Marineford Era 1525, North Blue, White City. Flevance.
Six in the evening.
Bang! Boom, boom, boom!!
The oppressive atmosphere that had long weighed on the White City, stifling and suffocating, was suddenly set ablaze by the sound of gunfire and cannon blasts.
At that very moment, residents from every level of society in this city and country were fleeing in all directions through the streets.
From beggars to nobles...
Piercing screams and wails, along with the cold, merciless crack of gunfire, rang out along the streets, packed with people on every side.
"Damn it, how could this happen?"
A black-haired boy of fourteen or fifteen, his face smeared with dust, was curled up in an alley piled with clutter, deserted by everyone.
His pitch-black eyes, webbed with blood vessels, were filled with panic.
Laplace clutched his head with both hands and gritted out in a low growl, "Doctor Trafalgar said Lead Platinum Disease isn't contagious. Urgh... My head hurts!"
The migraine that had plagued him for so long, with no discernible cause, struck again amid the overwhelming surge of emotion.
As a sharp pain tore through his lungs, images that had once been hazy but were now crystal clear kept appearing in his mind:
"Laplace... Meimumu... pirates... Flevance... Earth... a cement truck speeding straight toward me on the street..."
Boom!
Just then, a tremendous explosion rang out from the street not far away.
The boy named Laplace shuddered violently. When he came back to himself, his bloodshot eyes held an expression of helplessness that was neither laughter nor tears.
His tightly pressed, thin lips twitched unconsciously.
"Meimumu? Did I survive a disaster just to be plunged into one nightmare after another?"
His heart pounded violently as he gasped for breath, his mind in chaos. Fragments of memories from his previous life kept shifting and resurfacing.
His mouth hung open as he gulped for air, and his legs trembled uncontrollably.
Suddenly, another explosion boomed, and Meimumu's bewildered gaze cleared.
His body trembled despite himself.
"What a disastrous start!" The panic lingering in Meimumu's eyes hardened into resolve, and he grew intensely wary as he braced himself against the clutter and slowly rose into a crouch.
He took slow, deep breaths, listened, and surveyed his surroundings. He saw that the place he'd stumbled into while fleeing in blind panic was an alley piled with all kinds of clutter. The battered wooden crates around him provided enough cover to keep him fairly well hidden.
He clutched his head with both hands as waves of pain kept striking it.
A few minutes later, as his breathing steadied and the panic in his eyes began to recede, Meimumu suddenly noticed strings of azure code flickering at the corner of his left eye.
He blinked. It wasn't an illusion.
"What's this?" He froze. Then, amid a mixture of wonder and anticipation, the blue code quickly faded away.
Right after it, a futuristic-looking azure interface, like a dialogue box, appeared before his eyes. At its center was a dim, square slot.
Just then,
some information naturally surfaced in Meimumu's consciousness.
His mouth fell open without him realizing it.
A moment later, his mouth closed, and Meimumu's expression turned deeply complicated as he figured out what this thing was.
In his previous life,
he'd heard online that the world would experience a once-in-a-thousand-years total solar eclipse in an hour, so he went out onto the street.
Unsure if the news was true, he sat on a bench by the sidewalk, played League of Legends Mobile, and waited for the eclipse.
After a while, the eclipse did indeed arrive on schedule. In broad daylight, the sky darkened in an instant, and then a mysterious aurora appeared at the edge of the sun.
It was mysterious and breathtakingly beautiful!
His heart raced, his hands trembled,
and he switched to the camera app in the middle of the game. But the sudden darkness must have thrown a cement truck off, and then its rapid approach startled him badly.
The screeching brakes had been deafening.
The smell of burnt rubber had wafted into his nostrils on the breeze.
But with the healthy eighteen-year-old body he'd had, he could've easily dodged it.
As he darted aside, his phone flew from his hand. He was worried about it, so he turned to grab it, but his foot caught on something, and he lost his balance and fell.
By some freak of luck, the phone landed on one corner, sticking upright, and he went headfirst into it right after.
All he remembered was his left eye going dark and aching...
Now, Meimumu wanted to cry but had no tears.
"Shouldn't I have ended up in Valoran, if I had to go anywhere? Why did I end up in such a 'terrifying' world instead?"
Reincarnation!
He was sure of it, because his memories of the past were all his own, crystal clear.
At the same time, as the memories of his two lives merged and intermingled, he realized where he had ended up.
[ONE PIECE]
A fantastical world that had existed only in the realm of imagination in his previous life.
A world of island cultures, surrounded by the sea, whose general era resembled the Middle Ages of his previous life, yet was also somewhat different.
Its geography was broadly divided into the four outer seas of East, South, West, and North Blue, and the first and second halves of the Grand Line, which ran roughly through the center of the world.
And now, he was in a country called Flevance in North Blue.
And this country was now facing imminent destruction.
As the somewhat hazy information kept surfacing in his mind, the look in his eyes grew more and more uneasy.
"I used to be a grown-up chūnibyō and had my share of fantasies, but you didn't have to actually send me here, did you?"
As the thought crossed his mind, his heart pounded harder. Panic, excitement, and fear mingled together, until the increasingly intense gunfire from afar dragged his attention back to the present.
At the same time, a bone-deep chill crept over him. Having lived in this world for fourteen years, he knew all too well just how chaotic this era was.
The Great Pirate Era had been underway for nearly eight years.
Even Flevance, a country built on false prosperity, with its glittering exterior, was still rife with gangs and street thugs causing trouble.
And he...
His father had come from another country sixteen years ago to seek his fortune here. With his handsome looks and smooth speech, he'd met and married his mother, a down-on-her-luck noblewoman from the island whose title had been stripped away, and they'd had him.
Unfortunately, his father had been buried forever in a mining accident five years ago.
After the family's main pillar had fallen,
his mother had been depressed every day. His occasional migraines, which had started when he was five, nearly drained the family's savings, and a year later, she too died with regrets.
So he became an orphan and was taken in by a nun at a church with ties to his family.
A year later, the nun died unexpectedly, and that same year, the church "graduated" him on the grounds that he was too old to stay.
He had only a house to his name, but no other source of income, and he couldn't just live off his savings until they ran out.
So he'd started working as a reporter's assistant at a large newspaper.
Now he looked down at his left index finger, which had turned completely white up to the base, and a shadow passed through his eyes.
"Lead Platinum Disease!"
The disease hadn't yet flared up, but five days ago at the hospital he'd seen the patients suffering from Lead Platinum Disease, their appearance so wretched.
"Twenty years? That's how long I have to live?"
The light in his eyes dimmed, but soon another glimmer appeared.
"I've got a cheat."
With a thought, a square azure interface appeared before his eyes, and an empty slot appeared in the center of it.
[Equipment Slot]
Then the interface blurred for a moment, and the display in the slot changed.
Three neat lines of text appeared.
Name: []
Skills and Expertise: []
Special Expertise: []
At that moment,
as he looked at the empty interface, he couldn't help but fall into thought. Should he be called Laplace or Meimumu?
"Laplace is the name my parents in this life gave me. Meimumu was the nickname my parents in my previous life got used to calling me.
"So..."
[Laplace Merlin]
Merlin put the names together like this, because Meimumu was his nickname, while Merlin was his full name in his previous life.
At the same time, the information on the interface blurred and changed, and his name appeared.
He looked again at the empty [Expertise] field. A wry smile appeared on Merlin's face, but he quickly rallied.
That was because he'd already figured out the basic function of this "cheat" interface.
For some unknown reason, the [Equipment Slot] from League of Legends Mobile,
had become one of his innate abilities after his reincarnation.
Its current effect was that he could turn physical objects into [Equipment] and equip them, thereby gaining the effects they possessed.
Equipping [Equipment] activated [Synchronization Value]. At different synchronization stages after equipping it, he had a chance of acquiring one of the [Equipment]'s special traits.
At that thought, a bright gleam flashed in Merlin's eyes.
A surge of confidence rose within him.
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