The divine dragon did not wane. Rakuya drove his repulsion to ten thousandfold, forcing the surrounding sea apart as Ryugu Palace shook to its foundations.
Masses of seawater were shouldered aside and hurled outward and upward.
The ocean roared. The earth quaked.
Sea Kings hundreds of meters long were flung away like driftwood. Before absolute power, they were nothing.
Repulsion poured on without end.
Directly ten thousand meters above Rakuya lay an island. Without warning it buckled, mountains splitting, daylight smothered. The sea heaved up dozens of times its usual height, and the island, like a cork in a bottle, bore the brunt of the pressure and force beneath.
The island trembled. The ground cracked. The quaking grew stronger, wilder.
At last, with a thunderclap, the entire island was blown skyward by repulsion and the cataclysmic upsurge of water, hurled several thousand meters into the air.
It shattered into dust.
Where the island had been, a circular pit five hundred meters across yawned open. It seemed bottomless. The sea around it did not rush in.
A solid barrier ringed the shaft, holding the water at bay.
Sabaody Archipelago.
The overnight destruction of the World Government had already dealt a mortal shock. Following Fleet Admiral Steelbone Kong's orders, Marines across the branches were mustering when Sabaody began to quake again.
"What now?"
"Another quake? What is happening?"
Marines and pirates alike stared in confusion.
"Look. The sky!"
"Look at what?"
Grumbling faces tilted upward, uninterested. Then they froze.
A five-hundred-meter-wide waterspout punched an entire island into the heavens, driving it higher and higher until it vanished into the clouds.
The spectacle dwarfed the horizon.
Mouths fell open. Even the laziest dockside pirates stared, eyes wide and disbelieving.
"How is that possible? An island launched into the sky?"
"Maybe there is a volcano under it."
"Use your head. It sits on the ocean. What volcano?"
"Volcanoes still have magma, genius. Do you see anything but water?"
"This is too strange. What in the world is going on?"
The ground shuddered again. A boom rolled across every grove of the archipelago. A second pillar of water speared the heavens.
It surged like a mountain range in motion, like ten thousand steeds at full gallop. The sea turned upside down.
Everyone stood awestruck.
The memory of the meteor that crushed Mary Geoise ten days earlier still burned in their minds. Now another impossible sight.
Two ten-thousand-meter water columns mirrored each other in the clouds. Necks hunched. Fear crept in.
Power like that could turn them all to paste.
"What is happening?"
"Thank the seas I did not dive today. I would have been pulped."
"Isn't that exactly where you drop down for Fish-Man Island?"
"Good thing the coater's wife ran off and our coating never got finished. Otherwise I would be a dead man today."
"Captain, our coating is finally done. Are we still going to Fish-Man Island to see the Flowing Cloud god?"
The captain's hand cracked across the crewman's cheek. "Are you blind? You see those two pillars? You want the sea to swallow us whole?"
"Hey, look. Two giant rifts on the surface."
Heads snapped toward the horizon.
Across the endless blue, two vast circular mouths, each five hundred meters wide, had appeared. They were pitch black, bottomless. Seawater did not spill into them, as if something invisible propped the ocean away.
"What is this?"
"I have never seen anything like it."
Far below, Rakuya's eyes gleamed.
Both channels were open. One entrance, one exit. Each ran straight up and down, letting ships travel directly between Sabaody Archipelago and Fish-Man Island without being crushed by the sea, without fear of Sea Kings, without worrying about coatings bursting. A safe passage.
A coated ship sailing the old route from Sabaody to Fish-Man Island needed around ten days. Dropping through this entry would slash that to roughly one.
Rakuya spent one thousand points to exchange for two repulsion engines and mounted them at the base of each shaft. He also connected the two bases with a horizontal corridor. From afar, the layout resembled a giant U-shaped bottle, except both vertical legs were sheer and straight.
He set the engines at the bottom of the ten-thousand-meter shafts, each tuned differently.
The left-hand shaft would serve inbound traffic from Sabaody. Ships would ease onto the opening, then, cushioned by outward repulsion from the walls, they would never scrape the cylinder. Gravity would accelerate them into a controlled free fall. Near Fish-Man Island, the engine would counteract the planet's pull, bleeding off speed until the vessel drifted gently into the base. Lateral thrust would then push the ship along the bottom corridor to a safe zone and into the island's harbor.
Departing ships bound for Sabaody would take the other shaft.
Every variable had to be calculated by Rakuya himself. There was no margin for error.
He lifted his head to the twin throats linking the world above and the world below and nodded, satisfied.
The last few days had not been wasted.
With fast transit, Fish-Man Island would hold an absolute advantage in trade.
With coin flowing, its people would thrive.
And the Sun Tree sap would be his alone
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