Chapter 27: The Unseen Currents
The days that followed were a study in starkly opposed disciplines. The cavern, once a place of terrified survival, had been transformed into a strange and tense dojo. The air, thick with the scent of fear and damp stone, now also hummed with a new, focused intensity.
Kakarot's breakthrough, his horrifyingly intuitive grasp of sensing fear, had been a perversion of Moori's intent, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless. It proved the Saiyan's mind was not a blunt instrument; it was a razor, capable of immense focus, albeit sharpened on a whetstone of malice. Moori, his heart heavy with dread at what he was unleashing, had no choice but to proceed. The devil's bargain was struck.
He began the next stage not with flashy techniques, but with a fundamental truth. "You Saiyans treat your energy like a river in flood," Moori stated, sitting once more opposite his unwilling pupil. "You break the banks, you waste its power, you use it only for destruction. You have never learned to channel it. To build a canal system. To direct a single, precise drop to where it is needed most."
Kakarot, still riding the high of his discovery, was impatient. "I direct it just fine. It blows things up."
"Brute force," Moori dismissed. "A child can knock over a tower of blocks. An architect can build one that scrapes the sky. You wish to be more than a child, do you not? Then you must learn the architecture of power. It begins not with projection, but with internal control. You must learn to feel the river's current within yourself."
The lesson was infuriatingly simple and impossibly difficult. Moori had him sit and focus on the ki coursing through his own body. Not as a weapon, but as a flow of life. To trace its paths. To feel its eddies and pools.
At first, it was a disaster. Kakarot's Saiyan biology was a torrent of raw, violent energy. Trying to "feel" it was like trying to map the individual droplets in a hurricane. He would growl in frustration, his energy flaring uncontrollably, causing the air to crackle and the watching women to flinch.
But Moori was relentless. "Stop fighting it. Observe it. You are not its master yet. You are a student studying a wild beast. Learn its habits."
And slowly, grudgingly, Kakarot began to. His innate talent, the same one that allowed him to master any fighting technique he saw after performing it once, began to turn inward. He started to identify the sensation of ki not just as a source of power for blasts, but as a tangible force within his muscles, his bones, his nerves. He could feel it concentrating in his fists when he got angry, pooling in his core when he was at rest. It was a revelation so basic, yet so profound, it had never occurred to him.
Moori then introduced exercises. They were absurdly mundane to a warrior who had destroyed planets.
"Focus the energy into the palm of your hand," Moori instructed. "Not to form a blast. To make it warm. Not hot. Warm. Like a stone left in the sun."
Kakarot would sit for an hour, his brow furrowed in concentration, a tiny sphere of energy flickering and sputtering in his palm. It would oscillate between a dying ember and a miniature supernova that he had to quickly snuff out before it singed his skin. The control required was orders of magnitude more difficult than simply unleashing everything he had. It was the difference between a sculptor gently shaping clay and a landslide burying a village.
Next, Moori had him try to push a small, smooth stone across the floor using only a sustained, whisper-thin stream of ki from his fingertip. The stone would either not move at all or shoot across the cavern like a projectile to shatter against the far wall. The women began to watch these sessions with a kind of macabre fascination, their initial terror mingling with amusement at the sight of the mighty Saiyan being bested by a pebble.
Days turned into a week. The pile of dust that was once pebbles grew.
Then, one afternoon, it happened. The stone, under the focused stream of energy from Kakarot's index finger, slid smoothly, steadily, in a perfectly straight line across the cavern floor. There was no explosion. No wild fluctuation. Just precise, controlled application of force.
Kakarot stared at it, his face unreadable. There was no triumphant smirk. This was a different kind of victory. It was a silent, internal conquest.
Moori nodded, a faint glimmer of something that wasn't dread—perhaps professional respect for a pupil's progress, in his eyes. "Good. Now, cool the energy in your palm. Lower its temperature. Draw the heat back into yourself."
This was even harder. Ki was energy, excitement, heat. Cooling it was counterintuitive. It required a level of mental discipline that went against every Saiyan instinct. He failed for two more days, his frustration a physical heat of its own. But he did not give up. The challenge had hooked him. This was a new way to be strong.
Finally, he succeeded. A faint mist began to rise from his palm, the air around it chilling noticeably. He held the sensation, his eyes wide with focus, maintaining the precise, cool output for a full minute before exhaling and letting his hand drop.
The internal control was translating externally. During his solitary training sessions on the plains, he began to experiment. He didn't just fire ki blasts; he tried to shape them. He fired thin, precise beams that pierced single rocks instead of vaporizing entire boulder fields. He tried to contain the radius of his explosions, focusing the destructive force into a tighter, more devastating point. The progress was slow, halting, but it was real. He was no longer just a bomb; he was learning to become a scalpel.
Another week passed. The constant, oppressive fear in the cavern had not lessened, but it had become a background hum, a fact of life. The women went about their duties, their eyes still wary, but they had grown accustomed to the strange sight of their tormentor sitting in silent meditation or painstakingly pushing stones across the floor.
On the evening of the fourteenth day since the lessons began, Moori watched as Kakarot successfully ran through the entire sequence: warming his palm, moving a stone with pinpoint accuracy, then cooling his skin until goosebumps appeared. He did it without a single misfire, without a flicker of wasted energy.
Moori approached him. Kakarot looked up, his expression not one of pride, but of expectation. He knew this was just the foundation. He was waiting for the real techniques.
"The control you are developing is the bedrock of all that is to come," Moori began, his voice low and serious. "You are learning the grammar of a new language of power. Now, you must learn its poetry. Its martial application."
Kakarot's eyes glinted with a fierce light. Finally.
"Saiyan combat is linear," Moori explained. "A direct contest of force against force. It is powerful, but predictable. It has limits, as you yourself have learned. Namekian martial arts are different. They are about redirection. About using an opponent's strength against them. About flowing around obstacles rather than breaking through them. It is the difference between a hammer and water. The hammer eventually shatters. Water adapts, flows, and wears down the mountain."
He settled into a low, wide stance, his hands moving into a fluid, ready position. "If you wish to grow beyond the limits of your raw, brute strength… if you wish to truly become more than your ancestors… then you must learn to flow."
He held the pose, a silent invitation and a formidable challenge. The basics of Namekian martial arts awaited.
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