One by one, they drank.
Finn, Sakazuki, Borsalino, Kuzan, Gion, Sengoku — each took a capful in turn, no one taking more than their share, and the bottle passed back to Finn with thirteen portions remaining. Nobody reached for a second helping. At this level, at least, everyone present seemed to understand that the Fountain of Youth was not something you were greedy about.
Finn turned the bottle over in his hands and ran through the list in his head. Hina. Stussy. Garp. Zephyr. Kong. That was five more, leaving eight in reserve. Plenty of time to think about the rest later. There were people he would not hand this to casually — eternal life was not a gift you distributed without thinking — and there were people he could not imagine not giving it to.
He looked up at Imlia. "Out of curiosity — beyond the Ope-Ope Fruit and the Fountain of Youth, are there other paths to immortality?"
She seemed faintly amused by the question, not offended by it. "Probably more than a few. I've had a long time to look, but I've never claimed to know everything." She paused, thinking. "Two others come to mind. The first is pure gold — a metal developed by alchemists, more than two hundred years ago. It doesn't add vitality the way the Fountain does. It slows the rate at which you consume it. The total stays the same; you simply spend it at a fraction of the normal rate. Someone carrying pure gold might live a thousand years on what would otherwise be a single lifetime."
Finn knew about this. The girl — the one who looked eleven or twelve but was over two centuries old. He had filed that information away and not thought about it much since. Now that he considered it, finding more pure gold was probably unnecessary given what was currently in his hand, but he made a mental note anyway.
"And the second?"
"The Immortality Brew." She said it simply. "I have never actually seen it made or confirmed it works in practice, because as far as I know, I am the only immortal in this world. But I found references to it in old texts — an artificial method, a brewed substance that confers immortality to whoever drinks it." She reached into the pendant at her throat and produced a folded piece of paper. She held it out toward Finn. "The formula."
Finn walked over and took it.
He unfolded it. He could read every character on it. He had no idea what any of the ingredients were. Yellow Spring Water. Lingyin Grass. Several others equally unfamiliar.
He stared at this for a moment, then folded it back up and put it in his coat.
It was almost certainly useless in practical terms — he had the Fountain of Youth in his other hand, and even if this brew worked as described, finding materials with names like these in the actual world seemed ambitious. But Imlia had kept it for a reason, and eight centuries of accumulated judgment was not something he was going to dismiss without thought.
Besides: you never knew what would be useful, later.
He looked at her. She had given him eternal life and a recipe and a Fountain of Youth and the bones of a negotiated peace, and she had done all of it with the unforced generosity of someone who genuinely did not need any of it anymore. Whatever she had been — and she had been the hidden ruler of the world for eight hundred years, which was not a small thing — she was something else now. Something Finn found considerably easier to think about clearly.
He was aware that this was probably by design, on some level. He was also aware that it did not matter, because the practical outcome was the same.
"The transaction, then," he said. "How do we copy the world coordinates?"
"Wait about ten minutes," she said. "I've already started the process."
He had not noticed her do anything. He filed that observation away too.
Since they had time, and since the tension that had held the room since they entered had largely dissipated into something stranger and more comfortable, Finn simply talked with her. Behind them, the others were quietly dealing with their own reactions to the Fountain of Youth — Gion was examining her hands with an expression that kept cycling between satisfaction and the determined blankness of someone who had decided not to be emotional about something — and Sengoku had found somewhere to stand that required him to look in a direction other than where Tsuru was standing.
"Where do you think the coordinates point?" Imlia asked. There was a quality to her voice that Finn had not heard from her before — not quite lightness, but something adjacent to it. The weight of eight centuries seemed to have lifted slightly from her posture, now that the conversation had moved from confrontation to departure. She looked, at this moment, genuinely curious. Like someone looking at a door they were about to open.
Finn thought about it. What he actually thought was that the coordinates almost certainly pointed to Earth, because where else would the imprint of his transmigration have come from? But that was not something he could say directly, for a fairly long list of reasons.
He settled on: "Powerful armies. Weapons that can destroy islands in single strikes. Ships that travel through the sky."
Imlia considered this. "That fits, given what you are." She nodded as though it confirmed something she had already suspected. A brief pause, and then: "Will you really not come with me, Finn?"
Her finger traced a light path across his cheek. She was very close, and her expression was the one she had been directing at him since they first met face to face — not predatory, not manipulative, but the direct, uncomplicated expression of someone who had decided what they wanted and was asking for it plainly.
"After today, the Marines will hold this world. There will be nothing left here that truly challenges you. Nothing new." She held his gaze. "I can give you everything they can give you, and everything they can't. Come with me. Let's see what the next world holds."
Finn took a deliberate step backward. Not because he was unaffected — he was being honest with himself about that — but because being affected was precisely the problem, and distance was the practical solution to it.
Imlia read his meaning without needing him to say it. The directness in her expression shifted into something quieter. Not quite sadness, but not nothing either.
"What a boring man," she said softly.
"Next time," Finn said, smiling, knowing perfectly well how unconvincing it was.
She did not dignify that with a response.
Then the ground moved.
It began as a deep vibration underfoot, the kind that traveled up through the bones before the ears registered it. The rubble of the ancient castle shifted and cracked along the base, and the earth beneath opened as though something below had simply decided to surface.
It rose slowly. A ship's length, more or less, in overall scale — but no ship. The shape was wrong for that, the proportions belonging to something designed without reference to water or wind. Its surface was covered with a film that kept it perfectly clean despite however long it had been buried, and the light that ran along its hull came from within the material itself. It looked, in the most direct sense of the word, like it had been made somewhere else and arrived here by accident.
Which, Finn now knew, was exactly what had happened.
"Uranus," he said.
"Uranus," Imlia confirmed, without any particular emphasis. Just a name.
She began walking toward it. "Come."
Finn followed.
Behind them, the sound of several sets of footsteps indicated that the rest of the Marine leadership had decided to follow as well, because of course they had — this was Uranus, the ancient weapon, the thing that had shaped the course of this world for eight centuries, and no Admiral or Fleet Admiral was going to stand fifty meters away and wait patiently while it surfaced.
Imlia stopped walking without turning around. "The rest of you stay here," she said, in the tone she used for things that were not requests. "Finn only. I keep my promises. You have nothing to worry about."
Sengoku came to a halt. His expression was the specific expression of a Fleet Admiral who was being told to stand somewhere and was calculating whether to argue about it.
He looked at Finn.
Finn looked at Uranus, and at Imlia's back, and assessed the situation with the same practical efficiency he applied to everything else. She had not harmed him when she had the opportunity to. She had given him the Fountain of Youth before copying the coordinates, which was a generous ordering of events. And even in the worst possible scenario, he was not someone who could be neutralized quickly or easily.
He shrugged slightly at Sengoku, in a way that communicated: I'll be fine, stop worrying, and kept walking.