After coming down from the mountain, the four of them headed straight to the hospital before it closed to buy the instruments needed for brewing the nutritional supplement.
Strictly speaking, a hospital shouldn't be selling that kind of equipment at all.
But under El's relentless "money offensive," that principle evaporated in an instant. The hospital broke its own rules and sold him a brand-new full set of instruments—at five times the purchase price.
El didn't even blink.
After hauling all the equipment back to the ship, he went to the largest pharmacy on the island and bought a huge quantity of medicinal herbs, filling an oversized backpack.
The backpack was about the same size as the one Luffy carried when he returned to the Sabaody Archipelago after two years of training.
With El's current height, there was no way he could actually wear something that tall on his back. He had to grab it with one hand and drag or carry it back to the ship.
Once the herbs were stored, the four still didn't leave Drum Island.
With the kingdom's standing army and navy branch nearby—and the rule that pirates couldn't cause trouble here—there was no real danger. So instead of sleeping on the ship, they checked back into the hotel.
When night fell, they ate dinner together in their room.
After El finished showering and stepped out, he casually announced:
"I'm going out for a bit. You three play cards to kill time. If you want to leave the room, Nami, make sure you go with Carina and Kuina and protect them."
"Uh-huh…" the three answered in unison, nodding obediently.
None of them asked where he was going.
After El left, the three girls immediately huddled together, whispering.
"Carina, why do you think Nii-san went out this late?" Nami asked, eyes turning to the crew's resident brain.
Carina pinched her chin and thought for a moment.
"If I had to guess, Nii-san's probably out collecting information," she said. "Drum Island isn't like the other affiliated countries we've been to. Pirates and marines aren't allowed to fight here. It's a real mix of fish and dragons."
"Plus, the Drum Kingdom has a permanent garrison everywhere. It's inconvenient for Nii-san to scout with us following him, so he'd rather move alone."
"…I see," Nami murmured, satisfied.
Carina's analysis made perfect sense. Nami and Kuina both accepted it without question.
In reality, El wasn't going out to gather intelligence.
He was going to handle the real purpose of this Drum Island trip.
Yes—the real purpose.
Visiting Drum Island to learn from Dr. Kureha and obtain the method for making nutritional supplements had been mostly for the girls' sake, not his own.
With Life Return, as long as he kept eating high-calorie, high-nutrition meat, the effect on his body wouldn't be any worse than the supplement's.
The real reason El had rushed to buy the Eternal Pose pointing to Drum Island as soon as he reached the first stop of the Grand Line—racing against time to get here—wasn't just for them.
In addition to finding a shortcut to speed up the girls' growth, he had come to enact the "Supreme Plan 1.0" he'd drafted for himself after leaving Twin Cape.
Back in Cocoyasi Village, El had told Kuina: if his favorite Devil Fruit ever appeared in front of him, he would eat it.
After all, El had no cheat-like "system," no patron god, no external force dragging him from world to world and letting him break this world's limits from the outside.
If nothing unexpected happened, he would live and die in this world.
For that reason, he had to obtain the strongest power in history—otherwise, one day he might simply be erased by monsters like those in Mary Geoise.
Swordsmanship, physical strength, and Haki all have ceilings. Even someone who maxes out all three can at most reach "strongest in the world" in their era—that's still a long way from "strongest in history."
Only someone who unites Devil Fruit, swordsmanship, physique, and Haki, and pushes all four to their absolute extremes, has the right to compete for the title:
The strongest man in the history of this world.
And that Devil Fruit couldn't be just anything.
It had to be a fruit that stood at the peak even among Devil Fruits—one with enough destructive or strategic power to terrify the entire world.
Whitebeard in his prime had been such an existence.
His mutated human body had elevated the Gura Gura no Mi into the strongest Paramecia-type Devil Fruit.
And at the same time, the Gura Gura no Mi had helped forge Whitebeard's reputation as the man who could destroy the world with tremors.
If its user hadn't been Whitebeard, the Gura Gura no Mi wouldn't have become the "strongest Paramecia."
Likewise, without the Gura Gura no Mi, Whitebeard wouldn't have become that Whitebeard.
El's ideal Devil Fruit was on that level—a strategic-class Devil Fruit.
Besides Whitebeard's Paramecia Gura Gura no Mi, there were two other fruits El placed on the same level.
And now, he had come to Drum Island specifically to secure the Devil Fruit piece of his Supreme Plan 1.0.
His biggest goal here was to seize the Paramecia-type Baku Baku no Mi.
Of course, the Baku Baku no Mi was only part of the picture.
Among the strategic-class Devil Fruits El had his eyes on, one of them was this very Baku Baku no Mi.
However, his interest in the Baku Baku no Mi wasn't just because of its abilities.
He had a theory.
If that theory proved true, then he could use the power of the Baku Baku no Mi to obtain his real favorite Devil Fruit in the future.
And even setting that aside, the Baku Baku no Mi alone was one of the top fruits among Paramecia.
A user of the Baku Baku no Mi could eat any substance—including living creatures. Anything eaten could be integrated into their body, even if that "living creature" was a Devil Fruit user.
Yes.
A Baku Baku user could eat another Devil Fruit user and temporarily gain that person's Devil Fruit power.
In other words, someone with the Baku Baku no Mi could break one of the iron rules of the sea and become a person who, for a time, wields two Devil Fruit abilities—or even three.
But the more broken the Devil Fruit, the more useless its canon host tends to be.
That was true for the Noro Noro no Mi, the Doa Doa no Mi, the Hobi Hobi no Mi—and it was also true for the Baku Baku no Mi.
However, at this point in time, El was fairly sure that the Baku Baku no Mi had not yet been eaten by Wapol.
In the pharmacy waiter's memories he'd read earlier, there wasn't a single rumor about Prince Wapol being a Devil Fruit user or possessing the ability to eat anything.
And the current king—who had successfully turned Drum Kingdom into one of the top fifty nations among over 170 World Government affiliates—absolutely understood how precious the Baku Baku no Mi was.
So if the fruit had not been eaten yet, there was only one likely outcome:
The Paramecia-type Baku Baku no Mi was hidden away, locked up by the current king somewhere in this kingdom of snow.
And tonight, El had gone out alone to find it.
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