After restocking the ship with food and water and sleeping for the night, we left Shashakima Island as soon as the sun rose, intending to get through the Calm Belt as quickly as possible.
The crew will be rotated between day and night, meaning the ship will be moving for all hours of the day until we finally leave the calm belt.
We will have no wind or water currents to push our ship, so we'll be using a coal engine to power a paddle-wheel that will push us through the water. We'll be slowing down drastically when compared to the speed we sailed in regular waters, but this is still the fastest way of reaching the North Blue.
One week. It will take us a full week before we reach the other side of the Calm Belt.
Someone better design better ship engines in the near future because I will lose my mind if I need to stay on board for a full week any time we need to cross from the Grand Line to one of the Blues.
---------------------------------------------
"Spandam, do you have any plans for solving this case?"
Walking into their room on the third day over the Calm Belt, Spandine looked down at his son, watching his eyes roam over four different encyclopedias with knowledge on the North Blue.
"Yeah..." Spandam answered tiredly as he turned the page on one of the books.
"...Are you going to tell me what it is?" Spandine asked. He took the time to look outside the window, watching the ripples on the flat surface of the water as the ship moved forward at a turtle's speed.
The Calm Belt was an incredibly thin strip of ocean, if it had currents and waves like a normal sea it would have been crossed long ago. Needing to take only a day at most to cross it. But its lack of winds and currents, while making traversal incredibly risky, aren't the most dangerous part of it.
"Chief! Another one is heading this way!" Spandine turned to the door to his quarters after hearing one of his subordinates yell to him.
"Tell Laskey to take care of it! I'm busy here!" He yelled back before he returned to looking at Spandam go over his books.
Outside the ship, a monstrously large Eel with bull-like horns emerged from the water, towering over the ship like a snake ready to descend upon a small mouse.
Only to crumple back into the water as its neck opened up, the voice of a man blandly yelling "Rankyakyu!" echoing in the distance as the large eel sunk back into the sea.
"...I still don't understand how that works," Spandam said calmly as he turned the page of one of the encyclopedias.
"I'll get one of them to explain it to you late- You're changing the subject!" Spandine pointed out with a proud grin as he smiled at his son, "You still haven't answered my question and you're already trying to get me to think of other things! You're a natural at this!"
"Uh-huh~" Spandam nodded uncaringly, "Kuen Island only has one village, creatively named Kuen Village. The Island itself is sizable in mass, but its population is rather small. Their main export, at least until a few decades ago, was Dance Powder, which kept the island lush and green. Following the outlawing of the powder, the Island has degraded into a wasteland, with the few areas of vegetation on the island being situated high on the mountain at the center of the island, leaving most of the island a bare and empty wasteland."
"Did you get all of that from those books? Impressive~ What else?" Spandine praised.
"According to Chief Bo, His men arrived at Kuen Island in search of a man named Mubiao, a criminal who killed Queen Francesca of the East Blue's Orujo Kingdom. He details how his men complained about the lack of water and food on the island, mentioning that they had to split up, with half of them staying on the island while the other half took their ship to get food and water from the nearby Karakara Marine Base," Spandam clicked his tongue, "Which was stupid by the way, they should have requested the marine base to bring the food and water to them instead of splitting apart," He rolled his eyes.
"Need extra water and food, CP2 was searching for Mubiao, Island has only one village, anything else we should know?" Spandine asked.
"Yeah," Spandam closed his books and placed them aside, "Bo wrote that he lost contact with his men twelve days before his writing turned gibberish, The agents on the ship returned to the island, but after they rejoined the rest they just stopped updating him. Their last message to Bo was them reporting that they'll climb the mountain to have a vantage point on the island. This means that something on that island is the reason the Cipher Pol 2 agents went missing. If we figure out what happened to them, we might get closer to solving whatever cipher Bo is using to write his unintelligible entries. And once we solve his cipher-"
"We solve this case." Spandine smirked at his son's deduction skills, "It seems all these books are good for something,"
"You're saying that like you think they weren't good for something before now." Spandam pointed out, glaring at his father with his ghoulish-looking eyes.
"Troo!"
"Thank you Funkfreed..." Spandam nodded to the white Elephant that sat in the corner of the room.
-------------------------------------------
The rest of the trip was slow and boring, with the rare Sea King attack being easily delt with via the Cipher Pol agents using their Rokushiki techniques.
"Yeah, I still don't get how those things work..." Spandam said tiredly as he sat on the deck of the ship, his back leaning against a white elephant, as he watched a giant sea beast fall dead into the water, followed by an agent jumping on the air as they slowly made their way back down to the ship.
"You just kick super fast, it compresses air and turns it into a sharp blade of wind." One of the nearby Agents explained to him.
"I get that that's how it works, I just don't see how it's possible... In order to kick with enough force to generate a blade of wind like that, your leg will explode off of your body in a shower of blood and gore, the human body shouldn't be able to handle such forces!"
"Maybe so... Maybe it's a person's latent Haki protecting their body~" The agent said, shrugging her shoulders without giving anything much thought.
"What's Haki?" Spandam asked.
"Ehh, how do I explain it?" The Agent clicked her tongue in thought, "It's hard to explain really, just think of it as your willpower becoming a tangible thing that you can use to aid you." She tried to explain, her hands motioning around as she searched for a way to properly explain what Haki was.
"Give an example," Spandam told her.
"Still ordering me? Brat..." She whispered, "Remember Juanzo the Spike from Shashakima Island?" She asked.
"The weirdo that jumped through the wall. What about him?"
"When he tried to use his Devil Fruit, his hand turned into a spike, you remember that, right? Well, after he transformed his hand, he covered it in Armament Haki, using his Haki to reinforce his hand's durability and likely also the penetrative power of his spike." She explained.
"That's what it was?" Spandam wondered out loud, "I just assumed it was part of his devil fruit,"
"It wasn't. It was his Haki."
"And how can you learn Haki?" Spandam asked, a tilt in his voice as he seemed to perk at all the new information he was getting.
"Training mostly, Haki comes in three different types, each requiring different training methods to achieve and master, Armament Haki for example is mostly physical in- wait a minute..." The agent paused as she turned to look at Spandam, watching the boy give her an innocent look as if he was listening to her tell him a fairy tale, "I don't think I'm allowed to tell you any of this!"
"Yes you are~" Spandam innocently told her, the look on his face nothing more than an attempt to get her to keep talking.
"Troo!" Funkfreed agreed with his best friend.
"You almost got me there, Brat. I won't let it happen again!" Agent Deirdre chuckled before she walked away from the kid and his sword.
"Yes you will~" She heard Spandam say as he watched her leave.
"Heh... What a weird brat..."
-----------------------------------
Spandam stared at the sky as the people around him moved about loudly, his eyes focusing on the single cloud floating up in the sky high above him.
"Troo?" Funkfreed used his trunk to nudge at Spandam's back before he snaked it under his shoulders.
"We made it..." Spandam whispered as the trunk wrapped around him and lifted him onto the elephant's back.
And as the reincarnated boy sat on the White Elephant's back, he stared at the fog-covered island in the distance.
"Welcome to the North Blue..."