In Loguetown, Yami immediately opened the thousand-mile eye to look for Bartolomeo.
As a transmigrator, Yami possessed an absolute edge Blackbeard never had: a narrative vantage point above everyone else.
Unless someone never appeared in the original account, Yami knew the intel and whereabouts of those who either had top-tier Devil Fruits yet stayed low-key or had not yet eaten them at all.
Enel. Foxy. Wapol. And now, Bartolomeo.
Bartolomeo, the Straw Hats' die-hard fanboy in the original story, was the Paramecia Barrier-Barrier Fruit user.
The Barrier-Barrier Fruit is among the top Paramecia, able to produce an absolute defensive barrier.
Absolute defense means exactly that.
Barring special powers, no attack can break it.
Even high-grade Haki cannot shatter it.
The best proof is Kozuki Oden, who sailed with both Whitebeard and Roger and wielded Internal Destruction Armament Haki, yet he could do nothing to that defense.
Unless you exhaust the user's stamina or wield special abilities like the Paramecia Flower-Flower Fruit or the Paramecia Door-Door Fruit, you cannot break the barrier, let alone harm anyone inside.
Yami coveted this power.
With the multi-ability physique, he had sworn to make himself an all-around, unanswerable existence.
There is no invincible Devil Fruit in this world.
Every fruit has its bane.
Even the Nika Fruit fears sharp things and loses power at a Dark-Dark touch.
Likewise, no truly unanswerable person has appeared yet.
Even Whitebeard, the strongest man in the world, had more than one equal at his peak.
Say someone ate a top fruit and pushed Haki, martial arts, and swordsmanship to their limits.
If his enemy did the same, he could not be the singular strongest.
The awkward truth is that mastering fruit, Haki, martial arts, and sword to the top is the ceiling of this world.
At least before Yami crossed over, no cross-dimensional power had appeared.
Rocks was mighty, yet before Roger and Garp together he still could not avoid defeat.
Thus, for now only a multi-fruit user has hope of breaking the world's limit and becoming truly unanswerable.
Yami had that potential.
After taking the Door-Door and Glare-Glare Fruits, his sensing and escape were maxed.
If he added the Barrier-Barrier Fruit, his defense would be maxed too.
With a body impervious to blades and bullets, he would no longer fear top-tier Haki, and the few gaps in his offense would be covered.
He swept Loguetown once with the thousand-mile eye and soon spotted Bartolomeo in a slum-like quarter.
That grass-green cockscomb and the nose ring were impossible to miss.
But Yami's face quickly fell.
Right now Bartolomeo was an ordinary man who had not eaten the Barrier-Barrier Fruit.
No need for mind-reading or a closer look.
The bruises on his face and the fact that he had only two little underlings told the story.
The original account described Bartolomeo as a crime boss who ruled as many as 150 small towns before going to sea as a pirate.
One hundred and fifty towns. Compared to Bartolomeo's turf, Arlong's little empire was nothing.
He ruled so much precisely thanks to the Barrier-Barrier Fruit's invincible defense.
Like a Logia user, once he ate the Barrier-Barrier Fruit he would be unbeatable across the Four Seas and the first half of the Grand Line.
Even in the New World, the number who could hurt him would be few indeed.
If he had eaten it already, he would not look so shabby, nor be walking around with fresh injuries.
Details confirmed it. If Bartolomeo were already the barrier user, Smoker would not be Loguetown's top dog in Sea Circle 1520.
After five years honing the fruit, Bartolomeo would not be worshiping Luffy either.
The time he ate it likely fell during the two-year gap or after the story began, at the earliest 1519.
Whatever the exact year, Yami was early.
He felt unwilling to give up.
He watched Bartolomeo for a few more days in Loguetown.
When he saw Bartolomeo brawling for turf again, injuries unhealed and getting worse, Yami finally left the town with regret.
Since he had abandoned his ship in the East Blue, he departed in a simple skiff.
Looking at the little boat under his feet, Yami said with a helpless sigh, "When my strength is enough, I'm going straight to that old lion."
The old lion he meant was one of the legends of the previous era, the Golden Lion Shiki, who lost to the Pirate King in the Battle of Edd War by sheer bad luck.
If the strongest crew of this era was the Whitebeard Pirates,
then among the remnants of the Rocks era, the Golden Lion had the most successful run.
The Flying Pirates, before that once-in-a-century superstorm, were without question the strongest crew.
At that time Roger's and Big Mom's crews had not yet fully matched him, and Whitebeard's and Kaido's crews had not yet matured.
Shiki himself once stood near the world's ceiling.
A top-tier Devil Fruit. Peerless swordsmanship. Roaring Haki that shook the seas. The strongest crew. No wonder, like his former captain, he nursed ambitions to conquer the world.
Yami sought him for the fruit.
The Paramecia Float-Float Fruit is one of the very top Paramecia, in Yami's eyes no less than the Tremor-Tremor Fruit and in some ways even more strategic.
Everything the Tremor-Tremor Fruit can do to terrify the seas with tsunamis and shatter islands, the Float-Float Fruit can do.
And it can do what the Tremor-Tremor cannot.
After raising tsunamis and wrecking islands, a Tremor user struggles to save himself.
So in battle Whitebeard often reined himself in. He could not fly, and his sons were always around him.
The Float-Float user has no such concern.
After making a tsunami or destroying an island, he simply takes to the air.
More frightening still, to sink an island a Tremor user must either summon a monstrous tsunami or go below to crack the foundation.
A Float-Float user destroys an island by lightly touching the ground, spending stamina to make it float, then it stays aloft forever.
As long as the user is not knocked out, the island remains in the sky no matter how far he goes or even if he falls asleep.
Those sky islands can move with the user.
Picture this: the Float-Float user brings one floating island over another and cancels the lift.
An entire island falls. How many in this world could withstand a falling island.
Even if someone blasted it apart, the fragments would be no different from meteorites.
A single-target strike becomes an area-wide annihilation.
This is why the Float-Float Fruit's strategic deterrence stands above even the Tremor-Tremor.
It is also why the Golden Lion, though he lost his legs, shook the world the moment he reappeared.
A lion without the world's strongest crew is still a lion.
If that lion goes mad, not only Marine Headquarters but the World Government itself has a headache.
Yet in the end, that monster lost to a mere three-hundred-million-bounty Supernova who hadn't even learned Haki.
Utterly absurd.
That battle crowned Luffy the king of the movies and set him walking ever farther down that path, giving birth to the saying that no matter how fearsome the foe, one trip through a movie special will fix it.