—Broadcast—
The ache of separation settled deep in Curly Dadan's chest, a familiar weight she'd carried too many times before. This female bandit found her hands trembling as she stood at the threshold of her home. The fear gnawed at her: the next time she saw Ace's sister, that vibrant young woman might be nothing more than a cold corpse, just like the others who'd left this place with fire in their eyes and dreams in their hearts.
"Luffy... Sabo..." The names left her lips in a ragged whisper. "You two brats better not get yourselves killed. Ace wouldn't want to see you so soon." Her voice hardened, the anger bubbling up from somewhere deep and raw. "Damn that Garp. I'll never forgive him. Not in this lifetime."
She stood outside for several more minutes, hurling every curse she could think of at the absent Marine hero. The vitriol poured out of her—years of resentment, grief, and helpless fury—until finally, the storm inside her chest began to settle. With her mind somewhat calmed, though far from peaceful, Curly Dadan turned and walked back into her room.
The sight waiting for her inside drove every coherent thought from her mind.
A pale-skinned girl sat beside the bed, her movements slow and curious, like a doll discovering its own hands for the first time. She turned her fingers over and over, studying them with the fascination of someone seeing their own body as if it were a stranger's possession. For several seconds, Curly Dadan could only stare, her mind refusing to process what her eyes were showing her.
Then recognition crashed through the paralysis like a tidal wave.
"Uta!" The name tore from her throat as a sob. Tears streamed down Curly Dadan's weathered face as she rushed forward, pulling the girl into a crushing embrace. "Uta! You're alive! You're alive!" The joy of it—the impossible, miraculous relief—ignited her emotions to their absolute peak. "Luffy's going to lose his mind when he hears about this!"
Even through the two layers of clothing between them, Curly Dadan couldn't help but notice how unnaturally cool the girl's skin felt. The sensation sent a chill down her spine, making her wonder for a brief, dizzying moment if grief had finally driven her mad. After all, the resurrection of the dead existed only in myths and legends whispered in dark taverns across the seas.
"Dadan?" Uta's voice carried a distant, confused quality. "This is... the East Blue? Why am I here?"
The red-haired singer was not, in the strictest sense, a living person anymore. A more accurate term—though far from comforting—would be "the living dead." She had no heartbeat, required no breath to sustain her, needed no food to survive. Uta's soul and body existed in some strange equilibrium between life and death, caught in a balance that defied natural law.
On the island of Elegia, she had been pierced clean through the chest by a standard Marine-issue blade. It should have been the end. But the Uta Uta no Mi (Song-Song Fruit) dwelling within her body had sealed her state at that precise moment of death, trapping her in suspended animation as the music demon Tot Musica began to assume control of her physical form.
When Tot Musica had been fully revived within her corpse, Kaido of the Beasts had beaten the demon back to its own dimension with a single devastating Thunder Bagua. The result had left Uta in a strange limbo—stuck in what could only be described as a bug in reality itself. With the music demon's lingering influence, she had managed to complete her revival today, though "revival" was perhaps too generous a word for what she had become.
Through their halting conversation, Uta gradually pieced together what had happened during the void after her death. Ann—Ace's sister—had retrieved her body from Elegia's ruins and brought her back to the East Blue, to this familiar place where Ace's memory still lingered in every corner.
The girl who had died once no longer harbored dreams of creating a world where fans across all the seas could embrace happiness and love through her music. That path had been proven false, a road that led only to the emergence of the music demon and the harm of countless innocent lives. The singing space where everyone could be happy together had been, from the very beginning, nothing more than an unrealistic fantasy born of naive desperation.
Now, Uta's concerns were simpler, more grounded in the tangible world: she wanted to know about Luffy and Shanks. She hoped to hear their latest news, to know if they were safe, if they were thriving. When she voiced these questions, Curly Dadan felt her heart sink with embarrassment and regret.
Living in a remote backwater like Windmill Village meant information traveled at a crawl. With poor transportation networks and limited communication, small settlements like this one could only learn about the outside world through Morgans' newspapers—and even those arrived weeks, sometimes months, after the fact.
Curly Dadan didn't want to lie to the girl who'd just clawed her way back from death. She rummaged through the drawers in her house, pulling out every old newspaper she'd accumulated over the past months. The pile was substantial—papers stacked haphazardly, dates mixed together in no particular order. She brought the entire collection to Uta at once, explaining that she should read through them herself to get the full picture. Better that than risk any details being lost or distorted in a secondhand retelling.
Uta's hands moved with practiced efficiency as she sorted through the mountain of newsprint. She quickly organized them by date, then began extracting every article related to Red-Hair Shanks and the pirate Luffy. With these pieces laid out before her in chronological order, she settled in to study them carefully, absorbing every word without missing a single detail.
The process took over half an hour. Uta read slowly, methodically, ensuring she understood the full context of each report. When she finally looked up from the last article, she'd managed to construct a rough framework in her mind of what had transpired in the world since Elegia.
After the Elegia Incident, the Red Hair Pirates had been completely wiped out. The former Yonko, Red-Hair Shanks, had vanished without a trace. Uta's mind immediately leapt to the most likely conclusion: her father must have been captured. The Marines would never deliberately conceal the death of a Yonko—such news would be too valuable for their public image. No, Shanks was alive somewhere, imprisoned, perhaps suffering indignities she didn't want to imagine.
Five years after the Battle of Marineford, Luffy had set out to sea again. He'd reclaimed his ship at the Sabaody Archipelago, plunged beneath the waves, and survived the crisis at Fish-Man Island. Then, in Dressrosa, he and Admiral Gin had worked together to thwart Doflamingo's world-threatening conspiracy.
The Marines had dubbed Luffy's group an "adventurous crew with whom cooperation is possible," though this diplomatic assessment hadn't prevented his bounty from increasing significantly yet again. However, the newspapers from after Dressrosa contained no further mention of the Straw Hat Pirates. It was as if they'd simply vanished from the world stage after departing from that kingdom's waters.
"So Doflamingo turned out to be such a terrible pirate..." Uta murmured, her two-toned hair falling across her face as she stared at the news clippings. "And the Celestial Dragons... none of them are good people, are they?" Her voice carried a note of naive realization, as if this truth should have been obvious all along. "I hope Luffy's okay..."
Uta—once a wildly popular singer whose voice had reached across the seas—had fans from every walk of life. Yet for all her fame and adoration, she had possessed remarkably little understanding of the world's true nature. Looking at the wanted posters of Donquixote Doflamingo and Charlotte Linlin, she had no idea these men represented the forces of the Shichibukai and the Yonko respectively. Instead, she found herself critiquing their fashion choices and the quality of the photographs themselves, completely missing the significance of who they were.
Only someone as fundamentally innocent as Uta would have ever dreamed of building a musical world free from pain and pirates, filled solely with happiness and joy—and then actually attempted to bring such a vision to life. Unfortunately, reality had delivered its verdict with brutal clarity: complete failure.
Through her experience at the Battle of Elegia, Uta had learned a harsh truth. With her own strength alone, she could never shake the massive institution that was the Marines. She could never rescue her father, Red-Hair Shanks, from wherever they'd imprisoned him. She didn't even know which dark cell held him, whether he was being tortured, or if other prisoners were making his captivity a living hell.
The practical option would be to set out to sea and find Luffy. But Curly Dadan immediately vetoed that idea. For Uta—who had only just barely survived death—to throw herself back into the violent storms of the outside world would be tantamount to suicide.
Without a ship, without sailors, without a navigator, it would be nearly impossible for Uta to leave Windmill Village on her own. Even if her body as one of the living dead could survive without food or water, her physical strength wasn't anywhere near sufficient to swim across the Grand Line. She'd more likely find her unconscious body rotting in the sea than successfully locate Luffy in that vast ocean.
The wisest course of action, Curly Dadan insisted, was to take the long view. Uta could no longer use the power of her Devil Fruit—the Uta Uta no Mi had become dormant after Tot Musica's defeat. Outside this village, she was just an ordinary pretty girl. If she fell into the hands of other pirates, her fate would be horrific beyond imagination.
—
In truth, the Straw Hat Pirates weren't particularly difficult to locate. Though they'd deviated from their planned course, they were still somewhere in the second half of the Grand Line. Before heading to Whole Cake Island to confront the Yonko pillar that was Charlotte Linlin, they first needed to find a famous doctor capable of completely curing Chopper's mysterious "disease."
That doctor—a woman with a reputation for extraordinary skill—had become legendary throughout the Grand Line in recent years. Her hands possessed an almost supernatural ability to heal. Many complicated and supposedly incurable diseases had been completely eradicated by her miraculous treatment methods, cases that other doctors had given up on entirely.
But before agreeing to treat any patient, there was one bizarre rule that had to be accepted without question: the doctor strictly adhered to a principle that if she healed one person, another person must die. If someone couldn't accept this condition, she would refuse treatment entirely. Even if the patient died rotting at her doorstep, even if their family wailed and begged outside her clinic, the strange doctor would show absolutely no mercy or compassion.
It was a price written in blood, and it never changed.