2.2 - Sensing Ki Externally
Warning! The following section contains exercises that may cause nausea, dizziness and vertigo, severe migraine-like aura, pain and even fainting. No exercise should be undertaken without explicit permission from a medical practitioner. The reader proceeds at their own risk.
Prerequisites: Exercises in 1.4, 2.1. Additionally material from throughout chapter 1 is referenced.
If there comes a point when working through this textbook you find the exercises too wild, too hard or beyond your interest, if you've pushed through the first exercise in this section before closing the book for good I will be content. Admitting I'd be happy with you learning just the basics won't sit well with my publisher, of course, but if the world's inhabitants were able to feel at least the ki of others close to them consciously and reliably, I truly (and possibly naïvely) believe we will be brought closer as a people. That ability to peer through the window into the inner lives of those around us is there ready to be tapped by you.
We shall now learn how to sense the ki of others.
In the last section (2.1) we covered autoception - the internal sense, and learnt to consciously read the messages moving throughout the body that keep us functioning as a single organism. Remember those messages are written as intents (a form of programming) on the genki released from our centre. Also recall that some genki leaves the body to form an aura (section 1.5). The aura reaches out to others near us to facilitate subconscious social interactions, like passing on reassurances or warnings of danger, helping to create a sense of a person's emotions and motives beyond what mere visual clues can provide. In effect, the messaging between auras supports the remarkable empathic abilities we possess as a social species.
For ki-sensers in auratic contact and feeling mutually open with others, picking up nuance in someone else's genki is natural - not just their strong ki-signature impacting on your ki-sense but some of their open, intended actions and the emotions they wear on their sleeves. As that closeness in feeling deepens, the reading ability can extend to abstract thoughts we wish to share. Taken to the extreme, auras will become inextricably intertwined and a ki-senser's genki ignores some of its own checks and balances with friendly genki, treating another person very much an extension of the self. We can in effect pass exteroceptive sensation like touch, proprioception, even vision to others when we are lost in them. This is beyond the mere heartbeat and breath synchronisation between two partners. In short - for those who can perfect the ability, ki-sense at its height and pushed to its limits can enable a telepathic closeness no other ability can.
Though the above heavy nuances are only possible to detect in auratic contact, remember the centre is forever in contact with the ki-field, drawing up particles energy from it (1.7, 1.9). That interaction is not without consequence. The interaction disturbs and vibrates the 'surface' of the field, and that vibration - propagating outwards instantaneously, as reactions down there are wont to do - can be detected by others whose attention is in tune with the surface. A practised enough ki-senser can hypothetically read a ki-signature coloured by their most major intents from the other side of the Universe.
I hope you can understand why then I believe this ability is such a world-alterer. Having the coveted ability to fly, an ability I'm sure in part attracted you in part to this book, allows us to see the world below from a different perspective. Having the ability to read another's ki enables us to see from all perspectives.
Those giddy prospects are unfortunately a ways off for a novice. Getting to grips with the world closest to us will do for now. We shall discuss the differences between the two types of sensing in this section through a series of exercises increasing in difficulty. Whilst complete mastery of each exercise is not required before moving on, please try for a hint of success first - for the impatient I will indicate when you can start trying the next. You must also be at least proficient at autoceptive insight (2.1.1) and discernment abilities (2.1.2 and 2.1.3) before trying these exercises. Without those skills enabling you to identify your own genki's noise reliably, your attempts will be a messy, uphill struggle. Lastly, these are basic exercises that like autoception I recommend you revisit often to ensure your proficiency in connecting to your ki, the ki of others and the ki-field.
Choosing a target
Before we start outright, I want to discuss the set up needed for this exercise - some of which may seem obvious to you but from experience won't be to everyone - and what you can expect.
The easiest way to begin to sense ki is to be in auratic contact with someone. Ideally they will be a willing and patient participant in your studies, a person who will move around the room at your command, and are happy for you to slink away to pastures unknown whilst they remain in a tight location for what could be an hour or more.
However, I am aware many of you will be working alone or in secret. This is fine and the same exercises can be performed, you will just have to adhere to an unsuspecting someone's timetable.
Your helper (or target) must be someone known to you and at least neutral to friendly with you. The more familiar you are with them and their presence, particularly in terms of emotional closeness, the easier this will be. A partner, family member you genuinely like or a friend would be perfect, though a pleasant enough neighbour will suffice. This person should either be in the next room (within your home or an adjacent neighbour's) at a distance of three to five metres. This separation is just enough for two median-average Earthling auras to barely overlap. Remember, genki without an intent to interact with the physical world will not be hindered by something as trivial as a wall - however vision and sound is blocked by those, two cues you may use to subconsciously cheat.
Note: whilst we do love our pets and they particularly love us, this exercise will be orders of magnitudes easier to only practice on humans to begin with. Any kind of human will be perfect - using someone from the anthropoidal, teratoidal, zoomorphic or even (part-)alien subgroups won't help or hinder you.
Ensure for the first exercise at least that your target is the closest person to you to allow their ki-signature to dominate your senses. In most contexts and environments this is a fair assumption to make and will be the assumption we will make to help isolate another's genki from our own. I emphasize here the word most. If you are attempting this exercise at the back of one of my lectures: one, please don't - as boring as I or the material can get I am trying to impart on you important knowledge so I would be grateful for your attention and two, even in the expansive Miguel Hall at UoSC, the brightest ki-signature you'll be picking up won't be the object of your affection five rows in front, but me. Hello!
Where and how will I 'see' ki?
This is an interesting question and the precise answer will rely on your level of experience, your brain's plasticity (ability to adapt) and some individual quirks, and this will change over time.
For most of you this will be a brand new conscious experience and will be bizarre to say the least. Thankfully there are analogous situations with other senses that can elucidate. Sometimes individuals without much visual experience - say, are born with or develop cataracts very early - can have medical interventions to restore, greatly enhance or outright give sight. Equivalent interventions like cochlear implants can do the same for those born without hearing to provide some semblance of sound.
When the processing for these senses is suddenly required due to a new type of information appearing in the brain, the brain's underdeveloped architecture in these regions warps the perception of the information. To explain - we don't just experience the raw input we take in (see section 1.6 on colour processing). For those with all their senses intact, the world the brain shows us has already been neatly divided into individual shapes and sounds, distances, colours, names, etc. Many of us take the ability to match the sound of a human voice to a human face for granted - but for those who are gaining these senses, the brain just does not have the previous experience to marry the two and the world is extremely confusing. Someone who has gained sight can easily tell the difference between a cube and a ball through touch, but would struggle to find the cube when looking at the objects. Someone who is experiencing sound for the first time can be overcome with a sense of pain as the sensory information becomes overwhelming.
Processing and gaining a conscious sense of ki then, when there is no or a very rudimentary architecture in the brain to do so, can cause a similar confusion until the brain prunes and grows more connections between regions. As I've delved into before (sections 1,2, 1.6), for those coming to ki-sense later in life the mind will process the information as a mix of exteroceptive sensation and thought. For those young enough (or with a greater brain plasticity) an entirely different sense will eventually develop; although when trying to describe what they're sensing these individuals will default to using the other senses and complex analogy, too.
Often the words "see" or "feel" (in an emotive sense) are used to describe sensing ki, though the choice of language is ultimately up to you. Saying you can perceive a touch on (rather than from) the other side of the room sounds odd, but when sensing ki all bets are off. As sources of ki can be isolated in space much like vision can isolate objects (i.e. with a position and depth) ki-sense is sometimes considered a form of second sight, although not encumbered by the normal restrictions of vision. The accuracy of our visual depth perception is governed by the distance between our eyes, but for ki-sense only experience and ongoing practice draws the line. Further, our vision is limited to taking in the world in front of us with forward-facing eyes and is a defining feature of all subgroups of Earthling humans. The idea of seeing out the back of our heads in absurd - there is not black in our vision but literally nothing. In fact, if you try and imagine the scene behind you (I'll wait…) your first instinct may be to picture what the world would look like if you turned your head, rather than imagining the world around you as an unbroken whole. With ki-sense however, behind you is going to light up just as well as the front.
We don't just have one "layer" of perception, either. There are many "locations" within your perception that ki can be sensed. Usually the first place your sense develops is within the mind's eye, your internal world, before moving to the external world.
As a one-off experiment, keep your eyes open and switch your attention into your headspace, your mind's eye. Often you'll find idle memories bubbling up from your subconscious or you'll have an earworm - one of those incessant songs stuck in your head. Now, imagine a cat in this space. Recall the cat as vividly as you can - its sound, its movement in a familiar environment. The cat exists in a space separate from the world your eyes are processing and, although you are imagining the cat in the same space as those earworms and memories, this conscious effort is easy to separate, as if they are on different layers of the mind. Your imagination is "closer" to you, those other thoughts triggered in other ways are more "distant" from you.
[ Figure 1 ]
[ groundbreakingsci-stuff dot com/post/170956049752/2point2#one ]
Now imagine the same cat but in the world around you. No matter how well you can project the image of the cat running along a wall beside you is, you know the projection to be separate from the world you are truly seeing. This imagined cat is again closer to you than the external world. For those individuals with synaesthesia you will know that the synaesthetic responses are very close to those automatic thoughts (if internal) or very close to your perception (if projected). That is the same with ki-sense - ki-sense is extremely close to those automatic thoughts and the external world (behind even the synaesthetic response), and far from your imagination. The difference between imagining sensing ki and actually sensing ki is pretty much as strong as imagining seeing a cat and genuinely seeing one. You won't mistake the two.
(As a curious side note, not everyone will be able to do all of the above; around 2% of the population do not have a mind's eye, known as aphantasia. Being aphantastic will not hinder your progress in sensing ki; although you may not directly "see" ki in the mind's eye, your gut reaction will remain.)
No matter where ki appears in the internal or external representation of the world around you, there are some constants. The ability to localise sources of ki-signatures, your "acuity", will come first before your depth perception and the representation will broadly mimic (though not limited to the visual) the image of the world I painted in section 1.2. Further, whilst you can go to great lengths to describe the ki-signatures of everyone you meet, you will not be able to get an explicable handle on your own ki-signature straight away - save a sense of uncanny familiarity. As our own ki forms a background to our lives, our ki-signature becomes the 'default', much in the same way we believe ourselves and those in the local area to be the only people in the world without an accent (whilst buried deep under my tutoring, I hear my Paozu accent surfaces at times). Though, unlike an insubtractable accent, you will eventually learn to suppress your ki and thus sense the world with and without it to gauge the difference your ki causes. As a consequence of our own ki interfering, we do not have a completely objective sense of the ki of others; I can discuss the feel of someone's ki-signature with friends and family, but there are subtle differences in how bright or colourful they present. The image below I was hoping would illustrate this, but not everyone took the task quite so seriously.
[ Figure 2 ]
[ groundbreakingsci-stuff dot com/post/170956049752/2point2#two ]
I dreamt up this game well before starting research proper for Groundbreaking Science, some time in Age 785. The idea was for friends and family to choose the best way to represent the ki-signatures of people they know. Indeed, not everyone has an overwhelmingly strong visual sense and that is expressed above. Whilst I was hoping the image could display the similarities between parents and children and the possible variations in perception, a lack of participation (Trunks), collusion (Pan and Dad) and very probable delegation (Vegeta to I suspect Bra, with him at least having creative direction on two of images) have made that harder to see. Still, I hope you can appreciate how difficult working with these test subjects has been over the years.
You will find some beats of the ki-signature reliably correspond to intent, moods and indeed personality. Those threads have been put to bizarrely good use by my brother Goten who, if there is indeed an official playbook for ki-use I'm not privy too, has I'm sure invented most of the irreverent uses. As a case in point Goten found the perfect way to make an impression - at first tailoring cocktails at college parties, then later creating bespoke sweets and hot drinks to match individuals, for many the best treats they'd had by far. Now his entire business revolves around his knack for "taste profiling" in just ten questions. The interrogation begins with reasonable, standard questions like "bitter or sweet?" and winds its way up to "I take you to a random place blindfolded. For ten million zeni, would you jump backwards?", changing completely for each person. His secret? The questions are all for the crowd's entertainment, more a patter to give him time to throw something tasty together. Instead he relies on reading ki-signatures (plus the hefty experience of trial and error used to develop his mental look-up table) to provide the ingredients list. Competitors have tried and failed to mimic his trick over the years, feverishly listening in on every profiling session customers willingly pay extra for and leaving frustrated, finding no pattern to the questions and results. Well, now I guess they can start to catch up. He could use the competition.
Exercise 2.2.1: Within Auratic Contact
Now you know exactly where and what to "look" for, let's begin.
Please sit in a comfortable position (cross-legged, seiza, seated), centre yourself and calm your breath. At first access your own bodily sensations and use that to monitor your own genki's flow for a time. In particular, pick out your breath and heart rhythm. Again how this manifests in your mind or projected in the world will differ - some will feel a physical rhythm, others a visual flash or a sound, a combination, and others an isolated emotion. Cruciall your own genki should feel normal to you, neutral in tone. You can feel your genki's presence and its intent but it is otherwise clear, like how water has a weight and resistance but is otherwise without colour.
When you are comfortable in that sensation, open your ears to other beats. Listen not within now, but without, shifting your attention towards where you know your test subject is - somewhat of a cheat to start with, yes, but there's no reason to make the work unduly difficult just yet. The temptation will be to reach with your own genki like our auras do when wanting to find or longing for someone, and whilst that will bring your own genki closer to theirs and so help telephone back their ki-signature, reaching is not a habit to fall into if you want to progress to sensing disturbances in the field. Wait, be patient, do not strain to reach.
As your attention is turned your skin may prickle and tickle, a tinnitus may be induced, a sensation of pressure on the mind itself may manifest. Your own thoughts of the person will be triggered in recognition as expected, the same thoughts and images that surface when you hear their voice from a distance. Seemingly unrelated memories or imagery, or smells and tastes and sounds may trigger within your own headspace, though on a separate layer of perception from that ongoing pop-song you've been unable to shake for the past three weeks. If you break from this direction of attention the sensation should leave (and the earworm sadly continue).
That cacophony of sensation is a ki-signature.
How will you know if the ki you are sensing is that of your target's? This does not sound like much of an answer but the sensation will literally feel correct. This is why we were working on our autoceptive discernment in the previous section. The good and bad feelings we have in our gut can be accurate if we train them to be, and that gut feeling will tell you whether you're picking up the person you expect. If in your over-enthusiasm to learn how to fly you've skipped autoceptive training, then your gut feeling will be all over the place and therefore useless. Sorry! Back you go.
After you're sure you're able to find someone within auratic contact, it will be time to train your sense of direction.
Turn your attention away now, perhaps in the opposite direction to your target. Early in your study the sensation of a ki-signature should fade across the entirety of your perception like an enveloping pulse, with no directional information. This means you can use the changing sensation to play a game of hot and cold, brute-force finding where someone is. With increased experience that sensation will immediately resolve itself into a gradient across you then slowly focus down until you are able to resolve their shape in your mind's eye. This is the sensory equivalent of slowly moving from mono to stereo, then to surround sound. Again, keep practising and the sensation will begin to overlap on the world around you too, growing in acuity until you can resolve the filaments of flow in others to the same level as your own genki.
[ Figure 3 ]
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Whilst you can also (necessarily) read your own intents, you will need a high degree of closeness - effectively a permission from the other person - to read someone else's to a nuanced level, and even then it will never be a perfect read. Pure, long distance and exact telepathy is reserved for those with magic. Never fear though, the gist of meaning can easily be sent between the auras of nearby friends through strong emotions or a coded message of imagery.
Consequences of over exertion
Be cautious in your practice, however. Zealousness in the early days can lead to a tiring of the brain and your ki. This will not manifest as mere exhaustion. You'll first experience warning flashes of intensity lasting a split-second. These zaps can feel like breakthroughs in your practice and may encourage you to push further but that is a misinterpretation - your progress should be slow in ramping. Instead, this is a faltering of your brain and genki's ability to modulate the new sensations relative to the sensations you're used to processing. Ignore these warning signs and your mediocre ability to sense ki will slam in the other direction, creating an overstimulation, a sudden hallucinogenic-like experience. Ki will become indistinguishable from other exteroceptive sensation, your brain's interpretation moving to that furthest layer of perception. In other words, you will see and hear, taste, smell, and feel the ki around you with the same immediacy and clarity as the solid world.
Does this sound like the perfect way to hack your way to mastery to you? It shouldn't, not when "blinding" all your senses in its strength. And unlike having a bright light shone in your eyes or a foghorn blaring, squeezing your eyes shut or tightly covering your ears will not make the sensation stop. The effective seizure may last only a few very long seconds, or it may persist for minutes at a time. The over stimulation will cause you to reflexively vomit, scream in imagined but very real-feeling pain from your eyes and ears, and feel like you're tumbling down a hill whilst being simultaneously exploded and crushed alive from all directions. Thankfully, you'll pass out pretty quickly.
Don't ignore those first strange zaps.
The risk is only in the first few weeks until new connections are made in your brain to process ki information properly. Until then however, be careful.
Exercise 2.2.2: Exploring the Ki-Field
Before attempting this exercise you should at least be able to sense a gradient of correctness across yourself when sensing a particular person's ki-signature - in other words, your ki-sense should at least effectively be in stereo. If you're still working in mono, you're about to get lost. Quite literally.
Reading the ki-signature of a ki you're practically enveloped in is one thing. But being able to find that ki-signature again when there's a block, a city, a vast mountain range or even an entire planet between you is a different skill entirely. You need to be able to read the ki-field, that membrane all centres and therefore ki interacts with (1.9). Now, rather than being in the room over, you need to put a fair amount of distance between you and your target. This could mean you moving to a bench nearby or an empty café, though ideally somewhere others won't be in auratic contact with you at first like a park (if available). That, and so people won't be stopping every five minutes because you're inadvertently pulling a strange face in concentration(!).
To begin, look for genki in general, your own and the ambient genki around you. Picture the genki fading away, those wisps depleting like steam from dumplings or coffee, energy and particle uncoupling to return to that lake of tappable energy. As part of its uncoupling, the intent within unravels - thought and ki-signature alike - losing voice and identity. Now imagine this separation affecting you, peeling yourself away from the surface of your own identity to become closer to the wider world around yourself, akin to those moments of sheer awe one can experience when in connection to the wilderness or the city rushing past you. Let the feeling take you and let yourself fall into that rush towards the ki-field, that expanse of lake, until you feel a sharp tug back. That tug is literally your life. The line acts as a life-preserver of genki threaded around your centre preventing you from completely losing yourself to the oblivion below. Do not worry that the tether will break accidentally. Though severing this line is possible to do, to do so would take an extremely deliberate act by a master of ki manipulation.
Getting close enough to the field to 'touch nose' to it (metaphorically speaking) isn't necessary to read the currents and ripples of ki-signatures - though being able to get that close without fear of permanent loss of self will help you when we move to amplification of genki and the theory behind techniques such as 'instant transmission'.
Once immersed, the quiet few ki-signatures you can possibly feel around you will multiply in volume. The world, the Universe even, will be yours to grapple with. Most will be a sheet of static to you, some buzzes louder and more unfamiliar than others and at first you won't know if the intensity is due to their power or distance. To begin with, let the ripples of ki-signature wash over you. Like hearing an orchestral piece for the first time and struggling to pick out the french horn or tuba, the noises will eventually resolve themselves into individual signatures. You can then begin to pick out separate threads of ki to compare what you feel with your memory of the target.
At this point your target will only be in some vague direction and have an intensity to you, and will feel much fainter than before to boot. The ki-signature will slip from your grasp often, but as you practice you will be able to hold tight and study, even from a distance. Shifting attention to deliberately drop and find the signature again is a good exercise to increase your confidence.
Exercise 2.2.3: Homing Beacon
When you are able to reliably find your target, start winding back the sense of immersion in the field. This is most easily achieved by paying attention to the physical world around you. When the signature slips from your grasp go back down to find it again. At some point you'll be able to hold that thread reliably (with minimal attention on the field) whilst engaging eyes open with the world around you, then eventually when standing and walking. At this point you will be ready to find your way home. Using the vague sense of direction you've gained with the ki-signature, aim yourself towards the source. With every stride the intensity of the ki-signature will increase (if imperceptably at first) until you bump into the source.
Technically, you can perform this task with your eyes closed, though I wouldn't recommend navigating anything but a very flat and empty expanse without vision to guide you - remember genki is not by default hindered by physical objects .so your ki sense is not naturally likely to prevent you from tripping (unless you have deliberately set your genki to search for obstacles, but that's a discussion for another time).
If you have a very willing participant, you can ask them to hide in the city or woods and see if you can hunt them down. Don't get too ahead of yourself - wherever you go to do this, make sure you're able to safely return home without using ki-sense, too!
Exercise 2.2.4: Multiple Targets
This last exercise will stimulate the development of your depth perception, and is best started when your acuity is such you can pinpoint the direction of your target's ki - faint though it may be against the background - at the distance of a few kilometres.
Learn a few more ki targets; three or four total is a good number. Again, the closer the person is to you emotionally the better, but in this case you need the individuals far apart - so friends, family across town or work colleagues would be ideal. Get some distance again and double-check you can find these individuals.
Then pick any direction and start moving. Public transport would be ideal as you won't have to concentrate on driving but I understand not everyone has access or the means to ride trains and buses all day. Walking will do, although changing your position relative to others is the goal and doing that quickly with motorised (or vapourised) transport will help your sense develop faster.
However you travel, both the position and intensity of your targets' ki-signatures will change. Some will be growing then fading as you go past their home, others will remain the same intensity but change in position as you inadvertently circle them. As these signatures circle and wax and wane, your mind will begin to map where they are in space, and eventually - pop! - you will be able to 'look' in their direction and 'see' exactly where they are. Depth perception will appear first for 'important' ki-signatures like your targets and then signatures you care about, before settling across all, finally forming a 3D coherent image with a noisy, truly distant background you aren't yet able to resolve.
Of course, we all have our limitations and that is due in part to the faintness of the ki-signature. As mentioned in section 1.2, Videl learnt the sense of distance the jarring way - by knowing the ki-signatures of powerful people on the other side of the globe. She learnt what 12,000km felt like as though looking over a cliff face at it and it made her ill. In that regard I do not recommend learning ki-sense by choosing a local hotshot as your target, less they change city for a day and you're left quaking in your boots as the distance resolves itself! Still, you may at some point experience some vague vertigo as you sense us training or entire cities on the other side of the world. It will pass, but daily life may be extremely difficult for a few days. Sorry about that.
If you keep this practice up, dropping into the field or sensing aura will be simple enough and you'll always have a part of your mind on it, like a fishing line trawling behind you. This is a useful skill as any big disturbances in the field will draw your attention, and your aura will keep a weather eye out for people sneaking up on you, much like hearing an alarm. Your 'sixth sense' can and will unnerve anyone not in a similar situation to yourself however, so try not to vocalise your observations too often. People still like to knock on doors to announce themselves even if you both know they know you know they're outside. Maintaining the pretence of privacy is of great comfort even amongst ki-users.
I can't promise you will master ki-sense over the course of a few weeks. The sense will take years to perfect, but ideally your acuity when in auratic contact will develop over the course of the next few sections, and you will be able to access the ki-field by the time we begin amplifying genki. Wishing to master the exercises in this section before moving on is a noble goal for sure, however in this case I believe you are more than capable of moving on to the exercises in the next section if you are able to sense a vague directional component of ki whilst in auratic contact.
I'm excited at the prospect of the world at large learning ki sense. Not just to bring us closer together as a planet but for the immense power the sense adds to daily life. The first benefit I can bring to mind is for medicine. There's a reason some older medical techniques discuss flow of ki in the body - practitioners of these arts use a different paradigm than my own, though they are not incorrect per se. Disruption in flow, pain, a concentration of buzzing genki around a problem area can all stick out like a literal sore thumb to the most skilled practitioners. Ki can also in part be used to heal, a form of externally-induced transformation. However, healing is a combination of ki-use and magic I am not experienced in and so the technique will not be covered by myself in great depth.
One further, frivolous use of ki-sense I've always found handy is never, ever making the mistake of asking a heavier person if they are pregnant. To be clear, this not a conversation topic anyone should dare to broach first - but in those rare, unavoidable situations you find yourself needing to make a judgement call, being able to sense the child could save you the social faux pas.
To expand for clarity, every living creature with a centre has a ki-signature. That includes bacteria, plants (great forests of the same organism can have multiple apparent centres though they stem from one and the same, see the "multiform technique") up to multicellular organisms with their own coherent drive to survive like animals and humans. This means children before birth, whilst connected to the parent to survive, will have their own centre and therefore genki helping to direct growth as soon as they begin to develop. Although this ki-signature is extremely difficult to detect early on - the uterus lying in roughly the same position as the parent's centre - the differentiation becomes far easier when the heart cells start beating and the flow of genki begins proper in the tiny growing embryo, somewhere after the third week from conception. Hormonal pregnancy tests are still by far and large the more reliably test, then! Although in one case, the pregnancy was noted far earlier.
Age 798: Marron with her parents Krillin and Eighteen at the family home in Satan City.
Krillin: It was a beautiful day. Sun was shining, waves lapping up the beach, Turtle humming, breeze rustling the palms–
Marron: Dad…
Krillin: –Hold on I'm getting there - fine sand warm against your tootsies, and Eighteen punching me in the face. All in all, a pretty standard day for the island.
Marron: He means they were sparring.
Eighteen: I wouldn't punch him without his consent.
Krillin: Oh really? I'm sure that happened once or twice…
Eighteen: Tit-for-tat. Embarrassing me in public is tantamount consent.
Krillin: Well if kissing you to show my love to the world is a crime then I'm guilty as–
Marron: Can we return to me, please?
Krillin: Keep your pants on! The only not-normal thing about the day was me having the upper-hand for once. Eighteen couldn't land a hit. After we recovered from the shock (that I'll admit damaged my pride that we should be so shocked) I worked out it was because I sense her. Which should be impossible - she had no ki-signature before.
Eighteen: We guessed that b*****d's work was undoing itself. I even felt the need to eat.
Krillin: I cooked for you to celebrate!
Eighteen: That first mouthful was the sweetest food I'd ever eaten.
Krillin: And then we continued with our lives, watching Eighteen's ki grow back every day. But before the month was out my Master - who we were staying with at the time - suggested Eighteen may be growing in - let's just say… two particularly symmetric places and there might be another explanation?
Marron: Trust him to notice.
Eighteen: By that point you had a heartbeat we could track, Marron. I learnt to sense ki that way. Yours was the only one I could sense for a long time because I'd spent months listening to it.
Marron: I didn't know you guys first thought the cybernetics were deactivating. Were you disappointed?
Krillin: Never.
Eighteen: No. I got you and kept the strength to protect you from harm. What more could a mother want?
You may infer that in the case of part-Saiyans, with their larger base genki, the child would be noticed faster and quickly outshine an Earthling parent. A reasonable extrapolation from what we have covered so far, but that is not quite true. A Saiyan child remains worryingly tiny in size for many months - developing instead in complexity and only exploding in size, genki and therefore nutritional need in the last two months. This is, I believe, to keep the parent unencumbered for fighting for as long as possible. For the last few weeks, whilst the child's hormones assist the parent in feeling the need to eat far more than usual, an Earthling digestive system (even slightly modified by the child's stem cells) struggles to cope and therefore this stage is a little more uncomfortable than a Saiyan parent would find it. The saying "eating for two" is particularly literal in this case!
Even given this, those carrying Saiyan pregnancies have a lot more energy and are far stronger than usual in those last few weeks in particular, especially if they are able to utilise the genki given to them by the child. The child is a little more boisterous during development, however the pregnancy and birth is easy (or easier, I should stress, before I am hunted down) and is an evolutionary advantage to encourage Saiyans to have more little soldiers, I'm sure. The excessive number of stem cells leaked back from the child to parent even speeds up recovery time and fixes current ills. I'm told there's not even stretch marks - though I'm sure we all would have been worth the hassle with or without. Videl assures me Pan definitely was.
Tangents aside my point is, ki-sense is not just about finding people or homing in on the next dangerous being to land planet-side. It's about connections, helping us empathise with others and for us to see our place in the world around us as one web, to understand the subtleties of life in all its forms.
So you see, if everyone could enhance their lives with this skill and see their fellow human as such, I'd be a very happy man.
Now you can sense your own ki and others', the next section will cover consciously drawing on and moving genki in and outside your own body at will, and the importance of both breath and words in doing so. Be warned - one of the exercises in particular could terrify you. Start summoning that courage - you may need it to see it through.