“And me?” Bulma smiled, tired and real. “I spent forty years thinking being right was the same as being good. It’s not. So go ahead. Tell me I’m average. Tell me Vegeta only stays for the gravity room. Tell me Trunks is smarter than I’ll ever be.”

“Woman, are you dying?”

The third was… herself. A Bulma made of fractured mirrors, her eyes two ticking clocks. This echo pointed a finger, and Bulma’s scanner display scrambled, then displayed a single line: “You already lost. You just don’t know it yet.”

The mirror-Bulma opened her mouth—and shattered. A single, clean crack ran from her crown to her chest. Then she dissolved into harmless light.

The Capsule Corporation hover-car hummed low over a sea of clouds, the last sliver of sun bleeding orange across the horizon. Bulma Briefs, heiress to the world’s largest tech fortune, tapped her fingernail against a faded, water-stained data chip. It had arrived in a locked box, no return address, just a single character etched into the metal: 山 (Yama).

Bulma’s gut said this was a trap. Her genius said it was the most fascinating puzzle in twenty years.

She looked at her own mirror-echo. The vain, brilliant, terrified shadow.

The hologram grinned. “The Dragon Balls are a curse. Every wish we make, Shenron doesn’t just grant it—he records it. He stores a copy of the wisher’s soul, their desire, their flaw . I found a way to extract those echoes. I called them ‘Yamamoto Doujinshi’—shadow copies of the wisher’s worst self.”

“Dr. Briefs,” the ghost-image of Dr. Yamamoto said. His voice was a recording, but it felt alive. “If you’re seeing this, the others are dead. Or worse, they’ve become… comfortable. Tell me, does your Saiyan husband still fight? Or has peace made him fat?”

Bulma’s lip curled. “Fat. And grumpy. But he can still blow up a moon. Continue.”

The screaming mouth slowly closed.

Three seconds later, his reply: