Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader

The Overdue rode considerably lower in the water than she should have—and considerably more crowded, now that Hollow Tide had apparently decided her own ship could "wait its turn" and simply commandeered Milo’s deck for the crossing instead. Along with her came roughly a dozen of her crew, who’d invited themselves aboard with the same casual, irresistible force she applied to everything. Just for fun, she had no intention of sailing the sea in a dying ship; she was merely killing time while waiting for her Fool bird to do his thing.

"You understand," Milo said, for what he suspected was the fourth time that morning, pacing the deck while Hollow Tide sat cross-legged on a barrel, sharpening a knife she didn’t appear to need for anything in particular, "that this King commands a Talent capable of seizing total, involuntary control of anyone he chooses. Not a spell. Not a trick. Absolute obedience, the instant he decides he wants it. I watched him do it to a guard with nothing but a look."

"Sounds annoying," Hollow Tide said, testing the knife’s edge against her thumb.

"It’s not annoying, it’s—" Milo pressed the heels of his hands briefly against his eyes. "It’s one of the most dangerous abilities I’ve ever encountered in either version of my life. I need you to actually understand the shape of the threat before we—"

"Loof." She looked up, entirely unbothered, knife still balanced loosely in one hand. "Can he punch a hole through a mountain?"

"I don’t—probably not, but that’s not really the—"

"Then I’m not worried," she said cheerfully, and went back to her knife.

Milo opened his mouth to argue further, found no version of the argument that seemed likely to land, and instead reached into the empty air beside him and pulled a fresh set of charts out of nothing at all—the specific, effortless motion of a man withdrawing an object from a space that existed nowhere physical, watching it simply resolve into his open hand.

The entire deck went quiet.

"Wait." Hollow Tide was on her feet so fast the knife nearly went overboard. "Wait, wait, wait. You already learned it? I gave you that book yesterday."

"I know."

"Nobody learns Inventory in a day! I had to practice for weeks before I could pull anything bigger than a coin out of the void without accidentally dropping half my own arm in with it!" She grabbed his wrist, staring at his hand as if it might reveal some hidden trick if she looked hard enough. "How?"

So Milo explained—the passive that absorbed a manuscript’s contents in full, complete, effortless comprehension; the active function that summoned the phantom of whoever had written it, gone now, teaching him whatever the pages held in ten uninterrupted minutes; the specific, structural rule that class or category never mattered at all, only whether his own attributes met the bar the skill demanded.

Hollow Tide stared at him throughout the entire explanation with an expression that slowly, steadily transformed from confusion into something close to religious awe.

"That," she said when he finally finished, "is the single most broken thing I have ever heard of in my entire life. And I once watched a man eat an entire Devil Fruit whole because he thought swallowing it faster would give him double the power."

"Did it?"

"No. He just choked and got a normal amount of power, slightly late." She waved the tangent away, already turning toward her crew with the specific, bright energy of a woman who had just discovered a new favorite toy. "OI! Somebody get the Fool some books! Good ones! Not the boring ledger nonsense, the fun ones!"

What followed was, without question, the single best afternoon Milo had experienced in either of the lives he currently remembered living.

A broad-shouldered woman with gill-slits along her throat produced, from some waterproof satchel, a slim volume that let him breathe underwater without so much as holding his breath—and Milo spent a full hour hanging half over the rail afterward, face submerged, marveling at a coral reef sliding past beneath the hull in colors he’d genuinely never once imagined a book could describe accurately, let alone let him see firsthand. A grinning young man with singed eyebrows tossed him a scorched, soot-stained manuscript for Fireball, and Milo’s first attempt promptly set the mainsail’s edge alight, to the crew’s enormous, delighted amusement, before he managed a second, considerably more controlled attempt that punched a small, satisfying hole clean through a floating barrel forty feet off the bow. Someone else handed him Ice Spear, and he spent a solid twenty minutes freezing patches of seawater into small, drifting rafts purely to see if he could, while three separate pirates placed increasingly enthusiastic bets on how many he’d manage before losing his balance and falling in.

"Try this one," Hollow Tide said, tossing him a fourth book with the casual air of a woman distributing candy. "It’s stupid. You’ll love it."

He learned Leap an hour later and discovered, with a whoop of genuine, undignified delight, that a single running jump now carried him five times the distance his own legs alone could have managed—clearing the width of the entire deck in one bound, landing hard enough to stagger, but grinning wide enough that nobody bothered mocking the stumble.

"I have," Milo announced, breathless, soaked, faintly singed, and happier than he could remember being in longer than he wanted to properly examine, "never had this much fun learning anything in my entire life. And I once read a thousand books in ten hours."

"See," Hollow Tide said, settling back onto her barrel with visible satisfaction, "this is what I don’t get about you. You’ve got the single best power I’ve ever heard of, and you spend it on skills that fix wars, rescue sisters, and outsmart Kings. Where’s the fun part of your list?"

"Saving my sister is the fun part," Milo said, still catching his breath.

"That’s not fun, that’s duty." She said the word like it tasted bad. "My brother had a duty, too. He’d make me take my medicine, go to his appointments, and show up for everyone who needed him, every single day, right up until it wore him down to nothing.

Duty’s important, sure. But it’s not a dream, Fool. A dream’s supposed to be the thing you want underneath all the duty—the thing you’d still want even if nobody needed saving at all." She tilted her head, studying him with that same sharp, unexpected perceptiveness she kept hiding under all the noise. "So. What’s your dream? Not your duty. Your actual dream."

Milo opened his mouth to answer with something reasonable, something appropriately modest, and found the honest answer arriving before he could talk himself out of it.

"I wanted to be a teacher," he said. "There was a classroom once—a while ago, in a way I can’t really explain properly. Children. A slate board. Twenty kids who thought I was funny and occasionally insufferable, and I loved every single impossible minute of it."

Hollow Tide looked at him for a long moment, and then, to his genuine surprise, laughed—not unkindly, but with the specific, exasperated fondness of someone watching a friend badly undersell himself.

"That’s it? That’s the whole dream? One classroom?" She shook her head, grinning. "Fool, you fought a book-golem the size of a house, taught magic to actual monsters disguised as children, learned four skills in one afternoon like it was nothing, and your dream is one room with twenty kids in it? Think bigger. You’re built for bigger."

Milo opened his mouth to protest and found, turning the thought over properly for the first time, that some old, stubborn ceiling in his own head had just quietly cracked open.

He thought of Fitch, dying alone in a loop of his own fear, teaching only the safest, smallest spell because reaching further had always felt like too much risk to take with someone else’s children. He thought of Wren’s hair-golem, Oliver’s paper knight, and every single kid in that classroom who’d started the year believing their own domain was too small to matter. He thought of a King who burned libraries specifically because knowledge, spread too widely, had always terrified men who needed people small in order to stay large themselves.

"Knowledge," Milo said slowly, feeling the shape of it arrive properly for the first time, whole and certain the way every true thing eventually did for him. "Not one classroom. All of it. Every book that’s ever been banned, every skill some King decided was too dangerous for ordinary hands to hold, every child anywhere who’s ever been told that wanting to know something made them dangerous instead of simply curious." He looked up, and found the words picking up speed now, the way they always did once he stopped being careful about them. "I want to set it loose. Everywhere. No King’s permission required, no bloodline deciding who’s allowed to learn what. Knowledge belongs to whoever’s hungry enough to go looking for it, and I want to spend whatever life I’ve got left making that true for as many people as I possibly can."

Silence settled over the deck for a moment—a genuine, surprised silence, the whole crew apparently having stopped what they were doing at some point during the speech without Milo quite noticing.

Then Hollow Tide grinned, wide and delighted and entirely without irony, and slapped him hard enough across the back that he nearly pitched face-first into the ice-spear-riddled water below.

"There it is," she said, satisfaction radiating off her like heat off a bonfire. "Now that’s a dream worth punching a King over."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!