Chapter 1154: Can't Even Die

In the winter that followed Loki's birth, the same year Charlotte Linlin killed Jorul, ceaseless disasters left Elbaph unable to grow crops or net fish. Estrid went on blaming the ruin on her cursed child, though plenty of giants chalked it up to chance. The infant reached for his mother only to be shut out, which devastated him. As hunger turned giant against giant, the broken-spirited people found Estrid's curse easier to swallow. One giant moved to kill Hajrudin as Loki's half brother, and Ida for supposedly seducing Harald, but the king came back in time to spare them, announcing that allied nations had pooled food to carry Elbaph through the famine.

Estrid soon died, rejecting her son to the end, and the people credited Loki's curse. When Harald was finally able to cradle the boy, his eyes were already kept wrapped, the guards insisting he suffered from some eye ailment. Loki never smiled before his father, having already given up on love, and the role of his keeper fell to Estrid's brother, a man who loathed him no less than she had. Ida opened a bar in the Underworld. Seven years on, Harald told Jarul of sneaking into the Levely, where a killing kept his cover from being blown. Jarul raised the Galleila, over a hundred giant shipwrights taken captive at far shores, and suspected Harald's strained ties with the World Government traced to ancient history rather than any fault of his own.

Harald raised eight branch routes to bind and enrich the country, yet loathing of Loki only deepened after the lucky horse Asla and then his uncle were found dead. In Harald's absences, Loki raided villages with Underworld beasts and struck Hajrudin for defending their father's ways, sneering at the friends who came to his aid. Nothing closed the wound his mother left, and one day he hurled himself from the Sun World into the Underworld to die, only for his unbreakable body to save him, leaving him to weep that death itself is denied to him. It was on that very day that he first crossed paths with Rocks D. Xebec, drawn at last without silhouette to reveal Blackbeard's face and his fatherhood of him.