The Divine Martial Returns!

Just as Chen Ye was thinking!

Before the first sword cry had faded, a second rang out.

A pure white halo lit up the ancient greatsword embedded in the World Tree.

The halo did not spread.

It exploded.

A pure white tide surged from the blade, pouring in every direction with the World Tree at its center.

A will.

A blazing will for freedom that had endured for eight hundred years.

Luffy was locked in combat with Imu.

He had just thrown his enormous white-flame fist when the Codex Sword's dark-gold curtain of blades swept toward him.

The two forces were about to collide.

The pure white tide swept across the entire icefield and howled over the horizon.

Luffy's hand stopped in midair.

Even his bones trembled.

That presence was too familiar.

It felt exactly like the power of the Sun God within him.

Yet it was utterly foreign.

It came from another age, another soul, another self he had never met.

Imu stopped too.

The King of the World hovered in midair, his dark-red pupils contracting sharply.

He recognized that will.

It was the power he had spent eight hundred years sealing away, trying to forget, and ensuring would never appear again.

The greatsword's pure white force did not stop.

It raced up the World Tree's trunk, a furious white dragon winding through the grooves in its bark.

Straight into the sky.

Above the forbidden zone, the thick storm clouds that had shrouded it for a hundred years began to tremble.

A storm churned within them.

Thunder and lightning erupted.

The dark-gray wall of clouds was an iron barrier. No light had pierced it in eight hundred years.

Now a pure white pillar of light struck its underside.

There was no sound.

It cracked.

The clouds tore apart from