"The Mother Tree of Devil Fruits?"
Senju Hashirama and the others stood frozen. They had been in this world for some time and had gained a foundational understanding of its mechanics, but Lin Xuan's words were entirely new to them. Even seasoned veterans like Whitebeard and Shanks looked on in stunned silence; they had never heard a whisper of such a thing.
"Chairman Lin, what exactly do you mean by that?" Whitebeard asked, his voice low and heavy.
Lin Xuan didn't answer immediately. Instead, he turned his gaze toward the man who had remained silent until now—the Pirate King. "Roger, you know the truth, don't you?"
Roger gave a helpless, wry smile. "Truly, nothing escapes your eyes, Chairman." He sighed, leaning back slightly as if recalling a distant memory. "It's true. Back when I was alive, I spent my final years obsessed with the secrets of this world. By deciphering the Poneglyphs scattered across the Grand Line, I eventually stumbled upon a truth that shook me to my core."
Shanks nodded solemnly. He remembered that in those final days, his captain had been chasing something—a shadow that he never shared with the rest of the crew.
Roger composed his thoughts and began to explain. "Every Devil Fruit in existence is born from a single tree. When a fruit ripens, it detaches and flies across the world, eventually parasitizing a common plant. The 'Devil Fruit Trees' people think they see are merely ordinary trees acting as temporary hosts. The true source—the progenitor of all—is the Mother Tree."
He looked toward the massive, writhing vines erupting from the Red Line. "I knew of its existence back then, but even until the day I died, I could never locate it."
The gathered legends were floored. This was a piece of information that redefined the history of the world.
Lin Xuan nodded. He had just received a telepathic update from Konan; Nico Robin and her team had made a monumental discovery regarding the tree's location.
The Holy Land of Mary Geoise.
Beyond what Roger knew, Lin Xuan now understood that the Mother Tree had always been in the hands of the World Government. Its main body wasn't just near the Holy Land—Mary Geoise had been built directly atop it. In fact, the Mother Tree was hidden deep within the foundation of the Red Line itself.
The massive continent that split the world in two was not just rock and earth; it was the tree's protective shell.
Nico Robin's team had even deduced that the Giant Jack—the colossal vine reaching into the clouds of Skypiea—was likely just a stray sprout or a minor branch of the Mother Tree.
Even Lin Xuan was momentarily taken aback by the scale of it. However, the revelation allowed him to connect the remaining dots.
Why did the twenty founding kings of the World Government establish Mary Geoise here? Why did Imu and the Elders defend this specific patch of land with such suicidal desperation?
Because the core of the Mother Tree resided here.
The World Government wasn't just an organization created to rule the world; it was a priesthood established to protect the source of all power. He even suspected the Mother Tree possessed its own consciousness, and the twenty ancestors were perhaps less 'kings' and more 'guardians'—or perhaps even something more sinister.
Testing this theory was exactly why Lin Xuan had remained idle when the Ancient Weapon, Pluton, fired. He wanted to see how the Mother Tree would react to a threat of that magnitude.
And based on the carnage before him, his hypothesis was correct.
BOOM!
The Ancient Weapon Pluton finally reached its breaking point and detonated in a spectacular, world-shaking explosion.
The crew members aboard the battleship had long since fled in a panicked scramble. A massive azure dragon soared into the sky—Kaido in his beast form—while Charlotte Linlin hovered nearby, her feet planted firmly on Prometheus. Shiki the Golden Lion, a master of flight, hovered effortlessly above the chaos.
The rank-and-file members of the three Great Pirate Alliances weren't so lucky. While many scattered, countless others were swallowed by the fire and the sea as Pluton vanished into history.
Rocks D. Xebec's face was so dark it looked as if it might drip ink. His "perfect" plan, a scheme decades in the making, had crumbled into ash. All his ambitions had been thwarted not by Lin Xuan, but by a handful of vines.
"Go to hell! All of you, DIE!" Rocks roared, his sanity snapping.
He lunged at the massive vines, his hands glowing with a blinding, solar radiance. This was the peak of his Devil Fruit ability—a searing, concentrated orb of energy that he slammed into the nearest vine.
However, the expected explosion never happened. The moment the light touched the vine, it was simply... absorbed. The energy vanished as if it had never existed, leaving the plant completely unscathed.
Rocks froze. His body shuddered violently, and he hacked up a mouthful of dark blood. He stood there, paralyzed, his eyes glazed over as if his very soul had been plucked from his body.
"Captain Rocks? What's wrong?" Big Mom shouted, her voice laced with rare concern.
There was no response. Rocks remained a hollow shell, his presence flickering like a dying candle. Kaido and Shiki exchanged looks of dawning horror. Something was fundamentally wrong.
At that same moment, back toward the ruins of Mary Geoise, a figure emerged.
Imu reappeared, clutching the Ancient Weapon Uranus. But the aura radiating from the ruler of the world had changed. Furthermore, several figures followed closely behind—the very ancestors who had been slain moments before.
They walked with a stiff, eerie precision, as if they had been yanked back from the afterlife and stitched back together by a power far older than the World Government itself.
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T/N:
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