"Papa…" Olga's small voice cut through the stillness, hesitant yet brimming with curiosity. She peeked out from behind Acier's bloated frame, clutching the back of his ragged coat with one hand while the other pointed forward without restraint.
"…Who's that weird-looking grandpa?" she asked bluntly, her finger aimed squarely at Magellan. Then her gaze shifted—bright red eyes sizing me up with childlike honesty. "And that handsome-looking brother…? Are they the ones who came here to rescue us?"
There was no malice in her words. Only innocence sharpened by two centuries of solitude. Magellan visibly flinched. For a heartbeat, a retort rose to his lips—weird-looking? He almost pointed out that Acier, swollen and misshapen from prolonged exposure to Pure Gold, looked far closer to a stuffed carcass dragged from a junk heap than he ever did.
But the words died before they were born. This was a child who had spent nearly two hundred years alone inside the belly of a monster. A child who had grown up talking to echoes and shadows. Magellan swallowed the sting along with his pride, turning his head away and letting the insult slide. Some things weren't worth correcting.
Acier, for his part, only laughed hoarsely, one arm instinctively wrapping around Olga as if afraid she might vanish again if he loosened his grip. Magellan exhaled slowly, regaining his composure. His expression hardened—not with offense, but with resolve. He turned to me, eyes sharp and focused, returning to the matter that truly concerned him.
"Then how are we going to bring the beast down?" he asked. His voice was steady, but beneath it lay iron determination. "Bonbori's death is the condition. That's the price for my loyalty—and my service."
Bonbori. The ancient calamity whose belly had become a world unto itself. A living abyss that had swallowed islands, civilizations, and lives without end. Ending it would not be simple—nor clean. Before answering, I turned my gaze toward Professor Myskina Acier.
"Before we decide that," I said calmly, "there's something I need to know." The professor met my eyes, his expression tightening. He already knew what I was going to ask. "The Pure Gold," I continued. "Do we need anything from Bonbori to refine it? Anything from its body—organs, fluids, cores—whatever it is that allows Pure Gold to be synthesized?"
Silence followed. This was no idle question. Acier was the only living man who truly understood the process. Pure Gold wasn't simply a substance—it was a miracle wrought through suffering, precision, and irreversible choices. If Bonbori's existence was entwined with its creation, then killing the beast outright could destroy something irreplaceable.
Acier's eyes darkened as memories surfaced—decades of obsession, centuries of regret.
"…Yes," he said at last, his voice low and heavy. "Bonbori's body produces unique catalytic enzymes. Without them, Pure Gold cannot be refined at its highest purity. They form deep within its core stomachs—places even I could never reach."
He clenched his trembling hands. "If you kill the beast recklessly," he continued, "those materials will be lost forever."
The air grew tense. Bonbori was not merely an enemy—it was a key, a vault, and a grave all at once. I nodded slowly, black lightning faintly crackling around me as my decision began to solidify.
"Then we take what's needed first," I said, my tone unwavering. "And only after that—" I looked out into the endless darkness of Bonbori's inner abyss, where acid seas churned and titanic organs pulsed like continents. "—we end this monster once and for all."
Behind me, Olga tightened her grip on her father's clothes. For the first time in two hundred years, she was no longer waiting.
"What about its esca?" I asked, my eyes never leaving the vast, breathing darkness around us. "Does it truly contain Pure Gold? The legends say Bonbori's esca itself is forged from it." The moment the words left my mouth, Acier shook his head—firm, immediate, almost irritated at the misconception.
"No," he said, voice rough but absolute. "That is a myth born from exaggeration and fear. Yes, the esca contains trace amounts, but nothing more." He let out a hollow breath and continued, the cadence of a man who had explained this truth too many times to too many people who refused to listen.
"Even if you refined the entire esca—a mass the size of a continent—you would be lucky to produce a fistful of Pure Gold. Bonbori was not born with it. Pure Gold is not inherent to the creature."
Acier's gaze drifted downward, toward the unseen depths of the beast, as if he could still see the long-dead island in his mind.
"From my studies… from what I have been able to piece together over centuries… Bonbori was once nothing more than a sea king like any other. Vast, yes, ancient even—but ordinary in nature." His voice lowered. "Until it swallowed a fragment of Pure Gold millennia ago." The words hung heavy.
"That fragment did not dissolve. It did not corrode. Pure Gold cannot be digested—not by time, not by flesh." He tapped his own chest lightly. "Instead, it was assimilated. The beast grew around it. With it. Because of it." Acier's eyes gleamed with the cold clarity of science.
"Bonbori never stopped growing after that. Its cells adapted and mutated. Over centuries, then millennia, the properties of Pure Gold bled into its physiology—its enzymes, its tissues, even its regenerative processes. Not enough to create Pure Gold naturally… but enough to make its entire body a perfect catalyst." He clenched his fists, shaking faintly with restrained excitement and old obsession.
"That is why Bonbori matters," he said. "Not because it contains Pure Gold—but because it has become the ideal medium to refine it. Materials harvested from its body can yield far higher-quality Pure Gold than anything I have ever produced before." Acier looked up at me then, eyes sharp despite his age and bloated form.
"Kill the beast without care, and you lose that forever. But process it correctly…" A grim, reverent smile crept across his face. "…and Bonbori will become the greatest Pure Gold refinery this world has ever known."
I remained silent for a few breaths, listening to the slow, thunderous pulse of Bonbori's body around us—the distant churn of acid seas, the groan of living flesh stretching like tectonic plates. Then I spoke again, calmly, as if I were asking about the weather.
"If I were to deliver Bonbori's corpse to you," I said, turning my gaze to the professor, "in its entirety… how much Pure Gold could you refine from it?"
For a heartbeat—no, for an eternity—Acier did not move. His mouth parted slightly, but no sound came out. His eyes, dulled by two centuries of despair and isolation, suddenly sharpened, pupils shrinking as if trying to process an impossible equation. The question did not merely surprise him—it shattered the boundaries of what he believed to be conceivable.
Beside him, Magellan froze. This was a man who had devoted his life to the idea of Bonbori's death, who had chased rumors and legends across seas, who had steeled himself against the very notion of facing such a monstrosity. And yet, even he felt his breath catch in his throat.
The absurdity of it hit them both at once. Bonbori was not merely large. Bonbori was colossal.
A living catastrophe whose body mass rivaled continents, whose girth could swallow island chains as a passing indulgence, whose existence warped the seas themselves. To kill such a creature was already the stuff of impossible legends. To then speak of retrieving its corpse—intact, no less—bordered on lunacy.
Acier's hands began to tremble. "You…" he finally croaked, voice cracking as decades of restraint collapsed under the weight of the question. "You speak as if such a thing is… trivial." He swallowed hard, his mind racing—calculations, projections, half-forgotten formulas resurfacing all at once.
"If—if—such a thing were possible…" he said slowly, almost reverently, "…then the yield would be beyond anything recorded in human history."
Magellan turned sharply toward him. "How much?" he demanded, unable to keep the edge from his voice. Acier laughed then—a dry, broken sound, equal parts awe and madness.
"Enough to make a kingdom eternal," he said. "Enough to destabilize the balance of the world itself." He lifted his gaze back to me, eyes burning now, alive in a way they had not been since before Alchemi fell.
"Bonbori's body has been steeped in Pure Gold's influence for countless millennia. Its tissues, its marrow, even its cellular residue would act as perfect raw stock. Refined correctly…" His breath hitched. "You could produce Pure Gold on a scale that rivals myths. Tens of Kilograms. Perhaps more."
The words echoed through the living abyss. Magellan's jaw clenched. "That's… insanity," he muttered. "Even the World Government—" "They would kill entire eras to control it," Acier finished softly.
Then, very slowly, he looked back at me—not as a broken survivor, not as a grieving father, but as a scientist staring at the embodiment of an impossible hypothesis. "…You are not asking if Bonbori can be killed," he said.
"No," I replied evenly. Acier inhaled sharply, realization crashing over him like a tidal wave.
"You are asking what the world will look like after it dies." I met his gaze without flinching, my voice calm but carrying an edge that left no room for misunderstanding.
"Do not mistake me, Professor. I am no saint, nor do I have any intention of sharing the secret with the world, nor will I allow you to do so." The words settled heavily in the living air.
"I only wish to ensure that I possess enough Pure Gold to grant the Donquixote Family eternal youth. As long as that condition is met, I will be satisfied. And under no circumstances will the secret of Pure Gold ever leave our hands."
My eyes shifted—briefly, deliberately—to Olga. The girl stiffened instantly. A shiver ran down her spine, and she shrank back behind her father, fingers clutching the fabric of his tattered coat. Of everyone present, she was the greatest risk—not because of malice, but because of innocence. Two centuries of isolation had preserved her body, but not tempered her nature. She was still a child, and naivety clung to her like morning dew.
Children talked. Children slipped. That alone could doom us all. Acier stepped forward at once, placing himself subtly between my gaze and his daughter.
"I will teach her," he said firmly, pride and resolve bleeding into his voice. "What may be spoken—and what must never be spoken. You have my word. You can trust me."
I studied him for a moment, then nodded. Because he was right to understand the stakes. If the World Government even caught the faintest whisper that the Donquixote Family possessed something as mythical as Pure Gold, the response would not be subtle. The full weight of the Celestial Dragons would descend upon us like divine retribution. Fleets. Gods. Erasure.
And I was not yet prepared to face something like Imu. A being spoken of not as a ruler—but as a god. I still had far to go before I could claim such a title for myself. After a brief silence, another question rose in my mind—one that had been gnawing at me since Acier's earlier explanation.
"Professor," I said, turning back to him, "if synthesizing Pure Gold requires such an absurd quantity of resources just to refine a pebble… then how did you manage to create it for your daughter in the first place?"
My gaze flicked, briefly, to the ring that now hung around Olga's neck on a thin chain—the same ring Acier had once forged to save her life. I already knew the answer was extraordinary. From the conversion rates he had described, such a feat should have been impossible for a single man. Acier exhaled slowly, his expression softening as memory overtook him.
"To be honest…" he said, voice quieter now, "…I cannot take full credit for that." He lifted a hand, as though brushing dust from an old, half-buried recollection. "Like Bonbori, I was fortunate enough to discover a fragment of Pure Gold. But unlike the one the beast consumed, the piece I found was… incomplete. A half-finished product."
Our attention sharpened.
"I unearthed it from a relic site," he continued, eyes distant, "along with fragmented records—texts so old they barely resembled language. Pure Gold was not my invention. It was already ancient long before my time." He swallowed, then spoke the next words with a weight that sent a chill through the air.
"According to those records, Pure Gold originated in an era this world has long forgotten. A time when beings far beyond today's understanding walked freely upon the earth." His gaze lifted to meet mine.
"They called it the First World." The words lingered, heavy and ominous. A forgotten age. A relic of gods. And a power that the modern world was never meant to reclaim. Acier blinked, momentarily pulled from the depths of his memories by my question.
"Wait… Professor," I said slowly, my tone sharpening with interest, "are you an archaeolinguist?" The word itself seemed to stir something long buried within him. For a heartbeat, Acier simply stared—then a soft, almost self-deprecating chuckle escaped his lips.
"So you noticed…" he murmured. "Yes. Among other things, that was once my field of study." Even Olga glanced up at him in surprise, as if hearing this for the first time.
"I specialized in ancient scripts and proto-languages," Acier continued, his voice gaining clarity as he spoke of something he truly understood. "Languages that predate the modern world—glyphs, sigils, symbolic equations that blurred the line between written word and scientific formula." He raised a finger, tapping lightly against his temple.
"Most scholars believed those scripts were ceremonial at best, mythological nonsense at worst. But I realized early on that they weren't stories." His eyes hardened. "They were manuals."
Magellan frowned. "Manuals… for what?"
"For technologies," Acier answered without hesitation. "For principles that the current age no longer possesses the foundation to understand. Pure Gold was one such principle—part chemistry, part energy alchemy, part something else entirely."
Something older. Something that did not belong to this era.
"The texts referred to epochs," he went on, "cycles of civilization. Rise, collapse, reset. The First World was described as the origin point—the age where knowledge, science, and what people now call divinity were one and the same."
He let out a long breath.
"I never fully deciphered everything. The language was fragmented and layered—one symbol could carry half a dozen meanings depending on context. But enough remained for me to replicate fragments of their work. Enough to save my daughter."
His hand trembled slightly as it rested on Olga's shoulder. I remained silent, but my mind was racing. Because I knew. The First World was not just a poetic term. It was a buried truth—one the World Government had gone to obscene lengths to erase. Ancient languages were not forbidden by coincidence. Scholars did not "vanish" by accident.
Those who could read the past could unravel the present. And Acier—this broken, guilt-ridden man trapped in the belly of a monster for two centuries—had unknowingly brushed against the same forbidden knowledge that could shake the very foundation of the world.
I finally spoke, my voice low. "…Then you were far more dangerous than you ever realized, Professor." Acier met my gaze, and for the first time, there was no confusion in his eyes—only quiet understanding.
"Perhaps," he said. "Or perhaps I was simply a father who read too deeply… and paid the price for it." I studied Acier for a long moment before speaking again, weighing my words with care.
"I am simply curious," I said at last, my voice calm but deliberate, "are you perhaps familiar with the ancient tongue used by the Kozuki family of Wanokuni—the language believed to have originated from the Ancient Kingdom itself?"
The effect was immediate. Acier's eyes sharpened, the haze of exhaustion and grief peeling away in an instant, replaced by the alert clarity of a true scholar. He did not answer right away. Instead, he searched my face, measuring intent, implication, danger.
Then he spoke, carefully. "…Are you referring to the ancient script carved upon the Poneglyphs?"
A faint smile tugged at my lips. "Yes, Professor," I replied evenly. "I want to know whether you are capable of deciphering the ancient texts of the Poneglyphs."
The silence that followed was heavy—pregnant with consequences. If his answer was yes, then the balance of power shifted in ways the world itself could not yet comprehend. The Donquixote Family would possess something no empire, no Yonko, not even the World Government truly controlled: knowledge unbound by history's chains.
Acier exhaled slowly, as though surrendering a truth he had kept buried for a lifetime. "Yes," he said at last. "I am… fairly proficient in the ancient script."
Even Magellan stiffened at that. "I never learned it from Wano directly," Acier continued, his tone thoughtful, reverent. "My understanding came from comparative linguistics—cross-referencing fragmented inscriptions, relic texts, and pre-World Government records. The Kozuki script is not merely a language. It is a compression system—dense, deliberate, designed to preserve meaning across millennia without distortion."
He let out a soft, bitter chuckle. "A brilliant safeguard, really. Elegant. Cruel." Olga leaned against him, sensing the shift in the air, though she did not fully understand it.
"I was forced to abandon my research," Acier went on, his voice darkening. "The World Government was already circling. Scholars vanished. Libraries burned. Entire lines of inquiry erased overnight. I knew if I continued, I would not merely die—I would be erased."
His hand tightened gently atop Olga's head. "And then… my daughter fell ill." The words were quiet, but they carried the weight of centuries. "At that point, nothing else mattered. Not history. Not truth. Not the sins of the world. I would have burned every book I owned if it meant saving her." His fingers brushed through Olga's hair with trembling care. "All my intellect, all my ambition—it became singular. I needed a miracle."
Pure Gold. Isolation. Bonbori. Two centuries of damnation for a father's love.
"I sacrificed everything," Acier said softly. "My name. My work. My place in the world. And then… I lost her anyway." He paused, breath hitching—then looked down at Olga standing beside him, alive, warm, real. "…Or so I believed."
There was no regret in his eyes now. Only certainty. "But standing here," he said, voice steady once more, "after two hundred years of darkness, I can say this without hesitation—it was worth it."
With Acier now among us, the implications were staggering.
The Donquixote Family—of all forces in the world—might now stand alone as the only single power possessing three living individuals capable of reading the ancient Poneglyphs. Acier would be the third, alongside myself and Nico Robin. Knowledge the World Government had drowned in blood and silence now sat, breathing, within our grasp.
There was, of course, one other. Lily. Clover's granddaughter. A shadow moving beneath Crocodile's domain.
I had never lost track of her whereabouts—not out of obligation, but for Robin's sake. The girl was a loose thread in a tapestry woven with forbidden history, and loose threads had a habit of attracting hunters. Still, I had never made a move to save her, nor did I intend to. My promise, sworn in blood and fire long ago, had been made to Nico Olvia, and that promise extended to her daughter alone.
Not to Clover's lineage. Not to the weight of Ohara's remnants. Not to a girl sheltered under another man's shadow. The world was cruel, and so were choices.