1.2 Life, the World and Genki

After initially being handwaving and poetic in my descriptions, I'll now demonstrate the world through the sense of ki. Ki has an intensity (a brightness) and a signature. As you may guess given the term, a ki signature is the unique pattern a particular life form's ki possesses and enables a ki-senser to distinguish between individuals. Life forms of the same species will have an underlying common pattern to their ki, although life forms with more complex consciousness like humans will have that reflected in a greater signature complexity. Therefore plants will appear more similar in signature than humans. This seeming discrepancy is further entrenched by an evolutionarily advantageous use the brain's processing; it is important for us to be able to tell the difference between humans and not so much individual plants, thus this is what the mind portrays.

[ Figure 1a,b ]

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The river valley near Central City in optical light and ki.

To illustrate this I have provided some imagery of a landscape, both in the visual and as understood through ki.

Disappointingly this is a mere approximation to what is experienced. The sense of ki extends beyond a visual understanding and impacts all the conscious senses, memory retrieval and beyond. A fair number of non-ki-users may experience something like this already; synaesthesia. In this condition one sensory experience triggers another in a predicable fashion. This could be the hearing of music accompanied by dancing colours, or names cause the synaesthete to taste strong flavours. It is thought cross-wiring between sensory-processing regions in the brain causes this. As I have been a ki-user since a young age my brain developed its own understanding of ki, an explicit internal sense, with minor contributions of the other senses that I can approximate as a synaesthetic experience. For ki-users coming into the ability later in life the experience will very much truly overlap with the other senses as the brain attempts to process the new information. Despite those caveats I have done my best to put the world on paper.

The scene depicted above is one of my own scribbles of the river valleys to the east of the Central Steppes. My vantage point is known to us as "The Spot". Many children have secret hideaways from their parents and this is the view from my daughter Pan's and her close friend Bra's. For most families the clubhouse is in the woods out-back or the park nearby, not six timezones away. That sounds like an alarming lapse of parenting I know, but our families have a different definition of keeping safe. No cell phone was necessary to check on them, they promised to never conceal their ki signatures so we could find them should be need to. Honestly, I was more worried for the wildlife than the girls.

I've labeled various ki signatures in the image to help explain the world as seen by myself and my friends and family.

[ Figure 2 ]

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1) Where there are plants there is ki. The ki of a plant, like all life forms, exists within and extends faintly around the plant. This external extension of ki is known as an aura. Meadows then, like those pictured, are picturesque seas to walk through; the higher the grass the more misty the glow. The ki isn't bright enough to obscure a person by any means - one would not be invisible in ki in a corn field - but the ki adds a fun hum to the scene. My memories of picnics include a faint, lively glow around my family caused by the grass and trees surrounding us.

You'll notice the heather, purple in the first image, is a similar colour in ki the grass. Whilst grass and heather are different species and have a distinguishable ki signature, it is individuality and sentience-induced complexity that "colour" ki further. In ki then these plants are, compared to animals and people, very similar. Sadly, flowers themselves are part of the same plant so do not have a different ki signature. Your other senses then will have to help you experience a flower. There are no trees in the image (the trees all secluding The Spot behind me and higher up the mountains) but their ki works in a similar fashion, with a glow in the tree and an aura around trunk and leaves. Ki is not impacted by the wind by any great deal, and so a tree swaying in a breeze leaves a very faint after image of ki behind it. As you can imagine, willow trees in summer are beautiful to watch.

[ Figure 3 ]

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The ki signature of a willow tree. The curtain of branches exists in ki, too.

2) Looking down, the ribbon of water through the landscape is strikingly bright. One can see why bodies of water were thought to have a life of their own. Rivers are full of life themselves, but even removing the fish and other animals, the water itself glows faintly still with ki. Rivers have their own ki signatures that changes throughout the year. If you know it well, one can identify a river by the water.

Older teachings say bubbles in the water create the ki as a type of breath. However, this seemingly logical idea developed before the invention of microscopes introduced an alternate explanation. The reality is indeed that ki is generated in the river, but by small, simple protozoa, algae and bacteria instead of bubbles. What about cleaned water like tap water? This water has no ki signature. Indeed, the old masters did note that boiled water was without any ki, but it was easily explained away - either the fire itself overwhelmed and killed the ki, or the metal of the pot it was boiled in destroyed it. To support this, ki-users sought out water made hot without fire or metal to see if it contained life. Surprisingly, you can find examples. The volcanic hot springs on Bunbuku Island contain life in water that fits this description, seemingly supporting the argument. We now know the creatures in these waters are extremophiles, a fascinating group of organisms that are able to survive in high temperatures, extremes of acidity or alkalinity, and possibly the harsh environment of space itself.

Here's another unbelievable story - I'd have to cover the events at some point so may as well start here, and I apologise for the exposition. When I was four I was kidnapped and forced to fend for myself in the Break Wastelands for six months. It was there I learnt to read ki as a survival skill to find food, avoid predators and crucially, to find clean water. For those with long memories they may remember the brief overthrowing of King Furry some fifty years ago by a man named Piccolo. My father, Son Goku, and his friends thankfully prevented the destruction of West City, but Piccolo's defeat was not forgotten by his son of the same name. The son became a self-appointed rival to my father, and the final of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai became a battle of vengeance. Much to the younger Piccolo's irritation my father won that fight, too. Piccolo didn't fulfil his wish of revenge until a number of years later when my then estranged uncle kidnapped me. Seizing the fortuitous situation and my father's willingness to sacrifice his life to overpower my then stronger uncle, Piccolo killed them both and became my new kidnapper. His eventual goal was a convoluted act of dramatic irony, I suppose, attempting to train me to kill my father on his eventual resurrection a year later. I'm… guessing claiming people can come back to life will lose me a few readers, even with official records of it happening across cities in the past decades. I implore the sceptical, then, to take this as a fantastical story and concentrate on my point. But be warned, my stories do get stranger.

I don't remember much from this jaunt to the Wastelands, being so young. I do know it took a few weeks for me to get used to sleeping outside and catching my own food. Whilst an Earthling through birth, Piccolo's ancestors are from the planet Namek. He was the person who taught me how to find clean water through ki-sense, water being the only sustenance he required and thus skilled in finding. Drinking contaminated water can mean life or death in or out of the wild, and it is an ability I've passed on to all the kids. They've known how to find and purify their own water since they were small. Detecting the glow of bacteria in the water and what's tolerable is a fun exercise that I hope wouldn't take you too much trial and error to learn. Although, maybe my definition of fun is a little warped.

(I didn't take to the ways of evil life, by the way. It didn't much suit our Piccolo in the end either, and our family has kidnapped him in return. To this day Pan often uses her childhood name for him, Uncle Piccoyo.)

3) The visual sky is a beautiful display of colours, not just the blues but the warm palette of dusk and dawn to that peaceful black of night. It has a huge personality. In ki however, it seems all but nothing. The air itself does contain life with bacteria, and there are fluctuations by time of day and in clouds, or subtle differences over land and sea. But nothing as easily discernible and enthralling as the sunset. Or so it would appear.

I didn't notice the ki of the air around us until I left Earth as a child for the first time, travelling to planet Namek with family friends. Leaving the atmosphere was the strangest sensation, a strong sense of solitude rushing towards me and a cacophony retreating behind.

There's an old story back from when the world was thought to be at the centre of the Universe. The Moon, planets, Sun and other stars circled the Earth, embedded on rotating spheres. Philosophers said these spheres made the most beautiful, heavenly music as they danced. Tragically we would never know the melody - having been on the Earth our entire lives and listening to the song constantly, we would believe the song to be silence. I wouldn't learn the music of the spheres story for a number of years but, as we left the planet and I felt that envelope of ki fall behind me, that was the first time I could appreciate the song of the sphere I lived on. Needless to say planet Namek's song was completely different, the ki in the air feeling like a soup in its unfamiliarity. With that in mind I can understand why the highest masters thought the Earth itself was imbued with ki, even if they had not experienced looking back at the Earth from space themselves.

4) The faint sky is punctuated by bird life. Sometimes invisible above low clouds or due to their height, their movement across the sky is detectable either way in ki. Concentrating on birds will teach you a number of things. A bird, before song, swells with ki as it inhales in anticipation and sparkles in time with its warbles. This is very much guidance we should take on the importance of breath in encouraging ki to flow around the body.

[ Figure 4 ]

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A murmuration of starlings with ki. Arrows indicate direction of movement. The ki appears like that from one organism rather than a flock.

Flocks of thousands of birds like starlings are called murmurations and are a beautiful sight late-winter, dancing in unison and creating beautiful shapes across the sky. The same beauty exists in the ki. The birds have an aura like all life, and it's easy to see in a murmuration why aura are useful. The shifts in direction of the birds are preceded moments before by waves of ki across the flock.

Subtle nudges in ki are created as the birds attempt to maintain distance from each other and this influences the transient shapes created, allowing the murmuration to appear as a connected whole. Aura between people can work in a similar fashion, and I will delve into the details within a future section.

5)
In the real image a herd of animals were not visible, well-hidden in the tall meadow grass. You could probably walk straight passed them, none-the-wiser. But in ki they stand out as though they weren't camouflaged at all. Hiding from a ki-senser is extremely difficult, although a technique of concentration developed on Earth we shall cover makes this possible. In my time in the wilderness I had to learn how to hunt to eat. Sensing the ki of animals who thought they were safely hidden from predators gave me the element of surprise in my hunts. It does feel like cheating and one does feel guilty, but hunger wins out.

Those who are able to suppress their ki completely can hide fully amongst grasses such as these. I've had to do this myself in many a life-or-death situation before. At least, in those situations I was more aware of the predator's capabilities than the hares I caught were. Whilst when painting I could not see the creatures with this ki signature, we do know aura typically reflect the size of the life form, and the aura's intensity falls away faster than an inverse-square from the body. Therefore it was possible for me to tell from miles away, without even recognising the ki signature of the animals, that the individuals of the herd were the size of large dogs. They were indeed small deer, and so Bra told me, the same herd that has roamed the valley for years.

6) I have to admit, I was going to leave out this explanation. I assumed it followed from previous discussion of animal ki, but my arm was twisted. I have drawn the grass nearby with a few brown spots in ki that are not visible otherwise, though this is laziness on my behalf - there should be many, many more. I am, of course, speaking of bugs and other usually reviled creepy crawlies.

My home in Satan City Age 797, with Goten (30) and Trunks (31) joined by Marron (26), the daughter of my father's closest friend and close friend to Goten and Trunks in her own right.

Gohan: Are there any sides to ki people might not immediately think of?
Trunks: So not flying then?
Goten: Always the flying. Gonna be soooo many flat people when this book's released.
Trunks: Goten...
Goten: What? It's true!
Gohan: I'm adding disclaimers to the chapter.
Trunks: Good. I can swing you our lawyers if need be.
Marron: Spiders.
Trunks: Come again?
Marron: Answer to the actual question. Spiders. Finding spiders.
Goten: Oh, here we go.
Gohan: Ah, I'll be covering ki-sense early.
Marron: Okay but that'll be about people and birds and lions and-
Trunks: Lions?!
Marron: -Yeah cool animals - or cute dogs or something - no one ever talks about the bugs-
Goten: (laughing)
Marron: -stop laughing you reprobate this is your fault!
Gohan: I think I know where you're going with this but for the camera can you explain?
Marron: Your delightful brother - I told you to stop - when we were little but he was old enough to know better, I was terrified of spiders. Scream-the-house-down-terrified.
Trunks: You weren't that bad.
Marron: I had nightmares! When I was just learning how to read ki, he thought it would be hilarious to play a game to test me.
Goten: I was helping!
Marron: The game involved him finding random animals and getting me to guess what they were. Lizards, frogs, mice, all of that. I can deal with that.
Goten: In my defence you were enjoying yourself - you said it was really fun.
Marron: I don't care what you claim I said! The point is, the last animal he got me was really tricky, and I spent ages feeling it out just, what the hell is that? Its ki was so sharp and mechanical, silent? Gaahhhh I'm creeping myself out just thinking-
Trunks: What was it Mar, what was it? Tell the nice people-
Marron: A TARANTULA.
[[Goten and Trunks both laugh]]
Marron: You were tormenting a five-year-old! It's nothing to be proud of and that's not even the end of it. If at any point they both decided I was irritating them by merely existing they'd shout-
Goten: FIVE!
Trunks: Six?
Goten: Oh yeah, SIX!
Marron: Oh my god you asses- they'd shout The Number.
Gohan: And that number is?
Marron: The number of spiders in the room. That freaking childhood trauma seared the ki signature of a spider into my brain to the point I can count them within moments of entering a room. They conditioned me to do it. And it is six. I hate you both so much and I. Hate. Spiders.

For those like Marron who have a... strong dislike... of spiders and such, sensing ki will confirm your worst fears. Sometimes ignorance is truly bliss. I don't remember learning to sense ki, the realisation of being able to sense scary things coming slowly or not registering within me enough to remember. The experience clearly stayed with Marron. For me the world has always looked like this (and just to confirm the old adage, 'you're never more than six feet away from a rat in a city' is near-enough true). An ant nest or beehive seems like a large fuzzy cluster of busy ki rather than any individuals particularly standing out. In other cases though if you are truly quiet and on alert, you can sense the movement and blind intention of bugs. Predators like spiders do have the same sharp purpose as other carnivorous animals, but their ki is simple in the impression it leaves. I don't find spider ki particularly intimidating and I think that is Marron's stark fear of them colouring her sense subconsciously. If you have a fear of any animal and especially a fear of bugs, I recommend spending a lot of time on this aspect of ki-sensing as you develop your technique. If your entire attention is taken up finding bugs around you to be fearful of and flinching at every movement you'll never progress. Still, this apprehension can be controlled and never bothers Marron in situations that require her full attention.

7) The fuzzy nature of ant nests is true of human cities, although human individuality is detectable. Central City itself is not visible from The Spot being some four hundred miles away. Nevertheless, it is still perfectly detectable and the subtle effect of the city can be sensed all across the globe. I've exaggerated the brightness a little, the combined aura of all the inhabitants being extremely faint at the distances I've painted it to. I've also included some of the turbulent structure detectable within ki. Ki in aura like this is not affected by the wind, the ki only very rarely interacting with the physical world around it. It is the intent a ki-user gives ki that will allow an interaction, but more in later chapters. The ki from the city therefore extends not as smoke blowing in the wind nor as a dome but as fat disk, extending equally upward into the atmosphere and downward into the earth, tapering off as it travels away from the city. There are denser regions as the ki swirls, pulled together not by the wind but more of its own meandering. The view of ki is not stopped by rocks on the surface either, impeded only by the ki of the plants on the hill close to me. As an aside, whilst ki sense is an enhancement to other senses, travelling using ki-sense alone in a completely dead local environment would be unwise. Without any ki signatures registering you will smack into inanimate objects. This is the reason we try to fight in remote areas if possible. We try to minimise loss of any form of life in this way yes, but in truth we want to have an unobstructed view of our opponent's ki.

8) From The Spot, West city is near 5,000km away, a fair distance. I've coloured the ki differently to represent the difference in feel of West City's ki. The contrast wouldn't be that stark to appear as a different species, but just to make it clearer. If anyone has visited both cities you'd find their reputation precedes them - West is on average far more brash and lively than that of the quiet, cultured and sophisticated Central. Their unique nature is reflected in the feelings of their ki and even in the turbulence - West city's ki is, on average at least, more erratic. The ki of the city is still detectable and strong even at a distance (the population being larger by a factor of three than Central) but from my vantage point doesn't appear to extend as high in the atmosphere. In reality the ki is forming the same fat disc as Central City, but it appears sunk into the ground due to the curvature of the Earth. Trace the shape back to the centre of the ki impression and you will find ground-level in West City. The true lack of impedance caused by the non-living landscape means no matter where I am on Earth I can see these cities.

These large population centres then make navigation around the globe extremely simple for ki-users. I doubt any part of the planet is unfamiliar to me now, from high up enough at least, but I can always find my way home by triangulating the main cities and setting a course. Having a constant sense of the near-spherical nature of the planet is useful but somewhat strange, and can cause trouble.

I taught my wife Videl how to use and sense ki when we were sixteen. She took to the skill surprisingly quickly, though it was a number of years before her acuity in ki-sense grew consciously. A few days before our wedding I visited Videl's home to find her distracted, restless. She got worse and worse throughout the day, eventually settling on the couch stock-still, only flinching. Videl denied anything was wrong, saying it was nothing serious, and of course my paranoia feared the worst. She must have cold feet but was unable to tell me. I asked her father, Mr Satan, if he knew anything was wrong which started him panicking... This culminating in him drinking to steady his nerves, me compulsively drinking coffee, and the start of a joint idea to write a letter showing that I understood her decision. This morphed from a letter into a speech (the letter rendered unreadable by the caffeine-induced shaking of my hand) which I regaled to her at speed over dinner, Mr Satan interjecting sagely when I fumbled my lines. She stopped me halfway through (I suspect she was patient for as long as she could bear and thought I was near the end) asking where I had got the baffling idea she didn't want to marry me from. After I stammered a weak explanation she laughed - not unkindly - then admitted she should have been honest but was embarrassed.

After a confused description of her own we worked out she was having side-effects of ki sensing. It was severe vertigo induced by our friends Trunks and his father Vegeta in West City on the other side of the planet. She had always been able to vaguely sense our friends in West City, but this was the first time she'd been able to appreciate the distance. She felt every metre of that twelve thousand kilometres as though she was dangling helplessly over a bore-shaft through the centre of the Earth. It took Videl a week or so to overcome the sensation, it coming in waves. Though thankfully on the day of our wedding our friends were with us and so the vertigo lifted for a time!

9) It is not just Earth's population centres that can be useful to navigate by. Outside the Earth's atmosphere one can use stars with your eyes and other planets to orient yourself. I've highlighted planet New Namek here. I'll admit the planet wasn't in this direction when I was painting, this image painted in June and New Namek rising in daylight hours in the northern Autumn months instead. I hope you'll forgive inaccuracy for the the point I wish to illustrate. As one's ki-sense develops, sensitivity to intensity appears first before the ability to pinpoint position, then depth. With practise then, the faint glow in the sky of other planets will start to nag at your senses. At first it will feel like a blip in the atmosphere, maybe the weather. It's only when your ability to resolve the ki down to a blurry point will you resolve the planet along with it. Your ki-sense is not limited by the power of the eye. I'm mildly farsighted but not that farsighted! Looking above at the planet I am able to resolve the townships on New Namek itself in ki. If I was looking for someone I knew well I may be able to lock onto them. Those with the greatest abilities could detect - and crucially pinpoint - a spider twitch from the other side of the Universe. I'm sure one day that will be Marron readying for a crusade against them. You may expect the underlying ki of Namekians to be distinctively different to Earthlings, they are alien after all. And that is true to an extent. Although, there are far more similarities than differences, reflecting both species' high socialisation and capacity to manipulate ki.

10) My final label you may expect, since I've been approximately moving from faintest to brightest, would be the largest source of ki in the scene. And at that particular moment you'd be correct. The blue ki signature is extremely bright and the same colour as New Namek for good reason. It is the ki signature of Piccolo, my kidnapper and first official teacher. Piccolo is not hidden in the grass here with the deer, but at Yunzebitto Heights in the North of the planet. We're viewing his ki signature right through the Earth. At the time I drew this he was training and his energy output was over a hundred times that of the entirety of New Namek. Namekians have retained their ki sense over the years and are on average many times stronger than a Earthling, however sadly there are only a few hundred Namekians left in the Universe. Piccolo's strength is impressive, his what we call 'power level' is elevated here, although even when not training his lower 'base' power level is still easily detectable for me. It was the strong power levels of Trunks and Vegeta that induced Videl's vertigo. We shall cover the raising and lowering of ki intensity in the next chapter.

Because of their elevated intensity I am constantly attending to the ki signatures of friends and family subconsciously. I always noticed whenever my father left the planet, or can detect the moment Pan suppresses her power ready to try and sneak up on me (I won't know when she was planning to ambush me or from where, but I'll be as ready as I can)! There is very little privacy amongst advanced ki-users, sadly. The ability to track and be tracked, even when unintended, is a fact of life for us and one of well-argued downsides of publishing this book. Imagine knowing from six hundred miles away your little brother is sneaking off to the city at night... and not phoning your mother like you promised you would? Sorry Mom, I lied. We are all co-conspirators of the worst kind.

So far I have spoken only of ki. The last of the labelled ki signatures in particular necessitates now making a distinction between different types of ki. From points 1-8 (and mostly 9) I was speaking of a type of ki known as 'genki'. This is ki generated from the body alone. Genki is literally 'life energy' itself. So far I have only discussed ki as life energy, so what's different between genki and other types? Most Earth-based ki-users never progressed beyond using their own body's ki, their genki, to marginally bolster their strength, and ki-sensing isn't dependent on the amount of ki one has. Thus ki was genki and no distinction was ever made. Only the most advanced users were able to harness greater strength beyond what would make sense from that great law of physics, "conservation of energy". It's only as we progress to modern day and power-levels have grown considerably that a distinction between the ability to use one's genki and the ability to amplify one's genki was necessary. This amplification (truthfully conversion from genki into another form) is a skill to develop and a very important one to maintain.

Confusingly, my friends and family never traditionally had a specific name for this converted ki, using 'ki' for both types and referring to genki when context wasn't sufficient. It is only recently that, from a fortuitous combination of attempting to teach Pan and Bra in a structured manner, Goten, Trunks and Gotenks needing to record notes for themselves and this research that precise terminology even begun to appear. Now if a specific term is needed we use "banoki" or "field ki" for the extra energy that breaks the laws of physics. The properties of field ki and genki do differ, which I will explain, along with the choice of the word "ba/field", towards the end of the chapter.

The kids (or 'kids' - gosh, Bra is the youngest and twenty-four years old now) have their own language and I've borrowed nearly all of their terminology for this textbook. I claimed it was so I could keep abreast of how Pan is training her students to support her, though in reality it was so I could keep up with what in the name Pan was talking about. Joining the kids on sorties can leave you lagging as they work as a terrifying unit, throwing around jargon-filled updates and commands that leave you dizzy. The increased terminology, although less accessible, allows for subtle distinctions to be made between techniques and more nuanced discussion than I had growing up. I was fortunate enough that Videl was an extremely gifted martial artist before I taught her how to use ki, and even then I taught her all backwards (rather dangerously teaching her to fly first). Now Pan has shown she can train novices extremely efficiently. "It's all about the grammar and vocab," she sings to students on their first session as she passes out notebooks and pens, far from the mystical adventure they were expecting.

You may want to start taking notes, too. We're going to learn some science next.