Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_qeiwsubwE

Cover:

On the cover, we see Yamato riding Komachiyo to locate the thief of the sword. Joining the hunt are Speed and O-Tama, with Speed having decided to stay by O-Tama’s side. Considering that it has been over a month since Speed was first fed at the start of Wano, from March 3rd to around April 9th now, Tama’s powers must’ve worn off, as they only last a month, meaning that Speed has decided to stay at O-Tama’s side out of her own volition. Her clothing is also more like a proper Wano kimono, which makes sense as Speed is originally a citizen of the Wano Country that betrayed her nation for the sake of joining the Beasts Pirates.

Loki:

A little detail I forgot to mention last time even though it was visible is that Loki appears to be carrying a massive hammer on his back, which presumably would be his weapon of choice. In Norse mythology, if we’re talking of hammers, of course we have to think of the Mjölnir, but said hammer pertained to Thor the thunder god, not Loki. Interestingly, the top tip of the hammer is completely black, but it’s unknown if this is due to a material the hammer is made of, or if this could be just like a black blade, but instead of infusing a sword, Loki infused a hammer.

Another detail that is easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention to all the text is that in his title text, it states that he has received a special bounty from the World Government, likely stated that way as he isn’t an actual pirate, that goes all the way to 2.6 billion belly. This staggering bounty is the 8th highest Government bounty in the series, or 13th if you count the Cross Guild Bounties, only putting him under the Yonko, Mihawk, and the Admirals, plus Sakazuki and Garp. On the other hand, it is 16th overall for all bounties ever issued in the series. It’s also the only bounty we’ve had on the 2 billion range aside from Blackbeard’s original post-timeskip bounty.

Loki claims that he is the Sun God which has been passed down in this country for generations, which reinforces my belief from last chapter that Loki’s fruit literally has to do with being the Sun God. After all he claims it is something that has been passed down across the generations, just like the fruit his father Harold had, so it just would make sense if his fruit makes him a sun god of sorts. But since Luffy has the Nika fruit, it again makes us wonder just what type of Sun God.

Interestingly, hearing Loki speak, you can tell that his speech pattern is a bit calmer than it first seemed last time. He is quite the psychopath, but he’s also a lot more calculating than he first seems, adding to his trickster persona just like Loki. His scream rattles the wolves nearby, as well as a reindeer and what looks like a yeti-like creature.

He explains that he has been chained for 6 years, so since 1518. The only two majorly relevant plot points from this year are Kuma’s One-Man Revolution, which isn’t really relevant here, but a far more relevant point, which is Shanks becoming one of the Four Emperors. And given Loki’s latter mention of Shanks, surely there’s a connection here. Given how he’s been chained here for so long though, I wonder how he has been fed this whole time, maybe with someone feeding him or maybe tying into his powers.

Treasure Tree Adam!!

However, Loki drops us a very big revelation as he gives us the name of the Yggdrasil-like tree… the Treasure Tree Adam!!

This name should be familiar, as it’s a tree that has been introduced long long ago in the story. In Chapter 431, Franky mentioned:

“Far, far, away, there is a war-torn island. On that war-torn island is a tree. Whether humans on the island fight wars or rain it cannonballs from the sky, or whether they all die off and their buildings turn to ruins, the tree always remains. It’s a special tree. It can’t be chopped down. People have gathered around it and created a settlement, and then a nation. There’s very few like it. That strongest tree in the world is the Treasure Tree Adam.”

Thinking about it, Franky’s words were more literal than we thought. The “war-torn island” he spoke of was literally the Kingdom of Warland. Franky explained how a few of the wood from the Treasure Tree Adam makes its way to the black market, which does make me wonder just who exactly is harvesting some of this wood from Elbaph. But given how hard it must be to attain, understandably it fetches a really high price, which Franky needing to pay 200,000,000ß just to attain enough wood to build the Thousand Sunny. With it though, he’s made the Sunny so robust that no normal cannonballs could damage it, making it an incredibly strong ship. Gol D. Roger’s ship, the Oro Jackson, was also built with Adam Wood that Tom used to craft it. With how resistant this wood is, it makes sense that Loki can’t just rip off the entire tree to escape, especially with his chains being made of kairoseki seastone too, likely blocking his devil fruit too. He claims there’s a key in the village, which is his only way out.

At the same time though, the Treasure Tree Adam is one of two colossal trees in the One Piece world. Because there is another even more colossal known as the Sun Tree Eve. Said tree is seemingly incrusted within the Red Line, with its roots reaching all the way down to Fishman Island, and its top said to be at the surface seemingly at the top of the Red Line, meaning the whole tree stretches for countless kilometers, well over 10,000 kilometers. Its roots were so colossal they even dwarfed the massive Fishman Island or the colossally long Sea Kings, which can stretch up to 5,000 meters, so you can imagine just how big it is, probably even bigger than the Adam. This tree is a yarukiman mangrove, the same type as those of Sabaody, which are belevied to be its smaller spawns, and it’s the reason why it can create a bubble atmosphere where bubbles generate, which is why bubbles work in Mary Geoise as well as Fishman Island. It is bioluminescent, which is how the people of Fishman Island get their light from the sun.

Of course, the connection couldn’t be more obvious. Adam and Eve are the two figures from the tale of Genesis, said to have been in the garden of God but being kicked after the devil deceived them and forced them to eat a forbidden fruit. So what if in the One Piece world there is a similar story of the Devil Imu having deceived the people of the God Country to eat the devil fruits, and thus usurped and took their land. Many have long since speculated that the Elbaph tree was the Treasure Tree Adam, but at the same time many now speculate the Sun Tree Eve could be the tree from where devil fruits originate. Hopefully we’ll soon learn more about the latter and the connection between the two! After all, even Usopp during Fishman Island wondered if there is a connection between the Sun Tree Eve and the Treasure Tree Adam.

In this shot of the Tree Adam we also get to spot the top of the tree, which doesn’t seem to have anything on top of it like we thought it could’ve. The top looks a lot lighter in color, but that’s probably due to being bathed by the sun.

Strong World:

Next, Loki explains that this is the “Underworld” of Elbaph, or “Meikai” (冥界) in Japanese. He explains that since the sun doesn’t reach here much, due to being covered by the thick leaves of the trees, a colder climate has developed, which is why it snows. This also has its symbolism though, because given the importance of the sun in Elbaph mythology, it’s as if this land has been abandoned by the sun. Many giants prefer not to live here, instead preferring to live up top with the leaves, which is where we see the village, castle, lake and rainbow, the rainbow in particular potentially being the iconic bifrost rainbow bridge of Nordic myth that leads to Asgard. He further elaborates that the Underworld is the area where there is land, a place no one dares go near, being treated as a prison and execution grounds. This lines up with what we speculated last week, that each of the realms of Elbaph might be themed after the nine realms of the Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, with this one serving as the realm of Niflheim, which is the frozen underworld where people are trapped as punishment, just as Loki describes it here.

Even Loki himself describes this area in their mythology as the “First World”, thus the first of Nine Worlds. Particularly he locates it within a chain of snowy mountains, claimed to have existed for tenths of thousands of years, which geologically might not be much but in terms of One Piece history is definitely a surreal number to think about. Each mountain has its own master animal, which Loki has managed to befriend. In this case we see a massive polar bear, a massive gorilla, a massive black wolf with a large scar on its eye and a fiery mane, and a large snake like the one that Luffy defeated in Road’s room, as well as a mammoth. So much for Jack’s fruit being an ancient model. In Egghead, Dorry and Brogy compared the Gorosei to the large beasts of Elbaph, so in this case I can understand where they were coming from.

Some of these species might seem slightly familiar though. And if you have good memory, you might realize for example that we’ve already seen the gorilla before, as it was a species we saw during Strong World. Oda has actually already showed some creatures from Strong World across his story, like one of the centipedes from the movie appearing during Totto Land in Chapter 828, so it makes sense that more of them are appearing, as Shiki must’ve gotten them from somewhere, even if slightly unevolved.

But the fact we see this many all in one place might suggest something massive: that Shiki may have actually visited Elbaph and taken so many of its native animals in order to form his grand army by stealing away the animals of Elbaph in order to evolve them and create his unstoppable army. So think of just how dangerous the animals of Elbaph are when Shiki thought that he could create an army to take over the world with them.

This one for example is known as the Del Kong, a giant gorilla with spiky proportions. The mammoth also looks similar to the Mammoth Dense, another creature from Strong World. And finally the snake is also from Strong World, being the Dasoku, which the evolved version in Strong World looked like a similar snake but with several feet more like a centipede. The bear is a Teroguma, a bear with really long arms, and even the yeti-like creature we saw before is actually a Screen Buffalo, another creature from Strong World.

However Luffy calls it a nostalgic feeling being next to so many big creatures, as he is reminded of all the creatures he had to fight in Rusukaina, so he instantly befriends them.

Interestingly, there’s also humans on the island, stating they picked a fight with Elbaph, which survive by carrying smelly animal corpses to confuse the creatures and all wear gas masks. Being a human in Elbaph definitely isn’t an easy thing, but I’m interested to know more about them in the future. They call Loki as “Loki-sama”, so they seem subservient to an extent.

When Loki hears Luffy reacting positively to Shanks’s name though, he wants to provoke Luffy, claiming that he knows Shanks, the “Pirate Coward”. This irritates Luffy, who quickly switches to Gear 4th, though Loki is able to dodge it. As Luffy transforms back, the island’s animals look absolutely terrified of him, with the wolf even shaking.

Luffy then asks several questions: why Shanks came to Elbaph, which he feels it surely can’t just have been to meet Loki, and if Shanks is still in Elbaph. We know the latter at least to not be the case, as we saw recently Shanks was busy hunting down Bartolomeo, but that doesn’t necessary exclude him potentially coming to the island later on. For the rest of answers though, we’ll need to wrangle them out of Loki, as he isn’t willing to give them out for free. And the price for that would surely be getting freed from his chains.

Giant Warrior Pirates:

We then see that Road, followed by Gerd and Goldberg, which they call “Female Warrior” and “Chubby”, are chasing after the Straw Hats. Road might be mad, but given how Goldberg is carrying the Sunny, I do think that they are trying to be nice and this is all just a misunderstanding, as Gerd and Goldberg at least would side with the Straw Hats.

We then get to see the rest of the crew with Hajrudin and the shipwright Stansen. As a reminder, though we are told of Hajrudin’s role in Dress Rosa, Stansen was also the same giant at Sabaody who was at the auction house and was freed by Rayleigh, later getting the chance to return home. The animal they defeated might be familiar as it too is a creature from Strong World: this is known as the Ettousaurus, with the kanji reading as Wintersaurus, which is a cross between a dinosaur and a reindeer, living in cold climates as suggested by its name. Hajrudin simply calls it a “herajika” though, which is the Japanese word for “moose”, even if it isn’t quite one. He also states that he is hunting it to serve its meat to the Straw Hats.

Interestingly, Stansen mentions something called the “painter” (peinta), being something that he can’t use due to it snowing so much, which would seemingly have made carrying the Ettousaurus back easier. The kanji reading is that of Taiyouseki, or “sunstone”. In this case, it means this is likely what is known to us as a Sunstone, which was a type of rudimentary compass that the vikings used, supposedly to locate the sun even when skies were clouded. So in this case, Stansen means that he wished to use his sunstone to locate the sun, but due to all the snow it’s impossible, meaning they’ll have to find their way back through instinct.

Saul-sensei:

Speaking of Strong World creatures, it doesn’t stop there, as there’s yet another one that cruises past the Great Eirik, being the Bakuzame, or the Chompshark. This massive snake-like shark is quite fierce, and yet it was quickly eaten and devoured by an army of Guntai Ari, or Army Ants, in just a few seconds when they were trying to assault Robin and Franky at the start of the film if you remember.

On the ship itself, Robin has gone for a much familiar haircut, making herself look like she did pre-timeskip! Given how we haven’t had a change in look since the pre-timeskip, it’s actually really refreshing to see someone get such a change such as a haircut at this point in the story. Since this is what Robin looked like when she was a kid, she hopes Saul will recognize her better with this look, a reunion she is really looking forward to.

However, as they prepare to make landfall, something happened. A giant comes in screaming on the upper levels where the town is, claiming that Saul-sensei has collapsed and can’t move. Now first of all, Saul here is referred to as “sensei”. This is something that was already hinted at during Egghead, when Dorry and Brogy seemingly referred to Saul as a “scholar”. “Sensei” as you likely know is a honorific referring to someone who is a teacher or master in some craft, so in this case he would be “Professor Saul”. This would make sense, as he was the one who preserved the research and Library of Ohara, so it makes sense if he tried to educate himself to become a scholar and understand more about the Void Century. However in this case he has seemingly collapsed, or “taoreta” in Japanese, “to fall”, and can’t move due to some reason. Just what happened to him? And who is this giant bearing the news whose face is covered? What about the mysterious silhouette we saw a while ago at Elbaph? I suppose these mysteries will explain themselves soon as we get into the thick of the Elbaph arc!