Chapter 8
Pirate King! Reaching the Top!
The sunshine was warm, seagulls wheeled overhead, and the blue sea stretched endlessly beneath rippling azure waves.
After leaving Xilian Island, Adrian had drifted across the sea in his small boat for more than two days. If nothing unexpected happened, he would reach his target island tomorrow morning.
That island was the world's most famous holy land of Archaeologists. It was said to gather more Scholars than anywhere else in the world and possessed the world's largest library—the Tree of Knowledge...
After arriving in the West Blue, Adrian had no reason not to visit the legendary holy land of Scholars—Ohara.
Especially the [Tree of Knowledge], which held more books than anywhere else in the world. It was far more attractive to Adrian than some flowery little five-year-old loli!
Never forget that Adrian could obtain corresponding Secondary Professions and skills by reading books!
Whenever he thought of the vast ocean of books stored in the Tree of Knowledge, Adrian couldn't help drooling.
Reading books = obtaining skills or Secondary Professions = gaining attribute points = increasing strength!
A perfect equation!
Oh-oh!
Just as Adrian sank into his imagination, a distinctive cry pulled him back to reality.
"Huh? News Coo?" Adrian looked up at the sky in surprise. Seeing the huge flock of News Coo flying overhead, he couldn't help being startled. "This is an unprecedented scale, isn't it? Did something happen?"
Adrian was about to wave at the sky and see what was going on when, before he had even finished striking a pose, several newspapers fluttered down from above.
"News Coo, who love money more than their lives, are actually providing free service this time? Is this a [Big News] they want the whole world to know about? Could it be..."
Unable to wait any longer, Adrian erupted with power, stepped on Geppo, and flew into the sky. He casually grabbed a newspaper before returning to the boat.
When he unfolded the newspaper, its headline showed a middle-aged man laughing uproariously. He had black hair and black eyes. Most striking of all was the thick black beard of the man, who wore traditional pirate clothing—it looked as though it had grown directly from his nostrils.
Just as he had guessed!
The Pirate King!!
In 1497 of the Sea Circle Calendar, news powerful enough to shake the entire world of navigation swept across the sea at an astonishing speed.
The Four Blues, Paradise, the New World, the Red Line, Marineford...
There was nowhere in the world where people could not hear discussions about it.
People spread the legend of the Great Pirate Gol D. Roger. He had completed the final voyage of the Grand Line, successfully reaching the true "final island," which lay beyond the last island recorded on the maps, Lodestar Island—and had named it "Laugh Tale"!
The world unanimously recognized that Gol D. Roger had led his Pirates to conquer this sea and completed the great voyage no one had achieved since ancient times!
For a time, Roger's name resounded across the entire sea. From the weakest East Blue to the Grand Line, whether Marines or Pirates, everyone respectfully called him the "Pirate King"!
"What an incredible achievement, Roger!"
A look of extreme excitement suddenly appeared in Adrian's eyes.
Before he could voice his feelings, the panel's notification tone suddenly rang out in his mind.
"Huh? Roger becoming the Pirate King affects the system too?"
Adrian casually glanced over the contents. He had expected to see an announcement similar to the newspaper's, but instead, he froze.
[The Pirate King, Gol D. Roger, has reached the summit... The game's closed beta will officially begin in five days. Relevant data is being retrieved... 3%, 17%, 39%... Data retrieval complete. The closed beta will last 15 days.]
"Closed beta?!"
Adrian's expression instantly became uncertain.
Before he could sort out his thoughts, the system panel sent two more notifications.
[The player's arrival has been detected. NPC Template function unlocked!] [Player Forum unlocked!]
Adrian waited for a long while but received no further information. Only the lonely panel notifications floated before him. It seemed he would have to slowly figure everything out himself.
"There are still five days until the closed beta, so there's no need to hurry. I'll follow the original plan and head to Ohara first... Then there's the NPC Template function. Based on my experience playing games before crossing over, the NPC Template function probably requires interaction with players to work, right? For example, issuing quests, selling items, teaching skills, and so on... Finally, there's the Player Forum!"
Although he couldn't understand why the Player Forum had been unlocked for him as an NPC, being able to activate it was already excellent news. He could use it to read players' posts, observe their movements, and collect intelligence along the way.
The forum entrance was located in the corner of the panel. After clicking it, a forum interface in the style of the Age of Sail appeared before him. Since the players had yet to arrive, the forum was completely empty, without a single post.
Curious, Adrian clicked [Register], and an unexpected prompt appeared.
[Welcome to the [One Piece Forum]. Please join the discussion and exchange ideas. The [One Piece Forum] is a public forum. To maintain public order online and social stability, please voluntarily abide by the following terms...]
Damn!
Adrian dragged the lengthy terms straight to the bottom. He never read this sort of thing, all right?
[Please enter your username: [Eight Trigrams Sea]] [Please enter the verification code: [1024]] [Please enter your forum password: [********]] [Eight Trigrams Sea, congratulations! Registration successful!]
It actually worked?
Adrian felt inexplicably speechless. It didn't even have the most basic anti-spam measures. Could this be some third-rate game?
Besides, was he a player with an NPC Template, or an NPC who had crossed over in the identity of a player?
From the moment "One Piece" was announced to be in development, it had received widespread attention from the outside world. After all, the claim that it was "the world's first immersive Full-Dive VR Game" alone was enough to attract attention.
The game company almost never advertised proactively, and only occasionally released some basic information on its official website.
This secretive approach instead made people even more curious.
After all, would wearing a layer of stockings feel the same as not wearing stockings?
Especially recently, the popularity of "One Piece" had continued to rise, all because the company's official website had suddenly released a closed-beta announcement.
On a certain player-made forum.
"Full-Dive VR? I'll contribute one of my kidneys first! Then I'll contribute a number I've treasured for years, sivr—"
"The game-time-to-real-time ratio is 5:1? Doesn't that mean I can live to be five hundred by playing games?"
"Are you sure you can live to a hundred, bro? And to the guy two floors above, have you been offline all this time?"
"Not to mention anything else, there are only 5,000 slots, first come, first served! If I fail to get a closed-beta slot because I was posting here, or if anything else happens, I'll blame every one of you!"
"Your statement is way too amateurish. Although the announcement says there are 5,000 slots, most of them have already been reserved by major guilds and professional clubs. Only a tiny number will be left for small fry like us. If you want to participate in the closed beta, you'll probably have to enter a lottery. The odds will be comparable to winning the actual lottery!"
"Speaking of which, aren't you curious what story 'One Piece' is actually about? I checked the official website before. Besides the closed-beta announcement, the game company also posted an image of the [Pirate King]'s bounty poster."
"With a lousy game like this, the opening has a few pictures and the rest is all guesswork! Play it if you want!"
"Can someone complete the number from the first floor? A classmate of mine wanted to see what a VR work looked like before he died."
"A good person is blessed all their life!"
Encountering the Pirate Crew
What Adrian didn't know was that the real world outside had also become exceptionally lively because of the sudden closed-beta announcement. Unable to access any player information, he could only make useless guesses no matter what he imagined.
Moreover, according to the panel's notification, the closed beta would last only 15 short days. On such a vast sea, the low-level, weakly attributed closed-beta players would hardly be able to do anything. At most, they could lay some groundwork for the future public beta.
The public beta a year later, when players arrived in force—that would be the true origin of the chaos.
However, launching the closed beta early also had certain benefits for Adrian.
For example, by contacting players in advance, he could test the "NPC Template function" that had baffled him for so long.
"If only the Player Forum could open now..."
Adrian thought greedily.
After a while, once his mood had settled, Adrian began looking through the bounty posters attached to the back of the World Economy News Paper.
"Pirate King Gol D. Roger, bounty 5,564,800,000 Beli. I remember it was only a little over four billion two days ago. Is this the huge bonus for reaching the top? ...No matter what, that's an astonishing figure. To reach five billion in this era, especially, he truly deserves the title of Pirate King!"
"Whitebeard, bounty 4.5 billion Beli... I remember that even Whitebeard's bounty twenty years later was only a little over five billion Beli, right? He already has this level now? But that makes sense. Whitebeard and Roger were two of the few gold-medal players on the sea. It's understandable that their bounty amounts were similar."
"Kaido of the Beasts, bounty one billion Beli... Tsk, tsk. Cute Kaido really has no presence at this point in time. Even several years later, he still needs to rely on a Sneak Attack to defeat Kozuki Oden. I really wonder how a Monster like this grew into one of the Four Emperors later on. His physical talent is terrifying."
"Big Mom in her younger days. Well, she isn't exactly young anymore. Her face and body have already begun to deform. How frightening... Huh, is this Monkey D. Dragon's bounty poster? Dragon had already left the Marines at this point? Seems so. After all, when Roger was executed in Loguetown, he still had to wear a cloak to avoid being recognized... Captain of the White Pirates..."
As he flipped through one familiar or unfamiliar bounty poster after another, Adrian's thoughts rose and fell along with them.
"Gecko Moria from the West Blue! A bounty of 15 million Beli! I'm really not used to seeing Moria this lean and wiry. His later otaku appearance is definitely cuter."
Adrian flipped through the thick stack of bounty posters to the end, but did not find his own name.
"I've waited two days and still haven't seen my bounty poster. It seems Kumadori Yamamba and Dawson really didn't report that I left of my own accord. I like people who keep their word."
A smile appeared at the corners of Adrian's lips. He truly had no interest in becoming a pirate. The thought of living under pursuit by Marines scattered throughout the world, day and night, made him uncomfortable all over.
Of course, Adrian had no intention of joining the Marines for now either. He still hadn't had enough of the free and easy life he had long yearned for. He had absolutely no interest in adding several more superiors who could give him orders!
As Adrian pondered his future plans, a burst of violent cannon fire suddenly interrupted his thoughts.
"Did something unexpected happen?"
He glanced at the panel. No message had appeared, so apparently it wasn't enough to trigger a quest yet.
Adrian looked in the direction of the sound. Far away on the sea, a pirate crew flying a black flag marked with crossed swords was wantonly bombarding a sizable merchant ship.
Faint screams mixed with the thunderous cannon fire and drifted toward Adrian's ears on the sea breeze.
"They look somewhat familiar. The Blade Pirates, whose captain has a bounty of three million Beli..." Adrian recalled for a moment before remembering the West Blue pirate bounty poster he had just seen.
He shook his head slightly and sighed. "So this is one of the reasons I look down on Pirates... Ordinary people already have a hard enough time surviving on this sea filled with Monsters, and you still insist on making their lives even harder!"
A short while earlier, aboard the merchant ship.
"Captain Clivatt! Pirates! Pirates are attacking us!"
Two young, robust men in sailor's clothing, their foreheads covered in sweat, pushed open the banquet hall doors with all their strength.
"What?"
The middle-aged captain, wearing a black top hat and a neat suit, was shocked. Before he could issue an order, the ship suddenly shook violently.
The weathered captain immediately recognized what had happened. Someone was firing cannons at the ship!
The banquet hall instantly descended into chaos. Exquisite food and wine spilled across the floor, while shrill screams rang out without end. Several timid guests were already trembling all over and had fallen to the ground.
At this critical moment, the experienced Captain Clivatt calmed himself and displayed the professionalism expected of him.
"Everyone, please remain calm! Stay calm! Please calmly follow the instructions of the merchant ship's security personnel!"
Captain Clivatt shouted at the passengers in the banquet hall, but the passengers already lost in chaos could not hear what the middle-aged captain was yelling. They simply followed their survival instincts and desperately crowded toward the hall entrance, as though they would be safe once they escaped the banquet hall.
The two young sailors struggled with all their might before finally pushing against the crowd and reaching the captain.
"What should we do, Captain Clivatt?"
"Our cannon fire is being completely suppressed!"
Captain Clivatt took a deep breath and composed himself before asking coldly, "How far away is the pirate ship attacking us?"
"Only half a nautical mile!" the sailor on the right quickly answered.
"How did they get so close before we spotted them? Did the lookout fall asleep?"
Veins bulged on Captain Clivatt's forehead as he angrily seized the sailor by the collar.
If they had been farther away, perhaps he could have escaped with his seasoned experience at sea. But at half a nautical mile, there was nothing he could do!
Before they could reach a safe distance, his merchant ship would probably be blasted to pieces by the pirates' cannonballs!
"We didn't know they were pirates at the time. They only suddenly attacked us after they drew close!" the other sailor hurriedly explained.
"We showed them the name of our merchant ship—forget it. That was a stupid question. If they feared the merchant fleet's reputation, they wouldn't be Pirates, and they wouldn't have attacked us." Captain Clivatt sighed, looking somewhat dejected. "What about the gunners aboard the ship?"
"They're fighting the Pirates, but they've already been suppressed. The pirate side's firepower is simply too fierce!"
"Forget it. Things have come to this, so let's prepare for boarding combat!" Captain Clivatt suddenly clenched his fist and issued his orders in an orderly manner. "Gather the combat team and assemble on the deck. Unless necessary, don't disturb the passengers. But if any young passengers volunteer to fight, remember to inform them of the assembly point!"
"Yes, Captain Clivatt!"
The sailors answered in unison.
Reasonable Compensation
Before long, the pirate ship completely destroyed the merchant ship's artillery team. It immediately raised its sails and headed toward the merchant ship.