The pirates sat and forgot, and they really believed the nine truths and one lie.

Scorpion has loved playing with puppets since he was a child. Due to his poor family background, he and his parents performed outside, and his family were all famous puppeteers in the local area.

The puppets controlled by these puppeteers are pulled by a thin string invisible to ordinary people on their fingers, and they use their finger skills flexibly to make the puppets move in front of the audience.

Scorpions' talent for puppeteering is far superior to their parents'. Two adults use two fingers to connect a puppet, and can only control a maximum of five puppets to perform behind the scenes.

At a young age, he could use his ten fingers to manipulate puppets vividly, making the audience believe that the puppets were alive. For this, his family could receive a lot of bounty.

Until the day he was ten years old, his parents went out to buy something and never came back. He waited and waited, but his two closest relatives still did not show up.

I had a bad feeling in my heart, so I went out to look for them on an empty stomach the next day. It took me less than an hour to find my parents, but they could no longer move and were lying on the ground like cold corpses.

This puppeteer couple was very unlucky. When they went to the market to purchase supplies, they encountered a gunfight between pirates and the navy. Scorpion's mother became a hostage of the pirates.

The farther the branch base is from the naval headquarters, the worse the quality of the soldiers is. This is a strong correlation. Some poor people entered the naval system and became slaves of the naval commander, doing laundry, cooking, farming and fishing for the commander's family.

Another group of ruffians entered the navy system and further corrupted the navy's military discipline, from the bottom to the top. Without upper-level supervision, the so-called justice is just a decoration, and only interests and wealth are eternal.

Scorpion's mother did not receive any rescue. The navy sergeant in charge ordered to shoot her and the pirates to death. The junior navy officers beside the sergeant would not question their superiors' orders.

The moment more than a dozen guns pulled the trigger, Scorpion's mother and the pirate were shot dead on the spot. Scorpion's father wanted to stop all this, but after the incident he was also beaten into a pirate.

Scorpion was shot in the head by the Marine sergeant who led the team. When he arrived there the next day, he saw the bodies of his parents being loaded onto a bullock cart by the surrounding neighbors.

The navy did not clean up the scene after killing people, and would not compensate for the damage to the surrounding environment. The grassroots soldiers have their salaries withheld all year round, and it is already quite good for them to have a full meal in the sub-base. Not having to eat a free meal in a restaurant in town is already a favor for this small town.

Scorpion followed the ox cart to the outskirts of the town and saw with his own eyes that the group of adults dug a big pit, threw more than a dozen corpses into the pit, and then buried them with soil.

The people of the town were kindhearted enough not to throw the bodies directly into the sea to feed the fish. There were mass graves all around here, with at least hundreds of people buried there.

Everyone in the town knows this child, and can only sigh at the fate that Scorpion will face next. They wonder what kind of substantial help is needed. For these poor people who depend on the sea for their livelihood, one more mouth to feed could bankrupt an entire family.

"What a poor child! He must have been so frightened by his parents' death that he forgot to even cry."

"Every time they go out to sea to earn money, they probably save up a little. We should keep an eye on them and make sure some bad guys don't steal the kids' money."

The neighbors in the small town cannot provide food for Scorpion to grow up, but they can still do the small thing of preventing outsiders from disturbing him. This is the limit of mutual assistance at the grassroots level.

Scorpion walked back to his home with an expressionless face. People around him didn't know what he was thinking. As he walked, the child's blood was lost and his tender feet were rubbed raw, but even so, the boy did not show any expression.

He stayed at home alone, not wanting to eat or drink water. Having lost his parents, no one would care about a weird child. But Scorpion was a human being after all, and he couldn't pretend to be a puppet all his life.

The deterioration of his body functions made him more and more eager to eat. Driven by the instinct for survival, he began to look for food in the house and search through the relics left by his parents.

Soon a locked wooden box caught the child's attention. Since he couldn't find the key, he could only use the most violent method. He lifted the box high up and threw it heavily on the ground. After several drops, the box could not bear the weight and something that looked like fruit rolled out.

When the scorpion found something edible, he ate the fruit without thinking too much. Maybe the fruit had been in the box for too long and the taste was not very good, but it was juicy and meaty.

The whole fruit made the scorpion's belly round. From that day on, the boy no longer needed to eat or drink water, or even breathe fresh air, because he had eaten that fruit, which was the superhuman puppet fruit.

The Puppet Fruit turned Scorpion into a puppet, which was the result he had always dreamed of. As a puppet, he was no longer bound by flesh and blood. Scorpion could even transform himself and make his original physical defects more perfect.

The ability of Scorpion's fruit is quite terrifying. Any creature touched by it will lose the ability to think and become an ordinary puppet.

Ordinary puppets have the ability to move and can understand the most basic commands of the puppeteer. When these puppets touch other humans, they will also transform the touched people into ordinary puppets.

It was for this reason that in less than a day, there was not a single breathing animal left in the entire town, and all of them turned into ordinary puppets of Scorpion. The originally vibrant island turned into a lifeless puppet town overnight.

In order to retaliate against the navy, Scorpion ordered these ordinary puppets that looked like humans to surround and attack the navy's sub-base. Due to the abnormal effect of the puppet fruit, this sub-base soon lost contact with the navy headquarters, and all the navy members here were transformed into ordinary puppets.

Ordinary puppets are stiff and cannot speak, but Scorpion likes quietness very much. He has a group of puppets around him to take care of his life, cleaning his room, making his bed, cleaning the yard, etc.

Although these ordinary puppets work slowly and are clumsy, Scorpion prefers to stay with these half-human and half-ghost puppets rather than cunning and difficult to get along with humans.

However, such a carefree life would eventually be exposed one day. The overseas naval bases lost contact with the naval headquarters for a long time, and the loss of contact lasted for several months.

The Navy Headquarters dispatched a vice admiral from the headquarters to cross the Grand Line and enter the waters here. After all, they are from the headquarters, and they dare not rush in if something happens in the branch base.

Moreover, there were no signs of artillery fire on the outskirts of the sub-base, which did not look like it had been captured by pirates. The navy standing guard outside the base looked very strange.

Even though he stood guard for a long time under the scorching sun, he did not feel any discomfort due to sweating. He stood in the same posture for a whole day without showing any changes.

A day later, the Vice Admiral of the Navy had figured out the situation here. All the naval officers and grassroots soldiers at the base were influenced by some force and turned into dumb puppets, who were placed at their jobs as usual.

And this process is irreversible. After humans become puppets, puppets cannot turn back into humans.