The closer one gets to the center of Akasha City, the more perfectly preserved the surrounding buildings become, and the denser and brighter the glowing moss grows, illuminating the road like a galaxy leading to another world. The fragments of memory permeating the air become richer and more coherent, no longer just scattered images and sounds, but like a deep background melody, telling the tragedy of a civilization's decline from prosperity to oblivion.
The crowd witnessed Echo of more memories: scholars fiercely debating in magnificent halls; people holding grand celebrations in the square; ships coming and going in the harbor, full of life... However, all the images were eventually covered by the boundless, all-consuming gray-white fog, hope turned into despair, and clamor turned into deathly silence.
That deep, pent-up sorrow and resentment, accumulated over countless years, weighed heavily on everyone's hearts. Usopp and Chopper needed to support each other to move forward, Nami's face was pale, and even Zoro and Sanji frowned, Resistance this mental pressure. Only Allen and Robin (with their unwavering will and thirst for knowledge) remained relatively calm.
Finally, they arrived at the city center. It wasn't a palace or temple, but a vast circular plaza. In the center of the plaza, there were no statues or altars, only a complex, multifaceted structure, seemingly pieced together from countless enormous crystals, slowly rotating. It hovered several meters above the ground, radiating a soft, sorrowful light—the very manifestation of the colossal collective consciousness that Allen had sensed!
Countless fine bands of light extend from this " Core of the Past," connecting the plaza floor and the luminous moss of the surrounding buildings, like its neural network, covering and maintaining the entire Akasha's "memory field."
The moment the Straw Hat Pirates stepped into the plaza, the rotation of the " Core of the Past " accelerated slightly, and its light flickered. Immediately afterwards, the moss around the plaza shone brightly, and countless points of light converged, coalescing in front of everyone into the semi-transparent image of an old man wearing an ancient scholar's robe.
His eyes were filled with endless weariness and sorrow, as if bearing the weight of the destruction of an entire civilization.
"Outsider..." The old man's voice resounded directly in everyone's minds, ethereal yet weathered, "Why disturb the peace of Akasha's eternal slumber? Why awaken these... pains that should have been forgotten long ago?"
Luffy forward and shouted, "We came here for an adventure! Why has this island become like this? Why has everyone disappeared?"
The old man's (or rather, the embodiment of the city's collective consciousness) gaze swept across the crowd, lingering on Allen for a moment, as if he had noticed his difference.
"Why..." the old man's voice was filled with deep bitterness, "Because we peeked into taboos we shouldn't have, touched upon the mysteries of time... We tried to build an ark that could sail through the river of time, to escape our inevitable destruction... But our actions attracted the attention of the ' Guardians of Temporal Order '..."
As he spoke, the surrounding memory field fluctuated violently, revealing the scene from that time: Akasha's scholars activated a massive device, tearing open the veil of spacetime, the immense energy disrupting the laws of time. Then, endless mist, imbued with the power of "forgetting" and "stasis," surged from the spacetime rift, engulfing the island. It wasn't physical destruction, but rather the stripping and sealing of the entire civilization from the "present" timeline, transforming it into an eternal "memory specimen" existing in the cracks of the past!
"We weren't killed, but 'forgotten'," the old man said sorrowfully. "Individual consciousness gradually dissipated in the long stagnation, merging into this land, leaving only these fragmented memories and unyielding obsessions, which converged into my— Akasha's— final Echo. We are imprisoned in our own past, forever unable to move forward, and forever forgotten."
The truth is shocking. Akasha's tragedy stemmed from his transgression of time, which resulted in punishment at the level of the laws.
"What is the Guardians of Temporal Order...?" Robin pressed.
"The embodiment of time, the maintainers of rules... They have no good or evil, they simply execute the underlying logic of the universe... We have crossed the line." The old man shook his head.
"How can we get you out of here?" Luffy clenched his fists; he couldn't bear this eternal imprisonment.
"Get out?" The old man gave a smile more like a grimace. "We've already 'got out.' Our very existence is this frozen moment in time. Break it, and we'll vanish completely, as if we'd never existed. Maintain it, and we'll be these eternal ghosts... This is our end, an unchangeable... 'past.'"
A profound despair enveloped the plaza. Even Luffy was momentarily speechless; faced with this kind of imprisonment at the level of laws, power seemed to have lost its meaning.
Just then, Allen stepped forward, his gaze calmly fixed on the sorrowful Watcher.
"You said you couldn't change the 'past,'" Allen's voice rang out clearly, "But now, we stand here, listening to your 'past.' Does this itself mean... that 'forgetting' isn't absolute?"