—Future Timeline: Holy Roman Empire Calendar, Year 1940—
"If it's not wrong for a pirate to call himself God," Borsalino said, "then the word doesn't mean what I thought it meant."
He was a Logia user himself. The Pika Pika no Mi, fully awakened, gave him abilities that strained the vocabulary of anyone trying to describe them. He could reverse time in a localized space. He could run on seawater without touching it. He could move faster than a coherent thought. He had never, at any point in this career, considered calling himself a god. He was a Marine Admiral. He earned a salary. He showed up and did the work.
"Keep listening," Barry said. "The title isn't exaggeration. Not for what he did next."
The tour guide continued her account.
Before the second voyage launched, Enel had confronted the obvious problem with his plan. Exploring the universe required a body capable of surviving it — and his was, for all the power it contained, the body of a carbon-based mortal. High-energy cosmic rays moved through open space in quantities the human body was never designed to handle. Even a natural Logia user's constitution had limits. The first voyage had already left marks on him that proper medical examination would have found troubling. A second voyage of greater range and duration was likely to finish what the first had started, leaving him adrift somewhere in the dark between stars.
He was in this predicament when Robin found him a solution.
She obtained from Chopper a vial of the Blue Panacea.
The tour guide paused here, acknowledging her audience's familiarity with the name. The Blue Panacea — Chopper's most significant contribution to the world, the invention the Sky Screen had prophesied before the reindeer had taken a single step toward creating it. The formula kept cells perpetually active, pushed the natural ceiling on cell division toward something approaching infinity, and resolved the central biological obstacle of aging at the source. The person who took it would not grow old in any conventional sense.
The cost was not trivial. Unlimited cell division ran without a governor — the body would continue producing tissue that served no function, accumulating in ways that required regular surgical removal. The process was described as considerable in its discomfort. Enel had been informed of this in full.
He took the Panacea without hesitation.
For a man who had flown into open space on a ship powered by his own sleeping body, the prospect of periodic surgery was not a meaningful deterrent. He was not afraid of pain. He was afraid of his ambition dying unfinished inside a body that had given out before he found what he was looking for.
The Panacea worked quickly. Every latent injury, every small cellular compromise left by the first voyage's radiation exposure — gone within a day. His body returned to the condition it had been in at its best, and then stayed there. When he was ready to board the second ship, his physical state was indistinguishable from a man who had never left the planet.
He departed without apparent sentiment for the world he was leaving. The ocean had always been the thing he hated most about the Blue Star — water everywhere, salt in everything, the endless horizon of a cage. The planet's inhabitants were welcome to fight over it. Some of them had been doing nothing else for so long they had apparently forgotten there was anything beyond the atmosphere.
Fish-Man Island provided the funding for the second voyage, and in exchange, Queen Otohime sent one of her most trusted people aboard to sail with Enel.
The Queen's reasoning was clear: she had invested the majority of the national treasury. She needed a return. What she wanted — what she had wanted for as long as her people had been living at the bottom of the sea, looking up at ships that rarely offered them anything but trouble — was a planet covered entirely by water. A world without shorelines. A place where the Merfolk could live without the particular exhaustion of coexisting with species that had never fully decided whether they were neighbors or resources.
A true ocean world. Somewhere no one would come to discriminate, exploit, or displace them. A place to continue, generation after generation, without the weight of a history defined by how other people had treated them.
Enel carried this request into space on the second ship, which was called the Pioneer.
"He didn't come back for two hundred years," the guide said.
The square was quiet.
"When he returned, he had completed Queen Otohime's commission. He had found an ocean world — a planet whose entire surface was water. The Merfolk received that information and, in time, began their own migration. Generation by generation, more of them chose the new world over this one. The population on Fish-Man Island has declined steadily ever since. Most of those who remain are connected to the old history in some way. The majority have already gone."
She let this sit for a moment.
"The information Enel brought back went far beyond one planet. He had marked dozens of terrestrial worlds suitable for settlement — various sizes, various climates. None requiring more than moderate environmental adaptation to make habitable. The impact on this world was immediate. Every major civilization, every species with the means to think about it, began to consider what it would mean to have a world entirely to themselves — somewhere without competition, without conflict over shared resources. The ambition to reach space, which had been an abstract concept before Enel's first voyage, became a practical goal."
She paused. "He did not find the infinite continent he had always been looking for. He had still not left our galaxy. The Pioneer was faster than the Discovery, but the universe does not accommodate impatience. He was not discouraged. Five years after his return, with the Empire's support, he launched the third voyage. This time with the intention of leaving the Milky Way entirely."
The monument stood against the afternoon sky.
"He hasn't come back."
Barry looked at Borsalino.
Borsalino was looking at the bronze face of the man who had once called himself God of the Skies, whose territory had been a floating island and whose ambition had apparently not stopped expanding until it encompassed the entire observable universe.
"Do you think he's dead?" Borsalino asked.
The guide, who could not hear him, was already answering the question in her own way. "That question has been asked for hundreds of years. Some believe he died somewhere in the dark between galaxies. Others believe he found what he was looking for and simply chose not to come back. He remains, by any measurement, the person who has traveled farthest from this planet. Whether he is still traveling, or whether he found his infinite continent and decided it was enough — no one in this era can say."
She smiled slightly. "Perhaps a descendant of someone standing here today will find him eventually."
The tour group began to drift toward the exit of the square. Barry fell into step with the crowd. Borsalino moved more slowly, looking at the monument for another moment before following.
The Pioneer.
He was from the same era. He had stood in some of the same places, breathed the same air, been recorded in the same period of history. And the thing he had become — the name they had given him, the centuries of it, the way the guide had spoken about him — had nothing to do with what Borsalino had been standing next to when they were both alive in the same world.
He thought about what people in the future would find, if they looked for him in the records.
He chose not to finish the thought.
—Broadcast—
The Sky Screen drew back from the future square. The timestamp disappeared. The bamboo of Sakura Island returned around the crew.
The silence that followed was a different kind from the one that had come before the story. Larger. The universe does that to silences.
"If the Outer Gods are that far beyond even someone like Enel," Nami said, working through it aloud, "then why would something like that care about Chopper?"
It was the reasonable question. Chopper was their doctor. He was a reindeer who had eaten the Hito Hito no Mi (Human-Human Fruit) and spent his whole life trying to learn enough medicine to justify it. He was currently lying in Robin's arms, thin and still, his chest rising and falling with no other evidence that the person they knew was still in there somewhere. He was not a pioneer. He had not claimed any title. He had not drawn any attention to himself that she could identify.
Nami had seen cult rituals before — the kind where someone declared themselves an intermediary for a god and performed a ceremony that mostly involved terrifying people and taking their money. None of those had ever attracted anything real. The gods didn't show up. Only the damage did.
The Outer Gods Robin had described were different in kind from all of that. They were not metaphors. They were not titles. They were things that had crossed the distance Robin had just described — the distance that was too large to calculate without special units of measurement, the distance that had taken Enel his entire transformed lifespan to barely scratch — and arrived here, in this world, and apparently found something worth their attention.
And what they had found, for reasons no one in the clearing could yet explain, was a small reindeer who wanted to be the world's best doctor.
The question had no answer yet. It hung in the air over Sakura Island exactly the way it had been left, and the crew stood around it, and the bamboo moved in the wind, and Chopper did not wake up.
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