by Herge
Ren was in his early thirties, had chronic knee pain, and an obsessive love for a franchise that the real world had already let die along with its creator. Every night, the same question consumed him: Why did the humans in Dragon Ball never get a chance to shine? He asked to relive the story from the beginning. His wish was granted, but without powers, without a special lineage, and without any shortcuts. Just an ordinary human body, cast face-down in the same desert where it all begins, with an entire decade ahead of him before Goku even appears on the horizon. Ren knows exactly what comes next. He knows who lives, who dies, who betrays whom, and which moves will decide each battle. The problem is that knowing the script is useless when his body can’t even break a rock. So he trains. He steals. He bleeds. He builds, through sheer brute force, something no human in that world has ever had: relevance. And every choice he makes, every life he saves before its time, every alliance he steals from fate, every path he rewrites with his own hands—stained with blood and sand—pushes the classic story further and further off the tracks he’s memorized. An adult reimagining of Dragon Ball, about a fan who traded his real life for the chance to rewrite, body and soul, the one he loved most.
