The Flower Capital
A lone, solitary figure walked slowly through the bustling, crowded streets of the Flower Capital. The surrounding shouts of vendors and the lively atmosphere felt entirely detached from him, as if he existed in a completely separate world. Beneath his calm expression, a subtle strain of deep sorrow was faintly visible.
As if sensing its master's heavy emotions, the long katana secured at his waist vibrated with a faint, low hum. Man and blade moved together like anomalies from another dimension, wandering aimlessly down the thriving commercial avenue.
It was Kenshin.
From a nearby stall, a vendor's passionate, boisterous pitch cut through the background noise of the street.
"Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Anyone without pressing official business, do not dare let this variable slide past your parameters! Take a look at this legendary blade! Gather around, gather around!"
"The steel I am holding in my grip is a world-class masterpiece forged during the leisure hours of a grandmaster from the famous Kitetsu lineage!" As the merchant delivered the high-energy hook, he aggressively slapped his paper fan against the tabletop.
Driven by the vendor's electrifying performance, a dense crowd began to rapidly consolidate around the stall. Even citizens who typically registered zero interest in street trade involuntarily adjusted their coordinates to spectate.
A masterwork blade!
This was an absolute, irresistible lure that no swordsman across the entire architecture of the One Piece world could comfortably ignore. Kenshin was no exception to the rule.
He held a comprehensive file on the Kitetsu series, but his database also indicated that any warrior capable of successfully wielding a Kitetsu was an elite anomaly. Because those blades were universally recognized and feared under a specific, volatile classification—Cursed Blades.
An asset designated as a cursed blade was mathematically guaranteed to rank among the absolute highest tiers of named swords. The surrounding crowd locked their stares onto the street merchant, breathlessly waiting for his next demonstration.
"This legendary steel can slice through iron as if it were soft tissue paper! Observe the thin sheet of paper clutched in my left hand; a microscopic graze from the edge..." The merchant produced a fragile piece of parchment.
"One sheet re-stabilizes into two!" "Four sheets!" "Eight sheets!" "Sixteen sheets!"
Within a limited timeframe, the pristine piece of paper was systematically reduced to a cloud of fine confetti, fluttering loosely through the air currents.
"Like pink cherry blossoms dancing through the winter gale, drifting softly to the earth..."
Witnessing the theatrical performance, Kenshin's brow furrowed tightly. He cast a brief, analytical glance toward the so-called "masterpiece" clutched in the vendor's grip, and his interest metrics instantly dropped to absolute zero.
Right at that microsecond, the merchant executed a radical, high-stakes maneuver that left the entire crowd paralyzed with shock. Drawing the edge of the blade across his own forearm, he carved a clean, superficial laceration.
A thin trail of crimson blood welled to the surface.
Before the crowd could process the injury, a small, circular container materialized in the vendor's fingers, and he smoothly massaged the topical ointment directly into the open wound.
In the flash of an eye, the crimson fluid evaporated from the skin, leaving the arm completely unblemished.
"A premium import direct from the East Blue! Toad Oil! Instantaneous clotting mechanics! Whether your system has sustained critical structural trauma or a minor superficial graze, the healing output is absolute! Step up and secure your allocation immediately; supply metrics are strictly limited, and once the inventory returns a blank, you're out of luck!"
Did the merchant design this entire layout to liquidate a sword? Negative! His primary operational objective was to sell ointment.
Processing the sudden shift in the variables, Kenshin stood entirely dumbfounded.
The surrounding crowd instantly swarmed the counter like a raging tide. A medical anomaly possessing a restorative capability of this caliber was something their local databases had never logged. Facing an optimized survival asset like Toad Oil, letting the opportunity slide past their parameters was out of the question.
Furthermore, every single line of text clearing the merchant's jaws projected an aura of absolute, uncompromised transparency. He was textbook definition of a merchant of pure conscience!
Staring at the chaotic, scrambling sea of humanity, Kenshin opened his mouth to voice a critique, but ultimately chose to let his verbal output remain at zero.
"Brother Kenshin! I've finally re-established a lock on your coordinates! Your displacement velocity is far too high; my scanners could barely keep pace!" A familiar voice suddenly echoed from behind his position.
A slender, agile youth stepped out from the crowd to match his bearing. It was Bell.
"Bell? What exact variable prompted you to alter your coordinates to this sector?"
"Ah... that directive was issued directly from Captain Drake's command structure. By the way, Brother Kenshin, what specific target is your current trajectory tracking?" Bell asked, his head tilting with curiosity.
"This sector features far too many listening nodes to safely exchange data. Let's shift our coordinates to an isolated zone," Kenshin replied, running a quick sweep of the immediate perimeter before guiding Bell away from the bustling market.
What neither of them calculated during their exit was that the busy merchant, while frantically processing transactions for Toad Oil, had subtly adjusted his peripheral vision to log their departure.
Kenshin? Bell?
Usopp retracted his gaze, his internal processors running a rapid cross-reference on the names.
This street vendor was no random native asset; he was a core sniper anchoring the Straw Hat Pirates, the legendary God Usopp!
After a brief microsecond of tactical contemplation, Usopp turned back to the crowd, waving a container as he barked, "Behold, the absolute final bottle of premium Toad Oil remaining in our global inventory! Which lucky asset will claim the ultimate allocation?"
"I'll secure the purchase!" a young girl chimed in, extending her small hand to swap her currency for the container.
"Ahahaha, exceptional execution! Our ultimate consumer has officially materialized! The active inventory for today's cycle has returned a total blank. Any units requiring Toad Oil must re-initialize their queues tomorrow!" Packing his remaining display items with practiced efficiency, Usopp handed the final bottle down to the child. "Here is your allocation."
Within seconds, Usopp had dissolved into the thick of the civilian crowd, completely wiping his presence from the sector.
A Secret Ledger of Blood
Tucked away within a completely silent, abandoned alleyway adjacent to the main avenue, Kenshin finally unsealed the heavy data blocks he had kept fiercely locked deep within his soul for a decade.
They had braved countless life-threatening campaigns together, forging a bond where they could safely entrust their backs to one another's steel; maintaining an artificial layer of secrecy at this stage of the macro-war carried zero baseline utility.
The solitary reason he had kept this data hidden in the past was because his internal psychological parameters hadn't fully aligned to face the memory. But the exact microsecond his boots touched the stone of the Flower Capital, his resolve had crystallized.
The variables of the past were converging; running from the simulation was an error loop. The timeline was ripe for execution.
This campaign within Wano Country would serve as the ultimate crucible to permanently settle his accounts.
"The baseline parameters of my biography are remarkably simple: I am a native asset of Wano Country, born and bred on these shores. However, my coordinates were forcefully shifted away from this land exactly ten years ago."
"Brother Kenshin... rest easy. My steel is entirely aligned to reinforce your deployment! This Shogun Orochi bastard is an absolute stain on humanity!" Bell growled, his features twisting into an expression of raw, volatile fury. "What is our precise timeline for initiation?"
"From my perspective, executing a high-intensity offensive tonight yields the highest strategic return. That monster Orochi has preserved his life signs far past his expiration date anyway!"
Bell's sudden spike in anger was entirely logical; Kenshin had just downloaded the unedited records of his lineage into his files.
The Flower Capital had originally functioned as Kenshin's ancestral home. Ten rotations of the calendar ago, Shogun Orochi's sensors had locked onto Kenshin's mother, marking her for immediate appropriation.
Kurozumi Orochi was a biological entity whose core coding was entirely dominated by absolute, insatiable depravity. From the precise microsecond he had misappropriated the title of Shogun of Wano, his tyrannical pursuit of women had never hit a cooling loop. The elite beauties gracing his private chambers were cycled through ruthlessly, a continuous rotation of victims.
Within the borders of Wano, Orochi's penchant for violently abducting civilian women was a standardized data point logged by every single citizen. Yet, under the crushing weight of his regime, not a solitary soul possessed the leverage to mount an open resistance.
But Kenshin's father was an elite samurai who completely rejected the protocol of submissively surrendering his wife to a tyrant. The exact microsecond the threat materialized, his father made an instantaneous, high-priority calculation, deploying his resources to successfully smuggle his young son completely out of Wano's closed maritime grid.
With his line secured, his father chose to stand alone, engaging the Shogun's enforcers in a total, suicidal last stand!
Ultimately, both of his parents were systematically erased from the ledger, their vital signs terminated beneath a high-density barrage of firearms deployed by Orochi's imperial vanguard.
To scale up the humiliation, the regime denied their bodies a proper burial protocol, scattering their remains across separate, unmapped mass graves. They were denied even the baseline dignity of a shared resting place.
At that critical timeline, a helpless Kenshin could do nothing but comply with his father's final directive, drifting aimlessly across the harsh currents of the open sea as an isolated wanderer. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, his internal tracking software had been locked onto a solitary, unchanging objective:
Get stronger. Evolve into a grandmaster swordsman capable of standing parallel to the world's apex, and personally execute Shogun Orochi with my own steel!
To fulfill that protocol, he had subjected his physical frame to a grueling, day-and-night regimen of sword mastery. Yet, after eight long years of isolated training, his baseline power metrics remained remarkably weak against the titans of the New World.
Until a watershed moment manifested two years prior: he crossed paths with Vale D. Drake.
That single encounter completely re-calibrated his life's trajectory. Having crossed the twenty-year threshold, his internal processors refused to tolerate any further latency; he needed to map his coordinates back to Wano! Regardless of how bleak the probability models looked, he demanded a final, decisive clash.
This underlying motivation was the primary reason he had accepted Drake's initial recruitment invitation without a single millisecond of hesitation. Navigating the treacherous, closed barriers of Wano as an isolated, solo asset was a statistical impossibility; aligning his variables with a rising, high-potential faction was an exceptionally optimized choice.
Unknowingly, the Drake Pirates had already completed a full twenty-four-month operational timeline since their inception, braving a catastrophic sea of storms, shifting alliances, and high-intensity conflicts as a unified front. Furthermore, they had just concluded a rigorous, two-year secluded training cycle to scale their attributes to the absolute peak.
He was fully aware that he had graduated from the hollow shell of a lone swordsman driven by blind vengeance. He was Dragon Kenshin—a core pillar anchoring the vanguard of the Drake Pirates!
This temporary solo detour into the capital was merely an independent sub-routine to finalize a deeply personal blood feud.
"Who goes there?!" Bell's brow suddenly furrowed into a sharp, dangerous scowl, his voice dropping to a freezing pitch as his tactical sensors flagged a live anomaly.
Kenshin whipped his head around, his eyes tracking the trajectory of Bell's gaze.
Emerging slowly from the absolute blind spot of the stone corner was a lone silhouette. Moving with blinding execution velocity, Bell's signature straight-edged ninjato cleared its scabbard in a flash, the razor-sharp edge coming to a dead halt mere millimeters away from the intruder's throat.