The instant Rei Ao's words fell—
"the heavens and earth losing all color" stopped being a metaphor, and became reality.
The clouds in the sky began to spin wildly, gathering into a colossal vortex. Sunlight was completely swallowed, as if broad daylight had been dragged into the deepest night in a blink—leaving only silent lightning flickering within the swirling mass of cloud.
The ground started to quake violently.
It wasn't an earthquake, but something more primal—some fundamental force awakening, roaring.
Far away, the ocean let out an angry, grieving howl. Towering waves rose in defiance of all logic—then, under some unseen will, froze in place.
Rei Ao merely raised his right hand. Two fingers came together like a sword, and he casually swept them forward—toward the Red Line, toward the heart of the Holy Land of Mary Geoise.
There was no earth-shattering boom. No thunderous collision of energies.
Only a single "scar across the sky."
One streak—a heavenly gash that felt as though it had existed since the dawn of creation, yet only now revealed itself.
At first, it was just a faint, nearly imperceptible ripple.
Then it expanded violently, becoming a rift that stretched from heaven to earth.
This rift was neither darkness nor light.
It devoured all color and illumination. Along its edges, countless tiny shards of space were annihilating and being reborn in the same breath.
Sword Qi?
No—this had long surpassed the domain of the sword.
This was a stroke of erasure upon the laws themselves, a negation of existence.
That mark swept through—soundless.
The sky was torn apart.
Not the clouds parting, but the very firmament splitting open into a massive wound, chaos-colored and slow to heal.
The land was torn apart.
The Red Line—solid beyond belief, bearing eight hundred years of the World Government's rule—was sliced as cleanly as butter under a hot knife. A bottomless canyon, several kilometers wide, yawned open in an instant, its cut faces smooth as mirrors.
Even the ocean was "torn."
Endless seawater was forced apart by an invisible power. The ocean floor, ten thousand meters down, was exposed to the air—only to be immediately flooded by even more violent seas surging in from across the world, madly pouring in to fill the void.
A super-tsunami erupted, sweeping across the entire Grand Line.
And standing atop the Red Line's summit—the Holy Land of Mary Geoise, where wealth, power, and sin converged—was the first to be struck.
There was no explosion. No gradual collapse.
In the instant that mark passed—
Centered on Pangaea Castle, everything within dozens of miles—the majestic buildings, the exquisite gardens, the hoarded treasures, the decadent palaces, the chambers of the Empty Throne that symbolized ultimate authority… and every living thing within—
Whether the lofty Celestial Dragons, the enigmatic God's Knights, the Five Elders who held the reins of power, or the one who dwelled deep within the Room of Flowers—"the master of the Empty Throne," Imu—
All of it vanished the moment it touched that scar, like pencil lines wiped away by an eraser—silent, complete.
Not destruction.
Erasure.
As if it had never existed at that coordinate.
In just a few breaths, the clamor died, and the dust settled—if there was any dust left to settle.
When the world-warping phenomenon finally eased, and sunlight struggled once more to spill through the unclosed wound in the sky—
What appeared before the ordinary survivors whom Rei Ao had mercifully spared was a sight they would never forget, as long as they lived.
The Red Line—that ancient continent spanning the world and splitting the seas—now bore a brand-new rupture, running north to south, so vast it filled them with despair.
Countless torrents of seawater thundered through it with unprecedented ferocity, roaring loud enough to split eardrums, forming an unparalleled super-channel—linking the oceans on both sides of the Grand Line for the first time in history.
And where the Holy Land of Mary Geoise should have stood, atop the peak by the breach, looking down upon all…
There was nothing.
Only an impossibly flat, smooth slice of bare bedrock, slanting slightly downward, reflecting a pale, deathly sheen under the sun.
Every trace of what had once been there was wiped clean—so clean it was as if it had always been nothing more than barren stone.
Mary Geoise had simply… disappeared.
Along with the Celestial Dragons who lived there, the World Government's central machinery, and eight hundred years of history and sin—
All gone with that single sweep.
Only now did the survivors—those whom Rei Ao, at the final moment, had transferred to the distant surface of the sea with an incomprehensible power, including Sengoku, Kizaru, some Marines, and the slaves once held in Mary Geoise—manage to return from their extreme shock and numb stupor…
They stood on the pitching decks of warships, or clung to shattered planks floating on the sea.
Each of them stared blankly at that terrifying cleft that had rewritten the world's geography, at that blinding emptiness.
This wasn't war. It wasn't overthrow.
This was… divine punishment? Or the apocalypse?
What kind of existence had they just witnessed?
Or rather—
What, exactly, had they just tried to "besiege"?
And Rei Ao hadn't merely eliminated a few arrogant Celestial Dragons.
To him, these so-called figures at the top of the world were no different from weeds by the roadside.
If they disgusted him, if they got in his way—then they died. He couldn't be bothered to spare them even a fraction more thought.
At that moment, Rei Ao stood quietly beneath the chaotic wound that had torn the sky apart, stepping on empty air. His robes fluttered faintly in the turbulent currents.
With his back to the survivors on the sea, his figure—framed by warped, twisted daylight—seemed unimaginably distant and unreal,
like a god who had descended into the mortal world and was already about to leave.
Sengoku finally forced his mind back from that worldview-shattering scene.
The golden Buddha light around him had long since faded, returning him to human form—
but his face was deathly pale, cold sweat covering his forehead.
He slowly turned his stiff neck to look at Kizaru beside him, who was just as silent.
Even this laid-back, brilliant young vice admiral—usually so frivolous—now showed not a trace of playfulness, only a heavy, profound dread.
Sengoku opened his mouth.
His voice was dry and hoarse, carrying a tremor he didn't even realize was there as he murmured to Kizaru:
"Borsalino… the world… I'm afraid it's truly going to change."
His words were filled with confusion toward the unknown future, and a deep terror of that absolute power they had just seen.
The old order had been reduced to ash in an instant—and the new order… who would build it, and by what means?
What would become of the Marines?
Kizaru didn't answer.
He only pushed up his sunglasses.
The lenses reflected that enormous breach in the continent and the raging flood of seawater beyond—hiding all emotion in his eyes.
~~~
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