Finn had seen fast healing before. Powerful Zoan users carried it naturally. Rokushiki practitioners who had mastered Life Return could manage wounds that would have killed ordinary people. Finn himself had improved considerably over the years — what once took weeks now took days, and with the Dark-Dark Fruit supplementing his constitution, serious injuries that he was willing to push through could close in hours.
None of that was what he was looking at.
Imlia rolled her shoulder experimentally, smoothed her hair back from her face, and let her arms fall to her sides. The shoulder that Shindokutō had cut ten centimeters into was unmarked. The forearm that the Dark-Dark Fruit had compressed into paste was whole. There was not even redness where the wounds had been.
The entire exchange — from injury to recovery — had taken less time than it took to draw a breath.
Sengoku broke the silence first. "Impossible. The Ope-Ope Fruit's immortality surgery affects lifespan. That's all it does. Even an immortal body in the conventional sense dies if the heart is destroyed. The surgery doesn't regenerate tissue."
Imlia glanced at him — one of the few times she had directed sustained attention at anyone other than Finn — and gave a small nod. "Correct."
"Then you aren't just an Ope-Ope surgery recipient."
"I am," she said. "But not only that."
She reached up and touched the pendant at her throat. Finn had registered it earlier and moved past it — a delicate thing, light gold with a small black gem at the center, the kind of jewelry that looked decorative and nothing else. He had not thought about it again.
She pressed two fingers against the gem, and a glass bottle appeared in her hand. Small, sealed, filled with something that caught the light in a way ordinary liquids did not.
Finn recognized the mechanism before he recognized what she was holding. "Devil Fruit materialization transfer technology."
Imlia smiled. "I like smart people."
It was Vegapunk's work, ultimately — the same line of research that had produced weapons with Devil Fruit properties grafted onto them. The pendant was not a pendant. It was a storage medium built from a space-type fruit's ability, the Devil Fruit power extracted and locked into the material itself. She had been collecting objects with time-space resonance for centuries; it stood to reason she would have encountered the occasional space-type fruit along the way, and that once its primary purpose was fulfilled, repurposing it into a practical tool was exactly the kind of thing Imlia would do.
She held the bottle up and turned it slightly in the light. Whatever was inside moved with the slow, thick consistency of something that was not quite water.
"I'll give you this," she said, looking at Finn, "if you cooperate with me."
"What is it?" Finn asked, after a pause he hadn't entirely intended to take.
"The Fountain of Youth." She said it without drama, the way someone might name a place they had visited. "It surfaces somewhere in the seas once every four hundred years or so. I found it three hundred and twenty years ago. I had drifted into a fog, fallen asleep — woke up on an island I had no charts for. The spring was there."
She said it with such complete casualness that Finn felt a brief, involuntary flicker of pure indignation on behalf of every person who had ever searched for it.
He also felt something else, which he immediately examined with the same pragmatic attention he gave everything. The Fountain of Youth. Actual immortality, not the extended lifespan that Ope-Ope surgery produced. Eternal youth specifically. He was not someone who had spent a lot of energy worrying about aging, but he was also not someone who rejected effective information when it arrived.
"So after drinking it," he said, keeping his voice level, "I'd have regeneration like yours?"
"No." Imlia shook her head. "What I have is the combination of both. The Ope-Ope surgery gave me immortality — it eliminated the mechanism by which I would have died of age. The Fountain of Youth then had nowhere to go, because my lifespan was already infinite. So instead of extending it further, that vitality transformed. It became what you see now." A brief pause. "Someone who has only the Fountain of Youth, without the surgery, would achieve immortality and permanent youth. Effective, extraordinary — but not the same thing."
Finn processed this. So Imlia was not a template that could be replicated. She was the product of a specific sequence, the surgery first and then the Fountain, and the combination had produced something that neither ingredient created alone. Anyone else who drank from the bottle would gain real immortality — no aging, no dying of time — but not the instant regeneration.
Which was still, by any honest assessment, an extraordinary thing to be offered.
"One sip per person is sufficient," Imlia continued, addressing Finn but speaking at a volume the entire group could hear. "Drinking more causes problems rather than benefits. This bottle holds enough for over twenty people." She looked at him steadily. "I don't want anything from this world, Finn. I have told you this repeatedly. I want one thing. Come with me."
"That's completely out of the—"
"Is it true?" Gion's voice came from directly behind Finn's left shoulder. "The eternal youth part."
Finn turned. Gion's expression had undergone a subtle transformation. The furious energy that had been radiating off her since before she had destroyed the castle with her own body was still present, but it had been reorganized into something considerably more complicated. She was looking at the bottle in Imlia's hand with an expression that Finn did not know exactly how to categorize.
He looked past her. Tsuru, white-haired and sharp-eyed under ordinary circumstances, was displaying an uncharacteristic stillness. Not the stillness of someone who had made a decision. The stillness of someone who was carefully not making one yet.
"Even older people," Imlia said, directing herself to Gion now with what appeared to be genuine warmth, "would return to their youngest and most vital appearance. The effect is complete."
From behind Finn came the soft, involuntary sound of someone swallowing.
He turned back around. "You're not seriously considering this."
Gion's expression snapped back to its normal configuration with suspicious speed. "What? Of course not. Obviously. I'm not considering anything. Why would I be? That woman is clearly trying to steal you away from me, which is—"
"Ahem." Fleet Admiral Sengoku stepped forward, placing himself beside Finn with the measured gait of someone who had considered his words. "Finn, if I might offer a balanced perspective—"
Finn turned. Any sentence from Sengoku that opened with "balanced perspective" had already arrived at a destination. "No."
Sengoku blinked. "I haven't finished."
"You were going to say something reasonable-sounding that ends with 'therefore perhaps we should reconsider our current approach.'"
Sengoku's mouth closed.
Finn looked at him for a moment. "Don't tell me the Fleet Admiral of the Marines is actually wavering right now."
"I am not wavering," Sengoku said, with dignity. "I am assessing. There is a difference." He folded his hands behind his back and looked at a point slightly above Finn's head. "Our objective in coming here was to dismantle the conspiracy that has governed this world from the shadows. The entity responsible for that conspiracy has, since we arrived, expressed consistent disinterest in continuing to govern anything. She wants to leave. Permanently." A pause. "Furthermore, she has now demonstrated a recovery ability that complicates our tactical position considerably. And she is offering something of—" He stopped. Started again. "I am simply pointing out that the cost-benefit calculation has changed since we walked in."
"The cost-benefit calculation," Finn said.
"Yes."
"And the benefit side of the calculation involves the Fountain of Youth."
Sengoku said nothing. His chin braid moved slightly.
Finn turned back to face Imlia. She was watching this exchange with the expression of someone who found it entertaining but was too composed to say so. The bottle was still in her hand, catching the light.
He had spent seven years building toward this moment. The independence of the Marines. The dismantling of the World Government's hidden authority. The system that had operated in secret above every institution, every nation, every person in the world for eight centuries — ending it, exposing it, replacing it with something that did not require a hidden throne.
Imlia had looked him in the eye and said: I was the one holding that throne. I am bored of it. Take it.
And now she was holding the Fountain of Youth and asking him to just leave.
The part that bothered him — the part he kept coming back to — was not the offer. It was that she meant it. The Wash-Wash Fruit's judgment had established that her intentions carried no malice, which implied a moral architecture so internally consistent that the fruit's framework couldn't find a crack in it. She genuinely believed she was doing nothing wrong. She genuinely wanted only Finn. She genuinely intended to leave.
If she left, the threat she represented left with her.
If she stayed, he was fighting someone who had just regenerated from injuries that should have mattered, and who had stopped Infinite True Void with Haki that had been building for eight hundred years.
Finn was aware of what the correct strategic answer was. He was also aware that strategy was not the only thing in the room.
He looked at the bottle, and then at Imlia, and kept his expression neutral while he thought.