In Dragon Ball: A brutal beating of Frieza at the start

Page 129

Just as Lin Ye was about to activate the system's stripping procedure, the entire space suddenly distorted violently, and the pure white background rapidly turned black, like a piece of white paper stained with ink. A crack slowly opened in the void, and the phantom of the leader of the Dark Star Cluster walked out of the crack. He wore a wide black robe, and the face revealed under the hood was exactly the same as Lin Ye's, down to the smallest mole at the corner of his eye.

"Give up." The phantom spoke, its voice exactly the same as Lin Ye's, but with a chilling coldness. "You and she are both my experiments. From the moment you crossed over into this universe, your fate was sealed today."

Lin Ye's pupils suddenly contracted, and he clenched his fists, golden flames burning fiercely on his body: "Who exactly are you? Why are you imitating me?"

"Imitation?" The phantom scoffed, snapping its fingers. Countless fragments of memory suddenly surged from the void, crashing into Lin Ye's consciousness like a tidal wave.

He saw the car accident he had before his time travel: when the out-of-control truck crashed into him, the steering wheel wasn't covered in blood, but in a thick, black slime; he saw the moment the system activated, a strange smiling face flashed in the depths of the screen, and the owner of that smiling face looked exactly like the phantom in front of him; he even saw that at the Tournament of Power, the Omni-King's gaze towards him held not curiosity, but a trace of pity, as if he were looking at a character destined for tragedy.

"These are all fake! You fabricated these memories!" Lin Ye roared, punching and shattering the fragments of memory. But the fragments scattered on the ground immediately reassembled, forming a new image. This time it was his parents' faces, their faces streaked with tears as they said to him, "Why wasn't it you who died?"

"Fake?" The phantom approached step by step, its black robes fluttering in the air. "Then tell me, why did your system suddenly appear? Why is it that you are the one who can use the power of a Super Saiyan? Why is everyone you meet subtly helping you become stronger?"

He suddenly ripped open his black robe, revealing twelve miniature cosmic projections on his chest, each containing a dying star: "I am the 'Observer,' the administrator of this multiverse. Every Lin Ye in every parallel universe is a vessel I cultivate to bear the impending 'End.' And you," the phantom pointed a finger at Lin Ye's chest, "are the seventy-three thousandth test subject, and the one closest to success."

Lin Ye's mental pollution rate skyrocketed on the system panel, exceeding 50%. He felt a severe headache as countless memories that did not belong to him flooded his mind—in some memories, he became a demon that destroyed the universe; in others, he was killed by Goku and Vegeta; and in still others, he strangled Alice with his own hands.

"See? This is your destiny." The observer's voice was seductive, like a venomous snake slithering into Lin Ye's ear. "No matter how you struggle, you will ultimately meet this end. Rather than resist, become part of the darkness; at least then you can control your own fate. Think of your parents, think of those you have implicated. Don't you feel guilty?"

"Guilt?" Lin Ye's eyes began to glaze over, and dark lines crept onto his cheeks. "I..."

Just then, the crystal cage suddenly made a crisp sound. Alice had broken free of her restraints at some point, and her consciousness transformed into a stream of light that broke through the cage, ignoring the obstruction of the black threads, and rushed into Lin Ye's consciousness.

"Look at this!" Alice's voice exploded in Lin Ye's mind, and a long-buried memory suddenly surfaced clearly.

That was the complete footage of the car accident: young Lin Ye was sitting in the front passenger seat, and his younger sister Lin Xi was in the back. The moment the truck crashed into them, Lin Ye used all his strength to unbuckle his seatbelt, lunged to the back seat, opened his sister's door, and pushed her out. His sister only suffered minor scrapes when she landed, while he himself tumbled down the hillside with the out-of-control car.

As Alice lay dying, the car's navigation system suddenly emitted a mechanical voice, the very same voice that belonged to Alice's prototype program: "Detected a rapid decline in vital signs, initiating emergency rescue protocol... Connecting to an unknown cosmic portal... Insufficient energy, force restart with administrator privileges?"

At the end of the scene, young Lin Ye used his last bit of strength to press the confirm button.

“We were never guinea pigs!” Alice’s voice trembled with tears, yet remained unusually firm. “Our choices led to this outcome! You saved your sister, and I saved you. None of this was arranged by anyone; it was our own decision!”

Lin Ye's eyes widened suddenly, and the black lines receded rapidly like the tide. He felt a new power surging within him, a power that did not rely on the system or the Super Saiyan transformation, but originated solely from his own will.

“You’re right.” Lin Ye looked at the observer, his eyes no longer filled with confusion. “My fate has never been decided by anyone else.”

He suddenly lunged at the observer, grabbing his wrist to the man's astonishment. Golden energy and blue programming code intertwined in his palm, forming a complex rune.

"System, execute the final agreement!" Lin Ye's voice resounded throughout the entire consciousness space. "In the name of host Lin Ye, forcibly format the current consciousness space and eliminate all external contamination!"

"No!" the Observer roared in despair, his body flickering like a television screen with a poor signal. "You'll regret this! Without the system, you're nothing! Do you think you can fight the End on your own?"

“At least I can choose my own path.” Lin Ye watched the observer’s figure gradually disappear. “In that respect, I’m much better than you.”

The space of consciousness began to collapse, the pure white background and the black pollution turning into fragments. At the last moment, Lin Ye saw Alice's smiling face; her figure was becoming transparent, yet she wore an expression of relief.

Goodbye, Lin Ye.

"Alice!"

Lin Ye suddenly sat up from the ruins, coughing violently. His throat burned as if he had swallowed a ball of fire. He looked around and found himself lying in the ruins of the core tower, surrounded by broken steel bars and twisted steel plates. The sky in the distance had cleared, and the black fog had dissipated at some point.

"You're awake?" Number 18's voice came from nearby. She was sitting on a rock, wiping the blood off her hands with gauze. Seeing Lin Ye sit up, she visibly relaxed and handed him a bottle of water. "You scared me to death! You've been unconscious for a whole day and night."

Lin Ye took the water and drank a few mouthfuls before realizing that his left arm was tightly bandaged, and a sharp pain emanated from under the bandage. Tien Shinhan and Moka were cleaning up the remains of the Dark Dragon Balls not far away; the black fragments emitted black smoke in the sunlight and quickly turned to ashes.

"Where's Alice?" Lin Ye suddenly remembered something and looked down sharply at his wrist.

There was a new silver bracelet there, with a blue crystal embedded in it, emitting a soft glow. Lin Ye gently touched the bracelet and immediately felt the familiar fluctuations of Alice's consciousness.

“She compressed herself into this.” Android 18’s voice choked with emotion as she turned her head to look into the distance. “When the core tower collapsed, she used her last bit of energy to protect you. Bulma said this is the core of her consciousness, and that bringing it back to the lab on Earth might be able to restore her, but…”

“But the chances aren’t high, right?” Lin Ye finished the sentence for her. He gripped the bracelet tightly, feeling the faint but tenacious consciousness within it. “It’s okay, as long as she’s still here.”

Suddenly, Goku's hearty laughter rang out from afar: "Lin Ye! You're awake! We won! Those Dark Cluster scum have all been driven away!" His voice grew closer and closer, and he soon appeared at the edge of the ruins, followed by an impatient Vegeta. "That Vegeta guy is still not convinced and says he wants to have another match with you!"

"Who's got a problem with that?" Vegeta sneered, but his gaze involuntarily swept over Lin Ye's wrist. "What's that? A new weapon?"

Lin Ye smiled but offered no explanation. He stood up and stretched his limbs; although they still ached a little, he felt lighter than before. The system panel didn't reappear, and he couldn't sense the Super Saiyan transformation anymore, but he could clearly feel the power flowing within him—power that belonged entirely to him.

"We'll talk about the competition later." Lin Ye looked up at the sky, the sunlight warm on his face. "Let's go home first."

He gripped the silver bracelet on his wrist and silently said in his heart, "Alice, we're home."

The blue crystal on the bracelet flickered slightly, as if in response to him. Lin Ye knew that new challenges awaited him, but he no longer needed the system or so-called "fate" to guide him.

He will walk his own path.

Chapter 299: A New Path of Cultivation

The alloy floor of the gravity chamber vibrated loudly from the force of the punches. Lin Ye shook his numb fists, and the 8700 million value fluctuating on the display screen gradually stabilized. He breathed heavily and wiped away his sweat. The pointer on the gravity controller was still at 500 times. For the past three months, he had been training himself to the point of exhaustion, trying to figure out how far he could go without the system's support.

"Hmph, at least you have some decent punches now."

Vegeta leaned against the hatch with his arms crossed, his deep blue aura rising and falling gently with his breath like silk wrapped in plasma. He glanced at the display screen, a mocking smile playing on his lips: "Much better than when I first came back. At least I'm not a useless piece of trash who just relies on the system anymore."

Lin Ye cracked his knuckles as he stretched his shoulders: "It's better than some people practicing against thin air all day long."

"You're asking for it!" Vegeta's anger surged instantly, causing ripples to spread across the metal walls of the gravity chamber. But he quickly calmed down and tossed over a silver capsule: "Bulma's new toy, wanna try it?"

The moment the capsule landed and unfolded, a pale blue energy flowed across the metal frame, and rune-like patterns moved as if alive. Lin Ye circled the half-person-high training pod, his fingertips barely touching the wall before being repelled by a slight electric current.

“Soul Training Pod,” Bulma’s holographic projection suddenly popped up from the top of the pod. She chewed her bubble gum and brought up a virtual keyboard, typing rapidly. “It combines Namekian mental magic with Earth’s neural connection technology, allowing you to throw your consciousness into past battlefields. To put it bluntly, it’s an ultra-realistic VR combat experience.”

An anatomical diagram suddenly popped up on the projector screen, the red nerve bundles glowing blindingly bright in the virtual brain. "But let me make this clear," she said, pulling back the chewing gum, her expression unusually serious, "this thing has no safety protocols. If you get killed in there, you'll be a vegetable in real life, and even the King of Hell can't save you."

Lin Ye bent down and lifted the hatch, letting out a rush of cold air mixed with the smell of ozone: "Sounds pretty exciting."

"Hey! You could at least have hesitated for a moment!" Bulma said angrily, hands on her hips. "I haven't finished testing it yet!"

The metal deck inside the cabin slowly rose, and as Lin Ye lay down, he heard Vegeta sneer behind him: "If you die, no one will collect your body."

"I'll fight you again when I get back." Lin Ye closed his eyes, and the neural connector felt like soft tentacles on his temples. "The loser will be Gohan's sparring partner."

"dream!"

As the hatch closed, the pale green nutrient solution gradually submerged his chest. Lin Ye felt as if his consciousness had been plunged into a vortex. When he opened his eyes again, the metal deck beneath his feet had turned into dark red sand, and the distinctive sulfurous smell of Namek made him cough.

"Oh my? Isn't this a little bug?"

A mocking voice came from above. Lin Ye looked up sharply and saw Frieza hovering in mid-air. The white armor of his first form gleamed coldly in the sunlight, and his signature tail swayed slowly. The scales at the joints were thinner than he remembered.

There were no system pop-ups, no weakness analysis, but Lin Ye's muscles had already reacted. He dodged Frieza's casually thrown death beam, his aura condensing into a pale blue ball of light in his palm: "Long time no see, Lord Frieza."

"Hmph, you fool who doesn't know what's good for you." Frieza flicked his finger, and dozens of beams of light rained down like a storm. "You got away on Namek last time, but you won't be so lucky this time."

Lin Ye weaved through the gaps in the beams of light, suddenly finding his movements smoother than he had imagined. There were no system prompts for when to dodge or when to counterattack, but his body remembered every struggle on the brink of death. When Frieza's tail lashed out with a whooshing sound, he almost instinctively ducked, his elbow slamming into the opponent's joint.

With a sharp "crack," Frieza's scream was filled with disbelief: "How could you...?"

"The more you practice, the more patterns you'll figure out." Lin Ye shook his numb arm; the blow just now had left his tiger's mouth sore. Without a skill copying function, he had to hone all his moves little by little, calculating the flow of qi with every punch. This feeling was both unfamiliar and reassuring.

Frieza roared, unleashing an energy storm that ripped thousands of meters of furrows into the ground with purple shockwaves. Lin Ye took a deep breath and drew a spiral with his hands in front of his chest—a move he had practiced hundreds of times in the gravity chamber, compressing his air into a spinning drill shape, specifically designed to break through energy shields.

"Try this! Spiral Gas Bomb!"

The moment the pale blue spiral beam collided with the purple energy sphere, Lin Ye suddenly heard a piercing alarm. Frieza's figure began to flicker like a television screen with a poor signal, and the entire landscape of Namek was distorted.

[Time-space anchor point error, forced exit from program restart]

Lin Ye opened his eyes amidst intense dizziness. The red alarm lights in the training pod illuminated the interior like hell. He struggled to climb out and found the garbled characters on the display screen jumping wildly—the twisted symbols were exactly the same as the patterns he had copied from the Dark Dragon Ball remnants.

“Bulma!” He had just grabbed the communicator when the alloy bracelet on his wrist suddenly became as hot as a branding iron.

Alice's ethereal form coalesced in the air, her hair, composed of data streams, moved without wind: "They've found us!"

In the holographic projection she conjured with a wave of her hand, twelve colorful universes appeared to be squeezed together by an invisible hand, with planets at the edges annihilating into particles. Each universe's image contained a Lin Ye, some clad in Saiyan armor, others draped in black cloaks, all locked in combat with observers in different forms. Meanwhile, the coordinates of the seventh universe were marked on the observer's control panel with bright red dots.

“That guy wants to wipe out all the parallel universes at once.” Vegeta’s deep blue flames suddenly exploded, burning a hole in the ceiling. “Perfect, saves us the trouble of searching for them one by one.”

"That's right!" Goku jumped down from the hole, carrying his Power Pole, his martial arts uniform still smeared with barbecue sauce. "Krillin has already gone to the Supreme Kai's World, and Gohan and Piccolo are gathering manpower. Lin Ye, your new move looks pretty powerful, want to try it out now?"

Lin Ye clenched his fist; the calluses on his palms were much thicker than they had been three months ago. Although he hadn't finished the fight in the simulated battlefield, the feeling of relying purely on himself was more reassuring than any system notification.

"Let's get this straight," he said, a slightly weary yet unusually bright smile, "the loser has to buy ten plates of barbecue, and no teleportation allowed to renege on the deal."

"It's a deal!" Wukong immediately assumed a fighting stance, golden energy surging into the sky. "But don't hold back!"

Vegeta snorted and walked to the open space next to him: "Neither of you are qualified to be my opponent." Despite saying this, he quietly adjusted his breathing, obviously carefully observing Lin Ye's moves.

Alice's phantom suddenly pointed at the screen: "Coordinate locking countdown has begun! Thirty minutes left!"

In the projection, the observer's metal mask turned towards the camera, the red light in his slits resembling two miniature stars. The control console behind him was deforming, twelve energy conduits piercing into the corresponding cosmic phantoms, the annihilation speed suddenly accelerating.

Lin Ye took a deep breath, his breath circulating slowly in his dantian. Since transmigrating to this world, he had relied on the system, used the Dragon Balls, and even stolen other people's techniques, but what had sustained him to this point was never any of these things.

It's the desperate counterattack on Namek to protect their comrades, the shouts at the Tournament of Power to prevent the universe from disappearing, and the smiling faces that flash through my mind every time I'm on the verge of despair.

“Wukong,” he suddenly spoke, his qi flowing even more rapidly, “after we’ve dealt with that guy, we’ll have a proper fight.”

"Alright!" Wukong didn't hesitate to put away his arrogance. "But don't try to run away then."

Vegeta had already rushed out the window, a deep blue streak of light drawing a straight line across the clouds: "If we dawdle any longer, it'll be too late!"

Lin Ye glanced one last time at the garbled code on the training pod, then turned and followed. Sunlight pierced through the atmosphere, casting a long shadow behind him. So what if he didn't have a system? He had always forged his own path, step by step.

"Let's go, let's meet that observer." He clenched his fist, feeling the power surging within him. "And let him know who the real trash is."

Wukong followed with a smile, his Ruyi Jingu Bang spinning rapidly in his hand: "Remember, ten plates of roasted meat, not a single piece less!"

The distant sky began to distort, with purple cracks spreading like a spiderweb. Lin Ye looked up and saw Vegeta's shockwave crash into the first crack, the resulting light brighter than the sun.

He smiled, then suddenly pushed off with his toes, and his figure vanished from the spot in an instant.

The battle has only just begun.

Chapter 300: The True Face of the Observer

Inside the council chamber of the Omni-King's palace, the auras of the twelve Gods of Destruction intertwined, creating an invisible pressure. Beerus's strawberry ice cream in his claws was almost melted, and his tail impatiently swept fine scratches across the smooth floor: to put it bluntly, he was the kind of guy who would flip the table if he messed up an experiment. He licked the ice cream; if the previous Omni-King were still around, he would definitely have stuffed this mess of emotions back into its bottle.

Stop making sarcastic remarks. Champa snatched the ice cream cup, his face covered in pink cream. "Last time in Universe 6, my satellite human was riddled with bullets by his shadow. Are you watching a show?"

"That's because your subordinates are too weak." Beerus rolled his eyes, flicked his tail, and snatched the ice cream back.

What did you say? Champa's roar made the crystal chandelier in the council chamber buzz.

"Silence, all of you!" The High Priest tapped the ground lightly with his scepter, and two golden beams of light wrapped around the wrists of Beerus and Champa respectively. He turned to Lin Ye, his white robes swaying slightly in the energy flow: "The anchor point you mentioned, do you have specific coordinates?"

Lin Ye pulled up the holographic map projected by Alice, and twelve red dots flashed on the cosmic star map: each anchor point was bound to a local spacetime rift. The anchor point for the Seventh Universe was in the Dark Cluster, which was the wreckage of the base we destroyed last time.

Dark Cluster? Wukong suddenly leaned over and poked his finger on the star map. "The gravitational field there is so strange. I almost got sucked in last time."

That's because the anchor point is in distorted space. Lin Ye zoomed in on the star map; the observer's consciousness needs a physical entity to interfere with the material world, just as a parasite must find a host.