective experience had felt like a few minutes.
That particular quality — the sensation of time simply not having happened — faded within about fifteen seconds of opening his eyes. He sat with it briefly, then let it go.
His mood was good. Better than good, actually. The progress on Ki sense was real and measurable, and if he could get there without spending Points, 20,000 remained in his balance. 20,000 Points was not a negligible amount — it was enough to bring an ordinary person to combat parity with unHaki-trained Supernovas from the One Piece world.
He'd been using One Piece characters as benchmarks for so long it had become reflex. Blackbeard had been the standard unit for months. The habit had just... generalized.
He tidied the room in an unhurried way, yawned, and concluded that sustained meditation was more mentally taxing than physically taxing. His body felt fine. His brain needed a break. Meditation sessions probably shouldn't run back-to-back — at minimum ten hours of genuine rest between attempts, letting the mind decompress.
So: group chat time.
RawrSoFierce: The dashing Admin has made further progress. Estimate four or five more days before genuine Ki sense is established, after which actual cultivation can begin.
Master Roshi: The man who spent three years to reach this milestone is currently lost in quiet contemplation.
Master Roshi: The gap here is somewhat alarming. Three years of my life, versus one week for someone else. I suppose if I had joined the Chat Group several centuries earlier and invested Points in my constitution, the timeline might have been comparable.
Kaguya-sama: I don't think the Dragon Ball Ki system is suited to me. Still nothing. It's frustrating.
Kaguya-sama: On a different note — Yukari-nee's house is genuinely enormous. The guest room alone is very large.
Eternally Seventeen: The insufferable Admin's talent is really something — though I'm not far behind, which is the only consolation. Otherwise surpassing you would become impossible.
Crazy Diamond: Yukari-senpai wants to surpass Admin-sama? Remarkable ambition!
Eternally Seventeen: Admin-sama has been muting me constantly — I want to see whether, if I surpass him in strength, the muting dynamic inverts. Just imagining it is exciting.
Kaguya-sama: …Yukari-nee, please don't daydream. If strength determined who held the Admin position, Wandering Earth would have been running this group since the beginning.
RawrSoFierce: A certain youkai sage has gone quiet in contemplation.
Wandering Little Planet: Wait — did someone just call my name?
Eternally Seventeen: UNACCEPTABLE! UNACCEPTABLE! UNACCEPTABLE! Garbage chat group, ruining my youth, wasting my facial expressions — I've been meditating so diligently these past days with the explicit goal of surpassing Admin-sama, and then THIS—
RawrSoFierce: Pfft — I'm professionally trained for this, and I still can't hold it. Pfahahahahaha!!
Eternally Seventeen: ～(tロt)σ Don't leave after school, I dare you!
"…"
The next several days, Ryū didn't go out once. Outside of active combat, going a week without food was no issue for his current constitution. The days had a consistent structure: group chat socializing, then quiet meditation.
Time stopped moving in hours and started moving in days. He'd close his eyes, and when he opened them again, the light coming through the window cracks would have changed in a way that implied considerably more time had passed than it felt.
When the morning light finally filtered through the gap in the curtains and his eyes opened in the same moment, the expression on his face was different.
"Hard work doesn't lie," he murmured. "First time I've put this much genuine effort into cultivation. But the return is worth it. Twenty thousand Points saved."
It had happened. A few minutes before opening his eyes, somewhere in the final stretch of that meditative descent — he had felt it. What Master Roshi's document described as Ki sense. The thing itself.
And the moment it arrived, he understood it.
His body felt like an enormous container — vast beyond easy reckoning, built by years of constitution-strengthening. But the Ki within it was almost nothing. A few drops in a vessel that could hold an ocean. Those few drops were what he'd managed to accumulate. The container existed. The fluid was barely there yet.
That was fine. The container was real. Everything else was a matter of time.
"So this is Dragon Ball Ki." He turned the sensation over in his mind. "Once you have sense of it, it becomes obvious — like how arithmetic feels impossible before you understand it, and then you learn it and wonder why it seemed hard."
The analogy was rough, but the shape was right.
Of everything that had happened in the time since the Void Beast mission — the six-figure Point windfall, the power upgrades, all of it — this moment was more significant.
Because Dragon Ball's Ki system didn't have a ceiling. The Void Beast rewards had been enormous. But those Points would eventually hit limits.
Ki wouldn't.
This was how the Chat Group would actually reach the next level.
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