Chapter 16 Stop it!

This time, Ace honestly paid for himself and Alice's lunch, and then walked into the shopping street.

Although Yokohama's development in various aspects is different from other cities due to the long-term chaos, as a port city with very weak government control, Yokohama's development is actually not backward.

Not long after Ace brought Alice into the commercial street, he was dazzled by the colorful world inside and ran into the game city and couldn't get out.

He and Alice each had a game console and played online against each other, and they had a lot of fun. In one afternoon, they played all over the game city.

When Mori Owl called a halt, Ace and Alice left the game city with some reluctance. But after walking a few steps and seeing a seafood fried rice shop across the street, he suddenly said with regret: "Oh, I was thinking of going out fishing this morning, but it's already this late."

Ace remembered that when he was on the ship, besides competing with his companions, everyone's favorite thing to do was to sit on the side of the ship and fish. After he was imprisoned in the underwater prison and pushed into the city, he never fished again until now. The last time he saw the sea was when he was escorted to the Marine Headquarters Mariejo for execution.

In his world, except for the Red Earth Continent, all landmasses are islands. After the death of the Pirate King, which ushered in the Great Pirate Age, countless people yearned for the sea.

The same goes for Ace.

Even though his original purpose was just to surpass his father, the Pirate King, and break the shadow he left on his life, after meeting his sworn brother, this became one of the reasons for him to go out to sea.

Just one of them.

When Luffy was a child, he met the great pirate Red-haired Shanks, and since then he had the dream of becoming the Pirate King. He wanted to witness with his own eyes the wonderful scenery described by the great pirate, and he wanted to experience those wonderful adventures himself... In fact, his dream is the purest among the three brothers.

The younger brother Sabo was born into a noble family in the Kingdom of Goa, but he was different from those nobles who pretended to be pretentious and treated ordinary people as garbage. He hated the ugliness of those nobles and did not want to accept the family marriage, so he chose to run away from home and came to the terminal of uncertainty.

——In layman's terms, it is a garbage terminal that handles all kinds of garbage from the Kingdom of Goa. Some abandoned people, poor people, in short, people who are even lower than the lower class, live here in order to survive.

The Kingdom of Goa is a city surrounded by high walls. The economic and living standards inside and outside the walls are very different, not to mention the nobles. There are always some valuable things in these garbage for the people living here. And the people living here are also garbage to the nobles in the Kingdom of Goa.

But Sabo is different. He treats everyone equally as a "human being", not like a noble at all. The first time he and Sabo met was in this garbage mountain full of garbage.

In order to escape from the suffocating aristocratic home, he decided to pursue his own freedom and go out to sea. A nobleman becomes an adult at the age of 18. If he has not escaped from that home before then, he must marry a wife arranged by the family, even if he hates that person, he must obey the family's arrangement.

So, 17 years old became the day they agreed to go out to sea.

But when he was ten years old, due to various reasons, Sabo, who was the same age as him, set out to sea ahead of time, but died at the gunpoint of the world's nobles, on the voyage of pursuit of freedom.

Fortunately, he and Luffy kept their agreement and went to sea at the age of 17.

Perhaps due to the influence of his two younger brothers, his reason for going to sea became more of a yearning for the freedom of the sea.

No matter your background or identity, you don’t have to care about it on that ocean. She will equally embrace everyone who yearns for her and runs towards her.

"…Rintaro?"

[…Ace-kun? ]

Ace came out of his memories and saw Alice looking up at him.

"What's the matter?" he asked with a smile.

Alice pouted, "What were you daydreaming about just now? You didn't even respond when I called you!"

"Well, I remembered some things from the past." He smiled with his eyes narrowed.

[Ace-kun likes fishing? ] Mori Ogai asked.

[Not bad?] Ace thought for a moment and answered, [After all, we spend so much time on the boat, fishing is a relatively interesting thing. Every time we go fishing, we always guess what interesting things we will catch.]

Alice held his hand as they walked down the street. "So, have you caught anything interesting?"

"Ha, that's a lot!" Ace's smile became more and more excited, and he gestured to her with his hands and feet, "For example, one time, I caught a sea king this big. It had a cow's head, but its body was like a cutlassfish! Another time, I caught a sea king that looked like a catfish, but it had a crocodile's mouth. When I caught it, it bit off my upper body in one bite! But it was a pity, because I was still a user of the Roast Fruit at that time, so I roasted it on the spot! You know what, the meat was quite chewy and delicious!"

As he spoke, his mouth began to drool. "Come to think of it, it's almost time for dinner, right?"

Mori Ogai: [……]

[Ace, be careful not to drool.] He said with some melancholy, [No matter what, I am still the leader of the port mafia, and sometimes I still have to have some dignity.]

[Okay!] Ace quickly admitted his mistake and subconsciously rubbed the corner of his mouth with his hand.

[Speaking of which, Ace, what are sea kings?] Mori Ogai asked curiously, and took the opportunity to change the subject of Ace's dinner.

[Sea kings are those sea creatures with particularly large bodies. I remember that after I joined the Whitebeard Pirates, the largest sea king we caught on the ship took the entire ship three days to eat.]

Mori Ogai recalled that there seemed to be more than 1,600 people on the Whitebeard Pirates' ship. It was hard to imagine how big this thing was if it took so many people three days to eat, especially with someone with Ace's horrible appetite.

It sounds like a lot.

If we look at it from the perspective of Yokohama, it would be a disaster.

This world is so different.

"Where are we now?" Ace, who had been led by Alice all the way and had no idea where to go, suddenly asked after walking along the river bank for a while.

Mainly because there are no hotels or shops nearby.

"It's Tsurumi River." Alice replied.

"Tsurumi River?"

[Didn't you say you were a pirate? I was thinking, you've been here for almost a month, you haven't seen the sea much, right? Although the Tsurumi River is just a river, its lower reaches connect to Tokyo Bay, which is an estuary, and I thought you might like it.]

The window of the office of the leader of the Port Mafia can naturally see Tokyo Bay due to the height and orientation of the office, but Ace's life trajectory is different from his, so what he sees is naturally different from his.

What he saw when he stood there was Yokohama, a kind of joy that was like holding the whole Yokohama in his hands, while what Ace saw was Tokyo Bay, and maybe even felt like being trapped in a cage.

Ace is an easy person to understand. Or rather, too easy to understand.

He yearns for freedom, and his behavior is carefree and unrestrained. He and Mori Ouwai like completely different things.

For Morio, understanding Ace's personality is as easy as eating and drinking. He is not reluctant to do anything to win his favor, which will not do him any harm in the end.

Ace was slightly stunned when he heard that, his eyes fell directly on the surface of the Tsurumi River. The breeze blew across the water, creating ripples, and his eyes gradually became soft.

"Thank you," he said softly.

Soon, his expression changed, because a pair of upside-down legs suddenly floated down the river from upstream.

Ace took two steps forward, then suddenly stopped and said in a tangled voice, "Ah, it looks like someone is drowning."

Sen Ou Wai saw who was drowning at a glance. He was not in a hurry at all and said leisurely: [Yes, aren't you going to save him? ]

That being said, Mori Ogai really didn't hold out much hope for this. If it was a companion, Ace would definitely go to rescue him without hesitation, but Ace didn't know that this person was Mori Ogai's companion, and he also had the identity of a pirate, so Mori Ogai wasn't sure that he would definitely go to rescue him.

Besides, isn't he moving now?

But Ace's reaction was totally different from what he expected. He was stunned for a moment, and then suddenly realized: "That's right! I'm not a landlubber anymore!"

As he said this he plunged headfirst into the river.

After being awkward at first, he quickly swam towards the drowning person with great skill.

Mori Ogai, however, caught the strange part in his words——

Now he is no longer a landlubber? The most obvious implication of this sentence is that he was once a landlubber. However, considering his previous and subsequent actions, it is not just that simple.

Apart from being a little shy at first, his swimming skills are definitely better than most people in the world, which means that he was at least an expert swimmer before. His initial shyness was probably because he hadn't swum for a long time, and only after the initial adaptation did he regain his old feeling.

But as a pirate, as he said, he spends most of his time on the boat, so swimming is an essential skill and he should use it frequently. There must be some special reason why he doesn't go into the water for a long time.

Is it because of something that happened that caused him to have psychological trauma? But his behavior just now didn't seem like he had any psychological trauma, did it?

While Morio was analyzing the situation, Ace had already rescued the person to shore. He put the unconscious person on his back and was shocked to find out: "Huh? Isn't this a cure? How did he drown? Anyway! Save him first!"

Then Moriowai saw that Ace grabbed Dazai Osamu's two calves, lifted him upside down and began to shake him up and down, trying to make him vomit out the water in his stomach.

Mori Ogai: [……]

Mori Ou was horrified: [Wait! Stop it! ]

Do you want him to die!?