He had taken the Nine Realms Body Art off a man who died to his sword.
Nine realms had gone to war over access to it, on and off, for most of a century. He had never thought much about that. It was a method, and methods either worked or they didn't, and this one worked.
Whether it worked here was another question.
Zoro sat with his back against the hull and felt the blood coming through the bandages again. Someone had wrapped him fast rather than well. He couldn't fault them for it. Above his head the restaurant was being fought over — shouting, a table going down a staircase, the sound a man makes when he lands on a shoulder.
He straightened his spine, set his hands, and began.
The breath came first, in the old rhythm. Then the blood, moved the way the art required, through the channels and back. Slow at the start, because the body fought him. Slower after that, because there was nothing in the body to spend.
The bleeding stopped before the pain did.
He kept going, testing the edges of it, and found the first level of tempering nearer than it had any business being.
That was the boy's doing. Eleven years of dawn-to-dark on a frame that was already at the limit of what training alone could reach. He had hit the same wall every morning of his life and never been told it had a door in it.
Fang Yue had the method.
A thin sheen came up across his skin, no thicker than a coat of oil. Green, mostly. Green going black over the knuckles and along the forearms.
He looked at that for a long moment. In eight hundred years the art had never come up any colour but green.
Then he went looking for the rest.
The art wanted the body's own reserves and it had them, and that would hold to the end of the first level and no further. Past that a man draws on what the world offers. Every world offers something. It costs nothing but patience to find where it pools.
He reached out and found nothing.
Not thinness, not distance. He extended as far as this frame allowed, which was about the width of the storeroom, and came back with the sensation of a hand closing on air.
So the first level was available to him and everything above it was not.
He did not let the sheen go. Bringing it back would cost blood he wasn't sure he had twice.
Footsteps came along the boards above, unmatched, one of them wooden. They stopped at the top of the ladder and started down.
Zeff got three rungs from the bottom and stopped.
He stood with one hand on the ladder and a soup bowl in the other and looked at Zoro's forearms.
"Well," he said.
Zoro let the sheen go. It went off him like breath off a window.
Zeff came down the last rungs, set the bowl on a crate, lowered himself onto a barrel, and got his leg arranged the way he wanted it. He took his time about all of it.
"You were bleeding through the wrap every six minutes. I know, because I changed it four times."
"It stopped."
Zeff leaned over, lifted the edge of the bandage with two fingers, looked underneath, and put it back.
"Krieg's finished," he said, sitting back. "Your captain went through him like a door. Took a while. Kid doesn't know when to stay down, which I've noticed runs in that crew."
"Sanji?"
"Alive. Sulking." A pause. "He'll go with you."
"He hasn't said so."
"He'll go with you."
Zoro let that close.
Zeff pushed the bowl an inch nearer with two fingers.
"Drink that. It'll do you good." He sat back. "That black sheen I saw on you. Do you know what it is?"
"No."
"It's called haki."
Zoro turned the word over. It didn't mean anything.
"In all my years travelling the Grand Line I saw a lot of things," Zeff said. "Every man who survived out there was a master of it. Every one. I never met an exception and I looked."
He nodded at Zoro's hands.
"It comes out of people when they're about to die. Half the men I knew got theirs on the worst day of their lives." He shrugged. "Looks like the fight with the swordsman bore fruit. You've gone and awakened armament haki."
Zoro said nothing.
It had nothing to do with the fight. It was the tempering — breath, then blood, then the body worked on from the inside, which was the first thing any child in the outer courts learned and the last thing anyone here appeared to have heard of.
The first level. That's all this is, and in this world the first level has a name.
He kept his face where it was and let the old man go on believing it was the swordsman.
"Anyhow, that's not why you lost," Zeff said. "That's the other one. Observation."
"Observation."
"It's a sense. A feeling. A premonition, if you want to be dramatic about it." He waved a hand. "Trained to the extreme, and very few take it that far, a man can see a little way into the future. Not much. Enough."
Zoro's hands closed on his knees.
He was never where I put him.
"And the third," he said.
"Conqueror's." Zeff's mouth moved, not quite into a smile. "One in a million. Every last one of them is a name they know from one end of the Grand Line to the other. There's no training into it. You've got it or you haven't."
"And if you haven't?"
"Then you get very strong," Zeff said, "and you stay off the top."
He reached down to work the stiffness out of the stump.
"You going to ask me anything else?"
"No."
"Good." Zeff got himself up off the barrel in stages. "I'll say one thing, then I'm going back to my kitchen, which is currently in the sea.
"Men come back from things. I came back from something once and I came back different. The crew I had then spent a year looking at me sideways over it, and then they stopped, because people stop." He put a hand on the ladder. "Whatever's happened to you down here is your business. Nobody's going to ask. You've got a captain who wouldn't notice if you grew a second head, a long-nose too polite to mention it, and a cook who'll hate you on principle for the next six months."
"And you."
"Me?" Zeff started climbing. "I've got a restaurant to fish out of the water."
Zoro drank the soup, because the man had gone to the trouble and because the body needed it.
The problem was still sitting where he had left it. First level on his own blood. Nothing above that, in a world with nothing in it to draw on.
Except that a man had stood on a dinghy this afternoon and put weight into the air around a black sword, and that man had not been drawing on this world either, because there was nothing here to draw on.
So it could be done. Someone had already done it. The method existed and Fang Yue did not have it, which was a different problem entirely and a much better one.
One in a million. And without it you stay off the top.
He turned that over and got nowhere with it. There was no way to test for it in a storeroom with a hole in his chest, and by the old cook's account no way to test for it anywhere.
Zoro set the bowl aside, straightened his spine, and began again.