Arranging the Tontatta

After hearing Rebecca’s words, Yota was left speechless.

This little girl was only average in combat ability right now, and she wasn’t even a Devil Fruit user. What use did he have for her?

"No! How could I let my granddaughter sacrifice herself again?!" King Riku looked so agitated that Yota seemed like some kind of Demon King.

"I am also part of this country’s royal family. Of course I can sacrifice myself for this country," Rebecca said to her grandfather without hesitation.

Seeing that the two were about to start arguing again, Yota waved his hand. "Enough, enough. What use would I even have for you?"

At those words, Rebecca’s face immediately flushed. "M-my swordsmanship is quite good, and I can be your lover too…"

"Stop!" Yota raised a hand with a blank expression, feeling that his reputation had already suffered serious damage.

Besides, this girl was only fourteen, wasn’t she? Going after minors was illegal! The Great Harmony was always watching you!

King Riku looked as though he were about to have a heart attack. Yota seriously suspected that if he agreed on the spot, the old man would suffer a cerebral hemorrhage.

"Why is that the first thing you think of? Is Dressrosa the land of love and passion, so your minds can only think about this kind of thing?"

"Huh?!" Rebecca looked utterly confused. "Didn’t the newspaper say that you defeated the Beasts Pirates for Wano Country’s most beautiful woman?"

"What the hell?!" Yota suddenly had a bad feeling.

"Um, haven’t you read today’s newspaper?" Rebecca asked quietly as she looked at Yota’s darkening face.

"Bring me a newspaper!"

His bad feeling soon came true. Looking at the gossip column in the newspaper, Yota had already begun considering a hundred different ways to cook an albatross.

In truth, the report by a certain big newsman was not entirely wrong—he had merely switched around the order of Yota getting involved with Kozuki Hiyori and the Beasts Pirates being utterly defeated.

Thus, what should have been a story of a hero defeating an evil dragon and winning the beauty’s love became a story of a villain lusting after beauty and taking down another group of villains.

"I’ll pluck every last feather off that damned bird bastard!"

In the end, Yota still agreed to King Riku’s request. However, the person he wanted to serve him was not Rebecca, but her father—the furious Thunder Soldier toy, Kyros.

Kyros was fairly strong. If he had not been disabled, Ulti and Page One might not have been able to defeat him without transforming.

If he ate a decent Devil Fruit as well, his combat power should become much stronger.

"Father!" Yota waited for a while as he watched the father and daughter embrace and weep.

Once the two had calmed down, Yota made his demand for Kyros’s allegiance.

Kyros had a fiercely unyielding temperament. In theory, he and the members of the Donquixote Family should have been completely incompatible. But he had a daughter.

If he had been alone, Yota believed there would have been no way to persuade him unless he saved Dressrosa. But now, for the sake of his daughter, no matter how unwilling he was, he could only agree.

Yota was not afraid that he would betray him. For an upright man like Kyros, as long as Yota did not cross his bottom line, Kyros would give him loyalty that could at least be called adequate.

Afterward, Yota directly fitted him with a new leg. With the power of the Munch-Munch Fruit combined with Yota’s modification techniques, the leg was no weaker than the body he had painstakingly trained, restoring his combat power to its peak.

Seeing that his leg had been healed, Kyros finally developed some goodwill toward Yota. Rebecca looked at Yota with teary-eyed gratitude, only to be pulled away by Kyros, whose face had darkened again.

As for negotiations with the Miniature Kingdom, they were not difficult either. The Tontatta could be called models of innocence and naivety. Anyone with normal intelligence could fool them until they lost all sense of direction.

The Riku Royal Family had always had a good relationship with them, and through that connection, Yota quickly reached a series of labor agreements with them.

In fact, the Tontatta had never had a particularly good reputation in Dressrosa. No matter what legends the Riku Royal Family added to them—fairies, spirited away, and so on—it could not change the fact that the little people liked to steal.

Otherwise, Doflamingo would not have been able to enslave them so easily. Quite a few Dressrosa residents knew this perfectly well, yet almost no one suggested rescuing them.

Therefore, Yota felt that finding work for the Tontatta was better than letting them roam the streets and steal all the time. The little people might not have bad intentions, but like children, their concept of good and evil was far from complete.

To put it bluntly, if the Riku Royal Family had not covered for them in the past, the conflicts between the Tontatta and the residents of Dressrosa would never have been small. Moreover, King Riku’s isolation policy only treated the symptoms, not the cause. The Tontatta had to find their own social role in Dressrosa before they could truly integrate into society.

After Yota talked them around, the Tontatta’s minds were not very good at turning corners to begin with, much less when faced with such lofty social theories. Their eyes spun in circles as they listened, and in their confusion, they agreed to have their entire tribe work for Yota.

Fortunately, Yota was not some heartless exploiter. He did not impose a grueling work schedule on them, but gave them a nine-to-five system with generous benefits. After all, they were only growing plants. Even if the Tontatta worked at full capacity, the artificial Devil Fruit factory would not be able to process the output if production exceeded demand.

Yota did not intend to use artificial Devil Fruit in the Pirate World. After all, he could even draw genuine Devil Fruit. Unless these artificial Devil Fruit possessed abilities on the level of the artificial Devil Fruit created by Vegapunk, he did not care much about them.

But in other worlds, these artificial Devil Fruit would be extremely useful—they could directly transform people from other worlds to have the human physique of the Pirate World, allowing them to greatly strengthen their bodies through training alone.

To say nothing else, if these artificial Devil Fruit could be spread even slightly in the Naruto World, the Chakra he gathered in the future could increase dramatically.

Just as the bloodline of the Sage of Six Paths had increased the Naruto World’s foundation, the Pirate World’s physique and the Chakra system complemented each other.

Even if he traveled to other worlds in the future, artificial Devil Fruit would still be highly useful. Almost every form of special power cultivation complemented the human body, and the ability to greatly strengthen one’s body was equivalent to raising one’s foundation.