The father and son's conversation lasted until the early hours of the morning.
After roughly settling on a strategy for dealing with the Amento Kingdom, Aleus dragged his tired body back to his chambers.
The bathroom.
Billowing steam veiled the parts of the scene that shouldn't be shown.
Wiping his damp hair, Aleus walked over to the full-length bathroom mirror. The fog-resistant mirror remained perfectly clear despite the steam, reflecting his emerald-green eyes, handsome face, two powerful pectoral muscles, eight well-defined abs, and—
A gem embedded in the center of his chest, shimmering with a blue-black glow.
"The Hogyoku!"
Gently touching the gem on his chest with his fingertips, Aleus gazed at his reflection in the mirror with admiration.
"Whoosh!"
As Aleus's thoughts shifted, a pair of enormous, pitch-black batlike wings sprouted from his back near his trapezius muscles. They spread to their full span in an instant, blocking the light from the ceiling lamp and casting a vast shadow over the floor.
A pair of pale, curved horns also grew from his head.
At a glance, he looked as though he'd been possessed by a demon.
"This thing... If I were to name it, it should count as a Mythical Zoan, right? Bat-Bat Fruit, Mythical Zoan, Black Winged Great Demon Form?"
Aleus gently stroked the horns on his head and the wings on his back. This wasn't his first time examining himself in front of the mirror, yet every time he looked, he found it so wondrous, so marvelous, so... beautiful.
The Hogyoku in his chest had been born into this world alongside him, and the two had spent the past twenty years together.
For the first sixteen years, though, the Hogyoku had remained silent, bringing him no help whatsoever. The "Golden Finger" that had once filled him with ambition was frozen, leaving Aleus to focus on the dirt beneath his feet and grow stronger through his own efforts, sweating a hundred and twenty percent.
Fortunately, compared to those fellow transmigrators who'd awakened in a junkyard, been fished off a beach, embarked on adventures on deserted islands, gone on rampages aboard pirate ships, or come back to life on a blood-soaked operating table—
He hadn't been unlucky.
Not unlucky at all!
As the crown prince of a powerful New World kingdom, he'd been a winner in life from the moment he was born.
With such a mighty kingdom behind him, Aleus had received a top-tier elite education from an early age—most of it, in fact, devoted to martial training. What choice did he have? This was the Great Pirate Era, after all. And with the Ekmondo Kingdom located in the New World, sufficient strength was the most basic guarantee of survival in this era, on these seas.
At sixteen,
when his strength had hit a bottleneck, Aleus had chosen a Zoan Devil Fruit from the Royal Palace treasury—the Bat Fruit, Normal Zoan, Great Flying Fox Form—and prepared to eat it. It was only an ordinary Zoan, but it could fly!
Compared to chasing unrealistic hopes of finding the Rumble-Rumble Fruit or the Mera Mera no Mi and risking life and limb...
A flying Zoan Devil Fruit was already an opportunity worth a fortune.
However,
the instant he ate the Devil Fruit,
the Hogyoku, dormant for sixteen years, awakened. Under its influence, the ordinary Bat Fruit transformed into its current form: [Bat-Bat Fruit, Mythical Zoan, Black Winged Great Demon Form].
"My soul count still isn't enough!"
Aleus pressed a finger against the Hogyoku in his chest.
Four years ago, when the Hogyoku had awakened, Aleus had finally connected with its consciousness and learned why it had remained silent for sixteen years.
First, there was the Hogyoku's creation. Kisuke Urahara had used countless Hollows as the basis for creating an imperfect Hogyoku. Later, Sosuke Aizen had used the souls of hundreds of Soul Reapers, along with those of even more people in Rukongai who possessed the potential to become Soul Reapers, to create another imperfect Hogyoku. Only after the two imperfect Hogyoku fused was the complete Hogyoku born.
From this, it was clear that the Hogyoku was fundamentally an artifact created from a vast quantity of high-quality souls.
As for the Hogyoku's power, it possessed a will of its own. It could absorb the hearts of things around it and manifest them. It could also protect its host's body from death, and when the host reached their limits or their life was threatened, it could allow them to evolve without end toward the next dimension.
It sounded absurdly powerful.
But on closer examination, its strength hadn't come from nowhere. It needed to absorb the hearts of things around it. "Heart" didn't mean the physical organ; more precisely, it meant the souls of all intelligent beings. Only by using souls as fuel could it support its host's evolution toward a higher, stronger realm.
Its sixteen years of dormancy had been due to a lack of souls to provide energy.
So,
souls—
only souls mattered.
Over the first sixteen years of his life, Aleus had repeatedly hunted down enemies in actual combat, while the Hogyoku silently absorbed soul after soul. When he ate the Devil Fruit, its power clashed with the Hogyoku's, forcibly activating it before it had fully recovered.
Because the Hogyoku hadn't fully recovered, upon awakening it had only strengthened and enhanced the Devil Fruit's power before sinking into dormancy again. But this time, it wasn't completely silent; it remained conscious, allowing Aleus to wield it.
For four years,
Aleus had kept fighting and killing, steadily gathering souls for the Hogyoku.
After four years of unremitting effort, he'd collected a fair number of souls. The trouble was, their quality was truly poor. If he tried to fill the Hogyoku's bottomless, black-hole-like appetite with nothing but low-quality souls, the number he needed would be astronomical.
"But at least I'll have another chance to feast."
A spark of excitement appeared in Aleus's emerald eyes. War was the fastest way to gather souls. The only drawback was that souls had a limited freshness: he could only harvest them in earnest while the war was underway. Once time passed and the souls went to the underworld, he wouldn't be able to get so much as a single hair from them.
Several times, he'd heard about major battles breaking out somewhere, only to arrive a step too late. In the end, his harvest had been pitiful.
He'd only wasted his time.
But,
this time, he would personally direct the war.
He intended to turn the war with the Amento Kingdom into his own hunting ground for harvesting souls.
Sensing Aleus's excitement, the blue-black glow swirling within the Hogyoku on his chest quietly quickened.
After bathing and changing into the pajamas the maid had prepared, Aleus soon drifted into a sweet dream on the soft bed.
Before you continue