Bang—
With a dull thud, Bai Junyi's heavy body slid to the floor beside the bed in his tiny hut, which was less than ten square meters.
At that moment, both his expression and his heart were shrouded in darkness.
One sentence from Kudri kept replaying in his mind...
"You're nothing but a filthy commoner, yet you dared to ruin my fun. You have three days to settle your affairs. In three days, the Navy will come to your doghouse, arrest you, and execute you. Of course, you can try to run during those three days—if you can get past the Navy's blockade at the village entrance."
Playing cat and mouse was Kudri's favorite game.
Especially when the mouse was Bai Junyi, a nine-year-old orphan and commoner. That only stirred Kudri's hidden appetite for cruelty.
It had all started because Bai Junyi had accidentally drunk the spiked beverage Kudri had prepared for Eiffel, the daughter of the man next door. Because of Bai Junyi, the drink meant for Eiffel had been passed to him instead.
There was no doubt that after drinking it, Bai Junyi had fallen unconscious. When he woke, the first thing he saw was Eiffel's body, a blood-soaked wreck... No, her corpse. A Navy-issue longsword was buried in her chest, where her heart lay. Beneath her cold body was a foul-smelling mixture of blood and filth. Her eyes stared wide open, her once-delicate features gone, leaving behind only a hatred that refused to fade...
After beating Bai Junyi so badly that both body and spirit were broken, Kudri hadn't killed him outright. Instead, he squeezed the last bit of value out of him and let him go, so he could enjoy a cruel game—letting the fear of approaching death crush Bai Junyi little by little.
Bai Junyi didn't even know how he had made it from that cold cellar back to his ramshackle hut. All that remained in his mind were Eiffel's pitiful corpse and Kudri's mocking voice, echoing over and over.
He hadn't known Eiffel well. He was just a helpless boy who survived on other people's charity and by collecting fish washed ashore. She had passed the drink to him only because she pitied the nine-year-old boy and wanted to politely turn down Kudri.
But who could have imagined that one impulsive act of kindness would send Eiffel to her death? If she had drunk the beverage herself, she would have lost the most precious thing she had while in a daze, but at least her life would have been spared.
Instead, she hadn't passed out. Bai Junyi, the commoner, had. That was how she'd realized something was wrong with the drink. Kudri, who had always played the good-natured gentleman, couldn't accept that. If word got out, his father—the Navy colonel stationed on the small island called Frost Moon Village—would give him a stern reprimand.
On the island, Kudri, the son of the Naval Base's colonel, had always had a good reputation. Before this, Bai Junyi had also believed that this seemingly unreachable man was a good person. Kudri's disguise had clearly been convincing, though that was partly because Bai Junyi had only ever heard of this "important figure" and had never met him.
The reason he went to such lengths to hide his true nature was the powerful man backing him: his father, Navy Colonel Kuroje. He was widely regarded as a true Navy man, always protecting the island from pirates. He was, by all accounts, a good person. Four years earlier, when Bai Junyi had just arrived in this world as a helpless five-year-old, the colonel had fished him out of the sea from a piece of floating timber, brought him aboard his warship, and taken him to the island.
That's right—four years ago, not nine.
Bai Junyi wasn't from this world. He had arrived here by accident. Once a doctoral student with an IQ of 200, famous for memorizing the contents of an entire library, he had been reborn in another body as a five-year-old child. All the knowledge he'd once learned was useless in this world, where strength ruled all.
The moment he opened his eyes and saw this unfamiliar world, Bai Junyi had known where he was. The familiar Navy system and a report from fourteen years earlier about the execution of the Pirate King, Gol D. Roger, proved beyond doubt that this was the world of the anime One Piece, which he had watched in his previous life.
And in Frost Moon Village, he had even seen Roronoa Zoro, a future legend who was his age.
When he'd first arrived, he had dreamed of building an empire of his own. He had even wanted to study swordsmanship alongside Zoro at the only dojo in Frost Moon Village. But he couldn't afford the Beli needed to enroll, and he lacked the talent to make the dojo's master, Koshiro, take Zoro on as his heir.
And so those dreams came to nothing. For four years, he had lived on other people's charity and scavenged along the shore.
At times he had felt indignant, but there was nothing he could do about it. Even trying to get close to the future pirate king Zoro had proved difficult. After all, Zoro had entered the dojo, and the two of them now belonged to different worlds. The knowledge Bai Junyi had once acquired was worthless in a world with a completely different system.
Bai Junyi spent the night in a daze. The rising sun spilled through the cracks in the walls, falling across his face and lighting up his lifeless, bloodshot eyes.
That sliver of sunlight brought him back to his senses.
A mad world, a desperate predicament, a brutal enemy he couldn't fight back against—any one of them could drive someone to madness.
Bai Junyi was no different. He had been born in a peaceful era, and his timid nature had kept him living as he always had, even though he knew he was in the world of One Piece. But now he couldn't keep living that way. If even a meek, submissive existence couldn't keep him safe, then he would go mad on his own terms before he died.
His dazed eyes changed. His bloodshot gaze turned savage, veins bulging at the corners of his eyes. A twisted, deranged smile spread across his face, like that of a demon...
He turned and shifted the bed, which was made from a few broken planks. Then he began digging into the floor beneath it. After only a few strokes, a rusty iron box appeared before him.
With a crazed look on his face, Bai Junyi opened the lid. Inside was a strange fruit, shaped like an apple and covered in little blackish-purple bumps. It looked like a toad—one of those highly poisonous ones—and just looking at it was enough to make you feel sick.
Two years earlier, Bai Junyi had found the iron box on the shore. The first thing that had crossed his mind when he opened it and saw the fruit inside was that it was a Devil Fruit.
The rust on the box showed that it had drifted at sea for at least a year, yet the fruit inside looked as though it had just been picked from a tree, without the slightest sign of rot. That was proof enough that it wasn't an ordinary fruit.
But its appearance shattered his hopes.
As someone who had watched the One Piece anime, he knew the three kinds of Devil Fruits: Paramecia, shaped like pomelos; Logia, shaped like pineapples; and Zoan, shaped like bananas. But no Devil Fruit was shaped like an apple. And this fruit had none of the mysterious spiral patterns, only those blackish-purple bumps that made his skin crawl.
On top of that, its natural stench made it clear to anyone who found it that this was a poisonous fruit, not the extraordinarily rare and valuable Devil Fruit.
That was why Bai Junyi hadn't eaten it. He had hidden it beneath the bed instead.
But now he couldn't afford to care. On the brink of madness, Bai Junyi snatched up the bizarre Devil Fruit and shoved it into his mouth.
An indescribable stench churned in his mouth. But now that he had gone completely mad, Bai Junyi seemed not to notice. He chewed like a man possessed and swallowed the entire Devil Fruit, which was almost as big as his head.
"Urgh—ugh!"
The next moment, stomach acid surged out of Bai Junyi's mouth. Yet not a trace of the fruit's flesh remained in it, as if the moment it entered his mouth, it had dissolved completely.
Then a piece of information, as though he had known it from birth, appeared in Bai Junyi's mind.
But the information made the madness drain from his expression. His face shifted through uncertainty before his bloodshot eyes finally dimmed. Despair engulfed him, and he collapsed onto the floor, sitting motionless.
Unnoticed by him, a line of small writing had been etched into the bottom of the iron box beside him.
"Failed Experiment No. 01—Reason for failure: failed due to the incorporation of an unknown element never before encountered. Testing confirms extreme toxicity. Scheduled for destruction!" The name signed at the bottom belonged to someone who would become famous around the world.
The greatest genius among individual scientists—Vegapunk!
If Bai Junyi had seen those words, he would have realized that the history of the bizarre fruit he had eaten might stretch much further back than he imagined.
Vegapunk was the Navy's greatest scientific genius. Even now, before the story began, he was already the Navy's chief scientist. The markings on the bottom of the iron box revealed that this Devil Fruit was one of Vegapunk's research products from before he joined the Navy.
It had only been created because he had obtained a special substance that could be described as belonging to another world.
Even Vegapunk himself could never have imagined that the poisonous fruit meant to be destroyed would end up in the hands of someone from another world... much less how it would change the future!
I originally planned to write a more comedic protagonist, but somehow, without realizing it, I turned him into an extremist who would do anything to grow stronger. But that works too—it suits the fruit's ability.
This book's updates will be irregular for now. Once Xiao Jiao's other book, Death: Beauty Bodyguard Squad, is finished, I'll start uploading this one regularly.
Death: Beauty Bodyguard Squad should wrap up in about twenty to thirty chapters, which is why I started uploading this book early. Please look forward to it!