"Everyone, come with me."
Once he had confirmed Brook's location, Rowan gathered everyone on the deck, opened an air door, and led the group straight from the sailing ship into the Florian Triangle.
Mihawk: "???"
Just a little while ago, Rowan had said he had never been to the Florian Triangle before and could only get there by ship.
And yet less than half an hour later, he had brought everyone straight into the Florian Triangle.
I mean, one look at this sea shrouded in dense fog was enough for Mihawk to know where they were.
It wasn't as if he had never been here before.
"What exactly do you mean by this?"
Mihawk looked at Rowan with clear displeasure, feeling as though he was being toyed with. His right hand instinctively closed around the hilt of his black blade, his eyes sharp, as if he were already considering where to cut.
Hashirama Senju and Minato Namikaze reacted instantly, appearing on Mihawk's left and right.
The moment Mihawk made any suspicious move, the two of them would attack without hesitation.
The intense killing intent made Mihawk tense up so hard he nearly struck first.
Because he had realized that these two were no ordinary people. Though they were complete unknowns he had never met, they radiated an overwhelming pressure.
That pressure was no weaker than any of the Seven Warlords of the Sea.
Absolute top-tier fighters.
That left Mihawk genuinely surprised. Just where had this man found so many monstrous experts no one had ever heard of?
At the same time, Mihawk had to admit that the world was indeed vast and strange.
He really had underestimated it.
Rowan could tell Mihawk was annoyed, so he explained, "I wasn't lying. I really hadn't been to the Florian Triangle before. But just now I went to see someone and picked up a cheat."
He pointed at his eyes.
"She gave me a farsight spell that lets me see very, very far away. So I looked into the Florian Triangle, then used the Door-Door Fruit to bring everyone here."
"What do you think of that explanation?"
Mihawk's eyes flickered slightly, but he clearly didn't believe it. Mainly because magic sounded way too absurd. He had long since stopped believing in things like that.
Still, since Rowan had at least bothered to explain himself, Mihawk was willing to let it go.
Mostly because the temptation of fighting the dragon-slaying samurai Shimotsuki Ryuma was just too great.
After that little interruption, Rowan's gaze fell on the skeleton lying on the deck.
"So, are you getting up on your own, or do I have to drag you up?"
At first Mihawk had no idea what he meant, but in the very next second, that skeleton—which had clearly been dead for who knew how many years—sat upright with a plop.
Mihawk considered himself someone who had seen plenty in life, but even so, the corner of his eye twitched hard.
What the hell was this thing?
Nami reacted even more strongly, darting behind Rowan and screaming,
"A ghost!!!"
"Not a ghost. Brook, right?" Rowan said with a smile, looking at the skeleton.
Brook looked at Rowan cautiously. "Lord Shinigami… have you come to take me back?"
To everyone else, Rowan looked like a perfectly normal human.
But in Brook's eyes—as someone who had eaten the Revive-Revive Fruit—Rowan was surrounded by ghostly flames invisible to ordinary people, and carried the aura of the underworld, like a death god who had stepped out of Yomi itself.
So the moment he saw Rowan board the ship, Brook had immediately played dead, hoping to fool him.
Unfortunately, that plan had failed. Rowan saw through the act at a glance.
"No."
Rowan shook his head and looked at Brook with interest.
The Revive-Revive Fruit was an extremely interesting and unusual Devil Fruit.
Other Devil Fruits transformed the body.
The Revive-Revive Fruit transformed the soul.
That was why Brook could still move even after his body had rotted down to a skeleton.
In Rowan's eyes, the skeleton had never been the main body. The true body was the soul inhabiting it.
The skeleton was just a vessel carrying that soul.
Other people didn't have the equivalent of spirit sight, so they could only see the skeleton and not the soul attached to it.
But Rowan could.
And the moment he saw Brook's soul, the instinct of the Shinigami urged him to devour it, as if only by doing so could he become more complete.
So, behind Rowan, the gigantic phantom of the Shinigami appeared on its own.
The instant it manifested, an invisible pressure spread outward, heavy as a mountain, pressing down on everyone's mind—even their souls.
Everyone froze in place as if they had been hit with a paralysis jutsu.
At the same time, the Shinigami stretched out one arm, seized Brook's soul, pulled it out of the skeleton, and swallowed it into its belly.
In that instant, Rowan felt Brook melting.
No—not Brook himself.
It was the power of the Revive-Revive Fruit attached to Brook's soul that was melting.
And the Shinigami absorbed it completely.
But Brook's soul still remained.
Once the power of the Revive-Revive Fruit had been absorbed, the Shinigami seemed to become a little more complete.
The Revive-Revive Fruit gave the dead a second life.
And now, after swallowing that fruit's power, the Shinigami seemed to have gained the ability to bring the dead back to life as well.
Rowan turned and looked at Hashirama. He walked over and patted him on the shoulder.
The power of the Revive-Revive Fruit erupted at once.
In the One Piece world, Devil Fruits could awaken.
For Zoan fruits, awakening occurred when the user's mind and body aligned with the fruit's nature.
Once awakened, the user's combat power rose dramatically, and they gained terrifying vitality and recovery, the kind that let them get back up no matter how many times they were beaten down.
But if awakening failed, even though the user still gained that monstrous vitality and recovery, their consciousness would instead be swallowed by the beastly will within the fruit, and they would never revert to human form again, remaining permanently in beast form.
The Jailer Beasts of Impel Down were the clearest example of that.
Paramecia awakenings didn't carry that kind of danger.
But Paramecia awakenings didn't enhance vitality or recovery either. Instead, they affected the world around the user.
For example, an awakened Magnet-Magnet Fruit user could assign magnetism to non-metallic objects other than themselves.
An awakened String-String Fruit user could turn the surrounding environment into strings.
An awakened Gold-Gold Fruit user could expand both the range and quantity of metal they controlled, and the effect of temporarily converting objects into gold using gold dust became far broader, letting them create absurd amounts of gold in battle.
So then—
what kind of effect would an awakened Revive-Revive Fruit produce?
~~~
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