Dragon Ball Roshi

[Year 608, May 10]

[Yesterday was yet another boring day. Mom can waste an entire day just by shopping and gossiping, while Dad can spend a whole month as long as he has a guitar. Plus, he just came back from a tour a few days ago, so he's probably thrilled to be bored right now. As for me, I can only kill time by doing experiments.]

[This world... is so boring.]

[Why can't anything interesting happen?...]

At this point, Hathaway paused. Resting her chin in her hand, she gazed out the window at the birds chirping and the flowers blooming, her expression calm. The morning sunlight was perfect, and a gentle breeze blew in, tousling her messy purple hair.

She lifted a hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, thought for a moment, and then picked up her pen to finish the entry: [...I really envy those imaginative novelists. Their lives seem so colorful.]

With a swish, she tossed the diary into the drawer, stretched lazily, and stood up. Her seaweed-like purple hair cascaded messily around her, and she grabbed a hair tie from the desk to quickly tie her hair into a simple ponytail.

Her eyes fell on a copy of The Uchiha's Sinners 3 tossed on her bed. She had read this book so many times that she had lost count. Before leaving her bedroom, Hathaway stretched out her long, fair fingers to tap the painting on the wall, humming a tune as she briskly pushed open the door and left.

The painting on the wall had no frame. It was just a sheet of paper taped to the wall, with small white magnets at each corner. Behind the wall, a steel plate was embedded.

The painting depicted a little girl hiding next to her parents—Hathaway's mother, Hannah, when she was a child.

According to her mother, when Hathaway was just born, their family was still living in a cramped, one-room apartment, and this painting had kept her company. Back then, her mother had framed it and hung it on the wall. As Hathaway grew older, she took the picture out and simply taped it to the wall.

As she put it, the frame and glass were meant to protect the painting from damage. But after so many years, the paper and ink hadn't faded even a bit, so what was the point of a frame?

Downstairs, Hathaway walked directly to the dining room. As expected, her parents were already sitting at the table, having breakfast. Her father was reading an entertainment newspaper, while her mother, Hannah, elegantly sipped her thin porridge, occasionally chatting quietly with her husband, who was flipping through the newspaper.

"Good morning, sit down and eat your breakfast," her mother, Hannah, said as she saw Hathaway enter. Putting down her delicate spoon, she scolded gently, "I've told you to wake up earlier every day, stop staying up so late. Your health is important, you should take care of yourself, especially for a girl like you…"

At this point, the housekeeper came over and served Hathaway a bowl of fragrant shredded pork congee.

"Alright, alright, I'll pay attention," Hathaway said with a headache, pulling out a chair and sitting down. She nodded at the housekeeper, grabbed a sweet pastry with her fork, and took a bite.

Her mother, Hannah, sighed helplessly and continued, "I met that boy from the Derly family yesterday. He's quite good-looking, and his family's not bad either..."

Hathaway rolled her eyes secretly, looking exhausted and uninterested as she ate in silence, not wanting to engage with her mother's attempt at matchmaking. Seeing this, Hannah sighed in resignation.

Her father paused while flipping through the newspaper, casually asking, "Are you really not planning to go to college?"

Hathaway took a few sips of her congee and bit into a piece of cake. "Come on, Dad, I don't want to sit through boring classes! Anyway, I'm off to the lab now!"

With that, she got up from the table, her ponytail swaying as she walked briskly out of the room.

The housekeeper came over to clear her utensils.

Hathaway's parents exchanged a look, both of them feeling helpless.

However, when it came to their daughter, they couldn't ask too much. In the past, when they were struggling to make ends meet, her husband pursued his musical dreams but couldn't earn a penny. The turning point came when Hathaway was six years old. That day, she used one of her little inventions to bring in the first pot of gold for their family. That was also the start of their family's rise.

Although Hannah and her husband had always known that their daughter was exceptionally smart, they never imagined she would be this brilliant.

At the age of 20, Hathaway already held hundreds of patents for various inventions. Some of these patents only earned her royalty fees, while others allowed her to become a shareholder in several large companies through technology equity. Essentially... their family could do nothing but live extravagantly, and still never worry about money.

Not to mention, Hathaway's father, with her support, had become a famous singer in his own right.

By the way, it's worth noting that the patents Hathaway invented were registered under her mother, Hannah's name. As Hathaway had put it when she was younger, "I'm still so young. If I use my own name, people will just gossip. That would be a hassle."

The child was too smart and contributed so much to the family that the greatest consequence was... Hannah and her husband realized they could hardly ask anything more of their daughter, and they couldn't bear to restrict her in any way. As long as she was happy and healthy, that was all they could wish for.

---

Twenty years had passed since Mu Taro had secluded himself with the Phoenix on the deserted island in the sea.

Time passed swiftly, never stopping, and in the blink of an eye, twenty years had gone by. The event of the "Master Muten saving the world" more than forty years ago, under the government's control of public opinion, had gradually turned into a myth, with fewer people mentioning it.

As for the 'Seven Dragon Balls' that the 'Master Muten' had claimed could make any dream come true, except for those who had witnessed the Phoenix collecting them and their descendants, more people considered these so-called 'Dragon Balls' to be nothing more than the Master Muten rhetoric.

It should have been him, the Master Muten himself, who used his incredible celestial powers to revive everyone who had died, but he conveniently attributed it to the nonexistent Seven Dragon Balls.

After all, no one had actually found a single Dragon Ball over all these years.

Gradually, those who knew of the Mastee Muten began to mythologize him, and the legends surrounding him grew more fantastical.

Not to mention those who were already unfamiliar with who the Master Muten was, even those who had witnessed the events started to doubt whether things had been as exaggerated as they seemed. Was it possible that in the face of such a massive disaster, everyone had simply hallucinated?

Experts even conducted studies on the matter, with research topics titled 'Massive Doomsday Hallucination Syndrome' and 'Doomsday Death Hallucination'... the latter explained why so many people thought they had died and come back to life, which they considered to be an illusion.

Whether it was an explanation or a misinterpretation, and who these so-called experts really were, did it even matter? Of course not. What mattered was that more and more people were forgetting the so-called Master Muten, and those who remembered him began to regard him as an elusive myth, a spiritual solace at best.

The people could always rely on the dependable country and the great king, of course.

---

Hathaway walked into the basement of her family's estate, which housed her enormous personal laboratory. It was filled with all sorts of strange and unusual inventions, though most of them hadn't been turned into patents yet.

1, 0, 6.

Beep beep beep, the password was correct, and the basement door opened.

As soon as she entered, a smile spread across Hathaway's face. This was her domain.

She walked over to the workbench and glanced at an orange-yellow bead that served as decoration, smiling as she said, "Today, I'm definitely going to unlock your secret!"

She grabbed a baseball cap from the table, put it on backward, and became fully immersed in the pile of equipment.

The bead had been something she found during a solo adventure on a remote mountain. Hathaway loved adventure and disliked boring, mundane life, so she often went off on her own. She was smart, brave, and strong, always bringing her own tools on these trips, so she never really faced any danger. Over time, her parents had gotten used to it and allowed her to go without much fuss.

A few days ago, during an experiment, Hathaway accidentally discovered that this bead, which she had brought home as a souvenir and used as decoration, was constantly emitting a specific electromagnetic frequency.

This was interesting. Intrigued, Hathaway decided to dig deeper and solve the mystery of the bead.

In this era, personal computers didn't exist on Earth yet, or to put it another way, even devices similar to computers were still in their infancy. Though there were auxiliary devices akin to computers, they were far from perfected, making scientific research on Earth fairly inefficient.

If we look at the original Dragon Ball series, we'll find that even in an era with "space folding technology" (the capsules), people still communicated in ways that were far from the cutting-edge, sci-fi mobile devices. They didn't even have cell phones; communication relied on outdated landline telephones.

It seemed that in the Dragon Ball world, communication and computer technology were like parts of a technology tree that had been bypassed. Even though there were enough technological resources to invent them, the development of technology somehow veered off in another direction.

As she got absorbed in her work, time passed quickly.

After Hannah brought in lunch, not long after, she also called through the speaker connected to the basement, urging Hathaway to hurry up and come for dinner.

"Done!" Hathaway cheered, holding up the square device in her hands, measuring about 30 centimeters on each side, and was reluctant to put it down.

Hearing her mother's voice through the speaker, Hathaway muttered, "I should have never installed this thing." Pressing a button with one finger, she quickly responded, "Alright, alright, I'm coming right now."

Of course, she wasn't coming right away. She had to try out the device she had just made first.

Hathaway pointed the square device at the orange-yellow bead on the table and pressed its switch.

"Beep."

The screen of the device lit up, and after two seconds, seven bright dots appeared. The dots flickered in the coordinate grid on the screen, pulsating in sync with a rhythmic frequency, much like the human breathing pattern.

In the very center of the grid, there was a flashing dot.

It was the response from the special electromagnetic wave of the bead in Hathaway's hand.

She set down the device, took off the backwards cap, and picked up the orange-yellow bead. Looking at the red pentagram floating inside the bead, she stroked her chin thoughtfully and muttered, "Are there six others..."

Glancing at the other six bright dots flashing on the device on the table, Hathaway's lips curled into a smile. It seemed like... something interesting was about to happen.

---

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