One Piece’s Timeline Goes Far Beyond the Void Century

Amidst the heartfelt reunions, feasts, traitor conspiracies, and exciting Holy Knight introductions, One Piece‘s Elbaf Arc has also dropped quite a few shocking lore bombs, mainly in the form of the Harley texts and the Jewel Tree Adam mural. As things continue to heat up on Elbaf, these revelations have since taken a backseat, and just when it seemed like the series was going to fully pivot to just the action for a bit, the latest chapter of One Piece has dropped another shocking revelation about its elusive history, and the implications are much more serious than they seem.

Chapter 1144 of One Piece reveals the existence of an ancient facility on Elbaf that looks suspiciously like a robot. Continuing their tour of Elbaf, Ripley takes Franky to a building that looks completely out of place in the kingdom of warriors, as the Straw Hats’ shipwright himself puts it. Lilith and Bonney are also revealed to have stumbled upon the facility, though the most intriguing part is that Vegapunk estimates the structure to be at least 3000 years old, making it one of the oldest known objects to exist in the entire series. Though this number may seem like a passing detail, it could secretly be a massive hint to constructing a time frame for the First World spoken about in the Harley texts and by extension the exact origins of Sun God Nika.

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One Piece May Have Just Revealed the First World Timeline

Until the Elbaf Arc, the Void Century was thought to be as far as the mysteries about One Piece’s history go. However, this all changed when it was revealed that One Piece’s world has been destroyed not once but twice, with the Harley texts going on to expand on these apocalyptic events, referring to them as the First and Second Worlds. Of these, the Second World is most commonly assumed to be describing the era of Joyboy and the Void Century. Though mysterious and just a little confusing, the Harley also made it even clearer that Joyboy and Nika were indeed two different individuals from two different eras.

Sun God Nika very obviously precedes Joyboy and the Void Century, and though the First World is assumed to be the era from which the concept of Nika first arose, it has been difficult to pin down exactly how many years before the Void Century this was. That is, until the latest chapter, which conveniently gives fans a time frame of 3000 years.

Much like the highly advanced facility found on Elbaf, the mural on Jewel Tree Adam also depicts a very technologically advanced civilization under the stanza describing the First World. Though the connection is admittedly paper-thin, it is possible that the facility on Elbaf belongs to the First World era, which would also explain why there are no other surviving records of the facility, as Ripley states in Chapter 1144. More importantly, placing the First World at 3000 years ago on the One Piece timeline would also finally give us an approximate time frame for Sun God Nika’s origins, which in turn solves several other problems for the series.

Sun God Nika Being Much Older Solves a Huge Elbaf Plot Hole

One of the most confounding mysteries of the Elbaf Arc is how the Giants know so much yet also so little about Sun God Nika at the same time. As seen with Jarul, Giants have much longer life spans and can easily live for over 400 years, which means only two generations of Giants have passed between the present day and the Void Century. As such, it has never made sense how the Giants know so little about the Void Century, Joyboy, and Sun God Nika, how no one can seemingly correctly interpret the Harley, and how this information was lost through only two or three generations at best.

However, if Sun God Nika precedes the Void Century by a couple of thousand years instead of a few hundred, then suddenly, this inexplicable gap in the Giants’ knowledge begins to make more sense. While it is not yet confirmed whether the facility on Elbaf is truly as old as Lilith claims and why it came to be built on Elbaf, if there’s anything the Egghead Arc and the Iron Giant have taught us, fans should definitely keep their eyes on this detail as One Piece will surely prove its significance soon enough.

One Piece is available to read from Manga Plus and Viz Media.