The Unprincipled Old Man

"Turns out I'd been blaming Brother Daifuku all along." Mousse was naturally shocked when he learned the truth, and he also felt somewhat regretful. Fortunately, Daifuku was still young, so there was time to make amends. Otherwise, Mousse would never be able to face the good brother who had silently endured everyone's misunderstandings.

"Mousse, it's fine to tell him. That kid can understand, and he won't go blabbing everywhere." Charlotte Daifuku himself did not take it too seriously. After hearing about it from Katakuri, he even burst into rare laughter.

"Actually, Mousse only came up with that idea after eating the Book-Book Fruit, right? I wouldn't have believed he was that clever before. So we didn't really waste many days. And with the move Overheat, I can try out some ideas I'd previously given up on. Maybe I'll even become stronger than Oven in the future!"

After that, Mousse temporarily had no more ideas that could quickly boost his brothers' and sisters' strength and enhance the family's overall power. However, the only Devil Fruit users in Totto Land were not the Charlotte Family's second generation.

The one Mousse had pinned his greatest hopes on had originally been the head chef Streusen's Eat-Eat Fruit. This fruit could turn any object it touched into food. If it worked on human bodies as well, it would be as broken as the Hobby-Hobby Fruit.

But the head chef's answer left Mousse deeply disappointed. Still unwilling to give up, he asked, "Why doesn't it work on humans?" Then, the chef who had always seemed kind and amiable ever since Mousse could remember opened his mouth wide, stretched out his tongue, and licked his gleaming white teeth. With a sinister smile, he said, "Because... the human body itself is food!"

A chill immediately shot up Mousse's spine and straight to the top of his head, frightening him into taking several steps back.

Then Streusen clutched his belly and burst into laughter. Only then did Mousse realize the old man had merely been trying to scare him. Embarrassed and annoyed, he stuck out his tongue and made a face at the old man before storming off.

Although Streusen had been joking, that answer was not nonsense.

Broadly speaking, only things that could not be digested and absorbed, or that were severely toxic, fell outside the category of ingredients. The human body indeed did not fit that definition.

The Eat-Eat Fruit's power was to turn all objects into food, but it did not work on things that were already food or ingredients.

Though Mousse was unhappy about being frightened by that unprincipled old man, he did not hold much of a grudge. For one thing, coming to ask about it in the first place had been rather stupid.

If the Eat-Eat Fruit had been that powerful, Streusen would have long since been recruited by some Great Pirate, or perhaps become a Great Pirate himself. Why would he have still been drifting alone when he was nearly thirty?

For another, Streusen held a special position in both the BIG Pirates and Charlotte Linlin's heart. He was also the biological father of Perospero, Mousse's eldest brother. Even as Charlotte Linlin's most favored son, Mousse could not exactly hold such a trivial matter against him.

Charlotte Linlin having dozens of husbands could be called one of the biggest flaws in the original story, but after arriving in this world, Mousse learned that because of her enormous size, nearly all of the Charlotte Family's second generation, himself included, had been conceived through artificial insemination.

In other words, Charlotte Linlin's dozens of so-called "husbands" had almost never truly been husband and wife with her. At most, they were like the men on Earth who donated sperm to sperm banks.

Only then did Mousse understand why Charlotte Linlin, who was clearly obsessed with appearances and even disliked children of hers who looked ugly, could tolerate a husband as hideous as Bond.

In fact, if Charlotte Linlin had not wanted an excuse to eat wedding cake, she probably would not even have given them the title of husband.

A fake "prince consort" worth no more than half a cake naturally would not be valued. Any man with even a little ambition would leave far away once the child was born and he regained his freedom.

No wonder there had only been one useless good-for-nothing in the original story—speaking solely of ability—who had explicitly appeared as Charlotte Linlin's "ex-husband."

But there were always exceptions. Streusen, the head chef who had accompanied Charlotte Linlin from childhood all the way to the present, held a special place in her heart. Although their child had also been the result of artificial insemination, spiritually speaking, Streusen was undoubtedly the one most like Charlotte Linlin's husband.

With such an identity, and as the pirate crew's most senior veteran, everyone naturally treated Streusen with considerable respect. In fact, if he had not grown old, changed his mindset, and lacked the energy to manage mundane affairs, his position in the family might even have surpassed Katakuri's!

Shaking his head to clear away those stray thoughts, Mousse quickly turned his attention back to business. The idea involving the Eat-Eat Fruit was useless, so the only one in the family with huge development potential left was Charlotte Linlin's own Soul-Soul Fruit.

By Charlotte Linlin's usual habits, she generally stayed in Cake Castle and did not go out unless something happened.

But Streusen told Mousse that his mother had gone to an unmodified deserted island to train, which greatly surprised him. "That homebody, lazy Mom actually went out to train? Is the sun rising in the west?"

Yet Mousse understood in an instant and could not help sighing. "Looks like after calming down, Mom also realized the consequences of killing prisoners. Naive and childish as she is, she's not actually stupid. As long as she doesn't want to die, she'll naturally try to save herself. But isn't it a little too late to start trying when she's already over forty? If she'd been like this since childhood, with Mom's talent, what the hell would Garp even count for?"

That said, although training at forty-three was indeed somewhat late, working hard was still better than doing nothing but eating and playing like before.

Moreover, this could adjust her condition for the possible fierce battle in the near future. As the saying went, "Sharpening the spear before battle may not make it fast, but it will at least make it shine."

Considering that Charlotte Linlin had rarely trained before, this instead meant she still had considerable potential left to tap.

It was like a potbellied middle-aged fat man. Even if he could not train to the level of a professional athlete, as long as he built a body full of muscle, his combat power compared to his former shut-in appearance would still be completely transformed.

Well, the current Charlotte Linlin could at most be called voluptuous, while her combat power was enough to crush a hundred thousand shut-ins.

Mousse heard waves of thunderous rumbling from far out at sea. When the ship drew closer, he sucked in a sharp breath. Though the dust cloud made it impossible to see clearly, one of the mountains that should have been on the island in his memories had completely vanished!

If they unleashed their ultimate moves, most of the world's top powerhouses could sink islands and shatter mountains. But to nearly level an entire mountain in such a short time using nothing but one's own fists, as Charlotte Linlin was doing now, probably very few could manage it.

Even the world-renowned Marine Hero, "Iron Fist" Garp, had shattered eight mountains only through long-term special training specifically intended to deal with Chinjao's cone-shaped head. No matter what, that could never have been accomplished in merely a few hours.

And Charlotte Linlin's rigorous training had only just begun, yet it had already produced such a result. She truly was a "born destroyer"!