Chapter 23: She Caught Two Sea Kings
"Just like I remembered — even the interior matches. Ramen Ichiraku. The weird thing is, the previous owner of this body lived in Konoha for seventeen years and apparently never once came here to eat."
Ryū let his gaze drift around the shop. Nothing obviously special about it. No visible reason why, across every catastrophe that had leveled the Hidden Leaf, this one establishment kept coming out unscathed.
Maybe that was just the author's will at work. As long as Kishimoto didn't want the ramen stand destroyed, it would survive — even if the planet beneath the Naruto world spontaneously detonated. Ramen Ichiraku would probably just pivot to selling ramen in space.
That was Ryū's snarky inner commentary, anyway. He found himself a seat in an unobtrusive corner and called out to the owner — the man whom the internet had christened 'the Ōtsutsuki Ichiraku,' whose actual name was Teuchi.
"Hey, Teuchi-san — one bowl. Actually, no. Make it three."
His stomach had already rendered a verdict: one bowl would not be sufficient.
Teuchi, dressed no differently from any ordinary cook, nodded pleasantly. "Three bowls, got it! To go?"
"No, I'll eat here."
Teuchi paused. He looked Ryū over — this unfamiliar customer — with unmistakable puzzlement.
A single bowl of Ichiraku ramen was enough to leave a grown adult seventy percent full. Drink the broth too, and you'd hit ninety. The young man in front of him was neither heavy nor noticeably muscular. Teuchi had initially assumed he was ordering for family to take home. Three bowls, eaten alone, at this table?
Questionable. But the customer had spoken, and there was ramen to make.
Ryū, for his part, had no idea what doubts were running through Teuchi's head. He was already sitting quietly in his corner, consciousness half-submerged in the Dimensional Chat Group.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: The hour ran out. Phew — managed to buy out most of a street's worth of Fish-Man Island souvenirs, and caught two Sea Kings on the side.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: The souvenirs cost several tens of millions of Berries. The Sea Kings were free, of course — you can just catch them.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: [Image] [Image] [Image] [Image] [Image] [Image] [Image] …All of these are Fish-Man Island souvenirs. Now I'm trying to figure out where to keep the two Sea Kings.
Crazy Diamond: That's practically a mountain of stuff. How much did all that cost?!
Crazy Diamond: The new kid with less than ¥150,000 to his name is shaking.
Kaguya-sama: I'm not very familiar with One Piece's economy or what Berries are actually worth, but looking at that pile… I'd guess somewhere around forty or fifty million Berries?
Crazy Diamond: F-forty… fifty million?! Even converted to yen that's an insane number!
Kaguya-sama: I suppose? I'm technically still in high school, but my accounts combined probably have… a hundred, maybe two hundred million yen in them?
Crazy Diamond: …*shaking intensifies*
One had to hand it to Yukari Yakumo — this was a remarkably bold move. She'd practically cleared out an entire street's worth of inventory. The souvenirs really were stacked to the ceiling.
But looking at the volume of photos she'd posted, it was clear she wasn't at Fish-Man Island anymore. She'd already made it back to Gensōkyō.
As for how she'd transported that much merchandise — that was presumably known only to her. She probably had some kind of storage item, the Gensōkyō equivalent of a spatial ring. In a place filled wall to wall with yōkai, a storage artifact wasn't particularly surprising.
The boldest part, though, was the Sea Kings. She'd gone into the ocean and caught two of them. Alive. And they were big ones.
Imagine: two Sea Kings, each somewhere between three and four kilometers in length, deposited into Gensōkyō — and Yukari realizing almost immediately that there was nowhere to put them. Her entire estate's pond probably couldn't fit a single fin.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: Mm… I suppose the total wasn't that much. Around ninety million Berries. Whitebeard gave them to me, so.
Edward Newgate: Gurararara! Ninety million Berries is nothing. A trivial sum.
Crazy Diamond: Ninety million is a TRIVIAL SUM?! Poverty has truly limited my imagination.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: Slight miscalculation on my part — I didn't realize Sea Kings were quite this large. I'll have to throw them back into the sea to keep them properly, won't I.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: Actually, never mind. Too much trouble. I'll just eat them.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: How does one go about gutting a Sea King?
RawrSoFierce: …A certain dashing Admin quietly passes through.
Ryū surfaced in the chat just long enough to post that, then went back to scrolling through the backlog. Reading the group's conversations was one of his preferred ways to kill time.
The members here really were something else. Every single one of them. And they were so entertaining to listen to.
RawrSoFierce: @The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden — wouldn't your fox notice the Sea Kings and ask where they came from?
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: You mean Ran? When I dropped the first one out, I nearly gave her a heart attack. I explained it was prey I'd hunted down during my few days away — winter stockpiles.
RawrSoFierce: That is an absolutely airtight explanation. For absolutely no one.
RawrSoFierce: No sane person is going to believe that.
The Eternally Seventeen-Year-Old Maiden: Hmm, you may have a point… Tell her I found them?
RawrSoFierce: …Do whatever you want.
Of the current Dimensional Chat Group members, the most consistently active chatterers — besides Ryū himself — were Yukari Yakumo and Kaguya Shinomiya, followed by the newcomer Josuke Higashikata. The Little Wandering Planet had gone quiet lately.
Whitebeard was occupied with his son's affairs — he'd mentioned something about bringing Thatch home to be buried in his homeland.
Including Ryū, the group currently had six members.
He'd been thinking about appointing a Moderator. There were times he wasn't in the group, and having someone to maintain basic order would be useful — otherwise a certain someone would keep openly steering conversations into inappropriate territory, corrupting the innocent members of the group. Yukari Yakumo was the chief offender, and had done it brazenly more than once.
Six people was just too few, though. Better to wait until the numbers grew a little. Once the membership broke into double digits, he'd add a Moderator.
As for who that Moderator should be —
That was a problem for later.
Because the ramen had arrived.