Bai Ina slept very well—perhaps a little too well. That night, he had his first erotic dream since coming to this world. In the dream, he seemed to be making love with an exceptionally beautiful woman.
Waking from his deep sleep, Bai Ina opened his eyes to the familiar stone walls of the cave. Before his mind had fully cleared, he felt sore all over, exhausted to the extreme, as though he had fought someone for seven days and seven nights.
"Yesterday..."
Bai Ina's voice abruptly stopped. He could not continue, because as his consciousness cleared, countless fragments of memories surged into his mind. The protagonist of those memories was a little girl with a dark childhood.
In those memories, when the little girl was twelve, she and two young companions were abducted by traffickers and sold to the World Nobles.
To entertain the nobles, the three of them began fighting all kinds of wild beasts in an arena.
At only twelve years old, the girls had to face inescapable slaughter in that beast-fighting arena every day, day after day, year after year...
If the World Nobles had not forcibly fed each of the three girls a Devil Fruit at the beginning, merely to make the battles between humans and beasts more entertaining, they might have long since died at the hands of those utterly inhuman World Nobles.
Although this portion of the memories consisted entirely of scattered fragments, every single piece contained only one emotion.
Despair—
The despair of having no escape. The abyss of despair felt so real that Bai Ina's eyes unknowingly grew moist.
This life continued for four years, until four years later, when a fish-man named Fisher Tiger climbed the Red Line with his bare hands and reached the Celestial Dragons' residence, Mary Geoise.
Only