Chapter Text
Marineford was a graveyard of smoke and fire.
Shattered stone and wounded bodies littered the ground, the scent of blood and sweat mixing with the sea’s briny breath. Shouts tore through the air—of pirates calling to their comrades, of Marines issuing relentless orders, of the dying and the desperate alike.
Whitebeard’s massive form stood at the heart of the carnage, a crumbling titan bleeding from a hundred wounds, holding the line alone as his men fled behind him. It was his final command, for them to live to meet the new era. He was an old warrior from a dying age, and he had no intention of stepping into the future that belonged to them.
Amidst the chaos, two brothers darted across the battlefield. The full weight of the Marines’ attention bore down upon them. Officers and foot soldiers alike converged with one goal: kill Portgas D. Ace and Monkey D. Luffy before they could escape.
Ace’s sea prism shackles had fallen moments ago, but freedom tasted bitter in a mouth gone dry from pain and exhaustion. He and Luffy were running, staggering, towards the waiting ships, where cries of retreat echoed over the thunder of cannon fire. Allies and crewmates leapt in to cover their escape, blades flashing and bullets whistling past.
Every heartbeat was borrowed time.
“Whitebeard is just a loser from the old times. And he will die a loser!”
The words sliced through the din of battle.
Ace’s feet skidded on cracked stone, chest heaving. His jaw clenched, trembling with fury. The pirates who had already surged ahead turned sharply.
“Don’t listen to him, Ace!” Izou shouted. “Come on! We have to go!”
Luffy had stopped too—he turned to call out to Ace, but instead, his knees buckled and gave out. A smouldering piece of paper slipped out of his pocket as he collapsed to the ground.
“Pops gave us a place where we belonged!” Ace clenched his fists.
Akainu sneered, stepping forward, magma bubbling at his fists. “Pirates like you don’t deserve a place to belong.”
Ace’s eyes burned. “Whitebeard is the Pirate King who created this era!”
The clash was instant—fire against magma, protective rage against absolute justice. Ace hurled himself forward, a blazing arc of fury, fists igniting as he met Akainu head-on. For a heartbeat, the battlefield lit up in white-hot flame and molten red as their powers collided.
But Ace was already half-broken.
He was slower, weaker, drawn thin from exhaustion and the lingering toll of the weeks imprisoned in Impel Down. Every strike was sluggish compared to the Admiral’s ruthlessness, whose blows hit heavier, hotter, crueler.
A punch to the ribs—Ace staggered, coughing blood. A second to the shoulder—he dropped to one knee. The final strike sent him crashing to the ground, his breath ripped from his lungs.
Akainu loomed above, untouched.
“Gold Roger, the King of the Pirates, and Dragon the Revolutionary,” he taunted. “I was amazed to hear that the sons of those two are stepbrothers. You two have bad blood in your veins.”
His contemptuous gaze shifted, past the struggling Ace—
And landed on Luffy.
“Watch what I do.”
Ace’s heart slammed in his chest. “Wait!”
Luffy’s body trembled with the effort of just breathing. Blood smeared his torn vest and face, his eyes glassy and unfocused. Fatigue weighed on him like a crushing tide, muting the noise around him until only a single, fragile thing remained in his awareness: Ace’s Vivre Card.
“This isn’t your typical piece of paper. It reveals the owner’s vitality.”
The smouldering scrap of paper, smaller than ever before, fluttered away inch by inch across the ground. Luffy reached out with shaking fingers, desperate to recover the paper that linked him to his brother, and completely unaware of the molten fist bearing down on him.
“Luffy!” Ace’s voice tore from his throat, raw and broken.
There was no thinking, only instinct. Agony surged through every inch of his body, screaming at him to stay down, but it didn’t matter. Ace forced himself up and hurled forward with everything he had left.
He got between them just in time.
He braced for the blow. For molten magma to rip through skin and muscle and bone. For pain unlike anything he’d ever known.
Anything, as long as it wasn't Luffy.
But it never came.
Instead—wind.
A powerful blast of it slammed into Ace’s back, hurling him forward. He crashed to his knees, landing just short of Luffy. The air howled past him in a rush, and for a stunned second, all he could hear was Luffy’s ragged breathing.
Ace looked up, eyes wide, and met Luffy’s equally bewildered face. For a breathless moment, neither of them moved, locked in a daze, barely processing the fact that they were both still alive.
Then Ace snapped back to his senses and spun around.
A slender figure stood before them, back straight, robes fluttering. His long hair was bound high in a half-crown. In his hand was a blade so thin and refined, it barely looked real. Yet it easily held firm against the molten force of Akainu’s magma-coated fist.
Xiu Ya.
Ace’s heart lurched.
“Touch one more hair on his head, and I will scatter your soul across ten thousand dimensions.”
A frosty voice, painfully familiar, one he’d thought he would never be able to hear again.
The man shifted his blade slightly, and Akainu’s magma recoiled. Akainu stared in disbelief as he was forced back a step.
The world seemed to still. The roar of the battlefield faded into a hush as eyes turned towards the lone figure who had stepped between the condemned brothers and an admiral.
Then the sky cracked.
A jagged fissure split the clouds above Marineford, opening onto a gleaming brilliance that didn’t belong to this world. It poured like liquid light, washing the battlefield aglow.
From within that light, four swords began to descend.
Upon each sword stood a figure, and they moved gracefully, like stars falling in formation. Behind them, what seemed like hundreds more hovered on their own blades, silent and unmoving, suspended in the air. They stood as one, a testament to power restrained.
Like a court of gods.
Marines and pirates alike were frozen, heads tilted skyward with their mouths agape.
The Visual Transponder Snail in Buggy’s trembling hands slowly rotated, eyestalks fixed on the celestial figures, recording the imposing sight for the world to see.
“C-Captain Buggy, are those… Sky Islanders?”
Buggy stared at the figures descending from the heavens, his eyes bugging out. “I know what Sky Islanders look like, and that ain’t it! That looks more like judgement day!”
A Marine fell to his knees. “A-Are they gods?”
As if in answer, one of the leading figures touched down.
Yue Qingyuan stepped off his sword, and it flew into his waiting hand as he took his place beside Shen Qingqiu. In the same breath, Shen Qingqiu parried Akainu’s fist and slipped back, letting the Sect Master take his place.
A second figure streaked past them like a silver comet, heading straight towards the centre of the plaza where Whitebeard stood alone, holding back the tide of Marines to cover his sons’ retreat. With a single powerful slash, Liu Qingge carved a deep trench through the earth between Whitebeard and the Marines, sending the latter stumbling back and halting their advance.
Hovering right above the plaza on her sword, Qi Qingqi pressed her palms together as she chanted under her breath. Spiritual energy pulsed around her, then unfurled downward in shimmering threads.
The last of the four glided towards the rear where the pirate ships were clustered, waiting for everyone to return aboard. Mu Qingfang landed on the deck of the Moby Dick. Without preamble, he began rapidly assessing the situation.
“Clear a space for the wounded. Bring them to me in order of severity.”
When no one moved, still stunned by his presence, he clapped once, sharp and commanding. “Now.”
They scrambled to follow his instructions.
With the presence of these newcomers, the momentum of the battlefield completely shifted. A tense, hushed silence fell upon the large plaza. No one dared to speak first, to break the stillness, to acknowledge the arrival of these unknown visitors.
Sheathing his sword, Shen Qingqiu turned and walked towards the kneeling, bruised and beaten Ace—the hidden son of the late Pirate King, whose impending execution had sparked this war.
And in front of everyone—Marines, pirates, the Visual Transponder Snail broadcasting live to the world—this celestial-like figure raised his hands and gently cupped Ace’s dirt-stained face.
A faint warmth seeped into Ace’s skin. Healing qi.
“Idiot,” Shen Qingqiu murmured, looking down at him. “You really meant to die here, didn’t you?”
“I thought—” Ace’s voice cracked as his hand came up to cover Shen Qingqiu’s in an almost painful grip. “I didn’t think I’d get to see you again. I had so much I needed to say, but I couldn't even—I dragged everyone into this mess, I’m so—”
Shen Qingqiu cut him off calmly: “I’m pregnant.”
Ace blinked. “...Huh?”
There was a strange pause, as if the entire battlefield had sucked in a collective breath.
Ace’s brows furrowed. “What—I don’t think I—Did you just—?”
“I said,” Shen Qingqiu repeated, voice carrying crisp and cold across the silent, war-torn plaza, “I am pregnant.”
Ace’s mouth opened. Closed. Then opened again.
“You’re—you’re p–p–pr–” he stammered, face going red, a ringing sound playing in his ears as his brain attempted a full system reboot. “You’re—you’re pr–p–p-p–”
“PREGNANT, ACE,” Luffy helpfully declared from behind him.
Ace made a noise like someone had punched all the air out of his lungs.
Shen Qingqiu directed a stony stare at Luffy, who only beamed back despite his exhaustion.
“You’re welcome!”
“PREGNANT!?” The battlefield came alive again, but not with the clash of swords or gunpowder explosions. From the rift above, where the Cang Qiong Mountain Sect disciples still hovered in formation, a wave of commotion broke through their carefully maintained silence.
“SHIZUN!?” Luo Binghe shrieked. He would’ve jumped down had it not been for Ming Fan desperately holding him back.
Beside them, Ning Yingying let out a high-pitched squeal, hands clasped over her mouth in barely-contained glee. Some disciples were giddily bouncing in place, while others had their jaws hanging open in shock. Their solemn facades had crumbled all at once.
“What do you mean you’re pregnant?!” Mu Qingfang squawked from the deck of the Moby Dick, accidentally yanking a bandage too tight around someone’s wounded arm. “You don’t have—you’re not—”
“Shen Qingqiu!” Liu Qingge bellowed, forgoing decorum entirely. “Are you insane?”
“That shameless—” Qi Qingqi hissed, the spiritual energy rippling around her stuttering as her concentration slipped.
“Qingqiu-shidi.” Without sparing Akainu a second glance, Yue Qingyuan turned to his shidi, disbelief plain on his face. “Is that why you were so insistent on coming here?”
But Shen Qingqiu paid them no heed.
He turned away from Ace to face the Marine lines, his gaze passing over Yue Qingyuan to where Akainu stood seething, the remaining officers behind him frozen in wary confusion. No one had dared to advance.
“Tell me,” Shen Qingqiu called out, every inch the elegant and imperious Qing Jing Peak Lord. “Are you still so eager to execute a man for his bloodline?”
Several Marines flinched. A few of the braver ones began to raise their weapons.
"When you scoured the seas for the late Pirate King’s child, you slaughtered countless unborn children and their mothers.” Shen Qingqiu’s glare was cutting. “Are you so eager to repeat that sin?”
He took a step forward.
“Then come.” His voice dropped, lower, colder. “Try to kill the unborn grandchild of Gol D. Roger.”
He let the silence stretch.
“Try to kill me.”
—
The peace at Qing Jing Peak’s women-only spring was abruptly shattered by a shriek.
“PERVERT!”
Buckets and rags dropped to the ground as the female disciples scattered, voices overlapping in alarm. In the centre of the spring stood—no, floundered—a half-naked man. A flower-patterned shirt and an orange hat floated nearby.
So that’s what a pervert looks like, ten-year-old Ning Yingying thought to herself, morbidly fascinated.
The spring was shallow enough that the older disciples usually stood with the water only at their waists, chest-deep at most in the very centre. And yet the man was thrashing as though caught in a bottomless lake.
“Shouldn’t we save him?” Ning Yingying ventured.
“Don’t! What if he’s a demon that snuck in?”
The man flailed wildly, arms striking uselessly in the water. Each movement seemed to drag him lower instead of keeping him afloat. For a moment, his head broke the surface. Then, as though seized by invisible hands, he was pulled under.
Through the wavering surface, the disciples could just make out his body descending, limp now, drifting downwards. His dark hair fanned around his face as he sank until his back touched the pale stone at the bottom of the pool.
He had stopped moving.
The water returned to perfect, undisturbed tranquility.
“He doesn’t look much like a demon…”
“Is he dead?”
One brave senior sister waded into the spring. She brandished her broom like a sword and gave the intruder a cautious jab with the handle. There was no response. With a grunt of effort, she hauled him out and dragged him to the shore, leaving him to flop bonelessly onto the grass.
From beyond the bamboo fence came a voice—deep one moment, cracking the next, caught awkwardly between boyhood and manhood. It was Ming Fan.
“What’s all that shouting? Is everything alright there?” His voice broke spectacularly on the last word.
The disciples looked at one another, flustered and faces flushing in unison.
“Well…” Ning Yingying began uncertainly.
The man on the ground suddenly convulsed and coughed violently, water spluttering from his mouth.
They screamed.
“CALL SHIZUN!”
By the time Shen Qingqiu arrived, the unconscious man had already been laid out on his back on the grass, still drenched, but now with an outer robe modestly covering him. His shirt and hat had been fished out and laid out to dry beside him.
Shen Qingqiu’s expression was stone-cold. He was already annoyed about being dragged away from his study for this nonsense—an intruder perving on Qing Jing Peak’s female-only spring? Castrate the criminal then kick him off the peak. Done and dusted.
He stood over the man, arms crossed haughtily in judgement, then froze.
This face.
Though presently pale and plastered with damp strands of hair, there was no mistaking it. That same bright and freckled profile, now slack in unconsciousness. That same mouth that had not stopped moving for even a single breath.
It happened a week ago.
Shen Qingqiu had been dispatched on behalf of his sect to answer a commission from a certain provincial manor lord, who had requested an inspection of the protective arrays woven through his private forest estate. The man was wealthy and paranoid, and his woodland retreat was sealed from the public. Without the owner’s permission, entry was impossible.
And yet—
“Hey! Hello! Is that a person? Lucky! Man, I thought I was gonna die out here stranded and alone and starving!”
A man stood a short distance away, waving both arms enthusiastically at him.
An idiot, was Shen Qingqiu’s first thought.
“This area is sealed,” was what he said instead. Even as he spoke, his spiritual sense spread outwards, brushing against the surrounding arrays. The formations were intact. “How did you enter?”
“That so? My bad! Wish I could tell you,” the stranger answered cheerfully. “I wanna get outta here too.”
Without invitation, he launched into an explanation involving a boat, a storm, a scary grandfather chasing after him, a now-broken boat that “couldn’t even be called a boat anymore,” and how this was “officially the worst first adventure ever as a pirate, I can never tell Luffy about this.”
They were in the middle of a landlocked, spiritually-fortified forest, three mountain ranges away from the nearest large body of water. Shen Qingqiu seriously considered knocking the man unconscious. Clearly, he was some lunatic or, at best, delirious.
Then Shen Qingqiu noticed something else. He stepped forward abruptly and seized the man’s wrist, cutting him off mid-sentence.
The man didn’t resist, simply letting Shen Qingqiu grab his hand with a questioning but genial (read: dumb) smile on his freckled face.
Shen Qingqiu pressed two fingers to his pulse point, spiritual senses probing.
What he found was... nothing. There was no sign of a spiritual core. No trace of cultivated qi. In fact, the man was spiritually empty. His meridians were clogged, underdeveloped even, yet his heart hammered with a vitality that was almost offensive.
This idiot was a mortal from the lower realm.
Shen Qingqiu should have clocked it from the man’s strange clothing alone, but he had been too preoccupied with nursing his disdain towards the incessant blathering about storms and grandfathers and broken boats.
Lower realm mortals did not simply wander in. On exceedingly rare occasions though, accidents do occur. A spatial node might destabilise under excessive spiritual pressure. A boundary array might thin during recalibration. Some form of karmic disturbance could momentarily blur the layered separation between the two realms.
Well, at least this was simple enough to resolve. Probably even better than dealing with an actual lunatic, if he was being honest.
“You should not be here,” Shen Qingqiu said. With a flex of spiritual energy, he interfaced with the surrounding world-boundary array, thinning the partition in a narrow corridor to his right. A controlled realignment, just enough to allow the mortal to phase back to his native layer.
The man lit up. “I know, right!?”
“...” Trying to explain anything to this fool would be a waste of breath. Shen Qingqiu used his closed fan to point vaguely to his right. “Walk straight. You will return to your own world.”
The man chuckled. “That’s a funny way of putting it.”
Shen Qingqiu’s patience was thinning. “I imagine many things are ‘funny’ when one possesses so little sense. Now start walking.”
“Okay! Thanks for your help!” The man turned, about to step forward, then abruptly pivoted back. “Ah! I’m Ace, by the way,” he said brightly, jabbing a thumb towards his chest. “And you are?”
“It does not matter.”
The man—Ace—tilted his head slightly. He didn’t look offended.
He simply looked at Shen Qingqiu. His grey eyes moved over Shen Qingqiu’s face with open, unguarded attention, as if committing it to memory.
Shen Qingqiu felt, inexplicably, shy.
It was a sensation he hadn't felt in years and one he immediately loathed. He very nearly opened his fan on instinct, a habitual motion to shield his expression, before stopping himself. There was nothing to hide. This was merely a mortal with no sense of propriety.
So instead, he glared back, daring the man to continue his insolent scrutiny, waiting for the inevitable sneer or mocking comment that usually followed when people looked too closely at him.
After a moment, Ace’s expression softened. Whatever silent conclusion he reached appeared to satisfy him. His mouth split into a toothy, unabashed grin.
“Okay!” he said cheerfully. “Bye, then. See ya around!”
Shen Qingqiu bit back the retort he had poised on the tip of his tongue for an insult that never came.
See him around? He scoffed at the empty air where the man had been, shaking off the irritating prickle of being caught off-guard. How preposterous. Their paths would never cross again.
(“Oh right, do you know where I can find something to eat?”
Ace turned back, but the pretty man in the pretty robes was already gone.
In fact, even though Ace had barely taken a few steps, his surroundings already felt…different. The air was heavier. The trees less luminous. The strange clarity in the atmosphere had dulled without him noticing when.
Huh. Weird.
His stomach growled loudly.
Ace immediately tossed the thought aside and began trudging through the forest in search of anything remotely edible.
Pretty Man had said his name didn’t matter. And for a brief moment, Ace had wondered if he was like him. Like him in the way he hated his—
Ace’s mouth pressed into a thin line for half a second.
Some people were secretive. Or grumpy. Or both. Pretty Man definitely looked like both.
Ace kicked a loose stone out of his path. “Food first,” he muttered to himself decisively.
Then he’d figure out how to get off this island.)
Rare as such incidents were, Shen Qingqiu had to admit that he had been wrong. He did meet Ace again.
A repeated inter-realm breach within a week. Was there something wrong with the boundary arrays between the two realms? How had it gone undetected? He would have to raise the matter with the other peak lords. Tch.
Shen Qingqiu knelt down and reached for Ace’s wrist. His pulse was strong and steady, if slightly fatigued. No sign of internal injury. The drowning had been shallow, more shock than damage. Shen Qingqiu decided that with some rest, Ace could be safely kicked off this realm (again).
He was about to withdraw his hand when he felt it. A faint pulse of demonic qi.
Shen Qingqiu frowned. A lower realm mortal infused with demonic qi…a Devil Fruit user?
It had barely been a week since their first encounter, and within that time, Ace had consumed a Devil Fruit and somehow breached the boundary again.
Devil Fruits were condensed demonic qi fallen from their world—residue expelled during large-scale purges of corrupted energy. When suppression arrays strained under accumulated impurity, when sealed demons thrashed against their bindings, when demonic cultivators underwent qi deviation—excess demonic qi was forced outward.
Whatever was rejected passed into the lower realm, where spiritual density was thinner and laws less rigid, and the expelled corrupted qi condensed into artifacts.
When consumed, these artifacts did not grant power so much as overwrite the mortal’s meridian network entirely, replacing orthodox circulation with demonic structure. Exposure to water, especially spiritually rich water, disrupted the flow of the corrupted qi, weakening the body.
That such residue condensed into artifacts, the so-called Devil Fruits, in the lower realm was already an irritation.
But for a mortal to ingest one and reappear here…that was not normal.
“See ya around,” Ace had said.
Shen Qingqiu pulled his hand away and stood, turning on his heel to face the gathered disciples. “He’s not a threat. Just a mortal fool.” A pause. “Bring him to the bamboo house.”
“Shizun? Shouldn’t we bring him to Qian Cao Peak?”
“No need to bother them. He doesn’t need medical treatment.” Shen Qingqiu gave the prone body one last glance. “He needs interrogation.”
By the time night fell, Ace—ahem, the intruder, because who knew if “Ace” wasn’t just a convenient alias—had been washed, dried, and changed into plain white inner robes.
He now laid still on the bedding on the floor, breathing steadily. Shen Qingqiu had been called in by one of the attendants once the cleaning and dressing were done.
The blanket was crumpled at one end. Instinctively, Shen Qingqiu adjusted it, tugging it up to cover Ace’s chest fully. Then he froze.
Grey eyes stared back at him, wide open and alert.
Then: a wide, unrepentant grin.
“Handsy, ain’t ya?”
Shen Qingqiu did not flinch. Internally, he calculated the odds of smothering this man with the pillow and pretending there was never a mortal infestation issue brewing.
Not getting a response, Ace waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “You’re more than welcome to steal my virtue.”
“That,” Shen Qingqiu finally said, “implies you had any to begin with.”
Ace wheezed out a laugh. “You’re funnier in my dream. And pretty.”
Shen Qingqiu blinked. Unbelievable. “This is not a dream.”
Ace gave him a lazy thumbs-up and promptly passed out again.
Omake (why did sqq appear before everyone else’s dramatic entrance?)
When they were preparing for their grand entrance to the human realm:
YQY (settling everyone down) - We must proceed with restraint. No one else is to step through. We are here just to make a show of force, to intimidate without attacking. Remember, interfering in lower realm affairs is already crossing a line.
-Ming Fan raises a hand timidly.-
YQY - Yes, Ming-shizhi?
Ming Fan (points behind YQY) - Um, Shizun went down first.
YQY (whirls around) - Wha—XIAO JIU!
QQQ (scoffing) - What an impatient asshole. Can’t believe we’re helping him.
LQG (deadpan) - You volunteered.
QQQ - stfu.
SQH (sweating buckets, thanking the Lord he isn’t one of the peak lords being sent down to face off against the frEAKING ADMIRALS, FUCK, he still can’t believe that he transmigrated into this cursed OP/SVSSS multiverse mashup) - J-Jiayou, everyone…