Fifteen years!
What kind of concept was that?
Drake didn't know the exact reasons behind this arranged marriage, but he knew that after Sabo, any news of him still being alive had vanished from the world. This meant Mitian had kept waiting for him even when everyone else likely believed he was dead.
This...
Why?!
They shouldn't have even properly met. Why would she wait for him like that? A woman had spent fifteen years waiting for him over an arranged childhood betrothal he didn't even know existed, while he had been completely oblivious to her very existence!
Drake let out a bitter, self-deprecating laugh, inwardly cursing himself for being a bastard. He had continuously operated under the assumption that Mitian was a loose, unreserved woman. They didn't even know each other, yet she had forcefully planted a kiss on his lips right out of the gate and acted completely unbothered afterward. If that wasn't being overly open, what was?
In his heart, Drake had always harbored a faint distaste for that manner of behavior. If a woman lacked a baseline sense of self-preservation, self-respect, and dignity, then she was simply not the kind of person Drake would ever want in his life.
But now the data parameters had flipped. He was the exact individual someone had been holding a sacred, burning devotion for over fifteen years, and he had been entirely blind to it.
Fifteen years ago... he would have been a mere five-year-old child. His own memories of this world only stretched back to when he was about eight, surviving alongside Ace and the others. Prior to that timeline, his mind was a complete, sterile void.
"Did she... see me before all this?" Drake's voice carried a distinct tremor.
"You two met once when you were children. It was right after that meeting that her mother and I formally solidified the marriage covenant between you two... However..." Daolang, a towering, rugged warrior of the sea, felt his voice falter slightly beneath his burly beard.
"However... a short timeline after that, our pirate armada crossed into a catastrophic ambush that nearly left us entirely annihilated. You... vanished amidst that exact chaos..."
"But the faint mark between your eyes, the one that resembles a unique birthmark—it allowed me to cleanly identify your vessel at a single glance," Daolang suddenly burst into a booming laugh.
"A birthmark?" Drake blinked in confusion. He was relatively certain his physical face didn't harbor a single prominent birthmark.
SHING!
Canhong cleared its sheath, and Drake meticulously inspected his own reflection across the polished steel of the blade. Right at the absolute center of his brow, a faint, barely perceptible cross-shaped marking slowly materialized within his vision.
The structural lines of the imprint were exceptionally shallow. An ordinary individual would fail to detect its presence even from a close, personal distance. Two years had passed since his awakening, yet Drake himself had never unsealed this data point. Of course, a significant modifier was the simple reality that Drake almost never looked in a mirror; he simply didn't care about his appearance.
"How did you unearth the connection?" Drake questioned. He was certain they hadn't crossed paths prior to hitting this coast. That left only one logical pathway: the old man had analyzed his profile on the bounty posters, cross-referenced the name, and verified his lineage.
"Err... about that..." Daolang's weathered face flushed crimson with intense embarrassment. Executing a couple of sharp, awkward coughs, he muttered, "Actually... it was the Mitian girl. Roughly a month and a half ago, she tracked me down at the Red Hair Pirates' camp and laid out the entire sequence of data before my face."
He was naturally too embarrassed to admit the baseline reality. He was Drake's biological father, and he had obviously scanned the boy's bounty posters, yet he hadn't dared to anchor a definitive conclusion.
Granted, he had always yearned for his flesh and blood to forge himself into a formidable warrior of the sea. But when Drake finally surged into the global spotlight, his combat metrics were simply too overwhelming. Now, the kid was formally designated as an Emperor of the Sea. When Mitian had explicitly mapped out the cross-shaped marking anchoring Drake's brow, the old man's internal excitement had broken all boundaries.
"It was her!" Drake opened his mouth to articulate a sentence, but the words ultimately died. A profound wave of psychological guilt suddenly took root within his mind. While being the focal point of someone's intense devotion felt incredible, the stark reality was that he already owed her far too much.
"Why... did we even get betrothed in the first place?" Drake questioned, voicing the underlying skepticism fracturing his mind. To his analytical worldview, binding two individuals to a life-long marital covenant when they were mere infants was fundamentally flawed. Should their emotional trajectories diverge as adults, it would inevitably birth an absolute tragedy.
"Do you... genuinely possess zero record of the past?" Daolang raised an elegant brow, a trace of suspicion entering his eyes.
"Mm. Everything prior to my eighth year is a complete blank," Drake nodded firmly. "The current version of me only remembers waking up as an orphan, anchored by my three fraternal brothers!"
Drake was speaking the absolute truth. Within the structural framework of his operational memories in the One Piece world, he simply knew himself as Luffy's older brother. The surrounding data was completely redacted.
"You... so that is the reality. A total trauma-induced amnesia... Then, when Mitian crossed your perimeter to deliver the news, your vessel... didn't execute any hostile or inappropriate actions against her, right?" Daolang was genuinely startled. If Drake lacked his memory files, how on earth had he handled Mitian's arrival?
"Inappropriate actions against her?" Drake's eyelids twitched violently. Recalling the absolute chaos of that afternoon, a sharp wave of heat flooded his face. In that narrative layout, who exactly was the predator and who was the prey?
"Exactly! Mitian is an exceptional, pure-hearted girl—that is an absolute axiom. Moving forward, your vessel must cherish and protect her with absolute devotion."
Drake: "..."
Regarding Mitian, Drake truly possessed zero strategic scripts on how to proceed. Human emotions could never be manufactured via an instantaneous vertical leap, and Drake was naturally an individual who thoroughly loathed unnecessary complications. Forcing himself to meticulously engineer a romantic dynamic would likely yield nothing but negative feedback.
After a long, dense silence, Drake let out a slow, heavy breath. Let's permit the timeline to unfold naturally.
"By the way... I assume I have a mother, right?" Drake questioned further. Facing this newly unsealed biological father, his heart harbored a complex blend of instinctual anxiety and a quiet, hidden warmth. Perhaps, deep within the redacted layers of his soul, he had always yearned to anchor his vessel to a true family.
"Your mother..." Daolang's gaze darkened instantly, a profound, agonizing struggle shifting across his weathered features before he gritted his teeth to force the words out. "She vanished into the dark during the exact same year your vessel went missing."
"What... did you say?" Drake stared at him in utter disbelief. "My mother... is missing?"
"Precisely! It remains the ultimate, absolute failure of my life that I lacked the capacity to protect my own family!" Daolang's voice dipped into a heavy, self-reproaching growl.
"During that timeline, for reasons my intelligence networks have still failed to map, my Daolang Pirates were suddenly subjected to a synchronized, overwhelming assault by a combined vanguard of Marines and black-market hunters. As the defensive perimeter collapsed, I ordered your mother to secure your vessel and execute an immediate retreat."
"The definitive data that eventually reached my position verified that only your mother's biological trail remained; your vessel had completely vanished from the system, your survival metrics entirely unresolved."
"I pushed my physical frame to the absolute brink of destruction to chart her trajectory, but down the line, the signal went dead. The specific vanguard I was tracking appeared to be executing a calculated maneuver explicitly designed to draw my main force away from her coordinate."
"I liquidated every single individual involved in that ambush, but the biological trails of both my wife and son were permanently wiped from the ocean. Fifteen years have passed since that dark hour, and not a single night elapses where my mind doesn't frantically hunt for a methodology to unearth the supreme architect behind that strike."
"Yet I am continuously met with a wall of absolute silence..."
"The adversary executed the maneuver with deliberate strategic intent," Drake stated flatly.
The data points were glaringly obvious. The target of that synchronized operation was either himself or his mother. Given that he had spent his formative years wandering the wilderness before rising to global prominence—if he were the primary target, the shadow faction would have easily liquidated his position long ago. That left only one high-probability conclusion: the objective of the purge was his mother.
And they had successfully secured their asset!
"I calculate their primary target was mother."
Daolang cast a deeply startled look toward Drake. Throughout his decades of active, underground investigation, his own analytical models had continuously verified that identical conclusion: the phantom vanguard had deployed exclusively to capture Drake's mother.
Hearing Drake cleanly dissect the structural reality with a single sentence delivered a profound shock to his system.
"How did your mind map that deduction?" Daolang paused to process his thoughts, before nodding grimly. "Correct. Following decades of continuous data gathering, I have verified that the mastermind's absolute objective was indeed your mother."
A bitter, toxic mixture of emotions churned within Daolang's chest. As a warrior who yearned for absolute freedom and stood towering over the New World, failing to preserve the structural safety of his own wife and child was an absolute, defining mark of failure.