Lilith, the last surviving Vegapunk Satellite, is currently on Elbaf. And after Chapter 1176, I'm pretty sure Oda has something planned for her that goes way beyond what most people are expecting.
A while back, Rej posted a theory predicting that Lilith would end up playing a major role on Elbaf by creating hover technology to help regular-sized humans get around an island built entirely for Giants. Chapter 1176 basically confirmed the core of that prediction, but I think the actual scope of what Oda is doing here is much bigger than a single flying device. Lilith might be the person who converts Vegapunk's dangerous fire and sun science into Elbaf's actual vertical infrastructure.
Gulliver Among Giants
To call One Piece merely a "Pirate Manga" would do it a huge disservice; whenever Oda writes an arc, there is always a mixing and mashing of an assortment of genres. Whole Cake Island is a mix of Alice in Wonderland and Super Sentai, Impel Down is a mix of Dante's Inferno and Prison Break, and so far Elbaf has been no different. Beyond the obvious Norse mythology inspiration and the RPG elements, there is another piece of classic literature that maps almost perfectly onto what the Straw Hats are going through: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
In the second part of Swift's novel, "A Voyage to Brobdingnag," Gulliver finds himself stranded in a land of Giants. Everything is scaled to their size. Gulliver is about one-twelfth the height of the locals, so furniture becomes cliffs, hallways become open fields, and the Queen literally keeps him in a traveling box like a pet. He's functionally a doll in a world that was never designed for him.
Chapter 1129. The entire human "kingdom" fits inside a single giant room.
This is probably most noticeable in Chapter 1129, where Oda shows us Road's room. Inside a single giant chamber, there is an entire miniature kingdom built to human proportions. The whole thing fits on what is basically a tabletop. Road treats the Straw Hats as characters in his role-playing scenario, assigning them costumes and Viking personas, while the room itself is designed to keep even Giants from escaping. The Straw Hats aren't just small. They are, quite literally, live dolls.
An interesting thing about Swift's novel is that Gulliver's time among the Giants is also when the story becomes most satirical. The King of Brobdingnag listens to Gulliver describe European civilization, its wars, its politics, its institutions, and concludes that humanity is "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." This is, in a way, the same conclusion the Giants of Elbaf might come to about the World Government and the Celestial Dragons.
But the thing that interests me most about this parallel isn't the satire. It's the problem it puts on display. Distances that are nothing to a Giant become massive for a normal person. Stairs become walls. Hallways become fields. The environment itself works against anyone who isn't giant-sized, and this is before the Straw Hats have even started exploring the real island.
Oda almost never introduces a problem like this without eventually solving it.
Oda's Traversal Pattern
Whenever Oda builds an arc around an island with a unique geographic identity, he always introduces a traversal system that fits it. This has been the case for pretty much every major arc in the story:
Elbaf already fits this pattern. We have seen Painters using cubes to draw rainbows that can be sailed on, Svarr giant birds used as aerial transports, animal mounts like the Iscat, and various lifts connecting different parts of the island. The systems are already there. But what makes Elbaf's problem unique compared to every island that came before it is that the challenge isn't just horizontal distance. It's vertical.
The World Tree
Elbaf isn't just one flat surface scaled up for Giants. It's structured vertically, with at least three distinct layers: the Underworld, the Sun World, and the Heaven World, all organized around Treasure Tree Adam, Oda's version of Yggdrasil.
According to the ancient Norse view of the cosmos, Yggdrasil is an ash tree in which the Nine Worlds, including the world of humans and the world of the gods, nestle among the branches and roots. Its roots reach down into the underworld, its trunk holds the realm of humans and gods, and its branches extend into the heavens. Everything exists along this tree. It's the axis of the entire cosmos. I talked about this more extensively in my Elbaf mega-post, but the short version is that Oda is clearly drawing from this for the structure of Elbaf.
Loki climbing up from the Underworld. The vertical layers are physically real and distinct.
The Underworld sits at the base (where Loki was chained), the Sun World occupies the middle, and the Heaven World sits at the top. Getting between these layers means going up and down a world tree, not just walking across land. It's essentially what happened at Onigashima, where Luffy had to fight his way from the bottom floor all the way up to the rooftop, except here the "floors" are entire worlds stacked on top of each other, and every one of them is sized for Giants.
Chapter 1132. Rainbow ascent, one of Elbaf's unusual vertical travel methods.
For regular humans, getting from one layer to another without help would be close to impossible. And this is where Lilith comes in.
The Wings of Icarus
This is where the thematic side of the theory really clicks, and it connects to one of the most well-known myths in Western culture: the story of Icarus and Daedalus.
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a master inventor imprisoned on the island of Crete alongside his son, Icarus. To escape, Daedalus built wings out of feathers and wax. Before they took flight, he warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat would melt the wax holding the wings together. Icarus, overwhelmed by the thrill of flying, ignored the warning. He soared higher and higher until the sun melted his wings and he plunged into the sea and drowned. Daedalus, the careful one, survived and landed safely.
Chapter 1114, titled "The Wings of Icarus." Vegapunk's broadcast and the Mother Flame.
Oda used this myth directly. Chapter 1114 is literally called "The Wings of Icarus", and it frames Vegapunk Stella as the man who flew too close to the sun. He pursued forbidden knowledge, he built the Mother Flame (an artificial sun energy source), and it led to his death. The World Government took that same energy and turned it into something that can erase islands off the map. Stella is the Icarus of this story.
Chapter 1060. The destructive weapon powered by the Mother Flame.
But there is a part of this myth that people tend to overlook: Daedalus survived. The inventor who built the wings in the first place didn't die. He flew at the right altitude, made it to safety, and went on living. The story isn't only about the danger of reaching too high. It's also about the person who handled that same power responsibly.
That's Lilith.
If Stella is the Icarus, then Lilith is the Daedalus: the surviving scientist who inherits the same dangerous technology and has to figure out how to use it without making the same mistake. You could also draw a comparison to Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and brought it down to humanity. The gods punished him for it, but the act itself became the foundation of human civilization. Fire as a gift, not a weapon (sounds familiar, right?).
What if that same energy, that same "sun fire," could be used for something entirely different? Not a weapon, but a road. A way for ordinary people to move through a world that was never built for them. And it's not a coincidence that this is happening on the island most closely associated with the Sun God, mythic memory, and the World Tree.
Chapter 1138. The Adam mural, Sun God lore, and Elbaf's mythic core.
Chapter 1176 Provides the Mechanism
Before this chapter, the theory was built on logic and thematic reasoning. Solid, but speculative. Chapter 1176 changes that by giving Lilith a concrete technological function tied directly to Elbaf's environment.
Chapter 1176. Lilith deploying her Omni-Drain Converters.
Lilith reveals her Omni-Drain Converters (ODCs): devices that can absorb fire or ambient energy and convert it into usable output. She also confirms that hover technology is more feasible under Elbaf's conditions, thanks to the island's energy-rich atmosphere. On top of that, we get the Super Vega-Cola moment with Franky, where Lilith's energy output is applied directly to power up one of the crew's core fighters. That's not necessarily just a throwaway gag. That's a working demonstration of applied energy conversion.
This is exactly what Rej predicted. He said Lilith would create flying devices to help humans navigate Elbaf, and here she is, arriving on the island with tools that can convert local energy into functional technology. The prediction was right. But I think the application is bigger than a personal flying machine.
If Lilith can convert ambient Elbaf energy into hover power, and the island is structured as a vertical world-tree system requiring movement between layers, then the logical outcome isn't a gadget. It's a transit system. Something that lets people, not just the Straw Hats, move between the Underworld, Sun World, and Heaven World without being giant-sized. Whether that means reactivating ancient routes inside the Adam Tree, powering up forgotten lift systems the Giants built centuries ago, or creating something entirely new isn't clear yet. But the pieces are all there.
Treasure Tree Adam
And then there's the Treasure Tree Adam itself. Considering the importance fruit (Devil Fruit) and trees (Treasure Tree Adam and Sunlight Tree Eve) have in One Piece, it's very likely that Adam plays a role beyond just being the center of the island. Adam was first mentioned all the way back in the Water 7 arc (Chapter 431), when Franky explained the legendary wood he used to build the Thousand Sunny.
Chapter 431. Franky's first mention of Treasure Tree Adam, back in Water 7.
But only on Elbaf does Adam become the literal center of the world. If the tree really structures the island the same way Yggdrasil structures the Nine Realms in Norse mythology, then Oda has given himself the perfect foundation: ancient routes running through roots and branches, suspended platforms, internal pathways, forgotten systems that the Giants built centuries ago and that are just waiting to be reactivated. Lilith has already set up a lab inside a 3,000-year-old facility within the tree. She wouldn't need to invent everything from nothing. She would just need to figure out how to power up what's already there.
Conclusion
I've always held the belief that Lilith would play a bigger role post-Egghead, but I've always struggled to figure out exactly what that role would look like. Given Oda's history of drawing inspiration from classic literature and mythology, especially lately, it's entirely plausible that the Icarus/Daedalus framework is what ties her story together on Elbaf.
Stella was the Icarus. He flew too close to the sun and it destroyed him. The World Government took his fire and made it into a weapon. But the science didn't die with him. Lilith survived, she brought it to Elbaf, and she brought the tools to convert it. Elbaf's problem is specific: a vertically layered, Giant-scaled world centered around a World Tree, where normal humans can't move between layers on their own. Lilith's ODCs, the local conditions that support hover technology, and the likely partnership with Franky and Usopp all point in one direction. She's not building a single flying machine. She's going to build Elbaf's vertical infrastructure, turning Vegapunk's forbidden fire into the thing it was always meant to be: a way for everyone to move through the world.
TL;DR
Elbaf is a Giant-scaled, vertically stacked world (Underworld, Sun World, Heaven World) built around Treasure Tree Adam. Normal humans can't navigate it alone. Chapter 1176 confirms that Lilith has energy-converting tech (ODCs) and that hover technology works under Elbaf's conditions. She's being set up to build a transit system across Elbaf's layers, converting Vegapunk's dangerous "sun" science into public infrastructure. Stella was the Icarus (the one who flew too close to the sun and fell). Lilith is the Daedalus (the surviving inventor who makes that same fire safe and useful for everyone else).
A while back, Rej posted a theory predicting that Lilith would end up playing a major role on Elbaf by creating hover technology to help regular-sized humans get around an island built entirely for Giants. Chapter 1176 basically confirmed the core of that prediction, but I think the actual scope of what Oda is doing here is much bigger than a single flying device. Lilith might be the person who converts Vegapunk's dangerous fire and sun science into Elbaf's actual vertical infrastructure.
Gulliver Among Giants
To call One Piece merely a "Pirate Manga" would do it a huge disservice; whenever Oda writes an arc, there is always a mixing and mashing of an assortment of genres. Whole Cake Island is a mix of Alice in Wonderland and Super Sentai, Impel Down is a mix of Dante's Inferno and Prison Break, and so far Elbaf has been no different. Beyond the obvious Norse mythology inspiration and the RPG elements, there is another piece of classic literature that maps almost perfectly onto what the Straw Hats are going through: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
In the second part of Swift's novel, "A Voyage to Brobdingnag," Gulliver finds himself stranded in a land of Giants. Everything is scaled to their size. Gulliver is about one-twelfth the height of the locals, so furniture becomes cliffs, hallways become open fields, and the Queen literally keeps him in a traveling box like a pet. He's functionally a doll in a world that was never designed for him.
Chapter 1129. The entire human "kingdom" fits inside a single giant room.
This is probably most noticeable in Chapter 1129, where Oda shows us Road's room. Inside a single giant chamber, there is an entire miniature kingdom built to human proportions. The whole thing fits on what is basically a tabletop. Road treats the Straw Hats as characters in his role-playing scenario, assigning them costumes and Viking personas, while the room itself is designed to keep even Giants from escaping. The Straw Hats aren't just small. They are, quite literally, live dolls.
- Gulliver is kept as a curiosity by the Queen of Brobdingnag, who carries him around in a specially made box. Road keeps the Straw Hats on his table, dressed up and assigned roles like playthings.
- Everything in Brobdingnag is scaled to Giant proportions; ordinary furniture and rooms become vast landscapes at Gulliver's size. The Straw Hats are living in what looks like a LEGO dollhouse.
- Gulliver is paraded around and made to perform for the court as entertainment. Road is over-the-top, dramatic, and theatrical about the whole thing (bro is yapping).
- Ordinary things become life-threatening at Gulliver's scale. Insects, household items, animals. The Straw Hats face the same issue; threats that would be trivial at normal size are dangerous at their current scale.
- Gulliver is never in control. He is at the mercy of beings who see him as entertainment. The Straw Hats are, at least initially, at the mercy of Road, who is controlling the "game."
An interesting thing about Swift's novel is that Gulliver's time among the Giants is also when the story becomes most satirical. The King of Brobdingnag listens to Gulliver describe European civilization, its wars, its politics, its institutions, and concludes that humanity is "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." This is, in a way, the same conclusion the Giants of Elbaf might come to about the World Government and the Celestial Dragons.
But the thing that interests me most about this parallel isn't the satire. It's the problem it puts on display. Distances that are nothing to a Giant become massive for a normal person. Stairs become walls. Hallways become fields. The environment itself works against anyone who isn't giant-sized, and this is before the Straw Hats have even started exploring the real island.
Oda almost never introduces a problem like this without eventually solving it.
Oda's Traversal Pattern
Whenever Oda builds an arc around an island with a unique geographic identity, he always introduces a traversal system that fits it. This has been the case for pretty much every major arc in the story:
- Skypiea has cloud roads, wavers, and dial-based conveyance for navigating islands in the sky.
- Water 7 and Enies Lobby have the Sea Train (Puffing Tom), one of the most iconic vehicles in the series, connecting islands across open ocean.
- Sabaody Archipelago turns bubble technology into a mode of transportation, with bubble-coated bikes and floating platforms.
- Fish-Man Island uses currents and enclosed bubble routes to shuttle people around the ocean floor.
- Wano is built around segmented elevations, lifts, and gates between regions, forcing characters to climb through layers of the country.
- Egghead runs on floating platforms, vacuum tubes, and future-tech mobility, including the Vegaforce-01.
Elbaf already fits this pattern. We have seen Painters using cubes to draw rainbows that can be sailed on, Svarr giant birds used as aerial transports, animal mounts like the Iscat, and various lifts connecting different parts of the island. The systems are already there. But what makes Elbaf's problem unique compared to every island that came before it is that the challenge isn't just horizontal distance. It's vertical.
The World Tree
Elbaf isn't just one flat surface scaled up for Giants. It's structured vertically, with at least three distinct layers: the Underworld, the Sun World, and the Heaven World, all organized around Treasure Tree Adam, Oda's version of Yggdrasil.
According to the ancient Norse view of the cosmos, Yggdrasil is an ash tree in which the Nine Worlds, including the world of humans and the world of the gods, nestle among the branches and roots. Its roots reach down into the underworld, its trunk holds the realm of humans and gods, and its branches extend into the heavens. Everything exists along this tree. It's the axis of the entire cosmos. I talked about this more extensively in my Elbaf mega-post, but the short version is that Oda is clearly drawing from this for the structure of Elbaf.
Loki climbing up from the Underworld. The vertical layers are physically real and distinct.
The Underworld sits at the base (where Loki was chained), the Sun World occupies the middle, and the Heaven World sits at the top. Getting between these layers means going up and down a world tree, not just walking across land. It's essentially what happened at Onigashima, where Luffy had to fight his way from the bottom floor all the way up to the rooftop, except here the "floors" are entire worlds stacked on top of each other, and every one of them is sized for Giants.
Chapter 1132. Rainbow ascent, one of Elbaf's unusual vertical travel methods.
For regular humans, getting from one layer to another without help would be close to impossible. And this is where Lilith comes in.
The Wings of Icarus
This is where the thematic side of the theory really clicks, and it connects to one of the most well-known myths in Western culture: the story of Icarus and Daedalus.
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a master inventor imprisoned on the island of Crete alongside his son, Icarus. To escape, Daedalus built wings out of feathers and wax. Before they took flight, he warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat would melt the wax holding the wings together. Icarus, overwhelmed by the thrill of flying, ignored the warning. He soared higher and higher until the sun melted his wings and he plunged into the sea and drowned. Daedalus, the careful one, survived and landed safely.
Chapter 1114, titled "The Wings of Icarus." Vegapunk's broadcast and the Mother Flame.
Oda used this myth directly. Chapter 1114 is literally called "The Wings of Icarus", and it frames Vegapunk Stella as the man who flew too close to the sun. He pursued forbidden knowledge, he built the Mother Flame (an artificial sun energy source), and it led to his death. The World Government took that same energy and turned it into something that can erase islands off the map. Stella is the Icarus of this story.
Chapter 1060. The destructive weapon powered by the Mother Flame.
But there is a part of this myth that people tend to overlook: Daedalus survived. The inventor who built the wings in the first place didn't die. He flew at the right altitude, made it to safety, and went on living. The story isn't only about the danger of reaching too high. It's also about the person who handled that same power responsibly.
That's Lilith.
If Stella is the Icarus, then Lilith is the Daedalus: the surviving scientist who inherits the same dangerous technology and has to figure out how to use it without making the same mistake. You could also draw a comparison to Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and brought it down to humanity. The gods punished him for it, but the act itself became the foundation of human civilization. Fire as a gift, not a weapon (sounds familiar, right?).
What if that same energy, that same "sun fire," could be used for something entirely different? Not a weapon, but a road. A way for ordinary people to move through a world that was never built for them. And it's not a coincidence that this is happening on the island most closely associated with the Sun God, mythic memory, and the World Tree.
Chapter 1138. The Adam mural, Sun God lore, and Elbaf's mythic core.
Chapter 1176 Provides the Mechanism
Before this chapter, the theory was built on logic and thematic reasoning. Solid, but speculative. Chapter 1176 changes that by giving Lilith a concrete technological function tied directly to Elbaf's environment.
Chapter 1176. Lilith deploying her Omni-Drain Converters.
Lilith reveals her Omni-Drain Converters (ODCs): devices that can absorb fire or ambient energy and convert it into usable output. She also confirms that hover technology is more feasible under Elbaf's conditions, thanks to the island's energy-rich atmosphere. On top of that, we get the Super Vega-Cola moment with Franky, where Lilith's energy output is applied directly to power up one of the crew's core fighters. That's not necessarily just a throwaway gag. That's a working demonstration of applied energy conversion.
This is exactly what Rej predicted. He said Lilith would create flying devices to help humans navigate Elbaf, and here she is, arriving on the island with tools that can convert local energy into functional technology. The prediction was right. But I think the application is bigger than a personal flying machine.
If Lilith can convert ambient Elbaf energy into hover power, and the island is structured as a vertical world-tree system requiring movement between layers, then the logical outcome isn't a gadget. It's a transit system. Something that lets people, not just the Straw Hats, move between the Underworld, Sun World, and Heaven World without being giant-sized. Whether that means reactivating ancient routes inside the Adam Tree, powering up forgotten lift systems the Giants built centuries ago, or creating something entirely new isn't clear yet. But the pieces are all there.
Treasure Tree Adam
And then there's the Treasure Tree Adam itself. Considering the importance fruit (Devil Fruit) and trees (Treasure Tree Adam and Sunlight Tree Eve) have in One Piece, it's very likely that Adam plays a role beyond just being the center of the island. Adam was first mentioned all the way back in the Water 7 arc (Chapter 431), when Franky explained the legendary wood he used to build the Thousand Sunny.
Chapter 431. Franky's first mention of Treasure Tree Adam, back in Water 7.
But only on Elbaf does Adam become the literal center of the world. If the tree really structures the island the same way Yggdrasil structures the Nine Realms in Norse mythology, then Oda has given himself the perfect foundation: ancient routes running through roots and branches, suspended platforms, internal pathways, forgotten systems that the Giants built centuries ago and that are just waiting to be reactivated. Lilith has already set up a lab inside a 3,000-year-old facility within the tree. She wouldn't need to invent everything from nothing. She would just need to figure out how to power up what's already there.
Conclusion
I've always held the belief that Lilith would play a bigger role post-Egghead, but I've always struggled to figure out exactly what that role would look like. Given Oda's history of drawing inspiration from classic literature and mythology, especially lately, it's entirely plausible that the Icarus/Daedalus framework is what ties her story together on Elbaf.
Stella was the Icarus. He flew too close to the sun and it destroyed him. The World Government took his fire and made it into a weapon. But the science didn't die with him. Lilith survived, she brought it to Elbaf, and she brought the tools to convert it. Elbaf's problem is specific: a vertically layered, Giant-scaled world centered around a World Tree, where normal humans can't move between layers on their own. Lilith's ODCs, the local conditions that support hover technology, and the likely partnership with Franky and Usopp all point in one direction. She's not building a single flying machine. She's going to build Elbaf's vertical infrastructure, turning Vegapunk's forbidden fire into the thing it was always meant to be: a way for everyone to move through the world.
TL;DR
Elbaf is a Giant-scaled, vertically stacked world (Underworld, Sun World, Heaven World) built around Treasure Tree Adam. Normal humans can't navigate it alone. Chapter 1176 confirms that Lilith has energy-converting tech (ODCs) and that hover technology works under Elbaf's conditions. She's being set up to build a transit system across Elbaf's layers, converting Vegapunk's dangerous "sun" science into public infrastructure. Stella was the Icarus (the one who flew too close to the sun and fell). Lilith is the Daedalus (the surviving inventor who makes that same fire safe and useful for everyone else).
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