The mist clung to Marya's skin like cold silk, a tangible dampness that beaded on her leather jacket. Beneath her boots, an impossible surface of still, black water held her weight, each step sending out perfect, concentric rings that disrupted the perfect mirror of a starless sky. The silence was a physical thing, thick and deafening, broken only by the soft shush of her denim shorts and the creak of her tall combat boots. Then, the mist began to unravel.
It retreated not like a fading veil, but like a creature drawing a curtain, revealing a scene that stole the breath from her lungs. A figure sat in a high-backed chair of dark, carved wood, legs crossed elegantly. One hand held a book with a cracked, leather spine; the other lifted a glass of wine the deep, haunting red of old heart's blood. The woman turned a page, the sound a crisp snick in the absolute quiet.
Marya froze. Her golden eyes, usually so sharp and assessing, widened. A cold, impossible recognition slammed into her chest, a feeling so profound it was dizzying. The line of the jaw, the fall of raven-black hair, the poised, intellectual stillness—it was a ghost painted in perfect, agonizing detail.
"No," she muttered, the word a puff of vapor in the chill. "It can't be."
She forced a step closer, then another, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. The woman sipped her wine, closed the book with deliberate care, and looked up.
Silver eyes met gold.
The world tilted. Those were her mother's eyes—the legendary Celestial Sight of the lost Mansei Kingdom, like liquid mercury caught in lamplight, seeing everything. A smile touched the woman's lips, not broad, but warm, knowing, and edged with a familiar, noble arrogance.
"Marya."
The voice was exactly as she remembered from the faintest, most cherished echoes of memory: intelligent, melodic, carrying a weight of ancient secrets and a New World-born resilience. Marya's own voice, when it came, was strained, tight with a storm of disbelief and a desperate, guarded hope.
"Mother?"
Dracule Elisabeta Vaccaria stood, setting her glass on a small, floating table of the same dark wood. "You are close to awakening your power," she said, as if commenting on the weather.
Marya's brow furrowed, her stoic demeanor cracking under the surreal onslaught. "My power?"
"Yes, honey." Elisabeta closed the gap between them. The air hummed, carrying a faint, metallic scent like rain on old copper. Before Marya could retreat into suspicion, her mother's hand took hers.
The touch was solid. Warm. Real. It was the feel of calluses from handling tools and weapon grips, the slight coolness of a silver ring against her skin. Marya's fingers, of their own volition, tightened, holding on as if to a lifeline in a raging sea. The sensation was so overwhelmingly physical that Marya's head snapped up, her golden eyes searching her mother's face.
"How? Is this real?"
Elisabeta's smirk was pure, sardonic Vaccaria. "I am here. But we are not in the physical world. We are in the In-Between. A threshold only you can access." She gave Marya's hand a gentle, insistent tug. Marya resisted, her head shaking slowly, the long black hair inherited from her father swaying.
"I don't…"
"Your Devil Fruit's true power," Elisabeta said, her silver eyes gleaming with a scholar's passion, "is not merely to become mist, but to walk its currents. To commune with what lies within it—including echoes of those who have already crossed."
Marya's eyes bulged. To speak with the dead? It was a power that felt less like a weapon and more like a sacred, terrifying responsibility. A chill that had nothing to do with the mist crawled up her spine.
"Come," Elisabeta urged, her tone softening. "We do not have much time, and there is much to discuss. Your father kept this from you for good reason… but your journey now demands it."
The still water and mist vanished without a sound.
They stood on a wide, elevated bridge of stone that defied gravity, arcing over a deep valley. The air changed completely. It was thin, crisp, and carried a profound, mineral weight—the taste of iron and cold crystal on the back of the tongue. Marya gasped, her boots now on solid, intricately carved flagstones.
"What is this?" she breathed, her curiosity instantly overpowering her shock.
"This," Elisabeta said, her voice swelling with a profound, tragic pride, "is my home. Tonggou Province. The heart of the Mansei Kingdom."
Marya's head swiveled, her observant nature kicking into high gear, devouring the impossible vista.
The city lay cradled in a bowl of jagged, charcoal-gray peaks—the Carpathian Ridges. They speared into a sky the color of a deep, eternal twilight: an indigo so rich it felt like velvet. No clouds marred its expanse, only the faint, pulsing glow of unseen stars. The architecture was a breathtaking, jarring fusion. Sweeping gabled roofs, layered like giant stone feathers, topped structures built from fortified walls. But within those walls, embedded in the mortar, were veins of something dark and glassy—dormant fiber-optic cables, waiting for a pulse of energy lost to time.
Everywhere, the image of a graceful, long-necked bird with a human face was carved into lintels, bridges, and the very stones underfoot. Their stone eyes, some hollow, some holding faint, dead lenses, watched the silent streets.
The city below was a tapestry of red-tiled roofs, a startling blaze of color against the somber stone and indigo sky. Cobblestone streets wound between buildings, but the air wasn't filled with market cries or laughter. Instead, a low, resonant hum vibrated up through the soles of Marya's boots, a frequency so deep it was felt more than heard, emanating from the very ground. The Iron Altitudes. The smell was of charged static, aged parchment from vast, unseen libraries, and a clean, frigid stone.
Marya saw a massive, 300-foot spire of pure black obsidian—the Pillar of Kronstadt—rising from the city's heart like a frozen lightning bolt. It was scarred, cracked, a tombstone. She imagined it thrumming with power, a beacon to the stars, and felt a pang of loss for a history she never knew.
"He kept this from me," Marya stated, her voice flat, but her golden eyes were alive, tracing the carvings of the celestial bird.
"To protect you," Elisabeta said, standing beside her, a silhouette of grief and defiance against her lost world. "To have silver eyes in this world is to have a bounty by birth. The World Government hunts our legacy, seeks to scrub our 'Celestial Sight' from history itself." She turned, her silver eyes capturing Marya's. "But you carry it in your blood. And you carry this."
She gestured not to Marya, but to the scarab beetle symbol that Marya now realized was glowing softly on her own brow, a mark left by Achlys touch.
"Your power, the mist, the Void… it is tied to this place. To the thresholds we built. The Chrono-Gates." Elisabeta pointed to a distant, colossal stone archway that framed the blood-red sun. It looked like a grand, dead gateway to nowhere. "We believed we could speak to the heavens. That our 'Enlightened Path' made us untouchable. It was a hubris that cost us everything."
Marya listened, her calm, analytical mind piecing together the fragments. Her mother's research, the Poneglyphs, the Consortium's secrets—it all led here, to this silent, haunted monument of arrogance and wonder.
"Why show me now?" Marya asked, her guarded nature surfacing. "Is it just a history lesson?"
Elisabeta's smile returned, sharp and sad. "No, honey. It's a warning, and an invitation. The power you're touching—the Void in your sword, the mist in your soul—it is not a mere tool. It is a key. It can corrode reality, or…" She reached out, and her hand passed through the stone of the bridge parapet, making the solid rock ripple like water. "…it can open doors. To places. To people. But the door swings both ways. Igutoshi seeks to use you as its hinge."
The mention of the sword's spirit made Marya's hand instinctively twitch toward where Nisshoku's hilt would be. "It wants out."
"It wants home," Elisabeta corrected, her voice dropping. "And its home is a darkness that would consume you to get here. You stand on the threshold, Marya. Between your father's disciplined world and your mother's lost one. Between life and the In-Between." She placed her hand over Marya's chest, where the Heart Pirates insignia was emblazoned on her jacket. "Your journey, your guilt over Vaughn, your pursuit of my notes… it is all leading you to a choice. To become a warden of the threshold, or be consumed by it."
The setting around them pulsed with the low hum. For a fleeting moment, the dead fiber-optic veins in the walls flickered with a phantom blue light, and the distant, stone eyes of the Inmyeonjo statues gleamed as if catching a distant star. The very world of Mansei was a memory held in a crystal, and Marya was standing inside it.
Marya looked from the glorious, tragic ruins to her mother's fierce, loving face. The weight of it all—the legacy, the power, the crushing responsibility—settled on her shoulders. But within that weight, for the first time, was not just burden, but understanding. A map to her own chaos.
"So," Marya said, a faint, familiar smirk tugging at her own lips, mirroring her mother's. "No pressure."
Elisabeta laughed, a sound like silver bells and rustling pages. "None whatsoever." She began to fade, the vivid colors of Tonggou leaching away, the solid stone turning vaporous underfoot. "Remember this place, Marya. Remember the hum of the stones. It is your anchor. And remember… I am always in the mist."
The indigo sky, the red roofs, the silent, watching bird-faced statues—all dissolved back into the endless, quiet white.
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