'One Piece' Reveals Important Rayleigh Flashback

Luffy has been stuck running away from Katakuri until he regains the use of his Haki. This means that One Piece has had him frantically running around much like he did several episodes prior.

But the latest episode has a bit of hope as Luffy has an important flashback to his training with Silvers Rayleigh that gives him just the boost he needs to get back into the fight.

As Luffy finally catches his breath after using Brulee's ability to run through several mirrors, he thinks to how he can beat Katakuri. Noting that Haki wears out, thus weakening Katakuri's Observation Haki over time, he remembers training his Haki with Rayleigh. Rayleigh says that Luffy should feel presences and not just follow them with his eyes.

Focusing his ability to feel an enemy's presence will help his ability to think of where they are going to move next before they actually make a move. Luffy struggles a bit to understand, but Rayleigh importantly says that although he's teaching lessons, Haki will get stronger in an actual fight.

The tougher enemies Luffy fights, the better his Haki becomes. Luffy takes this to heart and wonders if he would be able to predict Katakuri's moves too. He's determined to fight again, and take on the one billion belly man, and it seems like the next episode will kick up the action once more. Luffy has reached a slight prediction power before as he was briefly able to predict Katakuri's moves after interrupting his merrienda, so there is no doubt that he would be able to reach this peak again.

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold.

Oda revealed that he was about 80-percent done with the manga at this point with the Wano arc, fans are worried that the series may be coming to an end sooner than they thought. But it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the ending will most likely still be years away given how much of the world there is to explore and just how well it's selling week to week.