"He's wary of us," I said, my gaze fixed on the blackened sea beyond the shore. The shroud rolled endlessly, heavy and suffocating, as if the ocean itself were holding its breath. "And that makes him dangerous. If Bonbori decides to dive into the abyss… even I may not be able to follow him."
The admission carried weight. I wasn't boasting when I said I could defeat the beast in a straight fight—but this wasn't a battlefield of my choosing. Bonbori wasn't foolish. Somewhere beneath those dark waters, the creature had already sensed me. Perhaps he'd felt my presence the moment my haki brushed against the depths. Perhaps that was why he'd retreated, sinking lower and lower, clinging to the one advantage he still possessed.
Distance.
"Lure him…?" Magellan echoed, his voice tight. He dragged a hand through his matted beard, frustration and disbelief warring on his gaunt face. "And then what? Is dragging him to the surface really part of this… rescue?"
"It's only the beginning," I replied. A faint chuckle escaped me, though there was little humor in it. "To truly carry out a rescue, we'll have to do something far more reckless." I turned to him, firelight flickering across my features. "We'll have to walk straight into the belly of the beast."
Magellan stiffened, his breath hitching. The words clearly struck him harder than anything I'd said so far. His mouth opened, then closed again, as if his mind simply refused to form a response. Then—suddenly—his expression changed. His eyes widened, not in fear this time, but in realization.
"Wait…" he muttered, as though a long-buried memory had clawed its way to the surface. His hands began to tremble as he fumbled with the tattered pockets of his pants, fingers digging desperately into worn fabric. "There might be… there might be something."
He pulled out a small cloth sack, frayed and stained by salt and time. It looked insignificant—little more than a scrap tied shut with string—but he held it as though it weighed a ton.
"See if this helps lure him," Megallan said hoarsely, thrusting the sack toward me. "This… this is what made him hunt us in the first place." I paused, watching his face as old pain resurfaced.
"Back then," he continued, voice cracking, "I dove into the sea to draw him away from my crew. I thought if I ran, if I sacrificed myself, they might live." His lips twisted into a bitter smile. "The monster still destroyed them anyway. Every last one." His gaze darkened, hatred burning bright beneath the madness.
"Sometimes I think… he let me live on purpose. Just to mock me."
I accepted the sack slowly, the weight of his words settling in my chest. It felt heavier than it looked. Carefully, I untied the string and tipped its contents into my palm. A small pebble rolled free.
At first glance, it was unremarkable—dull, blackened, coated in a hardened resin that absorbed the firelight instead of reflecting it. It looked like nothing more than a bit of tarred stone one might find on a ruined shore.
And yet— The moment my fingers closed around it, something stirred. I probed it instinctively, not with strength, but with my Voice. The world around me seemed to hush, the crackling fire fading into the background as my senses brushed against the object.
My breath caught. I pressed slightly harder, my thumb scraping away a thin layer of the black resin. The reaction was immediate.
A blinding golden light erupted from within, fierce and radiant, cutting through the gloom like a newborn sun. The glow pulsed once, alive and unmistakable, before I snapped the resin back into place, smothering the light as quickly as it had appeared.
The night swallowed it again—but the image burned into my eyes. I stared at the pebble in disbelief, then slowly looked up at Magellan.
"You…" I said, my voice barely above a whisper, shock and awe bleeding through despite my control. "You've been carrying this all these years…?" His brow furrowed, clearly confused by my reaction.
"That's… bad, isn't it?" he asked uncertainly. "I only knew it was strange. Bonbori went mad the moment we found it. Wouldn't stop chasing us." I swallowed, my grip tightening around the sack.
"You were carrying a piece of Pure Gold," I said, staring at him as if seeing him for the first time. "A fragment—small, yes—but unmistakable."
The fire crackled loudly, as if in agreement. A pebble-sized miracle. A beacon. No wonder Bonbori had hunted them. No wonder the beast still lingered in these waters. Slowly, a grim smile spread across my face.
"Well," I murmured, closing the sack and tying it shut once more, "it seems the sea itself has been guiding us all along." I met Magellan's eyes, resolve hardening like steel.
"This will lure him out," I said with certainty. "And once he rises…" I turned my gaze back toward the shrouded sea, where something ancient and monstrous waited below. "…we won't let him escape again."
Soon, it was just the two of us—two men and a dying boat—sailing straight toward the heart of the forbidden sea.
I had left my own vessel far behind, anchored well outside the zone where even seasoned captains refused to tread. What carried us now was a tattered skiff, its planks swollen with age and salt, its hull groaning with every swell as though protesting the madness of its passengers. It was a miracle the thing still floated at all, and in these waters, miracles were short-lived.
A black fog smothered the world. It wasn't the kind of mist that merely limited sight—it devoured it. The horizon vanished entirely, erased as though it had never existed. Above us, thunder rolled endlessly, low and distant, yet no rain followed. Below, the sea shifted in ways that defied reason. One moment the water surged violently, waves rearing high enough to swallow the boat whole; the next, it fell away unnaturally, sinking into sudden hollows that exposed churning darkness beneath the surface.
If not for my Observation Haki spreading outward like an invisible net, we would have been dead within minutes.
Whirlpools—dozens of them—spanned miles across the abyssal waters, silent and waiting. They didn't roar or announce themselves like ordinary maelstroms. They simply existed, pulling at the sea itself with patient, inexorable force. I adjusted our course constantly, subtle movements of the rudder and oars guided not by sight, but by instinct sharpened beyond the limits of human sense.
The sea was wrong. Despite the storm overhead, despite the thunder that clawed across the sky, the water itself was eerily calm—too calm. The surface would smooth out without warning, glasslike and still, only to erupt seconds later into violent turbulence. It was as if the Abyss Sea breathed, rising and falling to a rhythm known only to itself. Chaos given form.
The oars rose and fell in steady cadence, their creaks swallowed by the fog. Across from me, Megallan rowed with trembling arms, his frail body pushed far beyond what it should have endured. His heart pounded visibly beneath his skin, each beat echoing like a war drum in his chest. His sunken eyes darted in every direction, snapping toward the slightest sound—the splash of displaced water, the distant groan of the sea, the whisper of fog brushing against the hull.
Fear clung to him, thick and suffocating. Yet he didn't stop. I could feel it—his terror, yes, but beneath it, something far stronger. Resolve.
"You know," I said quietly, my voice cutting through the oppressive silence, "it's not too late to turn back."
I didn't look at him as I spoke. My eyes remained fixed ahead, on the unseen path only my haki could trace.
"I can handle this alone." For a brief moment, the only response was the creak of wood and the distant rumble of thunder.
Then— "No."
The word came out sharp. Absolute. Magellan's grip tightened around the oar until his knuckles turned white.
"No," he repeated, louder now, his voice trembling but unyielding. "I need to be a part of this." He drew in a ragged breath, forcing his failing lungs to comply. "If fate allows it… then I want to be the one who sends him on his way to the afterlife."
There was no hesitation in his tone. No doubt. Even in his broken, emaciated state, even knowing that this sea alone could kill him before Bonbori ever surfaced, he was prepared to stake what little life he had left on a single moment. I said nothing.
The fog thickened around us, swallowing the last traces of the world we'd left behind. The skiff pressed onward, deeper into the Abyss Sea, where myths were born and sanity went to die. Ahead of us, somewhere beneath those shifting waters, an ancient monster waited.
The boat groaned one last time as we let the oars slip free and drifted to a halt. The sudden stillness felt unnatural, as if the sea itself had noticed us and chosen to hold its breath.
"This should be a good place…" I murmured.
The fog pressed in tighter, swallowing sound, swallowing distance. There was no horizon anymore—only darkness above and darkness below, stitched together by a sea that refused to behave like water should. This was where we would wait. Where we would be found.
My intention was clear. Bonbori did not need to be slain yet—no, the beast needed to consume us. To take us whole into its abyssal body, where the truth I sought lay buried. I was gambling on knowledge from another life, on a fantasy tale and half-forgotten memories, hoping that the reality of that story of one piece transcended worlds.
If they did… then somewhere inside that ancient leviathan lay a mind that had once shaped Pure Gold. A mind that, if reclaimed, would become a cornerstone of the Donquixote family—standing alongside Einstein and Wolf as a true scientific pillar.
I reached behind me, checking the weight and balance of Shusui and Akatsuki one final time, ensuring both blades were secure. Then I pulled a coil of rope from the skiff and tossed one end toward Magellan.
"Here. Secure this around you."
He caught it clumsily, fingers trembling, but his resolve never wavered. I wrapped the other end tightly around my own waist, knotting it with practiced ease. If Bonbori swallowed us—as I intended—we could not afford to be separated in the chaos that would follow.
Magellan fastened the rope around himself without complaint, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the water beneath us.
"Well," I said quietly, "let's hope this is enough to lure him out."
The sea answered with silence. From the pouch at my side, I drew out the resin-coated pebble. In its current state, it was dull, lifeless—an unremarkable thing that gave no hint of its true nature. I didn't hesitate. My thumb pressed firmly against the blackened surface, and with a sharp crack, the hardened resin split apart.
Light exploded into existence. A blinding brilliance erupted from my palm, so sudden and intense it felt as though a fragment of the sun had been torn free and cast into the abyss. The thumbnail-sized orb of Pure Gold burned with impossible radiance, its glow cutting through the black fog like a divine blade. Shadows recoiled. The mist peeled back in rippling waves, revealing the sea in stark, terrible clarity.
The water beneath us reacted instantly. The surface trembled, then began to churn as though something vast had shifted far below. The eerie calm shattered. Waves rolled outward in perfect concentric rings, stretching miles into the fog. The light reflected off the water, turning the abyss into a sea of molten gold and black glass, an otherworldly contrast that made the air itself feel charged.
Magellan gasped, shielding his eyes as tears streamed down his weathered face. "That light…" he whispered, awe and terror bleeding into his voice. "It's calling to him…"
I could feel it too. Deep beneath us, something ancient stirred. A presence unfurled in my senses—colossal, predatory, aware. The sea grew colder, heavier, as though gravity itself had increased. The fog above twisted into slow, spiraling currents, drawn toward an unseen focal point below. Even the thunder seemed to quiet, as if the sky dared not intrude.
Bonbori had noticed us. The Pure Gold pulsed in my hand, each throb sending luminous ripples across the water like a heartbeat. And far beneath the skiff, in the crushing depths of the Abyss Sea, a myth began to rise.
The light of the Pure Gold pulsed once more—then the sea answered.
At first it was subtle. A pressure change so deep and absolute that even my bones seemed to groan in response. The water beneath the skiff began to sink, not churn, not splash, but collapse inward, as if the ocean itself were being inhaled. The surface stretched thin, forming a vast, concave hollow that pulled at the boat with irresistible force.
"Hold fast!" I barked.
Magellan's knuckles turned white around the rope as the skiff tilted sharply forward. The fog was torn apart by a sudden updraft, spiraling downward into the forming maelstrom. The Pure Gold's radiance flickered wildly now, its light bending and warping as something unfathomably massive displaced the sea below.
Then—the abyss opened.
A colossal shadow surged upward from beneath the hollowed sea, blotting out what little light remained. It wasn't a simple shape, nor a single form—it was scale upon scale, each one the size of a fortress wall, glistening with ancient scars and bioluminescent veins that pulsed like dying stars beneath obsidian flesh.
Bonbori rose. The sea screamed. A roar erupted—not of sound alone, but of pressure and vibration, a subsonic bellow that rattled the very marrow in my skull. Waves exploded outward in walls hundreds of meters high, annihilated instantly as the leviathan's bulk displaced them. The skiff was flung upward, spinning violently, the rope between us snapping taut as Megallan cried out.
Then we saw its mouth. It was not a mouth meant for prey—it was a gate.
An abyssal maw stretched open, wider than any island, lined with spiraling rows of teeth like jagged mountains, each one slick with blackened seawater and glowing faintly from within. The interior was not darkness but a vast, living tunnel of pulsating flesh and shimmering membranes, illuminated by eerie, organic light.
The Pure Gold screamed in my hand—no longer silent, no longer inert. Its brilliance intensified tenfold, as if recognizing its ancient nemesis. Bonbori answered. The leviathan surged forward, and the sea vanished. We were no longer falling—we were being drawn in.
The skiff shattered instantly, splintered like driftwood against the force of the current. Water tore past us in a deafening torrent as Bonbori inhaled, the pull so absolute that resistance was meaningless. My feet left the deck, my body snapping forward as the rope yanked Magellan and me together.
"Don't let go!" I roared.
Magellan didn't answer—but I felt his grip tighten. The world became motion and pressure and light. The roaring sea compressed into a narrow tunnel, then vanished entirely as we crossed the threshold of the beast's maw. The temperature shifted violently—cold to suffocating heat in an instant. The walls around us clenched and flexed, muscles contracting with titanic strength as we were dragged deeper inside.
Then the jaws closed. The sound was final. Absolute. A thunderclap that echoed through flesh and bone alike. Darkness swallowed us.
Not the absence of light—but a living darkness, thick and suffocating, punctuated by faint, pulsating glows along the walls of Bonbori's throat. Viscous fluids clung to us, slowing our descent as the beast's body convulsed, swallowing in massive, rhythmic contractions.
Every squeeze threatened to crush us outright. I drove my boots into the slick flesh, haki flaring instinctively as I anchored myself. The rope strained again, but held. Magellan slammed hard against the living wall, coughing violently, yet still conscious.
"We're in…" I muttered, breath steady despite the chaos. "Just like I thought."
Above us, the entrance sealed completely, cutting off the last remnants of the outside world. Below, the passage widened, opening into something vast and hollow—an internal cavern so enormous it defied belief.
Bonbori's belly. A cathedral of living flesh stretched out before us, illuminated by veins of bioluminescence and drifting motes of half-digested debris—wreckage, coral, bones… and things far older. The air was thick but breathable, warm and humming with the slow, titanic heartbeat of the beast.
"Are you alright…?" I hauled Megallan up by the shoulder, my grip firm as the last violent contraction rippled through the living walls around us. The rope between us lay slick with mucus and brine, stretched taut like a lifeline in a world that wanted us crushed, dissolved, forgotten.
He staggered, coughing hard, bracing himself against the pulsating flesh. Each breath he drew was ragged but real. Alive.
"I'm… I'm fine," he rasped at last. Yet even as the words left his mouth, it was clear his concern wasn't for himself.
His sunken eyes darted wildly, taking in everything—the immense chamber we stood in, the faint bioluminescent veins crawling across the walls like constellations trapped beneath living stone, the remnants of ship hulls embedded in hardened flesh, corroded anchors half-swallowed by muscle that had grown around them over decades… centuries.
The air itself felt ancient. Though it had seemed like only moments since Bonbori had engulfed us, the truth was far grimmer. Time inside the beast flowed differently. The roar of the sea, the crushing pull, the endless swallowing—it had lasted far longer than the mind could easily grasp.
More than a dozen minutes had passed.
The violent torrents of seawater that had dragged us inward were finally receding now, draining away through unseen passages deeper within the leviathan. Thick rivulets of brine slid along the curved floor, carrying splintered debris, shattered bones, and fragments of long-lost vessels toward a darker, narrower descent.
Toward the stomach. I glanced down briefly, feeling the pull even now—a slow, inevitable draw, like gravity itself had been rewritten within Bonbori's body.
If not for the fact that I had driven my boots and blade into the beast's flesh, anchoring myself with haki and sheer force of will, Megallan would have been lost. One misstep, one moment of weakness, and he would have been dragged screaming into the digestive abyss below—into acids that could dissolve steel and stone alike.
He realized it too. His fingers trembled as they tightened around the rope again, knuckles pale beneath grime and old scars. A shudder ran through him—not fear alone, but awe.
"So this is it…" he whispered. "The inside of the monster."
Bonbori's body responded. A deep, resonant thrum echoed through the chamber, like the beating of a colossal drum. The walls around us flexed slowly, deliberately, as if the beast were adjusting to the foreign presence within its domain. It knew.
I narrowed my eyes, extending my senses outward. Observation Haki brushed against the immense mass surrounding us, and the feeling that answered back was not mindless hunger. It was awareness.
"This place…" Magellan's voice trembled despite his effort to steady it. "Is it really the belly of a beast…? It's larger than most islands I've seen in my life. Can anyone truly be alive in such a hell?"
Disbelief and doubt bled through every word. To him, this wasn't merely unnatural—it was blasphemous. A nightmare given form and scale, where the laws of the sea and sanity alike had been devoured.
I didn't answer immediately. Instead, I closed my eyes and pushed my observation haki outward, letting it unfurl through the vast, living labyrinth around us. It slipped past the slick walls, through membranous passages and pulsing arteries, sinking deeper into Bonbori's colossal body.
And then I froze. There weren't one or two signs of life. There were hundreds. No—thousands.
Vital signatures flickered back at me like distant stars, layered and overlapping, some weak and fading, others steady, enduring. Fish, beasts, insects… and unmistakably, plants and trees. It was as if an entire world had been swallowed and forced to adapt, an ecosystem born not of land or sea, but of flesh and acid and endless darkness.
Bonbori was not just a predator. He was a continent that fed.
"Stay close," I said at last, my voice low but firm, cutting through the oppressive stillness. "This is only one chamber of the beast. For a creature of this size, having multiple stomachs is the norm. You'd be surprised how easily life finds a way to persist—even here."
Magellan stared at me, eyes wide, as the implications sank in. "An… ecosystem?" he murmured hoarsely. Before he could say more, something brushed against my senses.
Familiar. Human. Not a memory. Not an echo. A living presence. My eyes snapped open.
"Follow me," I said, already moving. "It seems this trip into hell won't be wasted after all."
I chose my path with care, every step deliberate. The floor beneath us shifted subtly, slick with viscous fluids that hissed faintly where they touched exposed metal or bone. Pools of diluted stomach acid glimmered dully in the bioluminescent glow, their surfaces deceptively calm. Even now, the corrosive scent burned faintly in the air.
For me, it was an inconvenience. For Magellan, it was death. One wrong step—one slip—and the acid would strip flesh from bone in seconds. And this was only the outer chamber, where seawater still diluted the beast's digestive fluids. Deeper inside, where the walls thickened and the light dimmed further, the acids would be purer… merciless.
I adjusted my pace to match his, subtly positioning myself between him and the more treacherous terrain.
"You're walking through the throat of a god," I continued quietly. "Bonbori doesn't digest everything at once. Some things fall through cracks in the process. Some endure. And some… are kept alive."
Magellan clenched his jaw, resolve battling terror in his eyes as he followed. Somewhere ahead, in the depths of the monster's belly, a human heartbeat persisted, a human who had survived within the beast of the belly for more than a century.