(Note this happens the day after shanks left leading up all the way to 2nd month(1week 4days befor raid on the villa ship) For more info on the world read Author's notes)
The cove kept its secrets like a closed fist. Wind threaded through the broken teeth of its cliffside and sang in a tone that could be both lullaby and warning, depending on which way the tide leaned. Donden's lab sat half-swallowed into that cliff: a crooked thing of rusted plates and glass jars and the stubborn, cheerful stench of oil. A narrow path stitched itself down the cliff face—granite bare and white where the rock had been scraped smooth by the boots of men and the bare soles of boys. Roots dangled like the fingers of buried trees. Vines braided the handrails. The last stretch to the beach was a scatter of sand and sun-bleached stones that clicked like teeth when you walked across them.
Luffy woke because the world moved him awake. He blinked, tasting salt and sleep and the metallic tang of Donden's workshop on the back of his tongue. For a moment he lay curled on the rough plank floor—his hair a small riot against the wood—and let the morning find him. He could have slept for hours. The sea called in a slow, steady baritone. The lab smelled faintly of solder and boiled fish, of oil that always seemed just an inch too hot. He let that savored smell sit in him a second, the way boys do when they've stolen a comfort.
Then he rolled and sat up. The cove sucked the distance in with the kind of hush an empty theater has right before the curtain rises. He listened. Somewhere below, a gull argued with the tide. Somewhere above, a cliff swallow made its living by the cliff's lip. Donden's peculiar contraptions—half-boat, half-thing-that-might-be-useful—hummed an idle tune. Dadan's voice had been gone for the night, and so had the warmth of anyone else. It was only the place and him.
A grin split his face—slow and wolfish, something old and careful in it that didn't belong to someone who still needed his naps. The grin was the memory of mischief yet to be performed, of plans half-formed and waiting like seeds in a pocket.
"Three months, huh," Luffy said aloud even before his feet hit the floor. His voice was small in the hollow of the lab, but it carried the kind of honest threat that made old men grin and beasts lean closer. "That's a deadline."
He shoved his feet into sandals that were too big and swung a hand free, testing the air as if it were a map. Donden's lab was a mile—no, sometimes it felt like two—from Fuchsia Village, depending on whether the tide felt polite that day and whether the gulls were in a mood to slow your steps. Donden liked to pretend his place was hidden because it added romance to his tool catalogue. Dadan liked to pretend they'd hidden him for protection. Luffy knew the truth: the lab sat in the last place a stranger would expect to look, which made it the right place to practice things that strangers oughtn't see.
He bounded down the worn stone path, the granite under his sandals whispering and sharp. He passed the pool where Donden kept little glass jars of seawater that glowed faintly when shaken—experiments, Donden said, meant to jar the cove awake if anyone tried to sneak in. Luffy didn't think about alarms. He thought about the note on Makino's counter. He'd seen it last night when Dadan had scooped him up and moved him like a prize. He wanted to read it again. The note was small, smeared with ale and time, and it said, in Shanks' looping, easy scrawl: "We'll be back in three months."
Three months. A blink of time for a man with a ship and a grin; for a boy who measured his life by the size of his next meal and the number of stars he could count before sleep, three months felt like a promise—and a challenge.
The run to the village was, in truth, longer than he'd expected. Two miles, if you counted the route Donden mocked as "the scenic disaster." Luffy did not mind. Running was an excellent problem solver. Problems were like knots. Running pulled at the knots. The path that led down from the cove veered through a stand of trees that smelled like sap and fried fish and old boots. The wind drove at his face and taught him its direction, and Luffy let that knowledge stitch itself under his skin—wind direction, cloud thickenings, the way gulls angled their wings when a storm mutated.
Fuchsia woke slowly. The houses hunched like tired people around their chimneys. Smoke cried soft out of pottery kettles. Makino's bar sat at the village heart like a ledger on a desk, a place where debts and stories got paid in both coin and stew. A small crowd had yet to gather; gossip had not yet enforced its daily laws. Luffy slid through the flap as if he lived there—that, in a way, he did. The bar smelled of long mornings: toasted fish, boiled bones, the faint sheen of spilled ale that had dried into memory on the wood.
The note on Makino's counter gleamed with the kind of mundanity that always accompanied important lies.
"We'll be back in three months."
The paper had been smudged where a thumb had rested. The edges curled. Someone—Shanks—had written it in ink that glinted like a coin in the sun. Luffy read it like a map to a place the world was going to change.
A chuckle escaped him, very small. Makino, pinning an apron to her waist, watched him with the casual affection of someone who'd raised more than one trouble-maker and expected more before supper.
"You're up early," she said. Her hands were small and competent, stained with flour and history.
Luffy shrugged, fingers dirty with last night's pine sap. "Shanks left a deadline. Thought I'd see how the village's doing without him."
Makino's mouth softened. "You'll look after things, won't you?" She didn't mean the entire world—just the small, sturdy part where shoals and gossip and chicken bones mattered. "You keep out of trouble, I won't have to charge you for the cleaning."
Luffy's grin dipped into something like a vow. "Deal."
From behind the bar, Uta hummed a line of melody like the beginning of a braid. She had been there all night, it seemed—at least, she had not been among the shouting crew that left the note. Her voice was threadbare and bright at once; when she hummed, the bar folded itself into something safe and smaller. Uta's hair caught the light—white bright at the roots, drowning slowly into crimson at the tips—and she hummed like someone who held an argument with thunder and always won by making the thunder laugh.
Makino glanced at her. "You want more stew, Red? You look like you'll sing the roof off if you don't eat."
Uta's head tilted. She had a way of looking like she meant everything she didn't say. "I'll help clean later," she promised, but her attention was already half on Luffy's face. "You're back?"
Luffy nodded. "Yeah. I read the note."
"You going to fight anyone while I'm looking?" Makino said with mock severity.
"Depends on the definition of fight," he said. He winked, which was his way of filing away the world into three columns: people to protect, things to fix, and treasures to be found.
Makino laughed, the sound that folded the room in, and it was honest enough to be a rebuke against worry. "Be careful," she said, more to herself than to him, handing over a bowl of something steaming and heroic. "The world's been looking kinder than usual lately—too kind, maybe."
The village moved in deliberate rhythms after that: men and women and children taking their stations, small wheels catching on each other perfectly. Luffy ate and made faces at the fish so that Makino would laugh. He tied on his sandals and shuffled through tasks—fetching a rope here, carrying a flour sack there—all of which Dadan would call "useful boredom." Makino watched him with the tired patience of people who had learned to measure storms before they reached the shore.
He returned to the cove with his arms full of errands and his brain full of plans. Training didn't begin with jumping to conclusions or dramatic speeches. It began with the chores, and the chores began with a level of rigor that, for Luffy, felt like a respectful insult: Makino's tasks were practical, but they had a cadence that could be turned into drills if you were clever. He learned to carry two trays balanced in such a way that a tray dropped by mistake would not spill, because the weight's center shifted and he could correct it with a flick of his wrist. Carry a tray while blindfolded, he thought, and you could learn the smell of a bar enough to navigate it at night. So he did.
Weekdays blurred into routines that let the day do the teaching. Dawn came with Makino's chores turned into precision and balance drills—tray-bearing became study in small corrections; sweeping turned into footwork training. He learned to place a bowl without glancing, to set a cup by reading the sighs the wood made under his fingers. Observation that began as a superstition matured into a craft: notice the way a jar's rim vibrated when someone laughed, how the rope at the dock held a different note when the tide was treacherous.
Midday belonged to the wild. Luffy's runs through the forest were an orchestra of small, practical things: he measured wind by slamming his hand into it and feeling how it tried to pull. The forest offered him an unending set of problems—paths that tried to hide themselves, slopes that tried to break your feet, animals that taught a boy what speed looked like. He ran until the chest tightened and became something useful, until he could close his eyes and let the terrain whisper directions. He mapped the currents of wind and water and the patterns of animal travel in the small, secret ledger a child keeps between the ribs and the mind. He could look at a fallen branch and tell you which storm it had been born of; he could feel, somewhere underneath the skin, the way a ridge sloughed off danger.
Afternoon meant Dadan. Dadan was all promises wrapped in gravel—she broke softness like bread and taught you to eat the pieces whole. Her punishments were lessons that wore like armor: logs that were too heavy, cliffs that dropped away into nothing where the sea met clouds, stones in place of chairs to make your balance dishonest and correctable. When Dadan told him to haul a log, she meant for him to learn leverage, to find the point in which a weight would listen to a child's insistence. She would grunt and swear and then hand him secrets in the form of scoldings.
Evening belonged to Donden and invention. The lab filled with the electric smell of things that wanted to improve. Donden delighted in failure and rewarded it with tools. He would hand Luffy springs and glass and the remnants of a stolen bandit contraption and say, "Make it do something worth a curtain call." Luffy found a way to make springs into traps, to solder thin wire into a crude latch that could, on a bad day, slam a door shut without a man's hands. He learned how to crush a blossom into a color that would stain a cloth for a day and how to make smoke from kitchen debris that would not suffocate. He invented capsules—tiny, shaky things sealed with a hopeful oath. At first the capsules were merely pockets of cork where a berry could hide; later they held stones, little nets, a piece of wire bent into a hook. The first capsule that survived a proper toss and still kept its contents made Luffy bark a laugh so bright it frightened the gulls.
Night was for the roof. He and Uta—when she managed to steal a break from the bar—would sit and let the world spill. His counting was a thing like a prayer. She hummed, and the hum balanced his plans. Her voice had the unsteady, perfect quality of a small thing that could, without meaning to, move the mood enough to settle a bar full of drunk men into a hush.
At first, the training felt like stacking small pebbles: repetitive, silent, almost cruel in its boredom. But pebbles become walls when you are consistent. Luffy was careful with boredom like a child with coal: it warmed him into practice. He measured the space under his ribs for breathing, practiced squeezing his hand into a fist until his wrist spoke truth. He made his body a catalog of tricks so that if the world ever tried to surprise him, each trick would answer with a polite, prepared motion.
And in the middling days—between the tenth and sixtieth—something like a whisper stroked the air. Luffy was in the cove one afternoon, returning a bit early because Donden had promised cake for anyone who could fix his temperamental pulley. Makino had sent a small package of bread and raisins wrapped in greaseproof paper. Uta had been at the bar the whole day, humming as she swept. Luffy, being a man of action and curiosity, climbed the pathway to the headland above the cove where a narrow lookout jutted like a finger pointing to all the possible roads the sea could take.
Uta, who had stepped out onto the bar's little wooden deck to string a lantern, leaned too far over the railing to peer at a kitten that had decided the rafters were a reasonable kingdom. The deck was high; below it the cliff dropped away into a fog that gulped at sound. Luffy saw her movements from a distance—he would say later it had been only a motion like a falling leaf, but the memory of it tightened his chest when he thought about it. The deck slivered under her barefoot. Her foot slipped.
Instinct is a shallow thing and a deep thing. The shallow part screamed. The deep part—something older than his chest, something that wore no name—reacted before thought finished dressing. Luffy tunneled a breath and moved, making the path between the lookout and the deck like an arrow finding its home. He planted his feet and barked a sound—part laugh, part command—and reached.
He did not remember moving. Later, when he tried to retrace the moment, he could only describe a strange lightness, the feeling of a hand that was not all his. His fingers closed around Uta's wrist as she fell and he felt a pull—not like a rope, not like wind, but like the world had lent him a hand and then drawn it back. Uta's eyes were wide and perfectly round in a way that made him want to keep them like a secret. The deck creaked and she grabbed for the railing and the kitten abandoned all dignity and made a dramatic leap for the rafters.
Uta did not cry. She blinked and laughed—an awkward, stunned sound, like someone who had been pushed into cold water and realized she loved the chill. "Luu," she said after a breath. She called him by the pet-name she'd already made into a weapon against sorrow. "Don't do that."
Luffy sat back on his heels and felt the air close like a lid. The wolves in the valley below had gone quiet. Dogs that usually barked at fishermen had their heads turned and sat with their jaws slack. Dadan—ever the remote observer—was halfway up the ridge a kilometer away, and she watched with an expression that was half suspicion, half satisfaction. She kept her lips sealed. That was Dadan's way. She had questions, but she kept them wrapped in a handkerchief.
Luffy didn't know a name for what had happened. He only knew that something small and mouse-sharp had ticked in his chest and answered like a sparrow finding seed. He wanted to test it. He wanted to press on the thing until it sang a tune he could recognize.
Over the weeks that followed, small moments like that collected themselves around him like evidence. He would be carrying sacks of grain up a bluff and find that his arms did not ache the way they had expected to; a blister would vanish as if it had been a shadow. He would jump across a puddle and feel his toes bite the world in a way that made the next leap simpler. He learned to trust the things that made little promises and kept them—wind direction, the way the rope would take the load if you shifted your weight correctly, the way a laugh could disarm a man twice your size.
The cove learned him in ways he did not intend. He practiced forming a fist where he would want it to be, not where it felt natural—because positions are lies you tell your limbs until they believe you. He tried to press himself into shapes a hammer could trust. He practiced letting his breath out like a promise and holding it like a ledger. Donden taught him to listen to the soft, mechanical cough of a hinge and to fix it before it failed. Dadan taught him how to bruise and not break. Makino taught him that a pot of stew could be a school.
Night after night he and Uta would find themselves on the roof. She hummed and he would trace constellations in the dark that only made sense if you were looking for places to hide from storms. Sometimes he would whisper lists—things he intended to learn. Sometimes he would sketch machines in the sand with a stick. She listened and hummed and sometimes the hum settled the cove like a lid. Once, when she sang a tune she had learned from a traveling merchant, the cats dropped their tails and slept. Once, when she tried a verse she'd never known, it rained out of season on a field of young lavender.
By the close of the sixth week the foundation of their long, quiet learning had been laid like mortar. Luffy could run the length of a dock three times without tasting the sea in his breath; he could climb a cliff faster than the gulls found food in a storm. He had managed to solder a crude capsule with a hand trembling but stubborn, the lid sealed with wax and the hope that wax can hold. The capsule that survived the drop from Donden's pulley into the surf was a small miracle; Donden scented it like victory and took it apart with the love of a man whose life had fewer surprises than machines did.
None of it felt final. It felt like stacking. It felt like preparing the house while the sky changed color. Luffy learned the thrill of small correctness: the exact moment you altered your grip and the board did not give. The world still held its deeper mysteries like a hand under a cloth. He tapped at the edge of that cloth sometimes and it shivered in ways he had not expected.
When he slept, he thought of the note: "We'll be back in three months." He tucked it like an ember in his chest. It warmed him in strange ways. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake and imagine Shanks' voice: "Don't be a coward, Luffy." He would laugh softly and go back to sleep.
Below the roots of Dawn Island, things stirred as quietly as gravestones deciding to sigh awake. The island ate slowly: bones of coral and metal deep beneath the mantle shifted like a giant forgetting to sleep. The island felt the pull of three children: a boy who learned too quickly, a girl who sang without knowing the power of her notes, and another child—still not yet in Luffy's world—whose shadow would soon find a place at their table. The earth kept its counsel, but things that listen pay attention.
And Luffy kept going. He practiced because a deadline was a bridge; it told him that time could be folded and arranged. He practiced because the world, in its quiet way, was watching. He practiced because making things that worked felt like a small declaration against the chaos outside them.
On the last night of the sixth week, the two-mile run felt shorter. The path back to Donden's Cove glowed with moonlight. Luffy held his latest capsule—the wax a little charred, the contents safe: a scrap of old glass that shivered into color. He felt the world press a little lighter against the ribs.
He climbed the path, not because he wanted to sleep, but because there was always more to do. The cove had a dozen small mouths that needed feeding. In the dark, the gulls argued softly, and the lab hummed the way a ship did when it remembered where it belonged. He opened the lab door and paused, listening to the cove breathe. His old grin came back, not wolfish this time but like a promise.
Three months. A deadline worth meeting.
Luffy found him on the sixty-first morning because the world had places where things went to unlatch themselves, and the Gray Terminal was one of those places. The Terminal was a reef of rusted metal and half-sunken hulls, an old docking flank for merchants who liked their deals whispered and their cargo left uninspected. It smelled of brine and mildew and copper, and gulls picked over whatever courage was left in the tide. Luffy ran toward it because running was how he answered curiosity—fast, hungry, and with no apologies.
He came around a half-broken mast and saw the boy curled against a slab of blackened timber, shoulders folded like someone trying to keep the wind out. The child looked too small to hold the marine knife he cradled like a charm. His hair, dirty-blond, clung in lank strands to his forehead. His eyes—clear blue, sharp as glass—watched Luffy approach with the careful patience of someone used to measuring every footfall. There was something quiet about him, like the kind of silence that sits politely at the edge of a conversation until it's needed.
Luffy slowed to a stop because he had learned to stop when other people were hurt. Two steps, a pause, another two, the way the sea taught rhythm. "Hey," he said, because that was often enough and because curiosity sounded softer with a consonant. "You hungry?"
The boy's gaze flicked up and then away. He took in Luffy's sandals, his sun-baked grin, the way his hair flared silver at the light and gold at the edges. He measured without moving—an assessment like a scale—and then, after a ridiculous small amount of time, nodded. He did not pick up the knife. The knife lay across his lap like a forgotten fact.
Luffy dug in the small bag of dried fish Makino had sent with him—the woman wanted goodwill sewn around the cove like a permanent stitch—and offered some. "Eat," he said. "It's good."
The boy's first contact with Luffy came as if he were trying to learn the weight of the offering in the air. He took the fish with fingers that smelled of old salt and something metallic. He tasted; his face did not change. He was not from a place where the taste of fish was a blessing. He swallowed and said, as if performing a small test of syntax, "You're… interesting."
Luffy's grin widened. He liked interesting. Interesting made the world less dull. "You look like you know how to break things properly," he said. "Wanna train?"
The boy's eyes slid over to the horizon as if he were always counting how far it was between him and trouble. Then he looked back at Luffy, and there was an almost deliberate curiosity there, clinical and unhurried. "Maybe," he said. His voice was small and calm and had the odd effect of making wind fall silent.
Luffy had a habit of doing things before he had names for them. He made a decision—one that would tangle itself into many future plans—and said, "C'mon. I'll take you where no one'll try to teach you to be a soldier."
He walked the boy back along a path that smelled of iron and salt and old promises. The day was thin; the sea's skin shivered like a sketch of weather. Luffy kept glancing at the stranger because people were puzzles and Luffy liked to solve puzzles by touching their corners. The boy's hands would tap a rock in a rhythm like he was testing the mineral for patience. He watched a gull with dispassionate interest. He accepted Luffy's jokes with a small curl of tooth that was not quite a grin.
When they reached the main street, Luffy led the boy to Makino's. The bar smelled of morning stew, smoke, and the faint, ever-present note of Ale that had been spilled and forgiven a hundred times. Makino, behind the counter, looked up and registered the boy with simple economy. Her hand slipped toward of a rag, as if to wipe an invisible surface.
Luffy beamed. "This is where you can get fed, man."
The boy's blue eyes looked over the bar like someone scanning a map. His gaze settled on Makino for a fraction and the fraction held—calm, analytical. He dipped his head in a way that was neither rude nor deferential. "I'm AO," he said, and Luffy liked the sound of it because it was a name that fit in pockets. AO. Like an engine with a quiet hum.
Makino slid a steaming bowl toward him. Her movements were gentle, maternal by habit and a tradecraft in a bar that saw all manner of poor choices. AO took the bowl with both hands, ate with the kind of economy that refused extravagance, and never met her eyes except once to say, "Thank you." The word was simple and clean and made Makino's shoulders drop the hairline of an inch.
Dadan appeared in the doorway like somebody who announces her attendance because it's less expensive than fireworks. Her silhouette filled the frame with a kind of purposeful menace, the way a giant could fill a valley with shadow. She looked AO over and snorted—a sound halfway between skepticism and amusement. "Where'd you drag up that rag?" she said.
AO's eyes rolled in a motion so small Luffy almost missed it. He didn't flinch. "Gray Terminal," he said. "I sleep where there's less to steal."
Dadan folded her arms and considered him as if judging which boot to tie. "Well, you'll sleep under someone's roof tonight. Don't get used to the rents down here being charitable."
AO's gaze moved to Dadan for a long, nearly still second. He watched the set of her jaw, the way her beard twitched when she held back a curse. He watched the brass chain on the wall where Makino hung a bunch of tokens and the small iron bell that was used to call people to the back room. Something—perhaps a pattern in his memory, a reaction keyed to uniformed shapes—tightened in his expression for the briefest of beats. The air around him seemed to note the change. Luffy, too, saw it. A little. It was like someone adding a dark brush stroke to a simple picture.
AO's voice never lost its calm. "I don't like men who dress like soldiers."
Dadan's face did not change in surprise. She shrugged like an old rug that had seen worse stains. "Wrong thing to say if a Marine happened to be in here," she grunted and then, because the world was cruel and kind both, she threw a half loaf toward AO's pocket. "You learn tricks, or you go hungry."
AO accepted the bread. He ate like someone who had practiced hunger into art. Luffy watched every movement as if memorizing a dance step.
That night the three of them—Luffy, AO, and the cove—fell into an arrangement that felt less like found family and more like an annex of necessity. Luffy insisted AO sleep in the loft above Donden's workshop, which meant that at odd hours the boy would wake to the sound of metal and the smell of hot oil and dreams that had edges of gears. Donden's contraptions, half-complete and full of mischief, watched them with the quiet, unblinking stare of things not yet finished. AO climbed into the loft with nothing but the knife and the soft sack of someone else's blanket; he lay on his back and watched the night not as an absence but as a page he might write on.
Training became three people's language. For Luffy it was play that hid strategy. For AO it was testing, an audition for the future. For Uta—when she joined later—it would be rhythm that moved the marrow of things. At first the rhythm was Luffy's: the world should be pushed, encouraged, persuaded toward being a better place for mischief.
They trained under skies that seemed patient. Luffy invented a circuit of drills that were equal parts movement and manufacture. They began with a warm-up he called the "wind-run": long runs that let you feel how a leaf chose the air. AO watched, learnt, and then suggested a variation—small foot placements that let you pivot on nothing and change momentum with a whisper. Luffy took to the variation and laughed because it made him feel like a cone of possibility.
Donden contributed what he always did: tools disguised as games. He handed AO a spring-latch and said, "Make it catch a fish." AO took the spring, looked at its geometry like it was a riddle, and wound it into a holder that could throw a net with a careful arc. His fingers moved like soft hammers. Donden whistled a note that sounded like he'd been given a new theory to disassemble.
Day turned into week and the rhythms tightened. Luffy ran the forest with AO as a mapping exercise and a gauntlet. They sprinted along ridgelines where gulls argued about currents, hopped between trees and fell through leaves like deliberate mistakes. AO's precision was astonishing to watch—his steps were placed as if the earth had marked desirable points in invisible ink. He could find an anchor point on any tree bark that would not give. Luffy learned from watching him, his own inventiveness absorbing the quiet calculus of AO's movements, folding it into something that was less precise and more explosive.
Uta's arrival, a few days later, was as ordinary as any other thing that altered the course of life: a hum here, the sound of Makino's broom on the floor, and then her small face at the doorway, hair catching the morning like something set to flame. She looked at AO for the length of one breath and hummed a little note that sat in the air like a pebble in water. AO did not react to the tune the way he reacted to soldiers; his face remained unreadable. But there was the tiniest lift at the corner of his mouth, an almost imperceptible softness that the others might have missed if they hadn't been watching for signs like cartographers look for tides.
Uta's eyes widened at the sight of AO. She had a natural tendency to file people away—this one would be someone she called a project in the future. "Hello," she said, and her voice, for reasons the village did not understand, made the room feel like it had been cleared. "You look like you need a bed that isn't made of old ship-splinters."
AO's reply was careful, factual. "I'll sleep where it is offered." He bowed his head once, not out of fear, but because he had seen manners pay rent in the past.
Makino watched the three with a woman's intuition that measured damage and goodwill in equal measure. She slid plates of stew between them and watched how they shared. Luffy ate like someone announcing gratitude with his mouth. AO took careful bites and folded his utensils in quiet. Uta nibbled at the crust and hummed a tune that, without intention, made the old clock on the wall slow its tick for a moment. Outside, dogs nosed each other and unaccountably sat in a new order.
Training intensity tripled when AO stayed. It was as if the presence of someone who could see the edge of each problem made the regular exercises into technical contests. Luffy began to invent drills mid-run—wind-run branching into tree-slam, then into equipment-carry while blindfolded. AO took each drill and refined it, turning what had been brutish into something efficient. Danden—no, Danden was Donden—applauded the innovations by handing both boys new springs and cogs.
Uta found a voice inside the drills that made them sing. Her humming had become a subtle engineering feedback loop: she would hum a rhythm and the boys would time their steps to it, and the rhythm improved their reflexes not because it counted beats but because it shifted how they weighted intention. Her songs—the ones she sang while scrubbing pots, while threading petals into garlands—began to have effects. A man who'd been arguing over a fishing quota suddenly calmed mid-sentence and agreed to split the catch. A pack of dogs that had been snarling went calm as if the tune had wrapped them in a blanket.
They discovered rules by breaking them. AO smashed a centuries-old ironwood tree near the cove in a motion so precise the tree's trunk cleaved as if the world itself had been asked to accept a new seam. The impact left a perfect handprint melted into the trunk, the lines of his fingers etched like a seal. No one had seen such force applied with such surgical care. Men who had watched forest fights for their whole lives blinked, as if some truth they had been told as a child had been rearranged.
Luffy, for his part, did something that would later be told as rumor and recorded in private notes. He stood beneath a boulder the size of a small ship—one that had been exposed at the mouth of an old landslide—and caught it. He did not grip it like grabbing a basket; he caught it like a child catching a ball, palms opened and steady. The sound that followed was a dull, astonished knell as the world, which had expected the boulder to roll, felt instead that something light and willing prevented it. He rolled the rock aside as if it were a child's toy. The valley below—where wolves had been listening to the air—shifted its mood, and birds left the trees as if embarrassed at having been surprised.
Uta's lullaby was a soft thing at first, an experiment in mood. The children took to testing melodies when they had gentle days. One time, drawn by curiosity, Uta walked through a field where the elder bandits kept a pack of Lord-class tigers—riders used them for a border patrol, and the tigers were as large as carts and had eyes like polished copper. Uta hummed because she always hummed, and the tigers curled their ears. The men who had expected spectacle found their mounts folded and snoring so deeply the dust settled on them like an unbothered blanket. No one could explain the depth of sleep: not poison, not muscle lock, not exhaustion—something older, like the feeling of safety you get when a lullaby covers your nightmares.
Those small miracles were the kind of thing that made neighbors look a little longer and then look away, because small miracles required stories and stories required explanation, and explanations had costs. Rumors began to fold like papers into corners. The bandits who had once taken pleasure in warning the children off the cliffs now sidled around them with caution and left extra food near the lab. They told each other about the boy who could catch mountains and the girl whose song silenced lions. The story softened into a marketable danger: perhaps if one were polite, the children were less likely to be a problem.
Luffy's inventions grew with the confidence of someone who had both curiosity and the discipline to repeat failure until the thing refused to be wrong. He figured out how to harden a small piece of resin with a heat that did not break it. He soldered a spring into a cap that kept a berry from decomposing for longer, which would later help make the first crude capsule. He drew a diagram with a stick in the sand that showed how to compress air in a bell to make a sharp, hollow sound: a signal. He practiced compressing his own breath until a cough felt like punctuation rather than a surprise.
AO's presence altered the tenor of danger. He was not loud. He was a careful machine in a room full of children learning to be weapons or artists. He assessed people the way a carpenter measured wood: for grain, for defects, for load. Where a bandit led with brags and bluster, AO mapped their limits. He took to stalking like a scholar did to books—collecting pages, rearranging knowledge into an outline of how to break an opponent down. He had a way of moving that made shadows feel redundant: he did not just hide; he refused the need to be seen.
The cove's animals reflected them back. Wolves listened differently. A fox would let them cross near its den. The sea, which had been politely still, sent a current that nudged the cove's small boats into alignment as if an invisible hand had decided the docks would be orderly that day. Donden scratched notes into a pad that would later become a catalogue of small anomalies. He muttered about containment ratings as if cataloguing comets.
At night, when men had the idea of gossip and sadness and set them on the floor to wrestle, Uta would hum and the room would soften. AO sat a little apart from the others, quiet and consistent. Luffy liked to think AO was waiting for the part of life that required decisions. AO's face never told when he was deciding. It held neutrality like a shop window displays a single item—inviting focused attention and no more.
One afternoon, after a morning of hauling ammunition for the bandits and an afternoon of building a new pulley that Donden insisted would be "greater than the last machine," Luffy took AO down to the tidepools where glass flared like hidden moons. The boys sat on rocks and split the crust of bread between them. AO watched the surf play with the light as if measuring angles in memory. Luffy scrawled shapes in the sand with a stick—ideas he did not yet have words for—and AO copied them in smaller, more precise lines. Luffy admired the neatness and then ruined it with a grin because neatness scared him a little when things could be bent.
"Why did you run?" Luffy asked, because there were truths he could not tell by looking at someone and wanted to be told by their face. It was straightforward, the way one child asked another how a trick was done. The question landed like a simple stone.
AO chewed. "It was a place I could not belong," he said. The words were not the shape of an apology. "I was not made for where they wanted me."
Luffy considered this, and the consideration in Luffy ran like water—he took the shape that fit best. "Well, you can belong here," he said. "If you like. There's food, and there's trouble. Mostly trouble."
AO's eyes slid to Luffy's face with a curiosity that made Luffy feel like a specimen. "You will teach," AO stated.
"I teach things," Luffy agreed. "I teach how to laugh at big rocks."
AO tilted his head the way a device calipers its fit. "You are not like the others," he said. He meant it as observation. Luffy took it as the highest compliment.
There was a subtle shift in the island then, as if something deep inside the bones of Dawn Island had been nudged awake by the small adjustment of children's arrangements. It was not the sort of thing that sent smoke into the sky. It was a low, slow settling, like a great beast turning over in the next room. The ground did not quake, but the earth hummed with a low note that some fishermen later said they had heard when nets pulled from the ocean: a single deep intake that felt like a breath.
Days blurred into chores spun into practice and then into routines rewritten by invention. The cove fed them—fish and work and small mercies. The bandits watched from a distance, feral and curious, and offered what they could: old rope, a rusted sling, advice that smelled of regret. Donden began to catalog the changes in a ledger, scratching down anomalies with that same modest awe he used when tinkering an engine that refused to behave. "Containment rating: increasing," he muttered one afternoon, more to himself than anyone else.
As the second month folded deeper and the children's bodies grew into the demands they asked of them, the island's other neighbors took note. Travelers who passed through on the way between larger ports told tales in hushed wonder about the girl whose voice changed men and the boy who stopped a rock. Most dismissed the tales as coastal exaggeration; the ones who stayed long enough to see the children's practice said only, "There is something in those kids."
It made the cove both safer and less safe. Safer because people feared the unknown; less safe because the unknown gained notice.
By the end of month two, the training had become a small machine of habits. Luffy's capsules had gotten better—sealed cork replaced with resin, better spring latches, a crude but reliable internal cushion. AO had started to craft small instruments of leverage that he could tuck inside a boot—a tiny pry bar that could rend a lock if placed with enough calm. Uta took to weaving a background hum to everything: a tune to mend a broken poultice, a note to quiet a frightened child, a melody that made the locals remember why they used to laugh.
On the last night of the second month, under a moon so full it seemed to lean in with curiosity, the three children sat on the windmill hill and shared a hunk of stolen sea-king meat. They ate not in silence but in the comfortable chatter that fills when people trust enough to not be guarded. The windmill's arms creaked like a ship remembering an old sea. The village below twinkled with lights like an informal scattering of stars. Foxes moved like secrets in the hedgerows. Danden's nothing-sweet tools hummed in the lab's heart.
And then, far out at sea, a flash of red broke the horizon like someone had suddenly placed a bright edit in the sky. It moved fast—too fast to be merely a trading craft, too precise to be a trick of the lighting. The flash left no time for the children to form explanation. It winked and then was gone, swallowed by the distance again as if embarrassed by its speed.
Luffy's grey-gold eyes caught the flash like it left a stain on his view. For a blink the world tightened. "Red…" he whispered. The word was small and old like a warning left in a pocket.
Dadan, up on the ridge half-hidden, heard the whisper as if it carried on a wire. She gripped her pipe and squeezed so hard the wood cracked with the sound of anger surprised into fear. Makino, locking the bar with more force than was necessary, stopped and stared toward the horizon with a face that was split between hope and dread; a mother's heart will always do both. Donden, in the lab, set down a wrench and began to sketch a new form of clasp that might hold a secret. He muttered into the scratchings: "Containment. Containment. Containment." The word was a prayer and a practical instruction.
Beneath them, beneath the roots and the marrow of Dawn Island, something shifted like a great thought moving into wakefulness. The island responded to the presence of will: to Luffy's new, messy competence; to Uta's song that threaded the world with notes; to AO's quiet that measured the land for load. The old thing under the stone felt the trio like a pin on a map.
Dawn Island, despite its breadth, was still an island to those who lived on it—large and whole and stubborn. The fishermen and the farmers called it an island because naming things keeps them from becoming monsters. Outside of perception shaped by Nen—where sailors and scholars believed the world to be twenty times larger than what the old maps suggested—something else was true. There were places larger than Dawn Island. There were continents that dwarfed Dawn just as a ripple dwarfs a pond. The truth, whispered in dusty corridors of ancient archives and kept from common knowledge by the kind of men who weighed danger and found it heavier than coin, was darker: in a frame the world might be two hundred times larger, a plane with edges that kept folding like a paper map you could never fully unfold. But that was not a story for a village over stew. It hung above them like an unmade ceiling—something their elders nodded to when they spoke of the strange storms, something the Red Hair crew had measured and chosen to treat as a careful, dangerous joke.
The children did not know the extent of that truth. They only knew the feel of the wind and the way their muscles answered when asked for more. They only knew, in the visceral way of small people, that their world had tilted. Luffy's heart beat in his chest like a small drum, and the drumbeat felt like the beginning of a sentence.
The flash of red sails was gone by the time adults decided what to do. Men with nets called it nothing. Fishermen who had seen much waved their hands and said the horizon played tricks. But Makino and Dadan and Donden and the bandits—all of them, even those who painted danger in broad strokes—knew the way a thing can look ordinary and be forbidden at once. They stored the knowledge in pockets where they might pull it out later and set it down like a loaded coin.
The last thing the windmill hill offered that night was a sense of debt. Luffy put his hand to his chest and felt the slow thump that had been training him into someone who might be trusted to carry more than his size allowed. AO sat a little back from the edge and watched the black of the sea like a man who liked to study a chessboard before moving a pawn. Uta hummed and the humming dissolved the tension for a breath, and then the cove returned to watching its children and measuring whether they would make things better or worse.
Far beneath Dawn Island, the creature that ate slowly—part coral, part metal, stitched together with echo-Nen and dead things' bones—turned. Its vast gutshire of decay shifted as if feeling three small new wills at the surface. It had slumbered while men forgot the old things, while emperors counted their coins, while governments wrote reasons into maps. It had felt hunger before. It remembered the taste of continents, the slow plans of sailors who took it for a mountain and paid with their lives.
Tonight the taste of three small children touched something in that monstrous interior. It inhaled. Not with malice, not yet, but with awareness. It had been waiting a long time to be recognized. The world, as the old charts liked to keep secret, answered to attention and to being noticed.
On the windmill hill the children laughed and promised small, ridiculous things to each other—catch a whale, make a friend of a leviathan, make Uta's voice the new national anthem (which is absurd and somehow inevitable). They did not know the way their laughter would scatter like seeds in the soil. They did not know that three months was a promise that would become a plan and that plans would need to be defended by more than courage.
Somewhere, far beyond their sight, the Red Hair fleet was becoming a rumor in the minds of men who read smuggled manifests and stitched together falsehoods for fun and profit. Someone noted a shipment rerouted. Someone else discovered a pattern in the stars. The clock was keeping its slow time.
Up on the hill the moon hung like a watchful eye. Luffy chewed and felt the meat in his mouth like a small trophy. AO sat impassive and observant and sometimes smiled a fraction when Luffy's plans excited him. Uta hummed and the tune settled like a blanket. They were small and fierce and, in a world that was much bigger than their cove could imagine, they had, in those weeks, become the thing the island felt in its bones.
When the night finished and the village went to bed, each adult tucked away a thought like a man folding a map: a memory to be checked later. Donden scribbled an extra note—"Containment rating; escalate to two." Makino muttered a small prayer. Dadan sat up too late and chewed tobacco and cursed to nobody.
Beneath them all, the island settled its great weight and made room for the next moment. The sea, for its part, kept its secrets with a patience that only oceans have, and the horizon kept a particular color as if waiting for an answer.
And in the loft above the lab, AO woke at a sound he could not identify and listened. He had been given a place—temporary and thin and mostly old rope—and he had slotted that space into his plans. He had started to belong because belonging was a practical advantage in the world. He folded what the day had given him into a narrow blueprint and laid his head down on a sack. The knife that had been his single companion lay beside him, quiet and patient.
Outside, the island inhaled slow and long, like something making itself ready for a game that would require more than cleverness. Luffy dreamed, incongruously, of gears and songs and big red sails cutting through the fog. He grinned in his sleep, hungry and simple and ready. The world, which was old and vast and laughing quietly under its breath, had noticed those three small people. It would, soon enough, decide whether to teach them mercy or to test their endurance.
At the edge of the cove the tide hissed like an old man telling a secret. The moon looked on and the three children slept under its watch. Dawn Island, still an island though not the largest thing in the real frame of the world, held them close and waited to see who they would become.
Author note: Size of the World:
The One Piece world in this story is 20× larger than canon.
True size = ???× larger, but Nen distorts perception, blocking awareness of the dangerous areas.
???
Space exists and can be traveled to.
TIME SYSTEM:
Time Conversions
1day = 49 hours
1 week = 10 days = 490 hours
1 month = 6 weeks = 60 days = 2,940 hours
1 year = 32 months = 192 weeks = 1,920 days = 94,080 hours
This influences:
Climate cycles(Longer seasons)
Character aging(Peaple Live way longer here then people on earth)
Ship travel
Seasonal monster migrations
Day/night behavior
Day/Night Cycle:
49-hour days
21 hrs night → 28 hrs of day