Nine days had passed since Luffy and the others left Orange Town.
On the East Blue, in a certain stretch of sea, two relatively simple wooden boats were sailing side by side.
"I think this is too reckless."
Nami's clever eyes were lively, showing she was in good spirits.
"What is?"
Luffy, sitting on the bow of the other small wooden boat, was eating an apple and gazing at the sea. Hearing Nami, he turned to ask.
"Going to the Grand Line with so little preparation is way too risky."
Nami spoke very seriously to Luffy.
"You're right. Eating fruit every day isn't a solution. It's a shame Tom is injured and can't catch fish for us. Without meat, we have no strength."
Luffy swallowed the apple in one bite, glanced at Tom lying powerless on Nami's boat, and looked with a greedy expression. Having gone days without meat, he was clearly near his limit of endurance.
"No sake to drink is really boring."
Zoro lay lazily on the boat, looking sleepy-eyed. He was truly bored out of his mind.
"Nothing to be done. I tried fishing for us yesterday, but my net got torn to pieces. Seems it's time to find a more durable, hard-to-tear fishing net. The enemies we meet are getting stronger, and even the fish underwater are becoming more ferocious. This won't do."
Tom was wrapped in bandages all over. With his hands behind his head, he lay on the boat looking at the blue sky, occasionally spotting a few seagulls flying high overhead. He thought the weather was quite nice today.
"You guys, don't fill your heads only with worries about food. Those are just small matters."
Nami was angry and yelled at Tom. "You, with your serious injuries, shouldn't move around if it's nothing important. Yesterday when you were fishing, you were almost dragged into the sea by a fish! Also, a few days ago you said you seemed to have forgotten something. Have you remembered it yet?"
Tom recalled yesterday's fishing attempt. Just as he was about to pull in the net, a sudden strong wind blew up, rocking their wooden boats side to side and even whipping up waves on the sea surface.
Luffy stretched his arms to help Tom hold the net tight, lest the caught fish escape.
But the wind direction changed in the blink of an eye, blowing in the opposite direction. Affected by this wind, Luffy's boat nearly capsized. While steadying himself, he almost dragged Tom, who was on the other boat, into the sea.
Seeing Tom about to fall into the water, Nami hurried over to grab him. But because the boat was rocking too violently, she lost her balance and fell forward.
Nami, falling forward, instinctively grabbed at what was in front of her. What she grabbed happened to be Tom's pants.
Tom had just steadied himself and was concentrating on pulling up the net when he suddenly felt his waistband loosen. He was instantly alarmed. Who's taking off my pants?!
"What are you doing, woman?! Let go!"
Seeing Nami clutching his pants for dear life, Tom was so shocked his face turned green.
"Idiot! If I let go, I'll fall into the sea!"
Nami was telling the truth. At that moment, if she hadn't grabbed Tom's pants when she fell forward, she really would have been thrown off the violently rocking boat. If she fell into the sea, she'd be swept away by the churning waves.
So Nami held onto Tom's pants, her body swinging left and right with the boat's violent rocking.
Seeing this woman gave no thought to his dignity and reputation, Tom hurriedly freed one hand to hold his waistband. With one hand, he could barely hold the net. But then, a fish with sharp teeth, twice the size of their boat, bit onto his net.
If Zoro hadn't acted in time to cut down the big fish, Tom, using only one hand, might really have been dragged into the sea by that sharp-toothed fish.
In the end, the sharp-toothed fish Zoro dealt with, its mouth full of the small fish Tom had caught, soon drifted away with the rolling waves.
All things considered, when Tom was fishing and almost got dragged into the sea, it wasn't because his professional skills were poor. The key point was that his teammates were too unreliable. Not only did Luffy help make things worse, but Nami also pulled his pants at the critical moment. Under such circumstances, it would have been a miracle if he'd caught any fish.
And Nami had warned Tom earlier that strong winds were coming. Tom had made some preparations. If Luffy, eager for meat, hadn't interfered, they probably would have caught the fish successfully.
"I can't remember, so I stopped thinking about it. Don't worry, I'm completely fine."
Tom saw that Luffy and the others, hearing Nami's words, were looking over with concern. To prevent them from doing anything unnecessary, he had to say this.
In truth, on the second day after leaving Orange Town, when Tom woke up, he vaguely felt he had forgotten something.
But what had he forgotten? At first, Tom didn't know.
He still remembered his past life on Earth, remembered he was a transmigrator, remembered Luffy inviting him to set sail, and remembered everything that had happened recently.
It wasn't until Nami said their next destination was Syrup Village that Tom realized what he had forgotten.
He had the name "Syrup Village" in his memory, but he couldn't remember at all what would happen there.
Tom thought until his head hurt. His memory of Syrup Village was a complete blank, except for the village's name.
At first, when Tom told Luffy and the others he seemed to have lost some memory, Luffy said eating more meat would fix it, and Zoro said finding a place to drink more sake would make him remember everything.
It wasn't that Luffy and the others didn't care. When they first heard Tom had memory loss, Luffy ran back and forth on the boat holding his head in panic, acting as if Tom was about to die. Zoro's expression was also very serious.
But after some questioning, Luffy and Zoro discovered Tom hadn't really forgotten anything. He remembered all the things they'd experienced together. How could that be called memory loss?
Therefore, Luffy and Zoro concluded Tom was playing a cruel joke on them. They even jumped onto Tom's boat and started wrestling with him.
Tom couldn't outright say he was a transmigrator who once knew what would happen in this world. So no matter how he explained to Luffy and Zoro, he couldn't clarify what he'd forgotten.
The three of them couldn't convince each other. They fought on the boat, their argument growing fiercer, until they were red-faced and thick-necked with anger. Finally, Nami couldn't take it anymore and gave each of them an iron fist, which stopped the argument.
As for Nami, upon hearing about Tom's memory loss, her first question was whether Tom remembered owing her money. Tom's heart stirred; he wanted to use the memory loss as an excuse to get out of the debt.
Who knew Nami immediately produced an IOU with Tom's thumbprint on it, telling Tom that even if he'd lost his memory, the fact that he owed her 405,500,000 Berries was undeniable, because the evidence was solid as a rock.
Looking at the IOU with his thumbprint in Nami's hand, Tom was dumbfounded on the spot. He had no idea when he had ever signed such an IOU for Nami.
Later, Tom found out that on the afternoon they left Orange Town, on the wooden boat, Nami had taken advantage of changing the bandages on his unconscious self to write up an IOU and conveniently pressed Tom's thumb onto it.
And so, without any awareness, Tom had incurred a massive debt to Nami.
What made Tom most speechless was that when he sought Luffy and Zoro's opinion on the matter, those two were practically kicking him while he was down.
"So you're that rich, Tom? Can you lend me some money to buy meat in the future?"
When Luffy learned Tom owed Nami over 400 million Berries, his first reaction was actually to think Tom was rich, and he shamelessly prepared to ask Tom for money to buy meat.
Tom was immediately speechless. If he really owed Nami that much money, from another angle, he could indeed be considered a rich man.
But the problem was, he had never borrowed that much from Nami. He hadn't gotten a single berry from her. In truth, it was Nami who had stolen a few hundred berries from him.
Moreover, Luffy said heartlessly to Tom that it was no wonder Tom had paid for mending his straw hat, since Tom was already so rich.
Hearing Luffy's words, Tom's face turned so dark it could have dripped ink.
Zoro, lying on the boat and not seeing Tom's dark face, said with feeling, "Looks like we won't have to worry about running out of sake. Having that much money is really something to envy."
At that moment, Tom truly wanted to take off both his shoes and smack Luffy and Zoro, those unreliable guys, into the sea to feed the turtles.
Seeing that single-celled Luffy had been fooled into confusion by Nami's words, and within a few sentences had become Nami's debt collector, pressing Tom for payment, Tom completely gave up on arguing with Nami about it.
Seeing Nami turn around, holding a 10,000-berry bill and the IOU with his thumbprint, giving him a mischievous yet somewhat cute smile, Tom's heart jumped. He vaguely remembered seeing Nami like this before.
But where had he seen it? Tom couldn't remember.
Carefully reviewing his memories, Tom discovered a frightening fact. The memories in his mind about this world had become very blurry. Some of the people in his memories were just silhouettes. What those silhouettes looked like, who they were—he couldn't remember at all.
This made Tom's cold sweat pour out. Nami beside him thought it was because of his serious injuries and approached with concern to ask.
Seeing Nami looking at him with worry, Tom vaguely remembered that Nami's hometown was Cocoyashi Village. But about that village, Tom couldn't remember anything. This felt very wrong. Why did his memory seem to always cut off at the most important parts?
Why was this happening?
Tom sat dazed on the boat, sinking into deep thought. He recalled that recently, his head had indeed suffered several impacts.
When sailing out with Luffy, they encountered a giant whirlpool, and he was hit on the head by a fair amount of gold. In Orange Town, meeting Nami, he was hit on the back of the head by five decent-sized rocks in a row. Leaving Orange Town, when Zoro carried him, his head was bumped hard.
And Nami had also punched him a few times on the head. This made Tom suspect that perhaps the recent repeated trauma to his brain had caused this memory gap phenomenon...
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T/N :
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