The First Half of the Grand Line, The Florian Triangle.
This desolate stretch of sea was locked within a dense, unyielding gray fog throughout the seasons. Natural sunlight could never penetrate the upper mist, leaving only a perpetual gloom and a heavy, deathly silence across the water. Floating quietly deep within the dark shroud was Thriller Bark—a vessel of such colossal dimensions it mirrored a rogue island, drifting like a lurking, spectral leviathan.
Yet, the courtyard of Thriller Bark was stripped of its usual quietude today.
"Ha... Hoo... Ha... Hoo..."
A succession of exceptionally heavy, labored respirations, echoing with the strain of a damaged bellows, vibrated across the wide, ruined flagstones of the central atrium plaza.
"Hehehe! Accelerate the stroke! Add more mass to the rotation, you miserable tub of lard!"
In the middle of the clearing, Gekko Moriah stood shirtless, his massive hands locked around the hilt of the Black Blade, Shusui—a weapon of pristine, uniform midnight hue that radiated the lethal, distinct sharpness of a legendary edge.
At this hour, though Moriah's iconic onion-shaped head and towering frame remained visually arresting, a close inspection revealed a dramatic structural alteration. The thick layers of soft fat that had accumulated along his midsection over a decade of absolute stagnation had contracted by a full dimension.
Since his total defeat at Ace's hands two weeks prior, a collapse that had scattered his thousands of harvested shadows back to the blue seas, there wasn't a single functional zombie left standing on the ship to serve as a training partner.
But destitute of a sparring asset, the Warlord executed his drills alone.
Furthermore, he was forcing his biology through an exceptionally bizarre, hazardous method of fruit manipulation.
"Shadow Replication: Forced Synchronization!"
Moriah roared, his narrow eyes completely bloodshot under the strain.
Suddenly, the ink-black shadow stretching beneath his heels defied the optical laws of the room, writhing violently like an independent animal. The shadow's arms drove forward, executing a flawless, high-velocity swordsmanship line with the precision and kinetic power of a master blade.
Simultaneously, Moriah's massive, out-of-shape torso—still bound to the weapon—was mechanically dragged and propelled by the shadow's trajectory. His frame executed an exceptionally perfect, fluid cutting arc that completely contradicted his current physical bulk.
Whoosh!
A colossal crescent of jet-black sword-qi unrolled from Shusui's edge, cleanly halving an abandoned stone clock tower across the plaza.
This was one of the most terrifying, intrinsic attributes of the Shadow-Shadow Fruit—the programmatic synchronization of the shadow's form and the physical entity.
Moriah, having entirely neglected his muscular conditioning and sword disciplines for over a decade, was now calculationally forcing his shadow to execute top-tier martial forms repeatedly. He intended to violently jar the dormant combat instincts within his bones back into alignment. This forced regime, which locked his joints within the invisible puppet strings of his own fruit power, was exceptionally brutal in tearing and reconfiguring his muscle fibers.
"Ha... Ha..."
With the strike cleared, Moriah leaned heavily against the hilt of Shusui to stabilize his weight. Thick beads of sweat ran down his pale, stitched skin like raindrops, splattering against the stone.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
A light, clear cadence of applause descended from the high perimeter wall.
A pink-haired girl, balancing a burgundy parasol against her shoulder while dressed in an elegant Gothic gown, sat perched along the masonry edge, her long legs dangling idly over the drop.
"Lord Moriah, though the trajectory of that cut carried a fraction of visual style, the frequency of your lungs sounds precisely like a dying seahorse. Horohorohorohoro~" Perona covered her lips, letting out her signature sarcastic chuckle.
"Silence, Perona!" Moriah growled in raw exasperation, his breath ragged. "This is an absolute reconstruction program! The moment I clear this layer of fat, restore the density of my Haki, and claim that enhancement serum the brat Ace guaranteed... I'll have the mass required to re-enter the New World!"
"Yes, yes. Lord Moriah's design is absolute," Perona said, rolling her large eyes before floating down from the masonry to hand him a heavy linen towel.
"But realistically, hasn't your pace turned slightly self-destructive lately? Dr. Hogback noted that you aren't simply utilizing your shadow to warp your muscle fibers to squeeze out the soft tissue; you've also been selectively harvesting the shadows of whatever swordsmen and martial artists wander into these mists."
Perona looked up at his pale features with a trace of genuine concern. "Though integrating the shadows of others grants you immediate tactical data and physical memory, it isn't an asset generated by your own training. If your system fails to digest the memory load in time, your cognitive centers won't maintain their autonomy."
"Tch! That civilian's medical insights are only functional for stitching together mute cadavers," Moriah grunted, wiping the moisture from his throat before discarding the linen into the dirt.
He understood perfectly that Perona's assessment carried absolute logical weight. Forcibly overriding his own neural pathways with foreign shadow memory to cheat his way back to high combat readiness placed an immense, crushing stress on his mind. But he had run out of conventional options. As long as he could reclaim the physical chassis that had allowed him to contend on the grand stages of his youth, he was fully prepared to invite a cognitive collapse.
Moriah lifted his chin, his narrow eyes tracking the heavy, unbroken fog bank that locked the sky. Those pupils, which had remained entirely lifeless for over a decade, were now burning with a frantic, unmitigated focus.
"Ace..."
Moriah's fingers compressed around the leather wrap of Shusui. The cold, solid weight of the hilt forced his memory to re-map the image of that absolute demon—Kaido.
Back within the borders of Wano Country, the horrific sight of that monster systematically smashing his most cherished companions into bloody fragments with that unreasonable, Haki-coated club had anchored itself deep within his soul like a permanent parasite, gnawing at his sanity night after night.
He had spent over a decade locked in fear; he had spent over a decade executing a coward's retreat, hiding within these gray mists to construct an army of numb corpses that couldn't feel physical pain. All of it had been a pathetic attempt to insulate his heart from ever again experiencing the despair of losing everything.
Yet, the young tyrant named Portgas D. Ace had not only dismantled his ridiculous zombie legion with unmitigated physical violence two weeks ago; he had ruthlessly torn open the absolute deepest scar in his history.
"My hull has added a few more monster profiles over the last month... and our physician has successfully stabilized a serum that breaks past biological limitations. I'll deliver your vial when our path crosses your coordinates. When I steer this warship into the Wano sectors to claim Kaido's head, your name is on the manifest."
The arrogant, ambitious declaration Ace had released through the communication channel still vibrated within Moriah's ears.
"Hehehehe! Hehehehahaha!"
Moriah suddenly burst into a manic, uninhibited roar of laughter, the sound carrying an extreme density of madness and resolve that had been suppressed behind his ribs for thirteen winters.
If any other rookie captain had declared an intention to harvest Kaido's head, he would have treated the statement as a lunatic's delusion. But this was the monster who had cold-bloodedly executed the World Nobles within the capital streets and broken through an Admiral's blockade—a Shura dreadnought packed with absolute madmen.
"Since you—a young monster—possess the nerve to declare war on the iron rule of the Four Emperors, then this worthless lifeline of mine, which logically died long ago on the fields of Wano, belongs entirely to your purpose!"
In that exact microsecond, Moriah's massive, reconfigured frame erupted with a ferocious, heavy aura that caused the ambient mist to ripple. It was the absolute, unyielding focus of a drowning man fully prepared to burn his own house down if it bought him a weapon.
"Dr. Hogback!" Moriah roared toward the distant stone castle like a hunting beast.
"Present! Present, Lord Moriah! Fos-fos-fos-fos!" The eccentric scientist scrambled out onto the terrace, his needle tools rattling.
"Drag out those swordsmen and line brawlers with bounties clearing ten million that our nets harvested yesterday! Prepare the restraints—I'm clearing their shadows for integration!"
Moriah's bloodshot eyes fixed onto the empty gray space before his chest, his vision already locked onto the burning battlefields of the New World.
"Before Captain Ace steers his prow through the gates of Wano Country, I will squeeze every single drop of soft fat out of this damn biology! I will reclaim every scrap of the Haki I surrendered in the dirt! I will absolutely not tolerate a single soul on that warship looking down on my station!"
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