-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen's relentless chronicle of Kozuki Momonosuke continued, each revelation more disturbing than the last. His life trajectory offered the assembled audiences across the seas a window into upheavals yet to come—transformations that would reshape the world order itself.
[The golden screen pulsed with new scenes, text appearing in elegant script beneath images of a transformed Wano Country.]
[With Kaido sealed and the Beast Pirates purged from Wano's shores, Kozuki Momonosuke restored the orthodox rule of his clan to the Land of Samurai. By his actual age, he had accomplished what his father, the legendary Kozuki Oden, had died attempting. The boy shogun had succeeded where the man had failed.
Within a single year of ascending to power, the Shogun's Mansion underwent multiple expansions, its traditional architecture swelling to accommodate Momonosuke's growing court. Concurrent with this physical expansion came a policy of aggressive concubinage—dozens of women brought into the general's household as the young ruler indulged appetites that belied his years.
More significantly, Wano Country's centuries-old isolationist stance began to crumble. The borders that had remained closed for generations slowly opened, allowing foreign influence to seep into the nation of samurai. Fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh opportunities—all began flowing into Wano, laying foundations for a future the country had never imagined.]
[The broadcast showed the Flower Capital transforming, foreign merchants walking streets that had known only Wano natives for hundreds of years. The Sky Screen lingered on Momonosuke himself—no longer the frightened child who had clung to others for protection, but a calculating ruler whose eyes held a disturbing clarity.]
[After countless nights sampling the pleasures of various women, Kozuki Momonosuke experienced an epiphany one evening. His precocious talent for statecraft—honed through hardship and observation—revealed to him the exact position Wano Country must occupy in the new world order. This was not merely about protecting Wano's citizens. This was about ensuring the Kozuki clan's supremacy remained unassailable for generations to come.
He understood the legacy Kurozumi Orochi had left behind. During Orochi's reign as the Beast Pirates' puppet, Wano had been transformed into an export economy—seastone, rare minerals, weapons, and heavy industrial goods flowing out while the nation's environment withered and its people starved. The citizens had been reduced to expendable labor, accomplices in the Beast Pirates' war machine without enjoying any of the profits. They had exported death across the seas and received only suffering in return.
But Momonosuke, through his years of forced maturity, had grasped truths that eluded older, more naive minds. He understood the world's underlying logic with a clarity that was almost frightening in one so young. Industry and science weren't inherently evil—the Beast Pirates had simply wielded them poorly, focusing exclusively on heavy industry while ignoring light industry and the welfare of Wano's people.
Wano needed population growth. Wano needed economic revitalization. And Momonosuke, despite his youth, recognized an uncomfortable truth: a life of pure hedonism and pleasure could not be sustained indefinitely. To maintain his position of privilege, he first needed to enrich Wano's citizens. Only the prosperous could be properly exploited. Only those with wealth could be taxed, controlled, and made dependent on the Kozuki clan's rule. What use was a peasantry too poor to pay tribute?]
[The Sky Screen displayed graphs and figures—economic projections that showed Momonosuke's cold calculus. Across the seas, viewers watched in fascinated horror as the boy general's philosophy unfolded.]
[The industrial infrastructure could not be dismantled. Momonosuke understood this even as his samurai advisors clamored for a return to traditional ways. Instead, he doubled down, constructing new factories and establishing trade networks that exchanged industrial products for resources Wano lacked.
Initially, the model remained similar to the Beast Pirates' approach—arms for food, weapons for wealth. But Momonosuke diverged from Kaido's unsustainable path. Where the Beast Pirates had sold weapons for currency and currency for Zoan-type Devil Fruits, pursuing power without economic sense, Momonosuke pursued profit with surgical precision.
The samurai class, those warriors who had rallied around him after Kaido's defeat, proved to be his greatest obstacle. They romanticized the past, dreaming of idyllic pastoral life where citizens toiled in fields and provided modest tributes to their betters. But such meager agricultural output couldn't support even the Shogun's household, let alone fund Wano's transformation.
Momonosuke's solution was as pragmatic as it was ruthless: eliminate the opposition.
If problems couldn't be solved, then those raising the problems could be eliminated instead.
To implement his industrial policies without interference, Kozuki Momonosuke raised his blade against the very samurai who had fought for his restoration. Past service meant nothing. Past loyalty counted for nothing. Only alignment with his vision mattered. Those who couldn't adapt, who clung to outdated ideals, who threatened his plans—all faced the executioner.
The purge was swift and thorough. Of the Nine Red Scabbards, those legendary retainers who had served his father unto death, nine met their end by Momonosuke's order. The cruel irony wasn't lost on historians: all nine killed, the entire group eliminated by the very lord they had fought to restore. The samurai class, after this bloody cleansing, bid farewell to relevance and faded into history's footnotes.]
[Gasps and outraged shouts erupted in viewing locations across the world. The Nine Red Scabbards—heroes of the Wano liberation—executed by the child they'd protected? The Sky Screen showed their deaths in stark detail: Kinemon, Denjiro, Kawamatsu, all the loyal retainers, cut down not by enemies but by their own master's decree.]
[The primitive accumulation of industrial capital proved brutal beyond measure. Momonosuke's most controversial policy would haunt Wano's history forever: state-sanctioned prostitution on a national scale.
Women of Wano were not merely encouraged but systematically directed to sell their bodies in foreign ports. Their primary targets were the wealthy members of the Neo Marines, whose gold coins filled Wano's coffers with foreign currency. This export of flesh became formalized, the women labeled "Oriental women" in foreign lands—a term that would persist for generations, carrying connotations both exotic and tragic.
These women laid the foundation for Wano's economic miracle, their sacrifice enabling the prosperity that followed. Yet their individual suffering vanished beneath grand historical narratives. Almost universally, the Oriental women contracted diseases—sexually transmitted infections that ravaged their bodies and followed them to early graves. Their families, steeped in Wano's shame culture, often rejected them. Society vilified these women who had enriched the nation, heaping scorn upon those who had given everything.
They dedicated their youth, their health, their very bodies to Wano's resurrection. Their reward was infamy, disease, and early death.
And Kozuki Momonosuke, seated in comfort within the Shogun's Mansion, knew every detail of their suffering. He felt no sympathy. To his calculating mind, these women represented resources expended for national benefit. When they grew old, when disease made them burdens rather than assets, they were quietly eliminated. Disappeared. Erased.
This blood debt was never repaid. It was never even acknowledged.]
[The Sky Screen showed glimpses—women departing Wano's shores with hollow eyes, their return marked by visible illness, their final days spent in squalor. The broadcast didn't flinch from the horror, displaying Momonosuke's calculated cruelty in unflinching detail.]
[Once primitive accumulation through human suffering had filled Wano's treasury, the industrial system exploded outward. Fortune—or perhaps something darker—smiled upon Kozuki Momonosuke's ambitions.
Conflict erupted across the seas. Islands that had known peace fell to violence. Revolutions ignited. Wars consumed nations. And through all this chaos, Wano Country—isolated, defensible, fortified—thrived. The very geography that had once enforced its isolation now became its greatest asset.
Refugees flooded into Wano, the desperate and talented alike seeking shelter from the world's growing madness. These immigrants, far from being burdens, brought skills and knowledge that accelerated Wano's development. They helped defend the Land of Samurai even as they transformed it.
The Revolutionary Army proved to be an unexpected economic boon. Their uprisings across the Four Blues sent aristocratic families to the guillotine, terrifying the surviving upper classes into paranoia. These frightened rulers purchased arms frantically, militarizing their kingdoms against revolutionary threats. And Wano's weapons industry happily supplied their fears, profits soaring with each revolution, each execution, each regime toppled.
Momonosuke recognized the pattern immediately: chaos elsewhere meant profit for Wano.
Like a shark scenting blood in water, the young Shogun didn't seek to calm the turbulent seas—he actively stirred them to greater fury. He forged an alliance with Buggy the Clown, one of the new Yonko, abandoning his ancestors' teachings without hesitation. The ancient heritage left in Wano by the lost kingdom—secrets and artifacts that should have remained buried—Momonosuke offered freely to facilitate the great catastrophe at the Holy Land of Marijoa.
He became complicit in the World Government's downfall, not from idealism but from calculated self-interest. The old order's destruction would birth a new world—and Wano would profit from the transition.]
[The broadcast showed Momonosuke and Buggy shaking hands, an alliance between the young tyrant and the clownish emperor. Behind them, ancient weapons and forbidden knowledge changed hands, pieces moving into position for humanity's greatest upheaval.]
[The Red Line had divided the world's seas for time immemorial, forcing all traffic through the treacherous Calm Belts or the pirate-infested Grand Line. It was cage and shield both, isolating the Four Blues while protecting them from each other's conflicts.
After the catastrophic events at the Holy Land of Marijoa, that changed forever.
The Red Line was breached. Waterways were forcibly opened, connecting all four seas in ways previously impossible. Ships could now circumnavigate the world without braving the Calm Belt's Sea Kings or the Grand Line's unpredictable weather. The Grand Line itself, once the world's most dangerous and mysterious waterway, became just another route—its mystique evaporated, its dangers merely historical footnotes.
Anyone with a ship could now "travel" anywhere. The word seemed innocent enough, but the reality was far darker.
The protective barrier was gone. The East Blue, West Blue, South Blue, and North Blue descended into unprecedented chaos. Pirates of every size and ambition, empowered by the Revolutionary Army's ideology, ravaged the kingdoms of the Four Blues. They plundered wealth that aristocratic families had accumulated through centuries of exploitation and oppression. Cities burned. Dynasties fell. The old order drowned in blood.
This mayhem aligned perfectly with Buggy the Clown's philosophy of absolute freedom—freedom to pillage, freedom to destroy, freedom from consequence. And it aligned even better with Kozuki Momonosuke's economic interests. Every revolution created demand for weapons. Every burning city needed rebuilding supplies. Every terrified kingdom sought Wano's industrial output.
The dividends from this worldwide catastrophe enriched Wano beyond imagination. While other nations collapsed under violence and turmoil, the Land of Samurai transformed from a closed, backward country into a prosperous industrial power. They made a fortune from war, a nation growing fat on the world's suffering.]
[Maps displayed the opened waterways, trade routes spreading like veins across a body, carrying both commerce and conflict to every corner of the world. Wano sat at the center of it all, supplier to every faction, profiteer from every crisis.]
[Through relentless industrial development and calculated immigration policies, Wano Country survived the turbulent era and emerged transformed. The comprehensive industrial revitalization policies implemented by Kozuki Momonosuke became collectively known as the Yamato Restoration—a title borrowed from older histories but given new meaning through his ruthless pragmatism.
Later nations would study and adopt these policies, replicating Momonosuke's model despite its moral costs. Yes, certain groups suffered. Yes, individual tragedies occurred. But the majority of citizens ultimately benefited from Wano's prosperity. This utilitarian calculus—sacrificing the few for the many—proved disturbingly effective.
Momonosuke left substantial wealth for future generations, transforming Wano from an isolated backwater into an industrial powerhouse. That his methods included forced prostitution, political purges, and complicity in global chaos seemed, to later historians, merely the price of progress.
Yet the costs were real and enduring. Wano's birth rate plummeted in subsequent decades, the nation's demographic collapse a delayed consequence of its social upheaval. The internal atmosphere grew oppressive, xenophobic despite its immigrant population. A new identity emerged—the Yamato nation—built on selective historical memory that glorified the results while sanitizing the methods.
But achievements couldn't be erased by acknowledging their price. Kozuki Momonosuke earned his historical title and was commemorated by subsequent generations, his legacy complex but undeniable.]
[Historical texts produced in Wano Country gave Shogun Kozuki Momonosuke decidedly mixed evaluations. His legendary experiences made him irresistible material for dramatization. Countless unofficial histories reimagined him in different lights: tyrant, hero, visionary, monster. Multiple personas emerged from the same historical figure, each interpretation finding its audience.
He became Wano's most famous shogun, the ruler everyone knew regardless of their education or station. His image graced every denomination of paper currency issued by the United Kingdom in later eras—the face of money itself bearing Momonosuke's youthful features. This ubiquity spoke to his enduring significance, beloved or reviled but never forgotten.
For scholars studying the Holy Roman Empire's initial formation, Kozuki Momonosuke remained an unavoidable figure. His policies, his alliances, his calculated cruelty—all formed essential context for understanding the new world order that emerged from the old world's ashes.
The boy who had once wept in fear had become the man who shaped an era. History would remember him, though whether as hero or villain remained eternally contested.]