Time flowed on.
Tens of thousands of years passed, and the Marty Ringer Empire mined tens of thousands of gold-producing worlds—yet accomplished little else.
Explorers continued pressing forward through the boundless universe, discovering tens of billions of strange and magnificent worlds and gradually constructing a vast map of the known cosmos.
However, no matter how expansive the known universe became, solar sail technology remained an almost inconceivable piece of black technology.
It was like a magical key—one that forcibly elevated civilizations originally stuck in a medieval stage straight into the interstellar era, a level of development they were never meant to reach.
This kind of "seedling-pulling" growth model eventually demanded its price.
Even after tens of thousands of years of research and exploration, solar sail technology failed to advance at all.
Worse still, due to the lack of other crucial aerospace technologies, many worlds achieved space travel yet saw their civilizations stagnate completely, unable to make any meaningful progress.
The ships used by space pirates made this painfully obvious.
Aside from ensuring safe travel through the cosmos, almost everything else about them remained medieval.
Sails.
Masts.
Ropes.
Deckhands.
Solar sails had to be manually unfurled, and whenever malfunctions occurred, sailors were forced to climb up and down the rigging with their lives on the line.
A single misstep could see them swept into a cosmic storm—ripped apart without even leaving a corpse.
What was even more absurd was that when space pirates conducted raids, they often relied on boarding actions between ships.
More often than not, plunder was carried out by physically boarding enemy vessels—exactly like naval warfare in the Age of Sail.
From social structure to cultural habits, from daily life to technological development, everything revolved around solar sails.
And because solar sail technology could not advance, their civilization became locked in place.
The entire cosmic society stagnated—as though frozen tens of thousands of years in the past.
Even after all this time, instant interplanetary communication remained impossible.
Information across most regions of the known universe could only be transmitted via human couriers traveling on sailing ships.
The reason was simple:
Ships crossing the cosmic Styx reached their destinations faster than communication signals.
This inevitably forced many worlds to maintain feudal systems—or outright slavery.
As long as you had enough money, you could purchase a noble title from the emperor, claim a habitable planet as your territory, and establish your own nation.
The Empire would recognize your absolute sovereignty.
If needed, you could even hire imperial troops to guard your planet.
As for why interstellar trade flourished everywhere—yet Blue Star, the world where the story of One Piece takes place was excluded—the reason was equally simple.
The peoples of the cosmos were terrified of humans.
That fear granted Blue Star an unparalleled and unique position within the known universe.
Once upon a time, Blue Star had been marked on the imperial star charts.
At first, the cosmic races attempted to conquer it.
The result?
Exactly what had just happened again.
They were beaten senseless by the humans of Blue Star.
Using captured alien spacecraft, humans finally entered the universe—
Only to discover, to their own astonishment, that they possessed the most advanced weapons in existence.
Compared to humans, the technological level of cosmic civilizations—aside from space navigation—was laughably inferior.
Even more horrifying:
The strongest individuals of Blue Star could sweep entire planets alone, relying solely on personal combat power.
This realization ignited a terrifying greed within humanity.
Humans discovered that they could conquer the entire universe.
That they could become the supreme gods of the known cosmos.
And so—
Like mad dogs unleashed from their cages, they surged into the starry sea.
They burned.
They slaughtered.
They plundered.
Countless worlds were reduced to ruin.
Hundreds of millions of innocent cosmic beings were massacred.
Faced with such atrocities, the Emperor of the Marty Ringer Empire was forced to mobilize the full might of his nation to wage war against humanity.
After a grueling and catastrophic conflict, they barely managed to exterminate these human demons—
And forcibly imprisoned the survivors back on Blue Star.
Blue Star was declared a cosmic forbidden zone.
No one was ever allowed to approach or explore it ever again.
Humanity had to be sealed away forever—
Lest they once again bring disaster to the universe.
Even so, the Empire paid an enormous price.
It was gravely wounded, to the point that the emperor could no longer consolidate power and was forced to allow the nobles to rule autonomously.
Although humans were driven back to Blue Star and gradually forgot their past—
Their influence continued to fester throughout interstellar space.
Since the rise of humanity, the villains of the cosmos had learned one crucial lesson:
How to gain without paying a price.
Humans had taught the pirates of the universe what true godless plunder looked like.
As a result, interstellar criminals banded together into massive pirate coalitions, looting merchant vessels wherever they roamed.
Among them, one pirate stood above all others—
A peerless figure who had plundered thousands of worlds.
The wealth he amassed was so vast that it could blanket an entire planet.
For hundreds of years, legends of this great pirate continued to circulate throughout the universe.
Even now, countless fearless adventurers searched endlessly for the location of his hidden treasure.
When Xiao finished extracting these memories from the space pirates, his temples twitched violently.
This world was insane.
And somehow—
He still felt like he was late to the party.
A colossal interstellar empire spanning thousands of planets—
Nearly destroyed by the inhabitants of a single world?
Shouldn't sheer numbers alone have crushed humanity?
And yet—
The Empire had almost lost.
Was the Empire truly that weak?
Or were humans simply that terrifying?
Considering the combat power of space pirates, the answer became obvious.
Against someone with conqueror's Haki unleashed—
You could send as many as you wanted.
They would all die.
After all, Luffy had trained for only two and a half years from the moment he set sail to the Fishman Island arc—
And with a single release of Conqueror's Haki, he had directly wiped out 100,000 pirates—
Pirates who had already survived the first half of the Grand Line.
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