The trees shuddered less than they should have from the air pressure as I flew past, just under the speed of sound, just over the top of the treeline.
I wasn't at full speed. Nor was I in any particular hurry. Perhaps the lack of air pressure stemmed from that fact, the lack of urgency softening the effect my ki had on the world around me.
Perhaps that could be developed?
I was procrastinating.
That was fine by me.
The closer I got to the Land of Korin at the northwestern corner of the central continent, the less my speed seemed to matter. It was a feeling, deep in my gut, that no matter how fast or slow I was, I'd get to my destination in the exact same amount of time.
That probably wasn't the truth, but maybe it could've been some sort of defense mechanism. Some sort of divine protection over the area, some sort of energy. I could feel it in my gut, but I couldn't pretend to understand it, or how deep it actually ran.
Nobody really understood the secrets of Earth's Kami, though. Not even Kami himself. Trying to do so myself, without some greater understanding of what the universe considered 'divine' was a fool's errand.
I'd figure it out eventually, though.
Seeing the base of Korin Tower, the giant stone pillar reaching up into the heavens, I curved my flight path sharply upward and shot past the clouds without losing an ounce of momentum.
To challenge Korin Tower, the transition required one to climb the entire thing by hand.
I wasn't a challenger.
I shot right past the dome at the top of the tower without wasting a second, my brain idly registering the power signature inside.
For a cat, Korin was strong. On an entirely different level from the average world-class human athlete. Comparable to Tien and Krillin, almost, and all of that energy was perfectly controlled, too. Not sharp like a blade, or wild like a storm, but simply… alive.
It reminded me of Kakarot and Pepper, in a way.
But he wasn't the one I wanted to talk to.
Directly above the top of Korin's tower was a large, dense layer of black storm clouds. I slowed a bit as I punched through them, more out of a professional curiosity than out of deference to the strange, annoying pressure that built up more and more in that space between the chest and the gut.
The storm was worse than anything that could possibly appear on the ground below, drawn by an abnormally high concentration of ki that I could only describe as 'wild'.
Simply feeling the ki confirmed one of my most basic beliefs about the elusive office of 'Earth's Guardian'.
They didn't have to be completely, totally pure of heart like Kami was.
At least, the one who'd created these clouds to protect the place hadn't been.
The clouds weren't a trial. They were a defense mechanism, put in place by someone who fully wished to kill any normal human who intruded upon the palace above, and hide the Guardian from the sights of the citizens below.
I'd felt 'trials' firsthand, in the smoke of an old Namekian's hut when I was a child. The energy, back then, hadn't felt malicious, exactly. It had been… smug? Testing, as if it was looking for something in me, and if I didn't have it, then that was my problem.
This energy was different. It wasn't quite at the threshold of what I would call 'malice', but it was definitely negative. Like a wild beast, and not a friendly one. It resisted me, pushed, snarled, as best as pure energy could. It wasn't protecting anything, it was destroying whatever it could, and the only reason that it hadn't gone further, following energy's natural pattern of expansion, was because something was actively keeping it from doing so.
If I hadn't been flying by my own power, wrapped in a sheath of pure ki, I was certain that the simple pulse of life beneath my skin would have attracted every bit of negative energy in sight, in the form of repeated lightning strikes.
Now, it was possible to create something similar to this with positive-aligned ki energy as well, simply by having the intention. It'd be a bit more difficult, but ki had extremely complex, abstract rules for how it interacted with physics. True, positive intentions would have made creating a weaponized barrier of atmospheric energy like this slightly more difficult, but whoever had created this thing clearly hadn't bothered thinking that far ahead. They'd simply pumped out a fairly large wave of slightly negative energy, and let it sit, slowly accumulating atmospheric electrons for centuries, maybe longer.
As a result, simply flying through it was like walking over an electrified field in rubber shoes, or, perhaps more accurately, swimming through a vat of acid, cloaked in a thick layer of table salt that instantly neutralized more and more of it with every foot I moved.
Still, there was a lot of the energy in question. The defensive layer of black clouds stretched for miles in every direction. Already, my ki sense had been drowned so thoroughly that I couldn't even sense Korin below, and only a faint ki signal above me to guide my way and keep me from getting lost.
It made me smile a bit. Based on the size and density of the field of stormy black clouds, whoever had created it was definitely stronger than the likes of Korin, and by at least an order of magnitude. From an earthling, I had to respect it. A power level in the thousands, perhaps even the ten thousands, wasn't something that most humans would ever be able to reach, no matter how hard they trained, or what they faced over their lifetimes.
Even if the current Kami wasn't particularly impressive, clearly the office was worth learning more about.