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26.95% One Piece: Dream of Immortality / Chapter 138: Complications

Chapter 138: Complications

Cherry and the other ladies boarded the Sunny whilst Cabernet lugged Bartholomew Kuma over her shoulder and brought him along.

"I really hope he hasn't sent out a distress beacon or something to inform the world government of our presence here…" Robin commented whilst looking at Kuma, which made the others, with the exception of Cherry, quite nervous at the thought.

"I've disabled his cybernetic bits temporarily, so that won't be an issue. Besides, unless an admiral shows up I should be able to handle whatever may come our way." Cherry brushed off the concerns.

They went into the dining room and settled down whilst Cherry went to the kitchen to grab some food and drinks.

"Speaking of that, since when were you strong enough to beat the Hero of the Marines, Monkey D. Garp? He might be old now, but from what I've heard he certainly hasn't weakened that much." Serene asked.

Perona was shocked at hearing that fact. She hadn't seen the broadcast of the war at Marineford and the newspapers naturally wouldn't mention such a thing even if it would spread word of mouth.

"Bah! The old man is too soft. He went easy on me just because I'm friends with his grandson." Cherry said, whilst rooting around in the pantry for snacks.

"THAT was going easy on you?! You looked like someone put you into a blender when you came out of that fight!" Serene exclaimed, shivering when she imagined how much it must have hurt.

"Well, he couldn't be too casual about it, could he? He had the admirals and Fleet Admiral Sengoku breathing down his neck at the time. Maybe he'd get away with not fighting Luffy seriously, him being his beloved grandson and all, but he'd get into a bit of trouble if he showed weakness against me." Cherry said, bringing an armful of sodas from Franky's stash and some snack foods that would go bad if they weren't eaten soon.

"I see." Serene said, popping open a soda.

"What's been going on with you, then?" Cherry asked.

"Fighting punks mostly. Shakky has been teaching me some more direct martial arts. Turns out she used to be an empress of the Kuja, can you believe that?" Serene said, then her expression became somewhat depressed. "But…"

"What's wrong?" Robin asked gently.

"... miss him…" Serene muttered inaudibly.

"What was that?" Cherry raised her voice, bringing a hand to her ear in mock deafness.

"I miss Brook, damn it! I only got to spend a little time with him until we were separated! I want to see his fluffy afro and his bleached white bones!" Serene shouted. It seemed like she'd been holding that in for a while now.

She had been spending an awful lot of time with Brook ever since he joined the crew. It hadn't really seemed like a romantic interest so much as a slight obsession, but who could really say.

"Hm, maybe we should check up on Brook. Knowing him, he has probably become a sideshow attraction in a traveling circus or something." Robin commented. No one could disagree with that assessment.

After finishing their snacks, Cherry decided to go assess the damage in Kuma's head. It wouldn't be a quick fix no matter what, since brains were pretty complicated organs, but it didn't hurt to get an idea of what she was dealing with ahead of time.

It was for this purpose that Cherry left her sword with Kuma. She had ordered the sword to essentially "memorize" the electrical patterns in his brain so she could use it as a reference. Fixing the "meat" was the easy part, restoring everything else not so much.

Cherry approached Kuma who was sitting quite still on the deck of the ship, though certainly not by choice. He'd be squirming up a storm right now if he still had muscles instead of replacing them with machine parts.

Cherry focused and touched Kuma's forehead and sent her senses into his brain to understand what happened to him.

She was surprised to find that his brain was mostly intact, with the exception of a few cybernetic implants that shouldn't have had this sort of impact on his mental state.

Cherry furrowed her brow in thought, then she decided to look into his mindscape.

What she saw, or rather what she didn't see, was quite shocking to put it lightly.

'This is incredible in a terrifying sort of way. To think that Vegapunk could directly remove memories from the mindscape without damaging the brain at all. I have to keep cultivation out of that man's hands no matter what, who knows what heights his genius would bring him to.' Cherry thought to herself.

Kuma's mindscape wasn't completely barren as she searched around. There was a scattering of fragmented memories as well as the memories that Kuma has created since whatever Vegapunk did to him.

It was also the first chance Cherry got to see what the genius scientist looked like. A strange old man with an empty head and a ridiculously long tongue.

Cherry exited Kua's mindscape, or what's left of it anyways, and heaved a great sigh.

This wasn't what she had been planning for, not at all. If she wanted to restore Kuma now, she'd either need to find his extracted memories (if they even still existed), or try to reform the memories from Kuma's soul.

However, Kuma wasn't a cultivator whose souls were naturally made more robust through years of cultivation and Cherry did not possess the capabilities at her current level to directly imprint his soul's memory onto his mindscape. Even if she did, she certainly couldn't do so without enormous risk on his part unless she had an even higher cultivation.

Simply put, meddling with souls was dangerous and she wasn't going to do it.

"I'll have to find that Vegapunk fellow and hope he has the means and the desire to store his memories…" Cherry thought aloud.

"So you aren't able to do anything for him?" Robin asked curiously, with some pity towards the large man.

"No, this isn't as simple as I thought. Vegapunk isn't a man to be underestimated it seems. The question is should I go right now, or should I make a breakthrough first? I'll need to find a devil fruit or two if I want to do that, though." Cherry said.

"Devil fruit?" Robin asked. She knew that Cherry had Cabernet and her sword as devil fruit objects, but not how they related to her cultivation.

Cherry took a minute or two to briefly explain to Robin about how she used devil fruit to push her cultivation realm to perfection with the energy burst from its transformation process.

"Can I get one of those 'blood bound' weapons too?" Robin asked.

Although she didn't normally use weapons, she thought she might be able to produce a blood bound weapon from her bloomed limbs which would greatly increase her arsenal.

"Sure, figure out what you want and I'll walk you through the ritual after I make or obtain it for you." Cherry said, receiving a peck on the cheek from Robin.

"On the topic of Vegapunk, don't you want to meet him yourself? I'm sure there are plenty of things you'd like to talk about with him, considering the way you are with Chopper." Robin observed.

"Yes, I would like to. However, I'm not so sure I'd be well received, him being a World Government scientist and all. That's assuming I can breach whatever defenses lie between me and him too." Cherry said.

Robin raised an eyebrow at her.

"Okay, okay. I'm pretty confident on breaking into just about anywhere, but that won't do me any good if he gets mad about me breaking his stuff. Or if the World government catches wind of it." Cherry sighed.

"I will just think about it overnight. There's no real rush here, Kuma isn't going to die or anything. At least not as far as I can tell…" Cherry said, tilting her head whilst gazing at Kuma.


next chapter

Chapter 139: Kuma's Memories

Cherry stayed with Bartholomew Kuma until she was ready to sleep for the night.

She spent this time rooting through what few memories he possessed in his current state in hopes of gleaning some useful information. There was definitely something to be learned as he had been protecting the Thousand Sunny for some reason, even though he was little more than a mindless robot at this point.

Under most circumstances, prying into the memories of someone without permission was considered extremely rude at the very least. However, considering that Kuma could barely be considered a person right now, and the fact that the vast majority of the real Kuma's memories weren't present in his mindscape at the moment, she didn't bother caring about that and just went ahead with it.

It was pretty easy to sift through his memories given the low quantity of them. Normally it would be a huge pain in the ass because each person's mindscape was generally an unique and complicated maze of sorts.

You might be in the middle of viewing a memory only to be cut off and have to go searching for the rest of it, among other complications.

Naturally that problem only increased with the subject's age, which was especially true for cultivators with their typically vast lifetimes. It became pretty pointless to even try it for older people without having the person's help in doing so.

Cherry found a memory of interest during the few hours she spent looking.

The strange old punk, Vegapunk, was standing in front of her, or rather standing in front of Kuma.

["My friend, I hope doing all this will be worth it to you."] Vegapunk spoke vaguely.

Kuma did not not speak to him, only stared down at him as if waiting for something. No thoughts went through his mind either.

["... Execute your orders."] Vegapunk said solemnly after studying his face, like he was hoping to find some semblance of the man he once was that was no longer there.

Kuma looked up, leveling his field of view before turning around to exit the room.

Cherry caught a glimpse of something strange in the memory. It was a large mass of some unknown substance in the shape of a giant paw print, floating in midair inside the room.

She glanced at Kuma's hands which even now twitched in futile resistance, doubtlessly attempting to make use of the devil fruit power they contained. In particular she focused on the paw prints on his palms which were identical in shape to the strange energy in the memory.

'What is that?' Cherry wondered, when a thought struck her. 'Didn't Kuma extract Luffy's "pain" for Zoro to absorb back on Thriller Bark? Is that energy pain, or perhaps something else?'

It was a lead she could follow up on, if she decided to go find Vegapunk.

Cherry decided to quit for the night and go to bed. She wasn't tired, but the work was mind numbingly boring.

"Did you find anything of interest?" Robin asked, waiting for her to come to bed under the covers.

"Yeah, but I mostly only have new questions than answers. Just more reasons to have a long chat with Vegapunk one day." Cherry said, flopping onto the bed lazily.

Robin said nothing more and only wrapped her arms around one of Cherry's before closing her eyes to sleep. Cherry followed her example.

A tall, cloaked figure gazed emotionlessly at a handful of wanted posters.

Among them were the wanted posters of Portgas D. Ace, Monkey D. Luffy, and Harpin D. Cherry. All three were figures who could cause great turmoil in the world, and all three possessed the name of D.

The figure set aside all the posters with the exception of one, Harpin D. Cherry's poster.

The son of Monkey D. Dragon and the son of Gol D. Roger had both been anticipated to become annoyances for some time, but Harpin D. Cherry had seemingly come out of nowhere.

The cloaked figure turned their gaze to a corpse inside a glass case. The corpse was of a young man who had died some months prior during the war at Marineford. The cause of death was a piercing wound through the chest, the weapon that caused it was likely to be a spear according to the autopsy.

The strangest thing, however, was that the body had hardly even begun to decay even after so long and with no special attempts made to preserve it at that.

The cloaked figure believed there to be some connection between the murdered young man and Harpin D. Cherry. The latter had disappeared during the battle and returned to it from behind the marine forces, so it was likely she was responsible for the former's death.

The question was 'Why?' The cloaked figure wondered if the body's lack of decay was related to the reason for his death. Harpin D. Cherry possessed some strange abilities the figure couldn't account for, did the young man also have something similar?

However, there were no connections between the two according to several investigations into their backgrounds.

The cloaked figure didn't like not knowing things. Information was power in its own right.

Still, it wouldn't do to simply have Harpin D. Cherry killed. The cloaked figure MUST know what the secret was before she died, else the secret may be lost forever, and that was an unacceptable outcome.

The cloaked figure didn't know that their hesitation out of curiosity would eventually remove the option to simply kill Cherry, as such an action would become quite impossible.

Cherry woke up to the light of dawn poking through the window of the room. Robin wasn't in the bed with her and a quick scan with Life Sense showed she was in the ship's kitchen.

Cherry reluctantly pulled herself out of bed. She still hasn't made a decision about Kuma and getting up brought her that much closer to needing to make that decision.

Cherry trudged her way into the dining room where the other ladies were waiting for Robin to finish making their breakfast. Only Merry had decided to try and assist her, and she couldn't really help with much being a sheep and all.

Cherry rolled her eyes at the lazy gluttons before joining Robin in the kitchen. She didn't really want to help either, but at least she'd get some brownie points with Robin if she did so.

"Good morning. It isn't like you to sleep in." Robin commented, whilst flipping a pancake.

"Good morning." Cherry yawned, walking over to tend to some bacon frying in a pan.

Robin cast a glance at her. "You'd almost think you were normal the way you're acting today."

"I'm perfectly normal, what are you talking about? It's everybody else who is weird." Cherry retorted. Though she said it jokingly, she was secretly serious. There was no way she'd ever accept the people of this world as 'normal'.

"Hmmm, am I weird too then?" Robin asked with a raised eyebrow.

"As weird as they come." Cherry replied without hesitation, earning a playful smack on the bottom from a bloomed hand.

Breakfast was served to the lazy piggies waiting in the dining room. Merry's breakfast was a bit interesting as whilst it was mostly greens, she insisted on having some meat included. A habit she picked up from Luffy no doubt.

"So what are you going to do with Kuma?" Serene asked.

Cherry was thoughtful over the question, letting it hang in the air for several moments before opening her mouth.

"I think I'm going to leave him here for now. I need more information and moving him will only cut off possible routes I can take. Bringing him to the revolutionaries will only compromise him in the eyes of the world government, and I don't know if I want to do that just yet." Cherry said.

Cherry told Robin, Cabernet, and Perona to head over to Shakky's rip off bar.

She knew that Kuma would try to leave if she left him as is, so she decided to muddy up his recent memory. Hopefully that would make him think whatever mission he completed here was no longer complete and return to guarding the Thousand Sunny.

Fortunately she wouldn't need to be too careful in going about it as he didn't have any important memories at present that she could mess up as collateral damage.

Cherry put on a mask so that he wouldn't recognise her hopefully.

After finishing up in his mindscape, she released Kuma after unlocking his devil fruit seal, but not removing it altogether as it may still come in handy later.

Kuma returned to his place in front of the Thousand Sunny where they found him before. He showed no indications of leaving, so Cherry figured it was safe to leave him now.


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