Chapter 228: Breaking Through the Ceiling
The name "Any-Skill Ceiling Breakthrough Card" was fairly self-explanatory on the surface, but Ryū wasn't entirely sure he'd understood it correctly — the implications were too significant to assume without confirmation. He wanted to see the details before forming conclusions.
His working theory: the card applied to a skill that had already been maxed out, removed the ceiling entirely, and allowed further proficiency increases through Points without any upper limit. If that was accurate, this was not a normal item.
He clicked the link.
[Any-Skill Ceiling Breakthrough Card: Can be applied to any skill whose proficiency has been raised to its absolute maximum and can no longer be increased. Shatters the skill's inherent limitation.
Achieves a "no-ceiling" state — proficiency can thereafter be raised without any restriction.
Note: A skill with a Ceiling Breakthrough Card applied can only have its proficiency raised via Chat Group Points. No other training method will increase proficiency once the card is used.
Each skill can only receive one Ceiling Breakthrough Card.
Members are advised to consider carefully before using. Waste not!]
He read through it twice.
His initial guess had been essentially correct.
A fully maxed skill, stripped of its upper bound. Perpetual room for growth, as long as Points continued to flow. The only constraint was that the development path became Points-exclusive — you couldn't substitute training reps for currency once the card was applied.
Two cards. Two skills. Permanently de-capped.
He thought about what that meant if he ever had genuinely large Point reserves — fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, the kind of numbers that sounded unreachable right now but that group quests at escalating difficulty could eventually produce.
The value of the cards at that point would be difficult to calculate.
If the Chat Group ever gets a shop, these go for at minimum thirty to a hundred thousand Points each. I received two of them from a holiday gift package.
He took a moment to simply appreciate this.
The 3,000 Points in the same package had initially seemed like the main prize. That assessment required updating. 3,000 Points was still meaningful — before this, his entire balance had been under 2,000. He was now sitting at 4,500, which was the most comfortable he'd been in some time. Small fortune, comparatively speaking.
What skills are currently at ceiling?
Three: the Six Powers, Armament Haki, Observation Haki. His Devil Fruit ability was still actively developing and hadn't reached its limit.
First question before using the cards: when a card was applied to "the Six Powers," did it break the ceiling on the whole system, or only on a single technique within it? The distinction mattered enormously. Six individual techniques meant six cards needed for full coverage — he only had two.
The link hadn't addressed this.
The only way to find out was to try.
He used one card on the Six Powers.
[You have applied an "Any-Skill Ceiling Breakthrough Card" x1 to the "One Piece"-world skill "Six Powers"! Application successful!]
He blinked.
Worked. The whole system, treated as a single skill. Shave, Iron Body, Moonwalk, Finger Pistol, Tempest Kick, Paper Art, and every variant and extension he'd developed in the Arena — all of them now had unlimited room for growth.
He sat with this for a moment.
If I ever have fifty thousand Points to put into Six Powers—
He pulled himself back. Fifty thousand Points was not a problem for today. He had 4,500. The ceiling was broken; the work of filling what lay above it was a separate project that would take time.
Before spending Points on Six Powers development, there was something more pressing.
Kizaru had uploaded something to the Chat Group's shared files a few days ago: a complete breakdown of "Life Return," the technique, its principles, and its applications. He'd uploaded it without any visible sign of guilt, which was very characteristic of him. The Marine Corps treated this as one of their most strictly protected internal secrets. Kizaru had shared it to a multi-dimensional group chat on a Wednesday morning like it was a recipe.
Life Return was worth prioritising above additional Haki investment, at least in the near term.
The reason: it was the technique that let a practitioner exercise complete conscious control over every element of their body. Hair, nails, individual muscle fibres, internal organs — all of it became subject to voluntary command. At its most developed, cellular activity itself came under conscious direction. And beyond that — by deliberately spending cellular vitality as fuel, a practitioner could temporarily push their output to 120% of their actual maximum.
That last part was the one Ryū kept returning to.
His physical ceiling was already high. Pushing it to 120% on demand, even temporarily, represented a different category of tactical option. Combined with the Six Powers at a post-breakthrough development level, the implications were significant.
He filed it for when there was time to actually study the material properly, and came back to the immediate problem.
One card remaining. Two viable targets. Armament Haki or Observation Haki.
Both had genuine arguments.
Breaking the Observation Haki ceiling: his current future-sight window was two to five seconds. Post-breakthrough, with Points investment, that could expand. Ten seconds was probably achievable at moderate cost. Twenty, thirty — with enough investment, the coverage area could extend from a city to a country. At numbers that were currently theoretical, planetary coverage entered the realm of possibility. The value of knowing what was coming thirty seconds ahead during a serious fight was difficult to overstate. The value of sensing every living thing on a planet simultaneously was something else entirely.
Breaking the Armament Haki ceiling: every physical technique he had built on top of Armament Haki as the foundation. The hardening that made his strikes capable of bypassing defences that would otherwise be impervious, the black-coating that turned his body into something that could take hits from things that should have destroyed it — each improvement to Armament Haki multiplied across everything stacked above it. Constitution upgrades, Six Powers development, the Devil Fruit — all of them became more effective when the underlying Armament Haki was higher.
The compounding argument favoured Armament.
The flexibility and information-superiority argument favoured Observation.
He wasn't going to rush this.
He had one card and it was permanent. He'd give himself time to think it through properly.
Which one.
He sat with the problem and let it sit.
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