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Chapter 161: Piloting Skills
"How is that even possible?" Nami shook her head, staring out at the vast, undulating expanse of the White Sea. The breeze up here was crisp, almost painfully fresh, lacking the heavy saltiness of the ocean below. "Even the Knock Up Stream that brought us to the sky only reached an altitude of 7,000 meters. We're currently 10,000 meters up. How could normal seawater possibly reach all the way up here to form these clouds?"
"If we think about it along the lines of the Knock Up Stream…" Robin rested her chin on her hand, her sharp eyes scanning the horizon. She pondered for a moment, piecing together the geographical puzzle. "Perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years ago, there was an even more massive, absurdly powerful current. One of cataclysmic proportions that scooped up a massive amount of the Blue Sea and hurled it into the sky."
Hearing Robin's words, Ganyu's train of thought came to a sudden halt.
She closed her eyes, and she couldn't help but recall the terrifying scene she had witnessed at the bottom of the ocean just moments before riding the Knock Up Stream. The memories were vivid: a gargantuan cavern resting at the base of the current, with scorching, angry magma surging from the earth's crust. She remembered the shocking sight of freezing seawater pouring into that abyssal hole, instantly vaporizing into catastrophic columns of steam.
Judging from the sheer scale of that thermal reaction, the seabed beneath the Knock Up Stream was indeed a dormant volcano quietly building up immense, world-shaking pressure.
This meant reality very likely aligned perfectly with Robin's deduction. In the distant, unrecorded past, there might have been geological activity so violent it reshaped the very atmosphere, permanently sending a portion of the ocean into this sky. To an immortal adeptus who had witnessed the shifting of mountains and the carving of seas in Liyue, such a massive terrestrial upheaval was not only plausible—it was familiar.
"Then why are the clouds here hard?" Zoro knelt down, poking the thick, soft cloud layer beneath his feet with the scabbard of the Wado Ichimonji. It yielded like a dense marshmallow before springing back into shape. "Normally… clouds shouldn't look or feel like this, right? They're just fog."
That was indeed a good question.
Hearing this, Konis's father, Pagaya, chuckled good-naturedly from where he knelt beside the Waver. He carefully glanced over at Luffy, who was currently sprawled out on the sandy white beach, coughing up cloud-water and looking half-dead. It was Pagaya's first time seeing someone so catastrophically terrible at swimming; the Cloud Sea right off the shore was barely waist-deep, yet the rubber boy had still managed to nearly drown himself in seconds.
"Er, I believe I can answer that question for you," Pagaya said, clearing his throat. He spoke with the gentle patience of a man sharing local folklore. "Here on Sky Island, our scholars have proposed similar theories to your friend's. The 'Sea Clouds' and 'Island Clouds' that make up our world are actually formed from prolonged contact between a specific, dense substance from the Blue Sea and the unique high-altitude moisture found only within the Imperial Cumulus."
He paused, adjusting his glasses and seeming to weigh his words carefully so the Blue Sea dwellers could understand. "So, our 'Sea Clouds' and your 'seawater' might actually share a great deal of similarity on a fundamental level. It's simply water that has taken on a different physical state."
"Oh! So that's how it is!"
The Straw Hat crew answered in unison, nodding their heads with deadly serious expressions, displaying remarkable tacit understanding.
Well.
Even after Pagaya's thorough "explanation," they clearly hadn't understood a single thing. But since the friendly local said so, they were more than happy to just go with it.
With the science lesson out of the way, the crew returned to the main attraction: the Waver.
After Luffy, Usopp, and Sanji had all finished their disastrous, flailing attempts to ride the single-seat craft, Zoro and Robin took their turns. The results were largely the same. Robin maintained her composure but simply couldn't find the balance, sliding off with a graceful splash. Zoro, relying entirely on brute strength to force the handlebars to obey, overcompensated and sent the Waver spinning out of control before face-planting spectacularly into the Cloud Sea.
Chopper, watching the Devil Fruit users sink like stones, furiously shook his head and gave up out of sheer terror of drowning.
Thus, after everyone else had failed, only Ganyu and Nami remained.
Unexpectedly, both women mastered the temperamental Waver with absolute, infuriating ease.
Ganyu went first. Her movements were incredibly steady, her footwork possessing an ethereal lightness. Her slightly petite frame stood delicately on the wooden deck; it looked as though a random gust of wind could blow her off the vehicle. Instead, she was as steady as a mountain peak.
Every rise, fall, and violent sway of the Waver failed to affect her center of gravity in the slightest. She accelerated, the dial in the back humming loudly, sending her cutting across the White Sea faster and faster, yet she remained perfectly balanced, her posture as serene as if she were taking a leisurely stroll through a garden.
On the other hand, Nami's mastery was born of pure nautical instinct. As a navigator who had been sailing ships alone across treacherous oceans since she was eight years old, she possessed a talent and feel for piloting vehicles that bordered on the supernatural.
Her posture was even more effortless and dynamic than Ganyu's. She easily commanded the Waver, leaning into the wind, doing tight laps, accelerating into jumps, and making sudden, spray-kicking stops across the sea surface. She rode the sky-vehicle like it was an extension of her own body, leaving both Konis and Pagaya completely dumbfounded on the shore.
"Whoa, that's amazing! Ganyu and Nami can actually ride it without flipping over!" Luffy watched from the beach, completely recovered from his near-drowning, his eyes sparkling with a mix of intense envy and admiration.
"Fantastic, Ganyu-san!! Nami-san!!! You're like beautiful goddesses dancing on the clouds!" Sanji cheered excitedly, spinning like a top in the sand.
"So it's not an absolute rule that every ship you pilot has to flip immediately…" Zoro muttered quietly to himself, crossing his arms and recalling some rather unpleasant memories of his own solo bounty-hunting days at sea.
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