The year was 1498 of the Sea Calendar.
Loguetown lay suffocating under a canopy of bruised, black clouds. The air was thick, heavy with the metallic scent of a storm that refused to break.
In the central plaza, humanity was a sea of pressed flesh. Shoulders ground against shoulders. The air hummed with a low, rhythmic vibration—the collective murmurs of thousands, sounding like the incessant drone of a locust swarm.
Rumble!!
A jagged vein of silver lightning tore across the sky, momentarily bleaching the world white.
"Hey! Pirate King! Where's the treasure you hid?" a voice cut through the drone, sharp and hungry.
"Is it really on the Grand Line?" another shouted. "You found it, didn't you? That legendary hoard—the ONE PIECE!"
The source was an unremarkable man in the crowd, his face lost among the masses, yet his words acted like a spark in a powder keg. On the high wooden platform, the target of those hungry shouts sat motionless.
Gol D. Roger.
The man who had conquered the sea knelt with his wrists bound, the heavy wood of the execution stand pressing against his knees. For a heartbeat, the plaza fell into a vacuum of silence. Breathing hitched. Eyes widened, straining to catch a flicker of emotion from the man on the brink of death.
The executioners stood frozen, their hands tightening around the shafts of their polearms, faces pale beneath their hoods. They were mere ripples in the wake of the man sitting before them.
"Hahahaha!! My treasure?"
Roger's laughter was a physical force, deep and resonant, vibrating through the floorboards. He sat cross-legged now, defying the solemnity of his own slaughter.
"If you want it, you can have it! Go find it... I left everything this world has to offer in that place!"
"You bastard—!" One executioner's face twisted in a mask of panic.
"The Grand Line!! The ONE PIECE!"
The roar was Roger's final decree.
The executioner's spear descended. Cold steel bit through flesh and bone, pinning the Pirate King to the platform.
[The Pirate King, Gol D. Roger — Executed]
"Uwoooooh!!"
The silence shattered. A tidal wave of sound erupted from the square and rippled outward to every corner of the globe watching the broadcast. It was a cacophony of madness: the manic cheers of dreamers, the calculated silence of the ambitious, and the cold, distant stares of revolutionaries.
The tide of the era had reached its crest. The Great Pirate Era had begun.
In a building overlooking the square, a man with a braided goatee gripped a stone windowsill. His frog-shaped glasses reflected the chaos below. A dull crack echoed in the room as the masonry crumbled into dust under his fingers.
Marine Admiral Sengoku stared at the madness, his jaw set in a grim line. He knew. The world was about to tilt on its axis.
"Ugh..."
In a narrow alleyway removed from the roar of the crowd, a small figure lay sprawled like a discarded rag. The vibration of the cheering finally reached him, jarring his senses.
He lifted a stiff, heavy neck. Beneath a layer of grime was the handsome, sharp face of a boy no older than twelve. His eyes, initially clouded with confusion, suddenly sharpened as they locked onto the distant execution platform. His pupils shrunk to pinpricks.
"Pirate King... Roger?"
As a lifelong fan, those features were unmistakable. Even translated from the screen to the stark reality of flesh and blood, that "wild" countenance and those iconic, sweeping mustache hairs were burned into his memory.
He was a transmigrator—an orphan from an orderly world who had traded a stable job and a quiet life for a nightmare of wood and salt. In his world, the One Piece was a story. Here, it was a death sentence. Here, the Celestial Dragons were a heel on the neck of humanity, and the "freedom" of pirates was often written in the blood of the innocent.
"Kanos Atlas..." the boy whispered, the name feeling heavy on his tongue. "I guess I'm you now."
Atlas forced himself upright, his muscles screaming in protest. He had to move.
The square was a graveyard of giants. Somewhere in that teeming mass were the monsters of the next generation—Red-Haired Shanks, Hawkeye Mihawk, the fledgling tyrant Doflamingo, the shadow-user Moriah. They were dormant volcanoes, and when they finally erupted, the Marines wouldn't be far behind.
Sengoku was no fool. The Admiral would move to purge the square. This place was about to become a slaughterhouse of blood and fire.
Atlas staggered. His stomach felt like it was filled with hot coals, a gnawing, hollow ache that threatened to fold him in half. His legs were leaden, yet he pushed forward, guided by the fragmented memories of the boy he had replaced.
The Loguetown Marine Base. That was the goal.
He moved through the outskirts of the crowd, a ghost among the madness. Every step was a battle of wills. He had lived as an orphan once before; he knew that survival wasn't a gift—it was something you tore out of the world's hands with bloodied fingernails.
The minutes stretched into an agonizing eternity. His vision began to swim, the edges fraying into darkness. Just as his knees buckled, the silhouette of a seagull holding a set of scales emerged through the gloom.
The Marine symbol.
A strange sense of relief washed over him, dulling the sharp edge of his adrenaline. The sounds of the world—the distant cannon fire, the screams, the rain—began to fade into a muffled hum.
"I..."
Atlas didn't finish the thought. His body, pushed past its breaking point, finally gave out. He collapsed toward the cobblestones in front of the base gates.
"Quick! A boy fainted over here!"
The last thing he heard was the frantic rhythm of boots hitting the pavement, and then, the world went black.