The paper felt cheap—fibrous and thin—yet it carried weight.
Wanted: Monkey D. Luffy. Thirty million berries.
That grin. I'd known it once as pixels and light, something safe behind glass. Here it was ink and pressure and breath at my lips, the sea breeze worrying the corners as if eager to carry his name farther. Luffy wasn't lore anymore. He was proof. Proof that the story had started without me.
Behind me, the village moved in a low hum. Hammers tapped, nets were mended, voices traded relief for routine. Smoke thinned from the burned planks by the docks. Someone laughed; someone else coughed. Life was already stitching itself back together because that's what life does when it has no other choice.
I folded the poster along its creases and slid it beneath my belt. I felt eyes on me—curious, grateful, careful. The words they had used since the second raid nudged at my ears: protector, blessing, stubborn fool. They were all true, in their ways. I wasn't a hero. I was a man who refused to die easy.
Old Man Jiro joined me at the edge of the shore, pipe angled from the corner of his mouth. "He's got a face for trouble," he said, nodding at the belt where the poster tucked away.
"Or for changing things," I said.
He grunted, smoke drifting sideways. "The sea likes to change things on its own. Men who help it along don't often grow old."
I didn't answer. We watched the tide breathe in, then out. The posters' ink warmed against my skin like a small, stubborn sun.
That night, food made the rounds, as it always did after danger. Someone set a clay bowl in my hands and I ate because refusing would only make more noise. The stew was thin, but hot; the bread was old, but it held together. People came by and said the things people say when they've been spared—thank you, you scared me half to death, I knew you could do it, I didn't know anyone could do it. I nodded. I let the words pass through me.
I didn't tell them what I kept thinking: this peace is rented.
When the embers at the center of the square fell to orange whispers, I slipped away to my cot. Salt clung to my hair; the cuts across my forearms were tight and clean. Two years in this world had taught me the rhythms of pain and the cadence of healing, and how both could be shaped by will.
I breathed once, twice, and called the panel.
The air didn't change, not really. But I did—somewhere just inside the eyes. The faint overlay settled, familiar as the outline of my own hand.
Strength: 43
Speed: 32
Perception: 33
Skill:
1. Martial Arts
Boxing – Intermediate
Swordmanship – Novice
2. General
Cooking – Novice
The numbers sat there, quiet and unafraid. Higher. They'd moved again after the fight—small steps measured in bruises and breath. Every increase meant something specific now. Strength wasn't just heavier punches; it was the moment my legs didn't fold when a cutlass rang against my forearm. Speed wasn't just running; it was closing the half-step that keeps you from being opened like a fish. Perception wasn't just clarity; it was catching the tell in a raider's shoulders before his hips committed to the swing.
I let the panel fade and lay there with the afterimage of the digits hovering behind my eyelids.
I had spent years learning the language of this body. The panel had taught me its alphabet—familiar shapes, steady cadence, no lies. It didn't promise destiny. It promised measurement. When the numbers rose, I had earned it. When they didn't, I hadn't. It was simple and cruel and fair.
I used to think I was here to survive. Then I thought I was here to protect this village. Then I realized those were the same thought said in different clothes. Survival without purpose rots. Protection without plan breaks. The raid showed me the limits of both.
Luffy's poster had shown me something else: the world was already turning its pages. If I wanted to matter—to live on my own terms and not as someone else's footnote—I couldn't keep pretending the sea would wait for me to feel ready.
So I set a line in the sand. Quietly, to myself, there in the dark.
I will set sail. Not as a dream. As a decision.
Not tomorrow. Not empty. Prepared.
Preparation had to be shaped or else it would spread to fill all the time I gave it, like water finding every crack. The panel gave me teeth to bite the future into pieces I could swallow. I rebuilt the plan in my head, not for comfort, but for clarity.
Milestones. Simple, brutal, measurable.
Strength to 50. Not a spike after one bloody day, but a held number—stable for a week.
Speed to 45. Enough to take angles on men quicker than me, enough to close before they finish a thought.
Perception to 40. To read breath and balance, to count footsteps in smoke, to hear the edge of steel in wind.
Skill targets. Boxing to the edge of Advanced, where combinations live in muscle, not in thought. Swordmanship to solid Intermediate—no flourishes, all function.
When those marks hold, I go.
I repeated it until the words lost their heat and became shapes I could carry. Not if. When.
Sleep didn't come for a while. When it did, it came the way it had been arriving since the panel woke—a deep, wordless drop without the leaden ache of lactic acid. I woke before dawn with the same steady alertness that used to make me suspicious. I wasn't suspicious anymore. I was grateful, and I intended to pay it back with work.
The shore was a gray line when I started. The sea was iron; the wind was a blade. I welcomed both.
Breath work first. The kind you do when no one is watching because it looks like nothing and feels like fire. In through the nose; hold until the ribs protest; let it go like a rope through a gloved hand. Again. Again. The numbers don't move for theatrics. They move for truth repeated until it becomes your skin.
Footwork drills next, cutting diagonal lines in the damp sand. Half-steps and pivots, low hips, shoulders free. I practiced slipping against an opponent that existed only in the air until the air felt dangerous. I shadow-boxed without shadow—just breath and stance and the small economy of motion that wastes nothing, because waste gets you hurt.
After that, the water. Cold enough to argue. I argued back. Long strokes just offshore to build pull and patience, then sprints parallel to the beach until the lungs sharpened to a point. I dove and stayed under, counting heartbeats and the way the world grew clear when I stopped asking it for air. When I surfaced, the sky had split wide and clean.
I ran the cliff path until my calves shook. At the top, I worked the rope I'd looped over a bent tree—pulls hand over hand, feet barely touching, then hangs until the shoulders trembled the way they do an instant before failure. Failure teaches faster than pride. I touched it and let it bite and learned.
By the time the village woke fully, I was a rumor passing through their morning. I didn't stop to let the rumor harden. I ate what I needed—hard bread, dried fish, a handful of berries—and kept to the edges. It wasn't secrecy. It was stewardship. Attention was a tax; I meant to keep my coffers full.
Jiro found me at the well while I was refilling a jug. He watched me the way a man watches weather, deciding if it's safe to leave the nets out. "You've made your mind," he said.
I tightened the cap. "I have."
He nodded as if we were discussing tides. "You'll tell them?"
"When it's time." I met his eyes. "Not yet."
He chewed the stem of his pipe. "You'll leave them stronger than you found them?"
"I'll leave them safer because I will have become someone who can survive out there." I wasn't sure if that answer was selfish or honest. Maybe both. "And I'll teach what I can before I go."
He grunted approval. Or just acknowledgment. "Boats don't spring from sand. If you'll need one, start thinking about the wood."
"I have been." Nights spent tracing the memory of simple hulls and workable rigs, nothing fancy. What mattered was a keel that forgave mistakes and a mast that didn't panic in wind. "And charts," I added, though the East Blue doesn't need them the way the Grand Line demands. "And coin."
"Coin we can help with," he said. "Wood, too, if you teach the boys to hold a spear without pointing it at their own feet."
"I'll start tomorrow." I paused. "Thank you."
He tapped the jug with a knuckle. "Don't thank me yet. I expect you to come back for tea, now and then. Men who think the sea is only hunger forget it's also patient. If you listen, it'll tell you how not to die."
I smiled despite myself. "I'm listening."
When he left, I took a moment by the water trough to breathe. Gratitude is a warmth you can't build a shelter from, but it keeps the hands steady.
Back at the shore, I called the panel again, not for the numbers, but for the ritual of it—for the reminder that progress is visible when you choose to see it.
Strength: 45
Speed: 35
Perception: 36
Skill:
1. Martial Arts
Boxing – Intermediate
Swordmanship – Novice
2. General
Cooking – Novice
I set the next week's blueprint against those digits, carving the days into tasks you could weigh or count.
Daily anchors:
Morning: Breath ladders; sand footwork; cold swim; cliff rope.
Midday: Bag rounds (pace, not power); precision drills with a weighted stick to clean up Swordmanship entries—no flourishes, just cuts that land and guards that live.
Evening: Endurance circuits in low light to train Perception under fatigue—listening sets, counting steps backward, eyes closed foot maps of the hut's interior, then open-eyes checks to see what my mind lied about.
Sleep: Protected like treasure. The panel did its part; I would do mine—no late chatter, no waste.
Weekly checks:
Test lifts against stones I'd marked with charcoal.
Time the cliff path.
Spar twice—once with a villager who moved like a boulder, once with a youth who moved like a whip. The numbers were mine, but other bodies were the lesson.
When the marks held—47 / 38 / 38, Boxing brushing the edge of Advanced, Swordmanship a true Intermediate—then I would tell them. I would say what should have been obvious since the second raid: that staying forever helps no one and that leaving with purpose is another kind of promise.
The poster's crease pressed against my side as I trained through the afternoon. I thought about that smile, not as a taunt, but as a compass. Luffy would pull storms into his wake. I had no intention of hiding behind them. I would learn to read weather and men, to step into danger by choice, not panic.
Toward dusk, I returned to the docks. The burned boards had been replaced with planks that didn't match, pale against dark. It made the damage visible, like a scar that refuses to be neat. Good. Neat scars lie. The sea was turning brass under the sky.
I stood where the water slipped thin across the sand and set the last piece of the plan where it belonged—outside myself. Words aloud make the bones remember.
"I will grow to the strength I need," I said quietly, to the tide and to whatever listens in the spaces between waves. "And when I hold it—not for a day, but for long enough to trust it—I will set sail."
The water came up and licked my boots and went away. No omen. No drumroll. Just agreement in the only language the world owes anyone: consequence.
On my way back, I passed the notice board we used for fish prices and storm warnings. I pinned a small square of scrap at the corner. Not a declaration. A reminder. Four lines, blocky letters:
47 / 38 / 38
BOXING: ADV-
SWORDMANSHIP: INT
THEN GO
Anyone could read it. Most wouldn't care. A few would ask later. That was fine. Saying it here made it part of the village, the same way the village had become part of me.
Night came down clean. I ate, I cleaned my cuts, I stretched until the muscles softened under my hands. On the cot, I felt the familiar quiet of a body that knows it will wake without complaint. A gift, earned, kept.
I didn't dream of the Grand Line or of legends or of my old room in Tokyo where the air had smelled faintly of dust and instant noodles. I dreamed of rope in my hands and the feel of a deck underfoot. Of wind that wanted to teach, not to kill. Of numbers turning like tide markers, slow and certain, while the horizon refused to shrink.
And beneath all of it, a steady thought, not bright or loud, but true:
The world is already moving.
Good.
So am I.
To be continued...