So far his Frost Breathing only had up to the Seventh Form, and the Seventh Form, Spring Breeze Comes, a Thousand Trees Bloom, was a continuous sword technique that slashed several times in an instant, with each strike able to be precisely controlled.
If he were facing demons, most of the blades would fall on the neck.
But this time he was dealing with humans, so his attacks landed on different vital points.
White lines appeared all over Big Blade Buri's body—his throat, waist and abdomen, chest.
The blood in all those parts was completely sealed off and could not circulate, and a fierce chill invaded his organs. Very quickly, the blood in his body began to congeal into ice.
Back in the Demon Slayer world, his Frost Breathing could briefly freeze a demon's blood cells and hinder their recovery, so as long as his attacks landed on a demon, they were effective and could set up the next strike.
Buri's strength was greater than that of many ordinary demons, but his recovery ability was garbage. With his blood and organs frozen into ice, no one coming to save him, and without any built-in "sit-up-and-revive" attribute, he quickly lost his life.
"Meow! It's over already, meow?!"
Meowth had been at the entrance of the town the whole time, and after only circling around a bit, it discovered what was happening inside.
"The Captain and the Vice Captain are dead?! Impossible."
"That Captain who was like a monster actually died."
"Everyone, don't be afraid. Open fire, turn him into a beehive."
This group of pirates had more than a dozen long muskets in their hands. They had been holding them without firing before, but now the Captain's death had made them so frightened that they wanted to fire right away.
Compared to the high-end goods from the South Sea that the Captain had, the muskets in these people's hands were very outdated, and their movements were really slow.
"Let you taste how awesome Meowth is, crazy scratching!"
Three long, sharp claw blades grew from each of Meowth's front paws, and it whooshed back and forth among the musketeers.
"My gun!"
"I spent all money just to trade for this musket!"
Muskets were very expensive supplies. Among ordinary pirate groups, being able to become a musketeer already meant you were an elite pirate.
If you pick up a blade, you can become a minion pirate. To pick up a musket, you need training and shooting talent, and no matter whether you're a wanted pirate or not, one shot to the head means death.
At least, that's how this batch of pirates saw it.
As a result, after Meowth darted among them a few times, all the muskets were turned into several chunks of scrap.
"Meow, how can such trash guns even count as guns, meow."
Meowth looked at the pirates holding pieces of gun scrap, its eyes full of disdain.
Who was it, Meowth? As long as there were materials, it was a ruthless one who could cobble together all kinds of weapons. No matter how small the prey, it could even make a super huge robot.
Of course, what it liked making most in daily life were hot-air balloons with the Meowth logo, but hot-air balloons were very fragile.
A bunch of minion pirates who had lost their Captain and lost their hot weapons were quickly tied up like rice dumplings under the joint efforts of Vane and Meowth.
Meowth stretched out a claw and poked a pirate's chin.
"Your boss is already dead, meow. Hurry up and hand over all your treasure, meow."
"T-Treasure is all on the ship, not on us."
"Then hurry up and take me to your ship. All your treasure is mine. A few of you come with me. If Lord Meowth is in a good mood, Lord Meowth might even reward you with some treasure, meow."
Vane and Meowth helped the townspeople keep their property, and now these townspeople had already started flattering Meowth as Lord Meowth.
This made Meowth feel incredibly happy. After so many years, it had actually become a "lord."
The matter of collecting the loot was left to Meowth, while Vane went to talk with the mayor to get information.
First of all, this was indeed the bizarre One Piece world, and his location was an archipelago country in the West Blue, one of the four seas of One Piece.
The archipelago country was called Thorn Rose. The name sounded pretty nice, but its national strength wasn't very strong.
Among the countries of the Four Seas, aside from those extremely powerful ones like the Flower Country, basically all of them needed to rely on the Navy to maintain their own security. And to be able to rely on the Navy, they had to become a World Government affiliated country and pay enough "protection money" every year—that is, the Heavenly Tribute.
Otherwise, whether the Navy would come or not really depended on whether that Navy unit was righteous or not. If you weren't an affiliated country, you didn't even have the right to complain.
Also, it was now Sea Circle Calendar 1504. The straw-hatted kid Luffy who wanted to become the Pirate King was currently only one year old.
The mayor had a worried look on his face. "I don't know why, but recently, pirate incidents in our Thorn Rose Kingdom have been breaking out more and more frequently."
The Thorn Rose Kingdom was composed of dozens of big and small islands on the edge of the West Blue, a typical backwater. You could tell just from the so-called town's scale and the fact that there were only a few houses with brick-and-stone structures.
Vane didn't know much about the timeline of this work. He only knew Luffy's birth time, and after hearing that the later plot got more and more bizarre, he stopped following it. At most, he would occasionally scroll past some plot explanations and take a look.
Judging from the current timeline, the impact wasn't very big. After all, it would still be more than ten years before Luffy, who wanted to become the Pirate King, set sail.
And the identity of this body of his was also particularly simple: a young outsider who had gone through a shipwreck. He had only arrived in Shell Town a few days ago, and before he could leave, he ran into the Big Blade Pirates invading Shell Town.
"Feels like I need to lie low in the 'starter village' for a while."
With his current strength, mixing around in the West Blue shouldn't get him killed easily, but people are afraid of the one-in-ten-thousand chance, and he also didn't have any goal to go out for now.
And he still had a ton of things he could do.
First was to adjust his breathing techniques and sword skills. Overall, the pirate world was a world where brute force smashed bricks, and skill-based sword techniques weren't entirely suitable for combat here. He needed to discard some techniques to improve his physical qualities.
Back when he watched the anime, he always felt that the most impressive thing about three-sword-style Zoro wasn't his swordsmanship but his teeth. If you wrapped Armament Haki around his teeth, maybe he could tear Kaido of the Beasts apart alive.
Another thing was to train moves besides sword techniques. If this body of his had just started as an ordinary person, then specializing in sword techniques would already satisfy him.
Now this body had demon blood, with extremely strong growth and recovery, and if in the future he ran into a situation where he didn't have a blade at hand, he couldn't have Meowth go snatch one for him every time.
"And staying here might not necessarily be safe."
The mayor of Shell Town said that recently, there had been more and more pirates in the Thorn Rose Kingdom. The Thorn Rose Kingdom wasn't on the main routes, and the people were very poor. Aside from Thorn Rose Island, the other islands basically didn't have much value to loot.
Also, this wave of pirates' behavior was very strange. Robbing money and killing people were normal, arson… Fires caused by pirate invasions were mostly caused by cannons and muskets.
Or they set fires to make the townspeople lose their ability to resist. But after the town had already been taken and the townspeople had all lost the ability to resist, still stubbornly insisting on burning people's houses was something rather hard to understand.
Even if pirates didn't understand the problem of draining the pond to catch all the fish, they should at least know that burning houses would make it very difficult for them to search for loot, and would even cause major losses.
...
"Meow, Vane really has a lot of money, meow!"
Meowth brought its anti-robbery pirate team back to the town.
The bounties of the Captain and the Vice Captain added up to 30 million Belly. The money and gold coins and gems found on their pirate ship were only worth about 3 million Belly.
Because pirates were mostly a group that lived for the moment and sought immediate pleasure, money in hand that wasn't spent was just waste paper. So every time they looted for a period of time, or even just once, they would find a place to spend it all, then continue looting.
Three million was of course not a small amount. Meowth was very happy hugging those shiny gold coins and gems.
"Their most valuable things should be that ship, and these two people's heads."
It was just that the Thorn Rose Kingdom was relatively far from the Navy base, so they didn't know how to exchange the bounty.