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But before that…
Tien sits in a lotus position in the voidlike existence he found himself trapped in. He replays the moment in his head again and again. Towa’s surge of power and successful reversal of the Mafuba. He was overconfident, and he paid the price for it. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he ended up trapped in there; time seems to lose all meaning, and his body felt like it were in an ethereal state since imprisonment. His attempts to sense beyond the confines of the bottle he was sealed away in only ever brought forth an overwhelming sensation of malice, evil, and hatred. But he would not give in to despair. He would learn from this, and one day he would get out of there.
He knows his allies, his friends and comrades, would be there soon…
Elsewhere...
Myriad colors and shapes flash around Shin as the the void overtakes him. After but a moment passing through the shard of spacetime, he finds himself falling and landing in a barren area. Shin quickly pushes himself up and tries to get his bearings, looking around to see if he could find Gohan too. With no sign of the boy, he attempts to sense around for anyone else… and finds nothing. A hopefully good sign, implying that no one else seems to have been sent to the same place as him, but also a worrying one given that there’s genuinely no one else there.
Shin extends his senses outward, beyond the immediate area, still finding nothing. Scattered if lacking plant life and some animals, but no people. He extends his senses further, and further, and further, and… still he feels nothing, no one. Shin’s worries grow, to the point that he attempts to Kai Kai somewhere else, seeking out the Sacred Realm of the Kais, and what he finds is a long-dead world, scars of ancient battles littering the landscape, some of the moons around it fractured and scarred as well. The most worrying sign though is what he senses beyond the world, that even the afterlife had been depopulated, the spirits of the dead long gone… save for a few lingering demonic Ki presences.
Softly, Shin asks aloud, “What happened here…?”
