Web of Balance

Web of Balance is an original speculative fantasy project by Zena Airale, distilled from the creative architecture of Dragon Ball Super: Groundbreaking while standing apart from it as its own independent universe.

Where Groundbreaking began as a transformative fan project rooted in Dragon Ball, Web of Balance reworks its deepest themes into an original mythos: breath, memory, power, survival, softness, governance, family, and the long aftermath of catastrophic history. It is not a one-to-one replacement, parody, or reskin. Instead, it is the independent story that emerged when the emotional and philosophical core of Groundbreaking was separated from borrowed canon and allowed to become its own world.

At the heart of Web of Balance is the question that has always driven Zena’s storytelling: what happens after the battle is technically over? The series is less interested in victory as a clean endpoint and more interested in what victory leaves behind — broken cities, inherited roles, wounded families, unstable institutions, sacred language, and people who must learn how to live after being shaped by impossible expectations.

The world of Web of Balance is built around Kydudu, an original setting shaped by ancient ruptures, post-Pangaean geography, spiritual inheritance, and the collision between mythic history and lived community. Its societies are defined not only by rulers and wars, but by rituals, archives, foodways, naming systems, kinship networks, ecological memory, and the tension between structure and freedom.

The project carries forward the philosophical DNA of Groundbreaking while translating it into original terms. Za’reth, Zar’eth, and Shaen’mar become part of a broader original language of balance: creation and control, breath and boundary, movement and form. These forces are not treated as simple good and evil. Creation without structure can become chaos; structure without breath can become domination. Balance is not stillness. It is ethical motion.

Unlike a traditional chosen-one fantasy, Web of Balance resists the idea that one savior can repair a world alone. Its characters inherit damaged systems and must decide whether to preserve, reform, dismantle, or reimagine them. Leadership is treated as a burden, not a crown. Power is measured by consequence. Care is not a private feeling, but a public responsibility.

The first major story, Heaven’s Nocturne, serves as the doorway into this universe. It introduces a world already carrying the weight of history, where old myths continue to shape present conflicts and where healing is never separate from politics. Its tone blends mythic fantasy, cultural memory, emotional realism, and philosophical science fantasy, while retaining Zena’s core interest in survivors, archives, and the sacred difficulty of staying.

In that sense, Web of Balance is both a beginning and a continuation. It begins as original fiction, free from the legal and creative limits of fanwork. But it also continues the questions that made Groundbreaking matter: how softness survives capture, how families rebuild after harm, how archives protect truth without owning it, and how people learn to breathe again in worlds that once trained them only to endure.

If Groundbreaking was the fan archive that taught the story how to breathe, Web of Balance is the original world built from that breath.