3: Amplification and Physicality - "The Potential of Earthlings"
"All of us here used to be enemies - I hated Goku in the beginning, too. But when there was a common enemy, we started to team up because we had to… And before we knew it, we became friends…"
This chapter is dedicated to my Uncle Krillin; the strongest - and bravest - full Earthling I know.
For many years Earth has been regarded as a useless planet. Aliens have known of and visited us over the millennia, only treating our home as an outpost, a hiding place, or a place of exile; their scanners reporting the planet as unworthy of investment. Earth does not have a remarkable concentration of tritium or oil, and barely any katchin ore to speak of. There's no homogeneity in flora or fauna to make a large-scale farming project profitable, and our seasons swing to the point unprotected humans need to migrate to stay alive. Many civilisations thought it best to leave the chunk of slimy rock to the barely sentient creatures that called it home and move on to easier wins.
But they didn't truly hear what their scanners screamed, that clear message hidden in the woeful statistics on geology and organic chemistry. Earth does not have a worthwhile abundance of one particular resource because we have a modest abundance of everything. Earth's richness is in its diversity. Life on Earth is short-lived but hardier than elsewhere in the Universe because of the adaptability we require to cope.
The hostility of Earth's ever-shifting environments created evolutionary pressures on mind as well as body. The ability to innovate in fields like construction and medicine enhanced our survivability far faster than any generation-to-generation chain of genetic mutations could, and so our society has learnt to greatly prize the traits of inventiveness, lateral thinking and the ability to dream. Combined with our isolation from the Universe at large, Earth has developed a series of unique technologies; from Capsule Corporation's dyno capsules and time machine to the seemingly simple home comforts of boba and pizza. (In fact, Earthling cuisine is highly sought after. I hear ramen-runs are now made to Earth, with cups of dried noodles and flavour packets going for a fortune in the central galaxy's curiosity stores.) Where once our planet was dismissed as a bubble of primordial scum, our potential Universal standing is rising, and Earth is on the cusp of being welcomed to the Galactic Commonwealth.
More nefarious entrepreneurial minds have other ideas, however. Why trade when you can own outright? Earth would be unprofitable when scoured of human life, true, but what if that Earthling creativity could instead be subjugated and utilised? Further, an Earthling's power level is minuscule, making our planet perfectly conquerable by the type of 'real estate' teams previously led by Freeza. I and my Saiyan-blooded friends and family are noted as far stronger and willing to help, but we have no guarantee that our potency will pass to our descendants. I have thirty years left in me to aid in planetary defence, my daughter not much more than fifty. The sharks are circling.
But there is hope. Our first encounter with a Saiyan - on the same day my father and I found out our extraterrestrial heritage - also taught us a useful fact. Whilst able to both manipulate ki with intent and raise his genki somewhat, the Saiyan relied entirely on his scouter (his heads-up-display eyepiece) to find ki users. What's more, he judged his chances in a fight purely on our reported ki output at rest. He thought he was sure to defeat us. A terrified and briefly overpowered child headbutting his solar plexus taught him otherwise.
Whilst Saiyans were never renowned for their general knowledge, they do have impeccable intuition for battle. My Uncle Raditz believing he had the upper hand wasn't bravado but a fair assumption based on previous experience. As such, a competition of strength based purely on scouter readout was just as valid as a full-on brawl. When our own little band ventured out into the galaxy we found the same attitude - along with a reliance on technological augmentation or genki-boosting techniques like transformations. Most other species of human were unable to sense, amplify, or suppress their ki.
You see, the elemental diversity in the very rock we stand on and the climate we swim through is built into our peerless creativity. Earthlings may not have the most magic, the longest memories, the rawest strength or the greatest genki, but dear God have Earthlings learnt to overcome their natural shortcomings to literally punch above their weight. Never underestimate the value of being underestimated, I say, as time and time again a fall from hubris has been in our favour.
Knowledge of us is spreading now - whispers of the amplification technique have reached elite warriors and a multitude of planets are developing their own takes in dojo equivalents and (regretfully) military facilities around the galaxy. But it remains that Earthlings are currently the species with the greatest capacity to use field ki. Any chancing shark wishing to do you harm will still have to judge your strength on scant knowledge. They will be wary, fearing a sharp punt on the nose or even irreparable damage to their gills.
It is with this context firmly in mind we proceed to the third chapter where we cement the basics of genki amplification, field ki manipulation and appling ki to raw physicality - the techniques that form your unique planetary heritage.
3.1: Suppression
Warning - The following section contains exercises that could cause hypothermic-like symptoms, fainting, and with great incompetence, death. The reader proceeds at their own risk.
Prerequisite reading and exercises: 1.4 (on centring, posture and breath), 1.6 (on vibrations and oscillations), 2.1-2.3.
The technique of suppression is front and centre in this first section because I believe it to be of utmost importance. I hope many readers will want to take the skills I'm teaching into planetary defence, and with that hope comes a frustrating truth - most Earthlings will need a lifetime of dedication to reach the power levels needed to tackle the very strongest threats.
As of writing, the enemies we face rival the powers of Gods; in some cases they are Gods. Our strongest fighter cannot hold a candle to them, being fifty times weaker even at their maximum. I am over a thousand times out. Any tactical advantage we as a planet can bring to the fight needs to be seized upon, including knowing when to run and how to hide to live to fight another day. I hope to all that is sacred in the Universe that with dedication and technique development skilled indigenous Earthlings will reach those heights without off-planet assistance. But until you are ready, suppression, rather than amplification, should be your first thought.
Now that I've sufficiently terrified you with the truth of the situation we find ourselves in, let us begin.
Ki, if you recall, has two components: a ki particle acting as a vehicle and an (average) ki energy assigned to the particle. Suppressing your overall genki will require a reduction in both or one of those outputs. But the most fundamental processes in the body are not easily fooled. The centre knows the body needs a consistent level of ki to function and will therefore endeavour to assign a minimum level of genki to the particle, only dipping below that minimum as the centre depletes. Instead we must change the number of particles leaving the centre - the flow. The body resists change in this, too; those with the keenest memories will recall that the number of ki particles leaving the centre per unit area, the flux, is a constant (at least in my model). So whilst we can't stem the flow of ki easily, we have one more variable available to us - the surface area of the centre.
In reality your centre has no physical surface, being a point in your body from which ki emanates. How then, can we change properties of something that doesn't exist? The processes that govern ki are peculiar in that a ki-user's intention is understood and interpreted in good faith. The very act of picturing the centre as having attributes like a changing surface seems to map well onto whatever unknown law of the Universe governs ki particle flow.
Picturing the centre as a ball as we did way back in 1.4 will now pay dividends. If you can imagine squashing down the ball-like centre, you can reduce the hypothetical surface area, in turn triggering a reduction in flow and therefore ki overall. This does not come for free - from 1.8 we know that changes in ki output take effort, a mental strength and concentration which is not limitless. Despite the inherent difficulties, there is a helpful trick of the imagination we can use to see out the technique.
3.1.1 Folding the Centre
Sit comfortably, steady the breath, calm your mind and attend to your ki flow - a process that should be second nature by now. If not, I implore you to return to section 1.4 to save yourself wasted effort here. Now, picture a hollow ball, like a perfectly spherical balloon. Let the ball settle over your centre until they're aligned. Breathe and shift your body until your imagination is able to project that ball in a steady position, until your centre and the ball become one.
Then - and this is the neat trick - imagine twisting the ball in half, as you can a balloon. You'll be picturing two smaller balls sitting side by side (or one on top of the other). Finally, imagine one ball passing into the other and edges overlapping until you're left with the one ball. The number of ki particles you produce will drop in an instant.
Drop by what? Well, curiously, that depends on your imagery. A naive view would see creating two balls as a halving and so output would drop by a factor of two. A more mathematical treatment would show that the surface area of a ball will drop to a quarter when the radius is halved. Someone more vividly-minded picturing how the air in the balloon increases in pressure and stretches the skin when twisted may believe the value somewhere in between. You may have yet another completely different intuitive take, some more realistically correct than others, but remember it is your expectation and imagination creating the intention.
[ Figure 1 ]
[ groundbreakingsci-stuff dot com/post/625639212188876800/3point1#one ]
My point is, there will be a way to visualise this change in centre such that the image is simple to hold in your mind and simple enough to repeat. A repetitive halving (or quartering) is a simple concept to picture. A nuanced sliding scale of centre size is not. These easy-to-visualise states act akin to harmonics, the stable states we discussed in 1.8 and 1.6. With practice your centre will understand your intention and play along - with the caveat that it is ever-ready to pop back to a more natural state of rest.
If you are fortunate enough to be learning with a partner, they should be able to detect your drop in ki as a drop in auratic pressure, the ki in your aura fading as what remains is summoned back to your body to help keep you ticking. At a quarter to a half ki you probably won't feel any ill effects for a long while. If you're sensitive to the moods of others, maybe you'll find your ability to detect those changes a little stunted - given your aura has less energy available for that social contact - but otherwise you'll be safe.
Should you succeed in this fractioning, the first danger you will encounter is "snapback". In the case of ki, what goes down must come up, and the moment your concentration slips your centre will take the cue to relax and snap back to its original flow rate. The return is usually accompanied by an extra pulse to cleanse your body of foreign ki which can have unintended consequences. If you are performing a delicate technique with reduced ki, for example, the effort you're putting into finessing the fine intent will blow outward and overwork, sometimes obliterating your target. Startling someone is one way to induce these dangerous results; eliciting any strong emotion is another. At this early stage, where you don't quite have a handle on techniques, I recommend either working without your centre being manipulated or releasing every technique before relaxing your centre, lest you blind, burn, or otherwise maim yourself.
Even with this two-stage release there can be repercussions. Remember - genki keeps your body in step too, and would have compensated the best it could with the reduced flow. During release there will be a momentary overcompensation in your homeostatic functions because of this coping mechanism. Maybe your heart skips a beat, you flush in temperature, you experience a dizziness or a moment of nausea, all due to the overcorrection and subsequent swing to normality. Further, remember genki performs social functions, and thus your sensation of warmness or hostility towards others may spike when returning. Even those without trained ki-sense may detect this abrupt shift and become unsettled.
3.1.2 Folding to Infinity
When you can reliably hold the first reduction in flow, repeat the fractionation process. You'll need an increase in effort to do so, to the point you may feel like you're back at square one, but stick with the expectation and imagination processes. The second drop will soon lock into place. Once you're comfortable, repeat ad nauseum. Remember to also practice the release from each stage.
Two to four folds in your aura will deplete and your body will require more genki than it's being fed. Your body will register that you're not making the wisest choice and so the effort required to fold will skyrocket, just as if you were twisting a balloon and feeling that tense resistance grow.
Pan has told me that this is the point she sees even the most attuned students making a rookie error by holding their breath. Now - ki will leave the centre with you breathing or not, but as we know ki is encouraged away from the centre by forms of flow. By holding the breath, genki builds and stagnates inside that imaginary ball you've created and sneakily runs its functions, hoping to give you the impression that genki is not leaving your imagined centre as you willed. But don't be fooled! If you find yourself suddenly dizzy with others saying how red in the face you are, then you best take a breath.
Folding will fractionate genki until the drop in ki pressure each time will be difficult to discern. To remove that last detectable spark of life you will have to imagine your centre vanishing to nothing, and genki fading out with it. This is far easier said than to perform. At small enough sizes the degree of folding makes the tension the centre is under excruciating. That final vanishing will take a further burst of effort.
At this final collapse any lingering wisps of ki will be quickly expended by your ki-hungry body. You will become a void in the world and the background ki will flood in. The usual ripples your ki-signature generates on the ki-field will dissipate and your unique rhythm will be undetectable in ki-sense.
To push this exercise further look to perform this suppression during exercise and particularly while anxious, as this will be the physical and emotional state in which the ability becomes of paramount importance. Speed, then, is another aspect to work on. As the effort required to reduce your ki flow decreases, so will your need to invoke powerful imagery to achieve the same results.
To the outside observer, the extinguishing of ki is an instantaneous or staggered collapse in the world, those elicited memories making up someone's ki-signature popping away from thought. Even those who are not actively training their ki-sense will feel a lack of presence. For those who have read ki as a "sixth sense" for their entire lives, witnessing a living being without ki is anywhere from mind-boggling to outright disgusting. Pan describes the sight as a stomach-churning unease, like seeing a headless body somehow walking and talking, and is a feeling you never fully get over.
A note on absolute suppression
There is an added danger here: ki-starvation. Genki is required by the body to maintain allostasis. Going without will eventually force your body out of sync and allostatic processes will begin to break down. The body knows the seriousness of this predicament and so will reverse as many flows as possible, attempting to drag ki back to your vital organs. Blood will be lost from the extremities in this process which leads to a condition much like hypothermia. If you stubbornly continue to suppress despite the warning signs, blood will eventually be lost from the head too, leading to hypoxic symptoms such as reduced oxygenation of brain cells, confusion, and finally unconsciousness. At that point you will not have the awareness to control your genki and your flow will snap back, consciousness returning soon after. In almost all cases unconsciousness will occur long before the body begins to break down and so you may believe there is no keen danger here. But if the reason for your suppression was to hide, snapback could lead to your discovery and subsequent death.
In summary, those very first signs of ki starvation are similar to hypothermia and important to act upon.
The hierarchical symptoms of ki-starvation are -
- Paled skin
- Muscle weakness or stiffness
- Spontaneous to sustained shivering
- Slurred speech, mumbling or teeth chattering
- Impaired coordination
- Slowed breathing
- Confusion
- Drowsiness
- Weakened pulse
- Loss of consciousness
Unlike in true hypothermia, the symptoms of ki-starvation cannot be remedied by warming the body, although rubbing your hands together or applying layers so your body needs to cool itself by forcing blood to the extremities and skin again can alleviate symptoms for a time.
3.1.3 Tolerating Ki-Starvation
Building endurance to this uncomfortable state therefore is a worthwhile skill to develop. To practise, lower your ki to zero for minutes at a time and observe your body. Stop when the symptoms begin to manifest to a strength that keeps you from holding a conversation. Then leave practice of suppression for at least a day to enable your recovery. Eventually you will build your tolerance from minutes to hours. Two hours of suppression while running on a treadmill and upon release performing memorised kata forms part of the minimum requirements Pan insists upon for those looking towards Heroing and front-line planetary defence. This isn't an arbitrary choice of test. Many of our battles last less than two hours and we'll ask those with talent but lower power levels to lie in wait, ready to deal with threats tangential to the main adversaries.
Completing the technique of suppression needs one final puzzle piece. This element is such a guarded secret that we officially kept it from our own children, but in the interest of a full education I am now going to share the secret with you. If you are training your children - which despite me warning you to refrain from I am sure a significant fraction of adults are - you may want to keep this tip from them to preserve your own sanity.
During suppression the body is starved of the genki required to regulate normal function. In most situations however, there is a ready replacement available - the wandering auras of other life forms. We learnt in 2.5 how to pass and how this is a progression of a natural social ability. It is possible then to suppress your own genki and let your body absorb the genki of others. Your desperate body will enable pass and draw that much needed generic instruction from any scraps of friendly genki it can find.
Anyone searching for someone suppressing their genki should learn to look for those little eddies that indicate life and flow, but this time as a subtle depression in the background of ki as the ki is re-purposed. The ripples, though, are at least an order of magnitude fainter than a ki-signature would be and take time and patience to find. Using this searching technique is thankfully nigh-on impossible in the heat of battle, but worth-while when you need to find - and sneak up on - mischief makers.
And that's why we deliberately neglected to instruct our children fully for a number of years. Teaching Goten, Trunks, Marron, Papayaman, Pan and Bra how to suppress their ki was imperative - anyone looking for us to cause trouble would hone in on them and, as rambunctious as those kids in aggregate were and remain, they would not be able to handle themselves against some of the more dangerous threats in the Universe. But a child that can fully camouflage themselves in ki can also camouflage themselves against their parents too, and whilst we did not care to know exactly what they were doing at all hours (children do need their privacy after all), detecting kids attempting to sneak out was as simple as waiting for their vanishing ki and honing in on the child-shaped hole. Pan and Bra eventually pooled their knowledge and worked out the trick to letting in ambient ki ("turning see through", they said) at age 11 and ten respectively. Trunks and Goten, well…
Pink House (my home) in Satan City, January Age 797 with Trunks and Goten.
Trunks: I can't believe I'm admitting this on camera… Let's get the record straight - for those that quote this story back at me, anyway. I'm a man of Science, but from an early age I was convinced beyond all reason that my father had psychic powers. I mean, I did believe in magic and still do, I know magic users personally. But my father? I was an idiot.
Gohan: He's not the gifted type?
Trunks: You tell me, you've known him longer. As far as I know he wouldn't spot a spiritual awakening if it was doused in hoi sin, dancing naked on a table and spoiling for a fight.
Goten: I believed your theory for a long time, too. Only thing that made sense as a kid.
Trunks: Exactly. So, why? Well, we learned to hide our ki early. Dad taught both of us.
Gohan: I was surprised he was so keen to teach you suppression over more powerful moves. I should have known he wouldn't have been forthcoming with the full knowledge.
Trunks: Right. As soon as we'd mastered suppression at what - Four? Five? I barely remember learning - we thought we'd have the upper-hand against our parents, that we could escape whatever mess we'd made and no one could pin it on us.
Gohan: And that wasn't your experience.
Trunks: Ha, pretty much. Dad could still hunt me down, no matter where I ran off to. Didn't matter how sneaky I'd try to be, how careful I was slowly lowering and raising back my ki, he'd always catch me and throw me in the Gravity Chamber. It drove me crazy. One particularly bug-eyed afternoon I scanned my entire body thinking Mom had jabbed me with a tracker chip in my sleep. Goten refused to help look for the scar.
Goten: Yeah, because by then I'd grown out of it - figured it was a coincidence. But full credit to you, bro, you stuck to your loopy guns on the magic thing.
Trunks: And you're still not helping.
Gohan: How'd Vegeta let you down gently?
Trunks: So, not long after my 18th birthday, Dad noticed Bra had gone AWOL and dragged me along on the recovery mission, all to finally demonstrate what I'd been missing. That a small child - or anyone, really - who suppresses their ki carelessly leaves a person-shaped ki-hole in the world, unless they completely let background ki flow through them. It was so painfully obvious I can't believe we hadn't noticed. I was such an idiot. Dad laughed for a solid week. Thought it was the funniest joke he's ever told, and definitely the longest. I can't believe you all kept it from us, not knowing could have got us killed.
Gohan: Then armed with this potentially life-saving technique, what did you do?
Trunks: Used it against Bra at every opportunity, of course. It was great to be the magic one for a change, and we drove her and Pan just as crazy.
Goten: Sure, this is a sweet story of a man showing he has a sense of humour and all, but it doesn't explain Mom. Now she's a psychic. She says she can't sense ki, but when she's fuming she just knows, you know? She could track down your lifeless body from the other side of the world just to rail on you for having the nuts to die before you did the dishes.
3.1.4 Restricting Pass
To become part of the proverbial furniture you will need to switch off the reception of pass. Now, pass usually doesn't suck up ki as you mosey around - from loved-ones yes, but your body will want to ignore foreign ki for the most part to prevent any intra-body miscommunication. Usually there's work involved in learning how to receive ki. When you're low on energy, though, the body is less concerned with the risks of incorrect ki-signatures and will do what it can to stay alive. In this extreme you have to work to stop the process. Think of yourself as a transparency, an emptiness, a statue that does not require life force. Restricting pass is not rejecting ki. Rejecting with thoughts of mistrust, threat and alienness will set up a guard (which we shall cover soon) and make you a literal black hole against ki, the opposite of your intention. Instead let go and feel that ki pass you by. The hypothermic-like ki-starvation response will subtly worsen, which is another counter-intuitive sign that you are on the right track. Ideally, a partner in the form of a practised ki reader will ensure you are performing this part of the suppression correctly.
3.1.5 Amping Pass
Logically then you can do the complete opposite. Consciously increasing the level at which you're absorbing ambient ki will both continue to hide your ki-signature and extend the time you can remain suppressed. A scouter won't look for negative ki spots, and a ki-senser scanning long distances for your ki-signature will not be able to discern that tiny eddy, so in particular circumstances this modification to the technique is perfectly sensible. To perform, relax as when detecting ki and let the surrounding ki wash over you. Now smile. You won't need to do this every time, but a friendly face helps immensely when learning. You're attempting to welcome the ki around you, to let it understand that you're present and happy to be worked with. Should the ambient ki trust you as friendly enough it will take to your body's instruction. Using this foreign ki, particularly when using none of your own, is a dissociative sensation - you're connected to the world around you and yet feel like your body is not quite yours. You can grow accustomed to this with practice.
Suppression will always be the first nuanced technique I recommend students learn due to its life-saving potential. Although, as always, I hope you never find yourself in a situation where suppression is required.
In the next section we will be learning the second of the Earthling techniques, amplification - both in genki and field ki. These are techniques you will need to perform should your cover be blown, and are the techniques that form the backbone of the rest of the chapter.
A huge thank you to StarBoyGoku for beta-reading this piece. I'll keep saying this - you lifted the work crazy high!