The pages turned themselves.
Ornn stood at the forge with the Creation Illustrated Book open in his mind, flipping through weapons and artifacts that would have made any collector weep with envy. Blades wreathed in starfire. Armors older than kingdoms. Instruments of destruction beautiful enough to be called art.
His breathing grew heavier with each page.
If I could forge something like that flaming blade... The thought arrived vivid and indulgent. The Beasts Pirates, the Holy Land, all of it — burned to the waterline.
The Illustrated Book, as if sensing his daydream, locked itself on a single page.
[Flowing Blade — Ruohuo (Top-Grade Legendary): A Zanpakuto capable of releasing, storing, and freely manipulating high-temperature flames exceeding 6,000 degrees Celsius.]
[Forging Requirements: High-Grade Sake Heart Steel + Five Fire-Attribute Devil Fruits, or the hearts of five fire-attribute Fruit users.]
Ornn stared at it. Then he exhaled through his teeth.
"Five fire-attribute fruits. Right."
He ran the list in his head. Flame-Flame. Magma-Magma. Heat. Melt. That was four, generously interpreted — and scraping the bottom of every fire-adjacent Fruit he could recall from the entire series. There simply wasn't a fifth reasonable candidate. He wasn't about to invent one and die holding a half-finished sword.
He closed that page and moved on.
The Illustrated Book was enormous. Thousands of entries, organized loosely by tier — Top-Grade Legendary at the front, descending from there. He flipped steadily, searching for anything that didn't require fruits he couldn't realistically obtain inside a weapons factory on Onigashima.
The results were not encouraging.
"Kaleidoscope — Crossed Tail"... String-String Fruit or the heart of a String user.
"Salvation"... Heal-Heal Fruit or the heart of a Heal user.
"Thor's Hammer"... Rumble-Rumble Fruit or—
"None of them," Ornn muttered. "Not a single top-grade legendary that doesn't need a Fruit."
He adjusted his expectations downward and jumped to the Middle-Grade Legendary section, already preparing himself for disappointment.
Then a familiar shape stopped him cold.
The silhouette on the page was unmistakable. A breastplate. Broad. Heavy. Built for someone who intended to be hit and found the experience mildly inconvenient. He had spent an embarrassing number of hours building this item in a previous life, stacking it on a champion who turned every fight into an endurance contest.
[Heart of Steel (Top-Grade Legendary): When a hostile unit enters within 300 meters, a mark condenses upon them within three seconds. Shattering the mark deals physical damage scaled to the user's maximum health. Additionally, the user's physical constitution is permanently and incrementally enhanced with each activation. (Cooldown: one hour per target.)]
[Forging Requirements: High-Grade Sake Heart Steel + Five Animal-Class Devil Fruit hearts.]
Ornn read it twice.
Then he set the hammer down.
Permanently enhanced constitution. Every single time the mark breaks.
This wasn't a weapon. It was a growth engine. Stack enough activations and the gap between him and the Yonko tier would begin — slowly, stubbornly — to close. The item didn't ask for fire Fruits, or surgery Fruits, or anything exotic. It asked for Animal-Class.
He was standing on an island drowning in Animal-Class Devil Fruit users.
The plan assembled itself in the space of a few breaths.
Step one: Forge high-grade Sake Heart Steel.
Step two: Acquire five Animal-Class Fruit hearts — by any means available.
Step three: Forge the Heart of Steel.
Step four: Never stop wearing it.
Simple. Brutal. Achievable.
The exhaustion that had been pressing down on him since the transformation faded. He turned back to the forge with the focused quiet of a man who had just found his direction.
He started immediately.
Coal went in first — several heavy shovelfuls — and he worked the bellows in long, steady strokes until the furnace roared back to full heat. Then he turned and counted out twelve Sake Iron Ore ingots from the workshop's storage. Not so many that someone would notice. Enough to give him what he needed.
Each ingot, according to his predecessor's memory, held enough material for a standard-length blade. A full breastplate in Ornn's current — and growing — proportions would need considerably more.
He loaded them all into the furnace and waited, watching without blinking until each piece softened to a deep, glowing crimson. Then he drew them out one by one with the tongs, arranged them in a four-by-four rectangular block on the anvil, and began hammering them together.
The work was loud. It was always loud. Nobody looked twice at a craftsman making noise at his forge.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
He drove the ingots together slowly, methodically, until the boundaries between them disappeared and twelve pieces became one. The resulting block weighed somewhere around eighty kilograms when he lifted it — heavy enough that the warden's workers would have struggled, comfortable enough in Ornn's grip that he barely noticed.
Good. More than enough for a breastplate.
He set it back against the anvil and began the carburizing* process. Carbon ash packed around every surface, pressed into the grain of the metal. Then a coat of Wano mud slurry — a technique buried in his predecessor's muscle memory — sealed it all in. Back into the furnace for another ten minutes, until the block glowed the right shade of near-white.
Then out again, onto the anvil, and the real work began.
The hammer fell in a rhythm that swallowed time.
Each strike stripped impurities, compressed the grain, drove carbon deeper into the iron's structure. Sparks erupted outward like small, dying stars with every contact. The block elongated under the repeated blows, stretching from a square mass into a long, dense bar.
When it was long enough, Ornn turned it horizontal, let half hang off the anvil's edge, and hammered that half down until it folded completely over the half that remained. Then he fused the fold flat and drove out the seam until no boundary remained.
One cycle complete.
He needed one hundred.
Ninety-nine more times — folding, fusing, hammering, folding again. The process that turned ordinary Sake Iron into high-grade Sake Heart Steel, the only material capable of carrying a legendary creation's structure without fracturing under the weight of it.
The forge roared. The hammer rang.
Ornn worked in silence, and did not stop.