The weight of the sea king was absolute.
I felt the shadow above me too late, a moment before impact, and then everything was pressure and cracking bone. It hit like a mountain dropped from the sky—flesh, muscle, scale, and fury, all focused on me.
I didn't scream.
There wasn't time.
My body simply gave under the weight. Crushed like wet wood under a falling boulder.
Darkness swallowed everything.
I might've blacked out. For how long, I didn't know. But when the world started returning, it did so slowly. Sensation first—sharp, terrible flashes of pain, distant yet intimate. Then sound—the muffled churn of water, the hiss of fire in the rain. Finally, light—blurry, fractured like looking through shattered glass.
When my eyes healed enough to see, I saw him.
The octopus.
He pulled me free.
With effort.
His arms wrapped around mine, dragging what was left of my body out from beneath the Sea King's enormous, smoldering corpse. My limbs dangled, half-formed. My chest cracked audibly with each tug. But he worked quickly, precisely. My head rolled back as my skull reknit, my brain pulsing behind fresh-grown bone.
The sea king was already half way in the water and almost like a cow if I disregarded the burn marks and focused on the pattren.
By the time I stood—well, was stood—I looked around.
Only six fishmen left.
Two were relatively unharmed.
The octopus—Hachi, if Arlong's scream was to be trusted—and another who looked fresher than the rest, maybe someone who arrived late or someone lucky.
The others?
Worse off.
One had burn marks that had melted half his face. Another had his arms wrapped in what looked like damp cloth, as if trying to stop the thermite still clinging to his skin. The last... he had no legs. Just two stumps bandaged in seaweed, twitching.
And then there was Arlong.
The self-proclaimed king of this ruin.
He was hurt worst of all.
His chest was an open canvas of vapor and ash. The thermite still worked its way into him—burning, hissing as rain tried to smother it. The flesh around it bubbled and twitched, refusing to close. He stood despite it, trembling not from weakness, but rage. I could see it in his posture, his clenched fists, the way his gills flared with every breath.
I smiled.
Arlong lunged.
A burst of motion. Animalistic.
He was going to end me. Tear me apart. He might not survive it, but he didn't care.
Like he could do all that. I waited and nothing.
It was Hachi who stopped him.
He caught Arlong by the arm and held firm.
They shouted. Words I didn't catch—quick, hot, sharp syllables. Arlong's voice broke with rage. Hachi's was lower, more focused. Whatever he said, it worked.
Arlong didn't like it, but he stepped back.
Still glaring at me.
His hand lashed out suddenly, wrapping around my neck.
Then he started dragging.
My body scraped against the wet stone. My heels left streaks of blood in their path. When we reached the edge of the courtyard, he stopped. Looked at me.
Then dipped my lower body into the sea.
A show.
A test.
I gave him nothing.
Just a bland, dead-eyed stare. No squirming. No thrashing. I even lifted a hand and patted his shoulder.
His eyes narrowed.
Hachi tilted his head. Then—
"Akuma no mi?" they both asked, almost in unison.
A Devil Fruit user?
I rolled my eyes.
As if one of those miracle fruits would ever roll into my path. My healing wasn't anything like a devil fruit. It was divine, It was devilish, It was demonic and it was a one way street.
A force even the nature would not dare comprehend.
Still, they took no chances.
Hachi unspooled something from his back. Chains. Thick. Black. Salt-encrusted. He worked quickly, his arms moving like eight synchronized snakes. Chains wrapped around my wrists, my elbows, my biceps. Around my legs, thighs, ankles. Around my chest, torso, and even my forehead.
By the end of it, I couldn't move.
Not an inch.
Not a flex of a toe or a twitch of a finger.
They'd wrapped me like they'd captured a demon. Maybe they did.
Arlong yanked on the chains and began dragging me again.
This time toward a building near the waterline. Old. Rotting. Half-sunken from the years. A stone staircase led downward into darkness.
He didn't walk me down.
He threw me.
I hit the stairs sideways. Rolled. Slammed shoulder-first into the edge of a step. My neck snapped sideways as the chain around it pulled tight. Bones cracked. My ribs caved.
Still healing.
Still conscious.
I didn't scream.
Only grunted when I hit the floor.
The hallway was long, dark, and wet. The smell was rot. Salt. Iron.
Arlong kicked a rusted iron gate. It groaned open.
Inside—three figures.
One, a skeleton. Cleaned to the bone, hunched in the corner as if it had died sitting up.
Another, half-eaten. Rats swarmed over him, pulling chunks from his gut, his thighs. They didn't even scatter when the door opened.
The last was still technically alive. Just skin and bones. Eyes sunken, chest barely moving. He didn't even look up.
A ghost still breathing.
Then I was kicked in.
I flew forward, hit the floor hard, and slid until my skull smacked the far wall. A fresh crack bloomed across my spine. My body spasmed. Chains rattled.
Arlong dragged the slack in the chain to a rusted ring hanging from the ceiling and looped it through. He yanked it tight, then fastened it to a heavy iron hook with a loud clank.
Suspended. Restrained.
My legs dangled. My back scraped against the cold wall. I couldn't lift my arms. Could barely move my head.
They couldn't kill me.
But they could contain me.
For now.
I had to give credit where it was due. Hachi thought this through. The others—too blinded by rage. But the octopus had clarity. Maybe pity. Maybe strategy.
Didn't matter.
I was chained like a beast, and it was his idea.
Arlong stepped closer.
Looked me in the eye.
Then leaned forward and bit into my side—one of the few places untouched by chains.
His teeth tore through flesh like paper. He bit deep, ripped a chunk loose.
I didn't make a sound.
He chewed. Swallowed.
Then looked at me again.
And found nothing.
No pain. No defiance.
Just boredom.
My eyes were half-lidded. I stared at him like one might stare at a fly on the wall. Nothing more.
That broke something in him.
Or maybe it scared him.
Who cared?
He turned without a word, his mouth still stained red. Walked out.
The door slammed shut behind him.
And darkness took over.
Thick. Heavy.
I could hear the rats chewing again.
The shallow breathing of the man beside me.
The slow, echoing drip of seawater down the far wall.
My blood worked slowly now. The injuries weren't fresh. The chains weren't lethal. There was no urgency. No trigger.
It would take longer.
I stared into the dark.
I had become a prisoner.
I shrugged.
A first time for everything.
----------
In the dark, you can't say the difference between day and night.
You can guess. Feel it in the subtle shifts of temperature, or the moments when the rats grow quieter—like even they, blind as they are, know when the sun leaves the sky.
But truth is, the dark doesn't care.
And after a while, neither do you.
It should've been more than three months. At least, that's what I believe. Might've been longer. Could've been shorter, too. I stopped keeping track at seven million eight hundred ninety-five thousand and twenty-eight seconds.
I grew bored of counting.
At first, in those early days, there was something close to routine. Arlong and his fishmen would come by, one by one or sometimes in pairs. They'd talk. Laugh. Then they'd tear into me like I was a feast laid out for their victories. A strip of flesh here. A rib bone cracked open there. A game, for them. A curiosity.
Their methods were blunt. Crude. They didn't know how to torture. They just inflicted pain. Nothing more.
Just pain.
Pain was the easiest to take. I was a step away from calling Pain my friend.
After a while, the visits stopped. Or rather, slowed. The lesser fishmen lost interest. They weren't built for patience. For cycles. Once it became clear I couldn't be broken—or killed in any satisfying way—they drifted off. Two stopped showing up entirely. I assumed they'd returned to whatever corner of the sea hadn't burned yet.
Only Arlong came back now.
Sporadically. Sometimes once a week. Sometimes less.
He'd enter without a word, dragging his clawed feet through the murk. Stand in front of me. Reach out. Rip something off—shoulder, arm, cheek, head, leg, heart whatever still had enough blood and flesh to feel it—and start chewing.
Then, between bites, he'd talk.
About humans. About Fisher Tiger. About betrayal and pain and the great war that never ended. About how he was born to be the ocean's vengeance. The son of suffering. The final answer to the questions the fishmen asked.
It was poetic the first time.
By the fourth, it was just noise.
I remember sighing once in the middle of his speech. Just a simple, tired sigh. That stopped him mid-sentence. He didn't say anything for a long time. Just stared. Then he bit off half of my head and walked away.
He never changed the speech.
They don't bring us food. Not that I needed it. The blood inside me had long since severed the chain between hunger and survival. But there were two others in here—if you could still call them that.
One was dead. Long dead. A corpse, half-rotted, half-consumed. The rats used him as both home and grocery store.
The other… he was something else.
Still breathing. Still human, maybe, in some small and tattered way. Skin stretched too tight over bones, mouth dry and cracked, eyes dull but still alive. His body didn't move much. But his mind must have. Because somehow—somehow—he got the rats to help him.
They'd bring him scraps.
Little pieces of the corpse when no one was watching. Torn flesh, dried sinew. Occasionally, they'd drop something in his lap with the reverence of servants. Once, I saw him smile. Just a little. As if that morsel was the best thing he'd ever tasted.
Then came the day one rat got bolder.
Too bold.
It skittered across the stone toward me—tiny paws soft, almost kind. It carried a strip of my own flesh in its mouth. Fresh. Not rotting. The man must've sent it. A request for fresher food.
The blood inside me didn't take kindly to it.
Before the rat could get close, the blood lashed out—instinctive, vicious. It swarmed out from my skin like a thousand tiny mouths and devoured the creature whole. Gone. Just like that. No sound. No mess. One second it was there, the next it wasn't.
I watched the man in the corner blink. Once. Then he closed his eyes. He didn't try again.
And so the days blurred together.
Or maybe it was weeks. Months. Hard to tell. All the same in the dark. No movement, no light. Just rats, rust, rot and silence. The chains bit into my limbs with the weight of permanence. I couldn't move. Couldn't twist or shift. My skin had fused in places where the metal didn't burn away. Blood flowed slower now. Not gone, just cautious.
To pass the time, I turned inward.
I studied myself.
The wine cores.
The blood.
The sixth sense.
The blood was a dead end. No matter how long I focused, how deep I pushed, it offered no answers. It moved on its own schedule. Protected on its own terms. It no longer coursed wildly through me. Instead, it had settled—anchored in my heart. A coiled serpent, watching the world from behind my ribs.
It did only what it wanted. No more. No less.
And then there were the cores.
Two wine cores—one nestled in my chest, the other in my abdomen. At rest, they felt inert. Cold. But when I meditated—focused—the cores would spin. Slowly, at first. Then faster. Each rotation built momentum. Heat gathered in my chest like coals catching wind. The chains grew warm against my skin.
The longer I focused, the faster they spun.
The faster they spun, the more the blood responded.
It wasn't a fight between them. Not exactly. More like a dance. The cores fed heat into my body. The blood responded by pulsing faster, more violently, as if preparing for war. It wasn't painful. But it was draining. Accelerating both processes ate through my reserves like fire through dry wood.
The moment I lost focus, it stopped.
And that was the catch.
It only worked in meditation. In stillness.
There was no way to use it for escape. No application in this state of binding. I could heat the chains, even deform them slightly, but I couldn't break them. Not without motion. Not without leverage.
So I gave up on escape with this method.
For now.
Instead, I kept count.
Of my resurrections.
Every time Arlong came back and tore into me. Every time he chewed through an organ or snapped a limb off. Every time the blood rebuilt me from scratch.
I kept count.
And now?
That number was twenty-one.
Twenty-one times to die.
Twenty-one times I'd come back.
Each one felt a little harder. A little slower.
Not because the blood failed.
Because the world dulled.
It grew quieter. Colder. Less surprising. More real.
Every new resurrection felt more like opening my eyes in the same dream.
I closed my eyes again.
Not to rest.
To listen.
Somewhere, the rats scratched. A steady rhythm, like fingernails on old wood. The other man—what was left of him—breathed once. Shallow. Then again.
The corpse shifted, bloated with moisture.
Water dripped somewhere in the corner.
And I hung there.
In silence.
In darkness.
Waiting.