In the latest chapter we see Nico Robin escapes from the Orochi Oniwabanshu using a body double and reports her experience to Nami, Brook, and Shinobu.
She returns to Orochi’s banquet, where Orochi is cautioning everyone that Oden’s wife Toki prophesied that this year will be the year of the Kozuki Family’s revenge. He warns them that Oden’s Nine Red Scabbards, now led by Kin’emon, have risen and are plotting to take over Wano once more, and he suspects that the attacks against Urashima and Jack in Kuri and the attack on Kyoshiro’s subordinates at the soba stand were orchestrated by Kin’emon.
While he talks, the guests whisper incredulously amongst each other, believing the Nine Red Scabbards and almost everyone else associated with Oden to be long dead. The banquet guests are struggling not to laugh at the shogun’s seeming delusion, but their mocking of his cowardice ultimately causes Toko to start laughing loudly.
Upon hearing Toko, the guests are quickly gripped by fear as Orochi becomes enraged and offended by his beliefs not being taken seriously. He attacks Toko, but is slapped by Komurasaki.
Komurasaki proclaims that as the daughter of a samurai, she would rather be struck down than live submissively as Orochi’s wife, and Orochi berates a prostitute like her standing up to someone like him as he transforms into an eight-headed dragon using his Zoan-type Devil Fruit.
This Zoan form is obviously based on the Yamata no Orochi, a legendary 8-headed and 8-tailed Japanese dragon.
The Yamata no Orochi beast is so large that its body covers the distance of eight valleys and eight hills. Fir and cypress trees grow on its back, and its body is covered in moss.
Yamata no Orochi appears in the earliest written Japanese documents, the Kojiki and the Nihongi. Without a doubt, the legend goes back even farther into pre-history.
The story goes that the warrior Susanoo got Yamata no Orochi drunk on sake and killed it, in the process saving Princess Kushi’inada who was to have been sacrificed to him.
