Father and Daughter's Conversation; Dongze Frantically Grinding Proficiency / The Two Clash Again; The Crowd Is Stunned

The ability he had unexpectedly awakened cleared the confusion from his heart. All that remained was to persevere, persevere, and persevere!

Seeing a flicker of envy in Kuina's eyes, Dongze sighed softly.

"Kuina! Talent is something you're born with. What good does envy do?"

"Do you think that if we envy this Moss Head's absurd growth in strength, heaven will give us a body like his?"

At Dongze's words, Kuina's eyes dimmed. He was right. No matter how much she envied Zoro, she couldn't gain a body like his.

Seeing her grow dejected, Dongze seemed to recall something and couldn't help saying, "If we can't change what heaven decided, then we'll just have to work harder. Maybe that's the only way we can stand out from the crowd!"

"Besides, I don't think you're any less talented than this Moss Head. Girls may gain strength more slowly, but who says a swordsman's worth is measured by strength alone?"

"And why do you think this Moss Head works so hard? He's trying everything he can to beat you. Until he does, you can't lose heart!"

"Hmph, I know! Besides, do I look like someone who gives up that easily?"

Zoro's movements faltered when he heard Dongze.

"Not bad!"

A grin tugged at the Moss Head's lips, and he went right back to his frenzied "self-torture."

Dongze's words had encouraged Kuina, but they had also kept her a rival who would push him to improve, someone who gave him a reason to keep fighting.

Zoro looked down on Dongze, but since the guy had cheered Kuina up, he had to admit Dongze was good for something.

What Zoro couldn't have known was that the Dongze he dismissed today would one day become the goal he chased all his life—even someone he looked up to. Life had a way of surprising people.

"Hey! Earth to Kuina!"

"Mm..."

"Stop shouting! I heard you!"

As she spoke, Kuina used her height advantage to pin Dongze by the head and give his hair a vicious ruffling. Then she casually blew a few stray strands off her hand. Zoro, who had been watching them from the corner of his eye, felt his eyelid twitch.

If he faced Kuina right now, he wouldn't fare any better!

Staring at the hair in her hand, he muttered inwardly, Damn it, that Female Tyrannosaur!

A Father-Daughter Talk and Dongze's Relentless Proficiency Grind

The sun sank westward, stretching their shadows longer and longer.

"Dongze, do you think girls really can't reach the top? Is Father right that I'll never be the strongest?"

Despite everything Dongze had told her, she still had little faith in herself.

Isshin Dojo was already coming into view ahead. Dongze hesitated, then remembered the accident that awaited Kuina because she couldn't let go of this doubt. At last, he sighed.

"Hey, Kuina. I happened to hear a few names around the village. They say these women are among the strongest people on the seas. If you're still unsure about your future, ask Master about them!"

Kuina hesitated. "They're all women?"

This time, Dongze offered no explanation. He simply listed the names. "Charlotte Linlin!"

"Tsuru!"

"Gion!"

"Amazon Lily!"

"..."

"You really heard about them in the village?"

"Kuina! A girl can become the strongest, but she'll have to work harder. Believe in yourself. The path is right beneath your feet, and your future is bright!"

The next day at Isshin Dojo, Kuina seemed changed when she appeared. She carried herself with an entirely different spirit.

It was as though something inside her had suddenly transformed.

Koshiro sat on his knees in the center of the Dojo while the others practiced the most basic sword techniques: guiding, lifting, guarding, striking, thrusting, tapping, snapping, stirring, pressing, cleaving, intercepting, and sweeping.

Thinking back on the night before, he was still startled.

Koshiro came from the Shimotsuki Family of the Grand Line's latter half, and he was no weakling himself. He might not match the world's best, Hawkeye, but he stood among the Great Swordsmen.

He had certainly heard of the people she'd named.

"Charlotte Linlin came from the Rocks Pirates. Her forces are immense, and she rules as an overlord in the Grand Line's latter half!"

"Her fighting strength is roughly on par with that person's!"

"Marine Vice Admiral Tsuru is even more formidable. She has the powers of the Wash-Wash Fruit and serves as the Marines' chief strategist!"

"The other two have made waves across the seas as well. He knew Gion. Her talent for Swordsmanship was monstrous, and she had already made a name for herself among Swordmasters despite her youth. She was a rising star in the Marines!"

"As for Amazon Lily, he had heard Monkey D. Dragon mention it. Nearly everyone there could use Armament Haki!"

When Kuina had named them, his scalp had prickled. His whole body had gone numb, and he had nearly lost his composure.

Only after she told him she wanted to know who they were and had never met them did he breathe a sigh of relief.

Of course, as a Great Swordsman, Koshiro couldn't bring himself to lie about them. Once Kuina learned who those people really were, her outlook changed completely.

Later, though, as Koshiro thought back on the matter, he began to sense something amiss.

Those names were famous across the seas, but news like that simply didn't reach the East Blue, supposedly the most peaceful sea.

Kuina's claim that she had heard them around the village was clearly a lie. When he pressed her for details, she gave him a name he hadn't expected.

"Dongze!"

Koshiro knew little about Dongze. He remembered the boy as diligent, but otherwise unremarkable. He had always done what was expected of him and nothing more.

Just a few days earlier, Dongze had lost to Zoro, who had joined the Dojo less than a year ago. That defeat was the only reason Koshiro had remembered his name.

This incident, though, made Koshiro realize Dongze seemed fairly close to Kuina.

Others might not know what those names meant, but Koshiro did. If Dongze understood their significance too, then the boy's background was far from ordinary.

A flash of light reflected off Koshiro's round lenses. Yet when he took another careful look at this ordinary pupil, he still found nothing remarkable.

Dongze performed the basic moves mechanically, without flair or any interpretation of his own.

Kuina and Zoro were different. Both had styles of their own. Kuina favored agility, and it was already taking shape within her basic moves. Zoro favored raw power, and with his gifts, he had a bright future too!

Did I get it wrong?

Koshiro watched the boy and fell into thought. But then how did he know those names?

During the brief moment Koshiro lost himself in thought, Dongze's eyes suddenly brightened. Unlike the others, he wasn't rotating through all thirteen forms. He had practiced nothing but the thrust, and in that instant, something about it changed.

When Koshiro looked again and saw Dongze's thrust, his eyes nearly bulged.

"Impossible!"

"How could this happen?"

The movement was still precise and by the book, but it was no longer what it had been. Before, his technique had been stiff and lifeless. Now that thrust seemed to come alive.

It was as if a lifeless thing had suddenly been given a soul!

This vitality was different from the quality Kuina and Zoro had brought to their techniques. If a basic sword move could be measured by proficiency, ordinary people would stop improving at ten percent. Talented students could break past that limit by folding their own insights and style into the move as they practiced.

They refined everything: how they exerted force, the angle, their breathing, which muscles they engaged, whether they used their spine to draw on their whole body's strength. Was the angle off by one degree or half a degree? To the left or the right? With each adjustment to their breathing, they improved.

But Dongze's thrust had skipped all the steps between and gone straight to the end.

For a swordsman, it was like going from mortal to immortal in a single leap. That was why Koshiro was so shocked.

What he didn't know was what had just happened to Dongze.

Dongze could see proficiency, but not every attempt raised it. Mindless repetition did him no good; it didn't add a single point.

He had noticed that yesterday. So when his basic thrust hit a bottleneck, he stopped going through meaningless motions and started thinking about how to increase his proficiency.

Drawing on what he knew, he deliberately adjusted every swing of his sword—his breathing, angle, force, and state of mind.

That last thrust had broken through his bottleneck. It had marked a qualitative leap. On the seas, anyone who had mastered a basic move to that degree could be called a Swordmaster.

A line of small red text appeared on the invisible screen before his eyes.

Basic Swordsmanship—Thrust: 1000/1000

That was all it showed. There was nothing else.

Dongze sighed inwardly. After years of work, he had finally perfected the basic thrust.

He suspected that if he wanted the next stage to open naturally, he would have to master all thirteen forms, one by one.

There was a shortcut, though: Koshiro, whose true strength Dongze couldn't gauge, was right here in the Dojo.

If Dongze swallowed his pride and let Koshiro beat him up every day, he might unlock the next stage early. But he also knew a tower needed a firm foundation. A shaky base could bring the whole thing down. He was better off mastering all thirteen forms, so he abandoned that dangerous idea.

A Rematch That Stunned Everyone

The days that followed were spent on the tedious grind of raising proficiency. Dongze threw himself into it so completely that he barely noticed time passing. He practiced one slash after another without tiring, and without realizing it, his gaze grew extraordinarily sharp.

To everyone else, though, each move he made still looked perfectly ordinary.

That was how the other pupils saw it.

There was one exception: Koshiro. Nearly a month had passed, and Dongze's staggering rate of improvement had taken him from shock to disbelief, then to numb acceptance. By now, he almost didn't want to see the boy at all.

Why?

Frankly, it was a little demoralizing.

Koshiro loved nurturing talent, but Dongze was improving too fast. If Zoro was running and Kuina was riding a bicycle, Dongze was riding a rocket.

He changed by the day, mastering all thirteen basic sword forms in an astonishingly short time.

It was like a man and a woman setting out to explore the mysteries of yin and yang, only for the man to finish before the woman had even taken off her clothes. It was absurd.

To outsiders, Dongze was merely swinging his sword mechanically, day after day, with no apparent improvement. In truth, he was making adjustments so fine they were almost imperceptible—to his angle, his breathing, even his mental state.

Those changes nearly made Koshiro rise from his seat. In training, the slightest error could send you miles off course. A tiny difference could separate heaven from earth.

Two people could follow the same training. One might break through and become a Swordmaster; the other might remain ordinary and fade into obscurity. The difference could lie in adjustments that small.

As a Swordmaster who had found his own path, Koshiro could hardly believe an apprentice was capable of such fine adjustments—especially an apprentice who didn't seem particularly gifted.

Perhaps because he had discovered Dongze's secret, Koshiro's usually unshakable composure finally wavered.

Watching Dongze put away his sword, Koshiro thought, Perhaps he can help me fulfill that dream...

Time slipped by, and before long, two months had passed. With the help of his Golden Finger, Dongze worked day and night to master each of the thirteen basic sword forms. He also used proficiency to temper his body.

Proficiency showed him exactly which parts of his body and which muscles he had failed to train. If an exercise was pointless, the number wouldn't go up.

Gradually, his strength began to surge. By now, he wasn't even sure how much explosive power he had.

The equipment Zoro had once used for training no longer strained him at all. He could even handle two or three times that weight with ease.

He joked to himself that he had become a beast too.

Unfortunately, he never got another turn in sparring practice. He couldn't tell whether Koshiro had arranged it that way or fate had simply intervened.

Just as in the original story, Zoro suffered his thousandth-and-some defeat.

Then came the day Dongze mastered the tenth basic sword form. Perhaps he had hit another bottleneck: after half a month of work, he still couldn't make any progress on the eleventh.

About a week later, Koshiro, who had begun paying close attention to Dongze, noticed.

And once again, events took an unexpected turn.

Koshiro paired Dongze with Zoro, the boy who had beaten him two months earlier.

"Father!"

"You know Dongze can't beat Zoro!"

Kuina's rapid improvement over the past few months owed much to the names Dongze had given her. They had rekindled her resolve. Even with Zoro training so intensely, he hadn't narrowed the gap between them. He had lost to her more than a thousand times in a row.

Because she knew exactly how strong Zoro was, she couldn't understand her cold father's decision. It made her furious.

If he knew Dongze couldn't beat Zoro, why put him through that humiliation?

Koshiro sighed softly as he looked at Kuina's face, flushed with confusion and anger.