Upon learning from Tater that the second spaceship had included over twenty Saiyans, including the woman whose tail I had once ripped out at the base, and my own brother, I did what anybody would do with that information.
I slept through the entire next day. Woke up in the morning, two days later, with Pepper draped over me like a blanket in her sleep.
After carefully extricating myself, which woke Lynn up, Lynn and I went through our morning routines as usual, leaving Pepper to sleep late, like she usually did. While we were at it, I stopped by my study to analyze my power level, now that I'd recovered from the battle, my cracked rib having already mostly healed.
Sure enough, my power level, while it had jumped, hadn't jumped much. The growth was less than a hundred thousand, negligible from my perspective. In fact, Lynn's raw power level had benefitted more from sensing out my battle than I had from participating in it.
Which, unfortunately, was just as I suspected. The Saiyan ability to heal stronger, also known as the 'Zenkai boost', wasn't some ultimate cheat code for gaining power rapidly. It depended on talent, foundational skill, and overall experience.
And while my foundational skill was high, I'd still never sensed anything strong enough that I absolutely could not match it in raw power.
On top of that, my actual baseline physical talent was the worst level of garbage possible. Simply getting to where I was at present had scraped nearly all of my momentum. In fact, if I hadn't integrated SSJP into my base physique the way I had, I'd have likely stalled at around the same place Tater and Lynn were, around a million.
That didn't mean that I'd hit some sort of physical peak or anything like that, but I couldn't rely on just sheer raw effort to get past my current limitation. In order to surpass where I was, I needed some sort of real enlightenment… an actual breakthrough.
In other words, I only really had two options: Either I waited for some other Saiyan to make a breakthrough into the high hundred millions and used that to push myself higher, maybe even unlock SSJP2, or I unlocked the original, vanilla Super Saiyan form myself.
Now, neither was impossible. By refining my SSJP form with my Blutz Overdrive technique, what I was actually doing was refining the efficiency of my S-Cells themselves, making it so that they worked better and smoother. That automatically made every form slightly easier. By every metric, I already possessed every single requirement to quite easily transform into the original Super Saiyan state.
Unfortunately, that wasn't how physics worked.
According to my research, neither Super Saiyan state was actually natural, at all. They were… broken memories of past Saiyan evolution. The Saiyan body had originally evolved S-Cells in the first place to hold Blutz Energy back, which allowed the Saiyan body to be smaller and more efficient. Humanoid, rather than skyscraper-sized.
Later, the S-Cells evolved a second time because these humanoid Great Apes were still waay too powerful to function properly, and the power tended to make them too dumb and too aggressive to survive to adulthood without blowing themselves up.
S-Cells were built into the Saiyan body to allow this current humanoid form. They held back the dumb, but powerful monster within. That was their entire function. The SSJP form was simply opening the 'floodgates' to allow the old power through without fully awakening that old, hidden part of the Saiyan's latent genes. That made it something of an evolutionary glitch. Supremely powerful, but not something that the Saiyan body was inherently built to utilize freely.
Which was why SSJP was so insanely tough to unlock. And the original Super Saiyan form was even worse.
In fact, on paper, since it required such a high amount of raw power without a single trace of subconscious Blutz energy leakage, it was borderline impossible for the average Saiyan to ever actually unlock the vanilla Super Saiyan form without first mastering SSJP, then cutting off their own tail, or otherwise flushing almost all traces of Blutz energy out of their system somehow.
Every single Earth Saiyan was an example of this limitation.
Pepper was able to freely control the Blutz energy inside of her tail with scary efficiency, but her S-Cells, up until her pregnancy, had been almost completely 'jammed', and refused to activate under any circumstances. Now that the 'jam' was gone, the transformation was so easy that she regularly transformed in her sleep without realizing it.
Lynn's problem, on the other hand, was the exact opposite.
Normally, a Saiyan's tail leaked trace amounts of Blutz energy into their bloodstream during normal life. S-Cells were designed to restrict that flow, but they didn't entirely stop it, which was a good part of why Saiyans had such naturally high power levels.
Lynn's tail leaked almost no Blutz energy when compared to normal Saiyans. Her S-Cells were scary efficient at tamping down the flow. That meant that, even though her 'activation' threshold was pretty normal, she couldn't get a grip on energy that normally stayed so perfectly stagnant, and definitely couldn't push that energy through her S-Cells to activate the transformation. The only time the energy even went through her system in large enough portions to be sensed was when she'd already overwhelmed her S-Cells and was actively transforming into a giant ape, and focusing on anything mid-Oozaru transformation was a losing game, even for me.
Meanwhile, my S-Cells were trained the same way Pepper's were. In fact, my transformation threshold was even lower than hers… but my S-Cells were still too sensitive to Blutz energy to allow me to clear the stupid purity requirement that separated simple SSJP from the stronger, clean Super Saiyan form that I wanted.
Well, at least I couldn't compare to the amount of Blutz energy Tater's tail leaked into his system on a normal day. Unlike him, I at least had a chance of, one day, being capable of both transformation lines.