Ch. 151: True Spirit Control

"How am I supposed to live off of... this?" Goku asked himself, scratching his head. In front of him was a small protrusion in the ground. He'd planted the seeds the night before, expecting them to be the fast-growing type, but he'd ended up sorely mistaken. 

"Looks like you're not a very fast learner, huh?" Raika suddenly appeared beside Goku. 

"Stop, Doing that!" Goku couldn't help but shout. He still wasn't used to Raika just appearing out of nowhere like that with no warning. If he could sense him coming up, Goku wouldn't have been startled, but Goku was used to being able to sense people, and he couldn't do that with Raika's instantaneous movement.

"Always stay on guard." Raika shrugged, "I flipped out the first time someone did it to me, too, you know."

"Your master taught you how to do that?" Goku asked.

In response, Raika snorted. "No, but I suppose I should tell you the story. I was actually doing exactly what I'm trying to train you to do..." He began the story of a young Yardratian named Raika.

...

Raika had been born to a martial artist family on ancient Yardrat, such a long time ago that even he didn't quite remember the time frame. Around the time of his birth, his parents had both ended up dying, forcing his elderly grandfather to raise him alone. As a result, he'd grown up extremely poor. As a child, he'd developed an intense fixation of martial arts, as he learned from his grandfather's failing dojo. eventually, he'd begun to learn about his chi, and how to manipulate it. 

As a young adult, Raika had become absolutely fixated in chi control. Though his Yardratian biology made him naturally physically weak, he quickly learned that he had a gift for it.

Eventually, his grandfather died, and Raika was forced to take up his place as head of the failing dojo. Unfortunately, nothing that he did worked, and he soon found himself so dirt poor that he couldn't even pay for food, so he decided to use his skills at chi control to alter the growth of Dewberry plants, to make them grow faster and bigger. After several years, he finally managed to succeed, but his victory was immediately overshadowed by a random encounter that changed Raika's life forever...

"Whoo! Finally away from those stuffy old men! I'm gonna find me a lady, and I'm gonna get wild!" While the young Raika was tending his fields, another, light-green skinned alien man suddenly appeared in front of him, shouting crazy, perverted nonsense. Naturally, the young Raika jumped fifteen feet into the air with a scream. "Huh. Pink skin, big head... I must be on Yardrat. Whoo! Sexy Yardrat women, here I come!" The stranger shouted, putting his finger to his forehead. "Kai Kai." With that strange muttering, the green-skinned stranger disappeared right in front of Raika.

Raika became immediately fascinated by the green-skinned stranger and his mysterious teleportation technique. Luckily, the crazy stranger seemed to be absolutely obsessed with getting rejected by women. Raika spent days chasing the teleporting stranger around Yardrat, before finally meeting him in a small city on Northern Yardrat. 

The man stayed in that city for several months with Raika, due to the fact that that specific city was home to Yardrat's largest red-light district. During that time, Raika and the Kai became rather close friends, despite the large differences between Raika's serious personality and the Kai's wild, perverted personality. Apparently, the Kai had been training for his new position for several decades, and his wild personality did not mesh well with the 'old men' that had been in charge of his training, so finally he'd just ended up running away. According to him, they likely wouldn't notice his disappearance for the next several years, if he got lucky. 

The Kai used his teleportation technique for everything, but he didn't really understand how it worked. As a result, they'd come to an agreement. Raika would support the Kai financially, while the Kai spent all of his time failing to pick up girls. In exchange, the Kai would help Raika study and learn his teleportation technique. 

After those months passed, under the Kai's less-than-expert guidance, Raika had managed to teach himself the essence of what he called 'Spirit Control' based on the Kai's 'Kai Kai' technique. That includes a derivative technique that he called 'Instant Transmission.' The only problem with Instant Transmission versus Kai Kai was the fact that he couldn't use Instant Transmission anywhere near as freely as the Kai was able to use his own technique. According to the Kai, that was because he'd been born with a mental map of the cosmos imprinted into his brain, allowing him to freely designate any point as a destination when he used his own technique.

"So the solution's pretty simple, right?! All we have to do is travel the cosmos, picking up girls from every single planet in this universe! That way, you'll be able to use that technique to go wherever you want to!"

"You just want to hit on girls!" Raika'd retorted, but the Kai trainee's logic had been entirely sound. Over the next two decades, Raika and the Kai had travelled the entirety of the sixth and seventh universes, having all sorts of adventures and gathering a couple companions along the way, from the worlds that they'd travelled through, including a perverted Frost Demon and a Namekian who'd been desperate to learn Spirit Control from Raika, in hopes of finding the legendary Super Dragon Balls one day. 

Finally, the Kai's vacation had come to an end, and their little group had gone their separate ways. Raika and the Namekian spent the next twenty years training their Spirit Control as they gathered the Super Dragon Balls, before the Namekian was finally able to make his wish... to break off a fragment of the Dragon's powers for his descendant's sake. That fragment became the Namekian Dragon, Porunga, the connection to which would be passed down to future generations with his blood. Unfortunately, as the Namekian did not have a natural aptitude for Spirit Control, he gave up on mastering the techniques that Raika taught him, never even managing to master Instant Transmission.

After the Namekian broke away from Raika, Raika decided to return to Yardrat and open his own dojo to teach Spirit Control to his people, but as he grew old, Raika managed to absolutely master his field, learning the secrets of immortality. As the millennia passed, eventually Raika shut himself off from the rest of the universe to live on his own. Nowadays, Raika's teachings had severely deteriorated among the Yardratians, and only a few of the techniques that he'd taught them remained.