Watching Roger get dragged back to his room by the ear by his wife, Li Ke couldn't help but let out a rather unkind laugh.
Generally speaking, he and Roger actually got along quite well. When you stripped away the "Pirate King" title, Roger was the kind of person who could easily become friends with anyone. His passionate, boisterous, and almost childlike personality was something many people envied.
Of course, there were plenty of people who preferred the serious and stoic types, but when it came to messing around and having fun, Roger was the ultimate companion.
"Maybe that's how they endure the silence of the sea," Li Ke mused.
Thinking back to the crushing loneliness he felt during those months at sea, he began to understand why captains like Luffy and Roger were so beloved. They had a knack for bringing joy just when the isolation started to set in. More importantly, they were the types to step up, shoulder the heavy burdens, and take the fall when things turned south.
Who wouldn't want a leader like that?
"But from a civilian or a historical perspective, Roger is a complicated man," Li Ke suddenly realized.
If he were just an average civilian, he'd probably want Roger dead. With a single sentence, the man had thrown the entire world into absolute chaos. Yet, from a historical lens, Roger hadn't necessarily done anything wrong. If the World Government acted even remotely like human beings, things might be different—but they didn't.
The world had progressed to the point of creating robots, yet where was their social structure stuck? Slavery. They hadn't even reached the level of true feudalism.
In an environment like that, it was only natural for "outlaws" and "rebels" to sprout up everywhere. You couldn't pin the blame for the sheer number of pirates solely on Roger. After all, the number of beggars in a kingdom isn't decided by the leader of the beggars' guild—it's decided by the Emperor.
Whether it was the Four Emperors or the rising Supernovas, almost all of them had some bone to pick with the World Government; many harbored deep-seated hatred. In that context, Roger's call for people to seek freedom was a historical inevitability—perhaps even his greatest achievement.
The problem, however, was that he was a pirate.
Even if pirates were the most "vibrant" group of this era, the average person living a peaceful life would never approve of what Roger did. To them, he was the man who had unleashed the Great Pirate Era upon their doorsteps. No matter how inhuman the World Government was, it was Roger who gave every thug a reason to raise a black flag and head for the Grand Line.
He was undeniably a sinner, yet he was also the turning point of history. History truly is a mess of contradictions.
"But hey, what does that have to do with me?" Li Ke muttered, ruthlessly cutting off his own philosophical tangent. "I'm just here for the girls."
They say once a man drains the "brain fluid" in his lower half, he finally starts using the brain in his skull. It seems there's some truth to that, though strictly speaking, Li Ke hadn't even had his fill yet!
Looking at his energy interface, he felt a wave of helplessness. His total points had only increased by a little over a thousand.
Robin had passed out toward the end, and the energy income plummeted when he switched to her clones. The bulk of that thousand-point haul came from Robin's actual body while she was still conscious; once she was out cold, the energy gained was practically negligible.
"In other words, no matter what, I have to get my hands on Nami."
Li Ke stretched his limbs and walked out to the inn's backyard to continue his physical training.
His Waterbending was far too shocking for this world's common sense, so he didn't plan on showing it off just yet. Fire, however, was a different story. In this world, it felt like just about anyone could conjure flames if they tried hard enough, so a little pyrokinesis wouldn't raise any eyebrows. Of course, he wasn't looking down on the Mera Mera no Mi—fire was still an S-tier threat when it came to wooden ships.
Flames flowed between Li Ke's hands. Fire shouldn't technically have the properties of a liquid, but Li Ke's modern knowledge told him otherwise. More importantly, he was currently far more familiar with the "Flow of Water" [1]. In his mind, fire was a plasma, and plasma could certainly flow.
Following the notes of a man named Iroh, the Firebending from the Avatar world indeed treated fire as a flowing force. Even Lightning Generation was described as guiding the energy of fire into a current, creating positive and negative poles within the body before releasing them as a focused stream. Lightning was simply the natural byproduct of that flow.
Li Ke was training himself to make fire move like water, gathering that heat within his body and forcing it to circulate. But as he practiced, he sensed something off.
"It feels less like I'm 'bending fire' and more like I'm 'steering energy.' Whether it's electricity or fire, they're just different energetic states of matter..."
He couldn't help but criticize the logic. Even with his physics knowledge regressed to a middle-school level, he could tell the four elements of Avatar were fundamentally absurd once you looked past the surface. If one truly reached the level of controlling the energetic states of matter, there wouldn't be much difference between them and a Creator God.
For now, though, he was just a guy spitting a bit of fire. It wasn't exactly world-shaking.
Between sets of his training forms, Li Ke took a moment to check his status bar, specifically looking for any updates regarding his missions.
He had assumed that "deeply communicating" with Robin would be the trigger to reclaim the 7 Days to Die powers she carried. Unfortunately, there was no reaction from the system other than his World Power increasing by five points. It was clear that Robin carried a fragment of that alienated power, but simply sleeping with her wasn't enough to collect it.
Looks like I'll need to find a specific way to extract it, he mused. Maybe summoning a 7 Days to Die Trader would do the trick.
He wasn't in a hurry, though. This was just a backwater border town, nowhere near Cocoyasi Village, and he didn't want to waste a summon here. He had a theory he wanted to test: if he summoned a Trader on a ship in this world, could he take them along for the ride instead of having them anchored to a single spot?
After finishing his routine of Fire Nation Royal Secret Arts and breathing exercises provided by Azula—ensuring his body remained in peak condition—Li Ke headed back to the inn. He grabbed two servings of food and knocked on his room door.
Robin opened it, her expression cold and guarded. However, seeing Li Ke standing there with a breakfast tray, she softened just enough to let him in. They sat at the small table, eating in silence.
The meal was simple, but Li Ke was struck by the sheer quality of the ingredients. Even the meticulously sourced ingredients from the Shokugeki no Soma world struggled to match this level of freshness. The flavor of the meat was far more intense and savory than anything he had tasted on Earth or in the gourmet world.
He suspected it came down to the sheer nutrient density of this world. In a place where humans could train to split mountains and part seas, the food had to be packed with an absurd amount of energy.
He was the living proof. Back in the Calm Belt, he hadn't cared about the taste of the Sea King meat Roger forced on him, but his body had craved it with a primal hunger. Every bite felt like his cells were screaming for more, reaching a point where even if he didn't know the exact flavor, he found it "delicious" simply because his body needed it so desperately.
It was a sensation he'd only felt once before—right after escaping the starvation of the 7 Days to Die world. But with Sea King meat, that feeling of pure satisfaction happened every single time.
It was a shame, really. Now that they had left the Calm Belt, Sea Kings were much harder to come by. Now that he actually had the time to sit down and savor the flavor, he had no meat left to eat.
Li Ke felt a genuine pang of regret.
"Before I leave this world, I should grab some Sea King meat for Erina. I bet she'd absolutely love it," Li Ke mused, tearing into a piece of classic 'Manga Meat.'
Robin, watching his distant expression, couldn't help but ask, "What are you thinking about? Women again?"
"Naturally!" Li Ke nodded, prompting a helpless sigh from Robin.
"Most people set sail on these treacherous seas chasing the legend of the One Piece," Robin remarked, her voice carrying a trace of lingering disbelief. She looked at the man beside her—a traveler who had the literal Pirate King as a personal mentor, yet seemed utterly uninterested in the throne of the world. "But you... you've crossed the Calm Belt and defied the laws of life and death, all just to find more girls."
Roger's appearance was far too iconic for someone of her intellect to miss. To the rest of the world, he was a ghost or a myth, but since she knew Li Ke possessed the forbidden power to pull souls back from the afterlife, the impossible reality standing on their ship was undeniable.