"This is my feeling."
Olvia glanced at Robin, speaking as if narrating and as if sighing at the same time, "I know what you want to hear, but after the Ohara incident, I completely came to understand."
"Human life is utterly insignificant when measured against the span of world history."
"From the perspective of an individual, whether it's the destruction of Ohara or the fall of Wano, both are enough to make one lament."
"But from the perspective of the whole world, these things are so trivial."
"Almost every year, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of lives perish for various reasons. Even if Wano hadn't fallen, this generation would all be gone in a hundred years."
"..."
Listening to Olvia's emotionless words, Robin felt a chill run through her whole body.
"You're insane!"
"Aren't I just stating facts?"
Olvia raised her head and looked at her daughter, whose face was full of disbelief, then gently shook her head, "When you were eight, you already became a history doctor. On that path, your talent even surpassed mine. But Ohara taught me that to truly record history objectively, perhaps talent is not the most important thing."
"After the World Government was founded, in order to keep people from knowing that period of history, they forcibly erased that blank hundred years. Countless people who wanted to study it lost their lives because of it."
"Their deaths were meaningless..."
BANG!
Robin rushed up to Olvia and slammed her fist onto the desk; papers and books flew everywhere. The desk couldn't withstand the force of her blow.
"You said before that they were great!"
Her voice was hoarse, her eyes fixed on Olvia's face like she was looking at a stranger.
Olvia was completely different from the person Robin thought she knew. Or rather, Robin had never truly known her at all.
"I once thought so," Olvia said, "But the fact remains. As a historian, the most necessary thing is to evaluate and weigh."
Olvia paid no mind to Robin's outburst. She had once been an ordinary historian and knew full well how blasphemous her words sounded.
But facts are facts, different perspectives yield different answers.
Now, she could only feel that those people's sacrifices were meaningless, even somewhat regrettable.
"Evaluate and weigh? You mean you act like a wh*re, begging for someone's favor?", Robin sneered.
"You must use different methods with different rulers. If he can help me, I attach myself to him, that's a fair exchange."
Olvia slowly tidied the broken desk and said indifferently, "That relationship could be husband and wife, sovereign and subject, comrades, mistress and lover, or even master and slave. What historians should do most is study more history, record the lost times, not be trapped in endless internal strife."
"Then how is it meaningless for all those Ohara scholars to search for the history of the blank hundred years?", Robin ground her teeth.
Her strong reaction came from Olvia's denial of all the Ohara scholars' efforts. The saddest part was Olvia had once been their leader.
'What kind of thing is this? Even if it was a wrong path, you, one of the only two survivors of Ohara, shouldn't stand before them and say it so shamelessly!'
"Isn't it?", Olvia raised her head and placed the sorted scattered papers onto the nearby bookshelf, "I worked hard for a full twenty years. The Ohara people worked for nearly a hundred years, time even longer than that blank hundred. Yet the results of our long efforts still don't compare to what I gained in these two years by Rosse's side."
"You're just arguing from results. Without everyone's efforts, how would you have what you have today? You can't even understand the Poneglyphs."
Robin hated Olvia's words. People from the Four Seas might toil their whole lives and still be no match for those born powerful in the New World. Does that mean the people of the Four Seas have no right to exist?
"Do you know how many people in the World Government actually understand the Poneglyphs?", Olvia's question made Robin frown sharply.
"What do you mean by that? Why ask this? There should be hundreds, surely many people understand them."
"No. From my observations these days, only three people know them. It's even fewer than the people who knew in Wano; at least they preserved the full inheritance there."
"Three? Which three?", Robin was surprised. She hadn't imagined so few in the World Government would know.
"One is the one on the throne, another is Sora, and the other..."
Olvia smiled with a hint of melancholy and glanced at Robin.
No need for her to say it, Robin should be able to guess. Rosse, on that side, had hardly hidden it; when he did those things with her, he openly chatted with Sora over Den Den Mushi about it.
"Rosse?"
Robin's pupils constricted, "Impossible! Absolutely impossible! He can't possibly know the Poneglyphs!"
If Rosse could read them, then why would he come ask her and Olvia about it? Normally, they would have no value to him.
"Why is it impossible?"
Olvia asked meaningfully. Rosse was so proud that he didn't care whether others could see through him. Many of his plans were open strategies; whether they succeeded or failed didn't affect his mood, and they still served his purposes.
This trip to Wano lasted several months. Previously, Olvia had never spent such a long time with Rosse.
Precisely because they spent so much time together, Olvia understood what kind of person Rosse was. Those small details he usually didn't care about were enough for her to guess many things.
Before Robin, she had been Ohara's youngest history doctor, historians are not fools.
"If he knows the Poneglyphs, why keep us? To him, we're basically worthless..."
Robin bit her lip hard. The news Olvia gave her was so shocking she could hardly accept it. Her gaze drifted and finally settled on Olvia, "Surely he didn't keep us because of you. That man, doesn't he worry that that history could harm the World Government?"
"Whether it harms them or not, I won't say. But he may have similar reasons for keeping us."
Olvia's calm smile made Robin's skin crawl, 'At a time like this, she can still smile?'
'Olvia, you've been trained by that man until you're no longer human!'
Robin had begun to think Olvia had gone mad and was rambling nonsense.
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