Chapter 296: The Livestock Project
As the New World's foremost Yonkō crew—and with Whitebeard himself famously billed as the world's strongest man—it was only natural that all the strange goings-on leading up to the feast had drawn attention from every direction, newspapers included.
The reporter Kizaru had just relieved of his camera belonged to one of the New World's papers.
And he hadn't even been the first one caught. With the Dimensional Chat Group's members almost universally packing Observation Haki—and every one of them broadly developed across the board—rooting out the rats and bugs skulking around in the shadows was, frankly, no challenge at all.
Kizaru alone had already flushed out three of them by now. Two were confirmed newspaper reporters; the third's identity was still unclear.
Could be someone from a rival pirate crew. Could be a World Government agent. Could even be one of Dragon's people—plenty of possibilities on the table.
Not that Kizaru particularly cared which one it turned out to be. The Whitebeard Pirates would get the truth out of the little bug eventually.
If they couldn't, well, they wouldn't be much of a Yonkō crew, would they? Kizaru had zero doubt the Whitebeard Pirates had at least one division suited to a bit of "enhanced interrogation."
Honestly, even Marine Headquarters had a department for that kind of thing.
Some people were simply too stubborn to reason with, and given how little regard for human rights existed in this world to begin with, of course Marine HQ had its own dedicated interrogation unit—not too dissimilar from Cipher Pol, really!
Looking over the reporter in front of him, who looked seconds away from wetting himself out of sheer terror, Kizaru wore a faintly teasing expression as he spoke. "No need to be this tense. I've already got some Whitebeard Pirates coming to take care of you. Keep your mouth shut, don't try running, and you'll be just fine—got it?"
The reporter nodded rapid-fire, like a chick pecking at grain, which said everything about just how terrified he was.
Soon enough, some Whitebeard Pirates arrived and led the paparazzi reporter away. Just as Kizaru had promised, they didn't use any force on him at all.
They escorted him off politely and courteously—though the poor guy still nearly jumped out of his skin, mostly because a couple of the pirates happened to have faces so rough their smiles came off scarier than a grimace.
Kizaru shook his head, sighed, then flickered out of sight and reappeared back at the feast, taking a sip of his drink. "Handled. Say, Whitebeard, shouldn't your boys get some proper training in? Letting a reporter sneak up like that, honestly."
This time Whitebeard didn't argue at all—he nodded along seriously and let out a booming laugh. "Fair point, they have gotten a bit soft, haven't they! Gurararara, no matter—once this New Year's celebration wraps up, old me's putting them through proper drills myself. Every division captain's going to hit Marine Admiral-level combat strength, no exceptions!"
Kizaru rolled his eyes. "Since when did 'Marine Admiral' become a unit of measurement for combat strength in your vocabulary?"
"Gurararara! Isn't it, though?"
"..."
Listening to the Navy man and the pirate captain bicker away good-naturedly, Ryū let out a helpless little laugh—then glanced over to his right, at Yukari, and immediately felt a few dark lines materialize across his forehead.
There was Yukari, that youkai sage, quietly wrapping up double portions of all the best dishes and stashing them away inside her gap.
Probably planning to bring them home for Ran and Chen, he figured.
He had to admit, for all her nonsense, this youkai sage genuinely looked out for the people around her. It was exactly why he'd trusted her to look after Sakura in the first place—she had a real knack for taking care of people, when she actually put her mind to it.
Just a shame her mind was perpetually somewhere filthy, that she loved driving inappropriate content into the chat at every possible opportunity, refused to change no matter how many times she got called out, and made a hobby out of talking back to him, her own Admin.
"Yaraya~ this humble self is well aware of her own natural beauty—a peerless beauty even among countless dimensional worlds, really—but Admin-sama, don't you think staring at my face for a full minute straight is a bit much?"
Partway through saying that, Yukari suddenly froze, her striking eyes going wide, and she whipped around to lock eyes with Ryū in disbelief.
Then, in her usual can't-let-a-sentence-go-by-quietly fashion, she blurted out, "Wait...wait wait wait! Admin-sama, don't tell me—has your mating season hit, and now you've got your eye on this humble self?! Wait—hold on! I might not be able to beat you in a fight, but you absolutely need to control yourself right now! Don't you dare try anything!"
"Feelings can't be forced, you know, and this humble self's mating season hasn't even—pfft! I'm a gap youkai, a boundary-dwelling spirit, I don't even have a mating season! Anyway, just—don't come any closer! I'll scream for help, I mean it!"
Ryū's mouth twitched, and he had to physically restrain the urge to smack her, deadpan as he shot back, "Can your mind ever just be normal for once? What kind of nonsense are you cooking up in there all day long?"
"Eh? Did I guess wrong? Ahahaha, lovely weather we're having today, and Whitebeard's spread is delicious too, really hits the spot! Ahahaha!"
"Hey—hey now...isn't that subject change getting a little too obvious? And that's the second time today you've said the weather's nice."
"..."
Time ticked on, and the feast wrapped up after roughly three or four hours, mostly because everything prepared for it—food, drink, all of it—had been thoroughly demolished.
Yes, even that dozens-of-meters-long charcoal-grilled Sea King had been reduced to nothing but a bare skeleton.
Never underestimate this crowd's appetite—especially given how many of them practiced physical cultivation of some kind. Practically everyone in the chat group had trained their body one way or another; who wouldn't want to be a little healthier, a little stronger?
Even Umaru, Eriri, and Sakura, who studied Gensokyo magic under Yukari, had all still used Points to boost their Constitution at some point.
Which meant that, aside from Hoshino Hinata, the group's newest and most recent addition, everyone else in the Dimensional Chat Group was, without exception, an absolutely astonishing eater.
Wandering Earth couldn't eat food itself, of course, but it still packed away plenty of it—stuffing it all somewhere onto its own surface.
According to Wandering Earth, it had recently gotten into a sort of simulation game with itself, raising up the last remaining humans still living on its surface.
Which meant—yes, that's exactly right—Wandering Earth was currently running a livestock-style breeding operation on its own remaining human population.
None of the Dimensional Chat Group's members had any objection to this, actually—if anything, they found the whole thing fascinating. There weren't many of those humans left on Wandering Earth to begin with, after all.
Better to have a planetary consciousness carefully tending to what was left than to let more of them simply die off, right? Though—wasn't there something a little too close to "raising chickens" about the whole premise?
Exactly how far Wandering Earth could take this human-raising project of its was, admittedly, a genuinely curious—and pretty exciting—thing to wonder about.
...
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