1.9: The Ki-Field, Yuuki and Shouki
I could hypothetically perform every technique remaining in this textbook with genki alone. To illustrate - I can draw ki from around my centre and aura with my breath, coax the energy up through my head and arms and focus it into the palm of overlapping hands in front of my head - the exact flow timed to beats ingrained by breathing a word. I can utilise all the righteous anger and desperation I'm feeling to bolster the ki with the intent to push away and explode. Done. A fully realised 'Masenko'. Anyone could do that with all the fundamentals in place. With genki alone though, especially if you're new to ki manipulation, you'd be lucky to blow a breeze. What you need is to amplify your power. You need to touch the ki-field.
In some ways, the ki-field is similar to the electromagnetic field and spacetime itself, and in further ways different from both completely. All physical objects have constant connections to the electromagnetic field with light impinging on them and the interactions of atoms within the objects themselves mediated through photons, too. Anything with mass interacts gravitationally, warping spacetime through its mere existence. In that vein, all living beings have a connection to the ki-field - the centre drawing from the field and genki fading to it. One can't necessarily experience the ki-field in the way we experience the other fields that form our reality - ki itself acting as a mediator of thought, intention and energy rather than a force onto itself - so one may like to consider the ki-field another plane of existence instead. But the ki-field maps onto our own reality well enough that the connections between living beings and their effect on the field can become for all intents and purposes visible.
Ki naturally exists separated into particles and pure energy, the former acting as vessels or seeds for energy and the latter an unstructured soup. Ki is stable this way, happy (if one could attribute an emotion to a fundamental building block of the Universe, of course). The act of bringing these two together, parcellating ki into self contained-packages with signatures and programming an intent, is an act of ordering. Whilst the physics of ki greatly differs from the fundamental forces we currently fully (or at least, "fully") understand, the Universe is consistent in that it loathes order. Disorder, or entropy, is always increasing throughout the Universe as a whole. Constructing order reduces entropy in one particular sense (building a tower of books for example), but these upticks in order are always balanced by an increase in disorder elsewhere that always increases over time (the dissipated energy used to build that tower).
As disorder and entropy must always increase then, genki never persists. The information strung together in genki - the ki signature and intent, the thoughts that encompass us as a person and our sensations, emotions and will - will eventually break down in places. The thoughts stutter as the energy is dragged away from the particle and eventually everything fades back to the noise.
What if that unused ki energy could be recovered and transformed again? The following explanation in analogous terms makes sense to me, although I'm sure you'll invent your own visual shorthand in time.
Think of the ki energy as an ever-rising lake, the ki particles like an impenetrable layer of reeds floating on top, locking you away from the water below. You exist in a boat floating across the surface of this lake. You need ki, you need to drink. Yes, you have your own bottle of water and can use a hollow reed to act as a straw for the bottle, but what if you're still thirsty? You can't reach down into the lake passed the reeds with your hands, nor stick your face in and drink; the almost non-existent gaps between the reeds make this impossible. Luckily you already have a reed. Thread it through a gap, effectively tricking the reeds into letting you pass and you'll be able to take a sip that way. We may lose some bottled water in clumsiness, but the gain in water we can potentially make will be significant.
This combination of a lake of ki energy with unused ki particle reeds on top (or 'closer' to us forming a barrier of sorts, if we think in higher dimensions) form the ki-field. Our centres have contact with the surface at all times as it is scooping up those particles to assist in parcellation of the ki-energy we are creating, and we have a tenuous connection to the field as our ki breaks down and adds itself to that lake. Those two connections, one upwards and one downwards, allow us to find the field with our own mind and, as well as a few other neat tricks, help us perform the manipulation necessary to amplify our genki.
Using the genki we have already parcellated, we can punch through the barrier of ki-particles with our own. The field accepts the deception, then we can hold the genki down to gather more field-ki (or banoki) energy to itself before reeling ithe combination back again. Some genki is used to perform this as the action requires an intent to do so, and how successful you are depends on your experience and your state of mind (more on the latter in a moment), but through this technique we are in one sense amplifying the ki we have available to us.
Of all the manipulations of genki one can choose, amplification unlocks the greatest gain in energy and it will be essential to master should you wish to partake in seemingly impossible feats. Amplifying enough genki energy can take a push intent from blowing a breeze to cracking mountains. From subtle negative social cues to guarding against ballistics. From imperceptible signals telling your foot to cushion your next step to surviving hypersonic-to-zero slams into the ground. These enhancements of natural phenomena will be crucial to perform for your own safety and so it is imperative you learn to amplify genki as soon as we finish the basics, lest you exhaust yourself continuing your training.
There is a point I glossed over in the past and I do wonder whether you noticed. I have described how the aura is used in a social setting and therefore can be perceived and even used by other people. If someone is within auratic contact they are easily detectable. I also spent a substantial amount of time describing how ki appears at great distances. When I perceive the ki signatures of Namekians from a number of light years away then, am I in auratic contact? A back of the envelope calculation says "highly unlikely" - for any source of energy radiating equally in all directions, the energy intensity falls proportional to the inverse-square. Further, the energy signature degrades over time and so in reality the fall-off is faster than this. So the Namekian genki would have faded away long before reaching here, and even if the auratic genki was travelling at the speed of light (in truth, meandering far slower) the information would still take a number of years to reach Earth.
Why then I can detect events planet New Namek right now? Whilst the idea of a lake of ki is a visualisation aid, the analogy does extend a little further. Like a lake, disturbing the surface will create ripples. As energy fades back from the centre, detectable ripples are created in the ki-field. The physics of the ki-field behaves a little differently to the more tangible fieldsas the natural speed limit does not exist at this lower level. The field must have a size - as every point in space has a corresponding point for the concept of direction and distance to be understood when detecting these ripples - but information travels instantaneously across the ki-field. The specific ripples or vibrations life causes on the field are what we detect when using this long-range version of ki-sense.
The ripples are driven by the ordered information carried within the genki; if there was no information then there would be no ripple as the vibrations would be indistinguishable from the noise of the field. Usually we detect the ki signature, that one strong pattern of information embedded in every packet of genki. Occasionally, very strong intents or emotions can be felt too, especially if they are simple and the entire being of the person is focussed on that one thought. A related note: If one is used to regularly equating long-range ki-sense with someone's ki signature only, one can sometimes fall into the trap of forgetting the ki-field can carry other information, too. Thus when someone is behaving very differently - filled with rage, confidence, their entire mind is resolved, often when they have suddenly become a lot stronger and the vibrations follow suit - one can feel as though their ki-signature has changed, sometimes to the point the person isn't immediately identifiable.
Accessing the lake of ki does not come for free, although experience and a calm mind will lower the cost. Following your decaying ki down into the field costs genki. Gathering ki from the field to use costs time and therefore more genki. One can offhand think of this process as a literal amplification of genki yes, but in truth there is a subtle difference between mere amplification of power (say, with just increasing genki output from the centre) and the amplification from drawing a huge energy from the ki-field. Your ki is brought close to the field and effectively punches through to reach that underlying lake. From there the first part of genki is spent instructing the ki signature to spread out and thread itself through what it can, pulling the new ki back in, like a net. The longer one leaves genki in contact with field, the more ki one can gather. The efficiency at gathering ki increases with experience, but even the best ki-users will still take their time when necessary to use as much genki as they can, and to amplify as long as possible. Now there is a bundle of extra ki wrapped within that ki signature, ready to be transformed by the intent into whatever form is needed.
Unlike other ki boosting technique,s this new ki component is unordered, noisy, and without ki signature or intent itself. This leads to a problem - how does one get it to behave?
Genki has the ki signature and an initial intent (whether the full intent or a partially complete instruction that is designed to be added to) set at the centre surface. With pure genki, where the unordered energy reserve is small or non-existent compared to the intent, a chain reaction of instruction travels fast. Pure genki then is very responsive and the intent manipulation efficient. The opposite is true in the case of combinations of genki and field-ki. What little genki remains must control the rest of the ki. For all practical purposes, very complicated intents can be extremely difficult to control as the message in the intent to, say, use ki energy to change direction of a blast, propagates very slowly outward through the field-ki. Thus field-ki heavy attacks are relatively sluggish in response. More commonly, these attacks are imbued with simple, complete intents like a pure push, meaning only one instruction need travel through the ki and nothing more.
There are two ways to improve the responsiveness of the ki mix. The first is to convert less genki to field-ki so the ratio is more favourable. This is an immediate fix, although your technique will not be as strong as there is less ki available overall to convert to your chosen energy type. As the amplification provided from moving from genki to field-ki is so great, this can lead to a significant reduction in power. The other way is to thread genki very carefully through the ki. The ability to lace ki efficiently takes experience, involving repelling those constructed strands of genki away from each other to spread them out maximally - all in the mind's eye, of course. I'll explain how to do this correctly in a later section. With correctly threaded genki, intent can reach all parts of ki faster and the remaining genki can control the ki efficiently. That said, the most effective way to use your ki in battle changes moment to moment, technique to technique. It is not just a case of transforming all genki to field-ki and firing - enough genki must remain after conversion to allow ki to be instructed. With no genki left, the technique will fade away.
In practicality, converting genki to field ki in fluctuations can be a mess and so the amplification is continually performed at a default level, almost subconsciously in battle, and adjustments made from that point. The ki is then held a while in the aura before being reassigned an intent. To use ki to the best of your ability takes complex management and strategy. Pure brute force can only get you so far.
Forward planning then can tip the balance in your favour. One useful trick is to build in unexpected changes in situation. Timing a transformation or holding back a fraction of power to lull your opponent into a false sense of security can give you the upper-hand towards the end if your opponent has miscalculated and is nearly spent. The moment you commit to the final tussle though, usually a great clashing of ki, you are hoping with every fibre of your being your opponent has less in reserve than you. If planned correctly, you can surprise the enemy with your remaining strength and overwhelm both their attack and guard in one go.
Sometimes the twist that gives us the upper-hand may indeed come from us, but may not be a calculated one. At times we surprise ourselves. For example, even the most experienced of us will be scared in a dangerous fight. But, as I always told Goten and Pan, being fearless will not help you win; acknowledging danger is what will keep you alive, and fear is a primeval emotion and not easily suppressed. Instead being brave, having faith in yourself and hope that, despite the risks you can prevail will bolster you.
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Those are sweet and soothing words to use on children, yet taking them to heart has quantifiable effects. Fear manifests itself as physical symptoms that take their toll on the body. Trying to ignore fear outright takes effort, an internal non-stop argument with every new hazard we perceive. Having courage instead and accepting that fear as reality frees the mind of this debate and allows us to work on the constants; the physical symptoms of shaking hands, laboured breath and other fight-or-flight urges. The particular tussle between the mind and senses to recover effort spent suffering from fear is referred to as yuuki, or courage. Should we dwell on fear and therefore have poor yuuki, we lose the ability to access many of the higher levels of ki energy as we do not have enough mental capacity, or effort, available. Correctly managing fear and freeing up effort means you can access higher levels of genki energy to charge with. To the outside observer watching someone settle themselves, yuuki can appear as another pool of energy to draw from.
A second, complementary state of mind impacts our ability to draw energy from the field. Anything that can disrupt shouki - our sense of self-assuredness, our mind, will affect our ability to be stable enough to touch the ki-field and hold the genki there in place as it is amplified. Anything that will rattle or bait you - taunts, displays of power, threats to the lives of others and any other form of surprise, can trigger this destabilisation.
One may think shouki and yuuki are the same, but baiting an opponent to such a degree they lose their calm completely can have the desired effect without eliciting fear in them. Even an experienced ki-user losing their cool will have their power level knocked significantly in this fashion. A rattled opponent could attempt to draw on more genki to compensate and maintain their overall power level, but this will cause them to tire quicker. It is best to let attempted distractions roll over you and make good use of threats to channel helpful emotional responses instead. This way you will retain your shouki and therefore strength. Alternatively, you could practice your own battlefield trash talk to bring your opponent down to your level. As easy as this may seem, I do not recommend this course of action as a first port of call. You will have to be prepared to back up your threats for them to be effective, and I hope you wouldn't use the teachings in this book to harm the lives of the innocent or unwillingly coerced fighters. Believe me, I've met some wonderfully nasty people in my time and beyond taunting someone to get them to make the first move, I'd never dream of reaching the dizzying heights of awfulness needed to shake their shouki to the core.
I've spoken of how the field is accessible through genki and therefore sentience, implying the energy source remains untappable through other means. This isn't quite true. A way to access that energy is possible, and I know that due to two of our friends and one much-maligned scientist.
Now, I'm not one to disparage my colleagues at large without ample reason, and I'm sure many of them will agree when I present this simple truth: whilst scientists entertain the idea of making huge, paradigm-shifting discoveries, they don't much enjoy the possibility of their colleagues doing the same. For a gaggle of people who consider themselves forward-thinking and open-minded, in the academic world huge changes in establishment do not happen overnight. Sometimes the best ideas and inventions are routinely dismissed until championed by a leader in the field (I am in Professor Jukyou's debt here) or until they cannot be ignored any longer. Maybe the work is disparaged because the idea is outlandish, or maybe because the scientist with the original idea is not well-thought of.
In this case I'm speaking of Dr Gero, a scientist and talented engineer, and a contemporary of the founder of Capsule Corporation, Dr Brief. His wide expertise in robotics and other forms of electrical and bio-engineering were unparalleled at the time, though his propensity to exploit his inventions for the development of weaponry was not admired by the academic community. Or anyone for that matter come to think of it, beyond the other founding members of the Red Ribbon Army. Suffice to say, the terrorist group would have got nowhere without his efforts, their military might rivalling the King's Guard at one terrifying point in time.
Despite his arguably flawed method of gaining research funding he never believed what he was doing was actually wrong. Far from it, that his research and technological developments were for the greater benefit of the world at large and more people should join his cause. He continued to publish in fringe journals with questionable peer review processes hoping to garner attention and assistance (I guess I'm one to talk right now), but the scientific community shunned him, barely even glancing at the paper abstracts before throwing his work in the trash.
If they hadn't then maybe they would have spotted some elements of his research pertaining to ki. Some ki basics. How to absorb genki from others and change its intent with technology. How to permanently change a life form, even a fully sentient one, into one that bypasses the need for genki altogether, effectively creating an untiring being of unnaturally long life. How to combine and manipulate DNA to create a life, crucially adding in the ki component that had been missing from previous controversial creation experiments in more respectable journals.
Before you jump the gun let me reassure you. I'm not suggesting an individual's talent should outshine their behaviour, not in the slightest. No matter how important someone's work turns out to be, they should never be lauded unreservedly or even allowed to conduct research if their discoveries and practices fly in the face of ethics. There are many, many people out there who have reason to greatly dislike this man and the outcome of his research, both in his Red Ribbon days and beyond, and my family and friends are somewhere in that mix. But it would be dishonest of me to continue this book without at least a passing reference to his previous research and how that has greatly impacted the construction of this model of ki. I guess in a strange way, the posthumous Dr Gero has been both a rival and a collaborator to me now. My ten year old self would never have guessed.
One of Dr Gero's more successful experiments gave us, after a convoluted series of events, our friends the cyborgs Androids 17 and 18 ('Seventeen' and 'Eighteen' to us). Their name and description may seem mutually exclusive, androids being completely artificially created machines and cyborgs modified humans, but Seventeen and Eighteen are definitely the former - they were named the latter both in keeping with the pattern of Gero's previous experiments and we assume as a control measure to make Seventeen and Eighteen question whether they were ever once fully organic. We know they are twins and must have been kidnapped as older teens, augmented in a hope to make relentless agents of destruction, though the Seventeen and Eighteen we know didn't get much around to being controlled in that fashion. They aren't certain of their lives or real names before Dr Gero's influence, nor precisely sure of what he did, but if the total and invasive nature of the modifications made to them are anything to go by, that memory loss may have a silver lining.
To me, the extent and manner of their designed abilities are nothing short of terrifying. I am far too comfortable tracking people with their ki signature. Not just seriously in battle but anything from knowing who's home when I step through the door, to finding small children who toddle away to cause mischief when my back is briefly turned. Seventeen and Eighteen however have no ki signature to speak of. To my ki-sense they are completely invisible, and should they wish to they could catch me wide open.
From trial and error (and Dr Gero's published works) we've established that whilst they had a centre like all living things, its connection to the ki-field has been completely severed and is therefore for all intents and purposes non-existent. They have no way to produce genki. Instead, each cell works alone as a tiny centre, possessing software that maintains homeostasis for them. Even with that development they still require ki, as thought and emotion requires systemic support and influence the whole body. Instead, using a biorobotic technology that is able to mimic a ki particle pioneered by Dr Gero, they derive their entire ki pool from the ki-field completely freely, parcellated perfectly. They aren't limited by the trappings of biological evolution and so their augmentations allow them to write intent on this ki perfectly easily, but there is no idiosyncratic ki signature associated with it. Without a ki signature, Seventeen and Eighteen are impossible to hunt down. They aren't entirely blank to ki-sense; when nearby I can faintly pick up intent, and there's a component of thought and emotion embroiled within, but those patterns are orders of magnitude lower in strength than a ki signature. Plus, the siblings are very good at hiding flares in emotion to remain undetectable, coming across cold and impassive when not completely relaxed.
Not only that, but due to the artificial nature of gathering ki, they never run out of it, and because ki can be transformed to other forms of energy they are not limited by the need to eat, only hydrate. They do have a maximum power level, the amount of energy they can draw from the field per second, but both of them can and will train to push that limit higher. Combined with their lack of ki signature, their modifications makes them both formidable opponents.
I wouldn't worry about them though. Other than their blunt manner and sense of humour so dark and dry you're never quite sure if they're joking or threatening to murder you in your sleep, they can be very forthright yet warm people when you get to know them. Seventeen and most of his family study and maintain an otherwise off-limits Nature Reserve on an island within South City's jurisdiction (actually, I redact my previous statement: you should worry about Seventeen if you're a poacher). Eighteen lives in Satan City, happily married to my Uncle Krillin and is Marron's mother. Some World Martial Arts Tournament aficionados will have heard of Eighteen at least. She was the runner-up in the 25th, losing to Mr Satan in the one-off Battle Royale. Whilst Marron has inherited parts of her mother's dangerous temperament, she is fully organic and thus has a ki-signature formed from a combination of her parents' - in part what her mother's would have been at least. As expected then Marron has not inherited her mother's greatly extended youthful looks. Eighteen is mistaken for her daughter's sister, her younger sister now, more and more regularly; it is a hot-button issue whenever we meet, especially with youthful Saiyan friends around, too. Betting on the first time Marron will be mistaken for Eighteen's mother has been expressly forbidden by Marron should we "jynx it" and age her prematurely.
Speaking of betting, a question you may now be asking yourself: given my description of Eighteen and her abilities, how powerful must Mr Satan have been to have bested her at the 25th tournament? I have a feeling not many people who gambled at the tournament are going to like the answer and so I will not directly respond to it, though I believe the start of chapter 2 will provide sufficient explanation.
Before we move on to putting everything we've learnt from the first chapter into practice - from understanding the broad scope of ki, defining the centre and the construction of genki, through to the processes behind manipulating the centre's flow and charge and finally seemingly defying physics - please allow me one final indulgence. My PhD did involve some computational modelling, after all. As a demonstration I want to explain at a high level how the new ki-scouters, engineered by Bulma and Mai, both read power-levels and can produce individual profiles on ki-users to help us train. Yes, there is math, but don't be alarmed - the section is a completely optional read! Unless this textbook is forming part of the lecture series I'm envisioning of course, at which point there'll be supplementary derivations provided, I'm sure.