Kurosaki Rei turned and left, leaving Yamato standing there, completely disheveled by the wind.
Far away on Onigashima, Kaido slapped his thigh in delight, positively beaming.
"So when you were young, you really did go attack warships just because you couldn't get enough to eat?"
Black Maria asked curiously. She had heard this version of events before, but hearing it come out of Kurosaki Rei's mouth in this particular context made her want to confirm it.
"The corrupt World Government had great food, after all," Kaido laughed loudly. "The first time I was on a warship, I ate really well. I figured it was a pretty good place."
He didn't mind at all that people brought up his captures.
As he said himself, if he hadn't wanted to be caught, none of those people could have captured him.
Back then, he'd been sold out by his country and sent onto a warship at just ten years old. After eating his fill, he sank the ship and escaped the very next day.
But faced with the vast, unfamiliar sea, he quickly realized that drifting alone made even getting enough food a serious problem.
So whenever he saw a warship at sea, it looked to him like a mobile cafeteria. He'd charge straight in, eat his fill, and then leave.
At the time, he wasn't even a Devil Fruit user yet. Seastone cuffs didn't affect him much—he'd just beat everyone on the ship into submission and unlock the shackles with keys he stole.
"I never thought you'd actually gone through such hardship," Black Maria said with a sigh. "For the Beasts Pirates to reach where we are today really hasn't been easy."
In truth, the Beasts Pirates only truly began to rise after the Rocks Pirates disbanded—after their Governor obtained the Azure Dragon Fruit from one of the Four Emperors, BIG MOM. That was when things really took off.
Later, Kaido rampaged through a World Government research facility and freed King. From there, the two of them roamed the seas, slowly building up the Beasts Pirates.
Compared to King, Black Maria and the others were all later additions to the crew.
"Maria," Kaido said with a smile as he watched Yamato frozen in place on the screen, clearly in a great mood. "What do you think Yamato is thinking right now?"
"Marveling at how heroic you were in your youth?" Maria guessed.
In reality, she couldn't read Yamato's mind at all. After all, it was hard for normal people to understand how a madwoman thought.
Kaido didn't reply, merely watching Yamato on the screen as she stood there deep in thought.
Meanwhile, back in Udon Prison, after handing in the ore and exchanging it for meal tickets, Kurosaki Rei went to get food.
Because his and Yamato's work efficiency was extremely high, his breakfast was exceptionally generous: red bean dumpling soup with flatbread, and plenty of it.
Kurosaki Rei already ate far more than an average person, and as his body gradually became more extraordinary, his appetite had become downright absurd—he could easily eat portions meant for twenty people.
Even so, after exchanging for food, he still had meal tickets left over.
This made Kurosaki Rei realize two things.
First, under Kaido's "more work, more reward" system, the labor returns were astonishing. Simply put, in Udon Prison, as long as your overall attributes were above 10 and you worked hard mining, you could eat your fill.
If you were strong, you could eat until you were stuffed—and still not finish everything.
Although the people here were prisoners, if you treated this place like a business, it could genuinely be called a conscientious enterprise in a world that valued proportional reward for labor.
Even in Wano, there were many people who went hungry. Yet here in prison, diligent work meant full meals.
The second realization was that, through Udon Prison's essentially unlimited food supply, Kurosaki Rei discovered that Wano itself wasn't actually lacking in food.
He didn't know whether the Beasts Pirates' provisions were entirely produced in Wano or supplemented by external trade and plunder, but based on his knowledge of the original story and what he was seeing now, he felt that Wano likely had enough food to feed everyone.
Whenever the Beasts Pirates held banquets, there was always so much food left over that pirates would play with it—throwing it around like children smashing cake into each other's faces.
When Luffy saw that, it enraged him.
Because the food they were wasting was exactly what many people in Wano desperately needed to survive.
Of course, Wano's poverty and the extreme scarcity in certain regions weren't caused solely by the Beasts Pirates. After all, they weren't Wano's direct rulers.
Wano's ruler was Shogun Kurozumi Orochi—a petty villain who delighted purely in tormenting the people. Even if Wano had enough to eat and wear, he would still make the people of Kuri suffer, because he enjoyed watching them in pain.
He even claimed he didn't like seeing people cry, then had his men feed them SMILE fruits, turning them into pitiful creatures who could do nothing but laugh.
Compared to Kuri, even the prisoners in Udon might have had better treatment—at least if you had the strength to work, you could get food.
"Yamato, you really can eat," Kurosaki Rei said in amazement.
She truly was naturally carefree. Though she'd just been questioning her entire existence and spiraling inward, once food was involved, she simply ate first—as if all her troubles vanished.
After Kurosaki Rei got his food, Yamato arrived carrying a massive pot filled with red bean dumpling soup, along with several flatbreads.
As an aside, red bean dumpling soup was considered high-tier food here, usually reserved for the occasional visit from the All-Star Queen. Ordinary prisoners wouldn't eat so luxuriously—cheaper meals were available for exchange.
But Kurosaki Rei and Yamato were merciless mining machines. In just one morning, they'd dug up a pile of ore as tall as a small hill, so they were flush with tickets.
Yamato rolled up a flatbread, shoved it vertically into her mouth, and swallowed it in two or three bites. She washed it down with red bean soup and said, "What are you talking about? Strong people have to be able to eat and drink. If anything, Brother Rei, your appetite seems a bit small."
Kurosaki Rei's expression turned strange.
This was the first time in his life anyone had said he ate little.
The feeling was… bizarre.
When he was young, the thing his master scolded him for most often was being a "rice bucket." Their life had been poor, yet he could eat an absurd amount.
He often ate so much that his senior sister would give him part of her portion, claiming she was "dieting."
Back then, Kurosaki Rei didn't think much of it and just ate it all. Now that he thought about it, his senior sister had only been a teenager herself, training daily during a growth period—why would she need to diet?
"How do you even fit all that food inside you?" Kurosaki Rei asked after snapping back to reality, looking curiously at Yamato's abdomen.
Yamato was tall, but her figure was still well-proportioned—a slender female build. No matter how he looked at it, her stomach didn't seem capable of holding that much food.
Her eating was incredibly bold. She simply lifted the half-man-tall pot and poured it straight into her mouth. By volume, Kurosaki Rei felt she'd drunk dozens of liters, yet her belly was still completely flat.
"Huh? Once good food goes in, doesn't it get digested really fast?" Yamato asked, confused. "Don't you do that too?"
Kurosaki Rei suddenly understood.
It wasn't that Yamato had some sort of extra-dimensional stomach—she had mastered Life Return, allowing her to digest food at extreme speed and convert its energy into stored bodily reserves.
While getting food, out of habit from his time in the system space, Kurosaki Rei had instinctively used Appraisal on it. He discovered that even the seemingly ordinary red bean soup counted as a Fine-grade recovery item.
Because of the power scale of this world, plants and animals grew larger and stronger, and food contained far more energy. Compared to the real world, even ordinary rice here could be considered a superhuman-grade food.
Since Kurosaki Rei wasn't injured, the red bean soup only served to replenish nutrition and stave off hunger for him.
But in the original story, when Luffy and the Supernova Kid were imprisoned in Udon, they'd eaten themselves into enormous fat blobs—only to deflate like balloons back to normal moments later, with their injuries fully healed.
That was the miracle of Life Return.
It was also the main reason that, in the original story, the very first thing Luffy did after every near-death battle was eat. No matter how severe the injuries, once he ate his fill and converted the nutrients, he'd recover almost instantly.
"Is there any trick to rapid absorption?" Kurosaki Rei asked. "Could you teach me?"
He was very interested in Life Return. Forget saving on recovery items—being able to enjoy more food alone made it worth learning.
"A trick? Do you need to be taught how to eat?" Yamato looked completely baffled. "I've always eaten like this since I was little."
Kurosaki Rei had a hard time holding it together. "Don't you think instantly digesting everything you eat is something not everyone can do?"
Yamato glanced at the few high-performing prisoners who had also earned breakfast. Most of them were chewing slowly, then patting their slightly bulging bellies in satisfaction.
"Now that you mention it," she said, "I think when I was little, I used to get stuffed too."
"Then how did you develop this ability?" Kurosaki Rei asked, pointing at her abdomen.
A physique and ability that let you eat endlessly without gaining weight—women in the real world would go insane if they knew about it.
"Let me think…" Yamato set down the pot and fell into thought. "I think it was when I was eight or nine. Back then, Kaido kept locking me up, and I often couldn't get enough to eat. Whenever I finally had a chance to eat, I wanted to eat more."
"But I'd get full after a certain amount. Since I was sneaking food, I couldn't take any with me, so it felt like a waste. I thought that if I could eat more and store it, that'd be great."
She continued, "So I tried pressing on my stomach, and I focused on digesting faster so I could keep eating."
"And then?" Kurosaki Rei asked.
"Then I digested it," Yamato said innocently. "After that I ate a lot more. Even if I had to starve later, I could last much longer."
Kurosaki Rei was speechless.
But Yamato's explanation helped him further understand why people in this world were so unbelievably resilient.
Red-Leg Zeff, Sanji's benefactor, had survived months of starvation after a shipwreck. Zoro, when first introduced, was also remarkably resistant to hunger.
This was likely because powerful people in this world all unconsciously mastered at least a bit of Life Return.
They might never have learned it systematically, but their strong bodies naturally absorbed food efficiently, storing energy within. When faced with harsh conditions, they could survive far longer.
Taken further, if someone who had mastered Life Return grew up eating well, they would continuously grow stronger—especially in terms of physique—gaining slow but steady improvements.
Learning Life Return was truly essential. It offered long-term benefits to physical attributes.
"Could you demonstrate it slowly for me?" Kurosaki Rei asked. "I want to observe it carefully."
He wasn't from this world, but he felt this was an ability he could learn.
Yamato grinned cheerfully. "Of course. But just watching probably won't let you feel it properly. How about this—you experience the change directly."
As she spoke, Yamato grabbed Kurosaki Rei's hand and placed it on her stomach.
Before Kurosaki Rei could fully react, she grabbed the pot with her other hand and drained it in one go.
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