Zarbon's corpse drifted apart in two neat halves, green blood trailing away like smoke in the wind.
Vegeta watched the pieces sink into the ocean with the mild satisfaction of closing an old, blood-stained ledger.
Dodoria. Zarbon.
Two decades of humiliation, mockery, and boots on his neck; erased in under ten minutes.
He exhaled once, slow and final.
"Good riddance."
He spoke to the empty sky, voice low and mocking.
"Five hundred and thirty thousand, Frieza says. Come out in your first form and try it, lizard. I cleared two million before breakfast."
Of course, no one answered.
The dead don't get rebuttals.
Vegeta was just turning to leave when the Grand Elder's ancient voice brushed the inside of his skull again.
[Vegeta. The scattered children return soon. Will you guide them safely to me?]
Vegeta's eyebrow twitched.
He had been thirty kilometers away, moving at supersonic speed, aura half-suppressed.
And the old man still found him like it was nothing.
"…How the hell are you doing that?" he sent back, irritation sharp.
A soft mental chuckle.
[When I unlocked your potential, my spirit touched yours. Your mental signature is etched into me now; as long as you remain on Namek, distance is meaningless.]
Vegeta folded his arms, hovering.
"So what you're saying is you can slide into my head whenever you feel like it. That's creepy, old man."
[I can only speak. Your mind is far too fortified for anything deeper. In truth… if you stilled your thoughts and reached outward with the same energy you use for ki, you would discover an entirely new world.]
Vegeta paused.
Mental energy as a separate muscle.
He had never trained it deliberately; only the spillover from ki meditation and near-death rage had strengthened it.
But now that the Elder mentioned it, he could feel it: a vast, glassy ocean beneath the roaring fire of his ki. Untapped. Uncharted.
A slow, dangerous grin spread across his face.
"Interesting."
[Train it, Prince of Saiyans. The golden form you seek may require more than raw power. It may demand a mind that can hold lightning without shattering.]
The connection faded.
Vegeta hovered in silence for a long second, eyes narrowed at the horizon.
Then he shot forward, a violet arrow slicing the sky toward the next Namekian village.
Physical strength? He had oceans of it now.
But a new world had just opened.
And Vegeta intended to conquer that one too.
Super Saiyan wasn't just a transformation of the body.
It never had been.