"Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me..."
In a cramped, run-down apartment tucked away in a corner of the city, a young man lounged in his pajamas, humming his own off-key version of the birthday song. He popped open the plastic shell of a cheap takeout cake. Propped up on the table next to it, his phone played a translated breakdown video of the latest One Piece chapter.
'Man, Kuma's life is just too tragic,' he muttered, shaking his head. 'He has such a wildly overpowered Devil Fruit and insane physical stats, but he still ended up completely miserable. Ah, whatever.' He clapped his hands together. 'Right, time to make a wish before I eat.'
He closed his eyes. 'Just give me a Devil Fruit! I'm not greedy—a Mythical Zoan will do perfectly, hehe.'
He took a deep breath. "I want to be the freest man in the world!"
The moment the words left his mouth, a deafening crack of thunder shook the entire apartment building. The cheap fluorescent light overhead flickered frantically before snapping off, plunging the room into darkness.
"Uh, did the power just go out?" he mumbled. His phone screen had gone completely black, too. And strangely, all the ambient noise of the city outside had vanished.
"It's... really quiet..."
He didn't know how much time had passed. It could have been a single second, or it could have been years. When he finally forced his heavy eyelids open, he groaned, pushing himself up from the gritty ground.
Endless blue ocean stretched out before him as far as the eye could see. He was sitting on a sandy beach, bordered by a dense, sprawling jungle at his back.
Suddenly, a sharp ache pulsed in his head as a rush of foreign memories flooded his mind. He wasn't in his twenties anymore. He was a boy named Bardock—an eight-year-old kid from the West Blue who already stood at a solid meter and a half tall. His family had traveled to the Grand Line for a mix of business and vacation, only to be caught in a freak storm. The massive waves had pulverized their ship, and that was the last thing this body remembered.
Grand Line weather was no joke. Those towering, fifty-meter waves could easily snap a steel battleship in half, let alone a wooden merchant vessel.
'So I actually got transmigrated?' he thought, looking down at his small hands. 'And my name is Bardock? Man, what a ripoff. If this were Dragon Ball, I'd be a Saiyan right out of the gate! This is just unfair.'
He let out a long sigh. 'Whatever, when in Rome, right? Bardock it is. But seriously... starting off as an orphan in a deserted island survival game? This is playing on hard mode.'
Bardock began walking along the shoreline, scanning the debris for any other survivors. Surviving on a wild island as an eight-year-old was practically a death sentence unless you were a natural-born monster like Big Mom, Charlotte Linlin. And Bardock was pretty damn sure he wasn't one of those freaks of nature.
The stretch of beach wasn't very long. He didn't find anyone else alive, but he did manage to salvage some useful supplies washed up from the wreck. There was a large wooden barrel still half-full of booze—good enough to keep him hydrated until he found a fresh water source. He also found a few massive wooden planks, roughly the size of a bed, torn straight from the ship's hull, which would be perfect for a makeshift shelter. A small, torn sail, a few lengths of rope, and a sharp pocketknife lodged right through the canvas rounded out his loot.
'If only I had a lighter,' Bardock thought greedily as he gathered his haul.
As he worked, Bardock noticed something shocking. According to his new memories, the current year was Sea Circle Calendar 1506. He might only be eight, but his physical strength far surpassed his adult body from his previous life. His stamina was absurd, too. Hauling heavy, waterlogged planks and dragging barrels across the sand barely winded him; a few deep breaths, and he felt completely fine.
'Sea Circle Calendar 1506...' he calculated mentally. 'Luffy sets sail on his seventeenth birthday in 1520. That means I have about fourteen years before the Straw Hat Pirates begin their journey. Fourteen years. Is that enough time to claw my way to the top of this world? Enough time to actually win my freedom?'
He thought about Koby. The kid had started off as an absolute weakling at sixteen, yet in just two short years, he had skyrocketed to becoming one of the sea's top combatants—strong enough to shatter the colossal stone arm created by Avalo Pizarro's Island-Island Fruit with a single punch. It was a feat so ridiculous that readers had started jokingly calling Garp 'Little Koby.'
'Sure, Koby was a bit of a crybaby, and that whole "working a hundred times harder" thing was completely broken anime logic, but he's proof that insane growth is possible here.'
He clenched his fists. 'No point worrying about the future. Just keep moving forward!'
The sky was already bleeding into shades of orange and purple. Bardock took two hearty swigs of the salvaged booze, relishing the burn, and found a sheltered spot near the edge of the tree line. Using the wooden boards and rope, he rigged up a crude lean-to, laying out the torn sail as a makeshift blanket.
Before the sun completely dipped below the horizon, he grabbed his knife and hurried to the jungle's edge to forage. He managed to pluck five wild fruits—they looked like peaches, but each one was the size of two adult fists. He had carefully selected them from trees close to the shore. Seeing half-eaten fruits on the ground and peck marks on the ones still hanging, he figured they were safe for human consumption.
Once darkness fully enveloped the island, Bardock hunkered down in his little shelter. He didn't dare try starting a friction fire on his first night. While a fire might scare off some predators, it was just as likely to act as a beacon. This was the One Piece world, after all. If the humans here were monsters, the wildlife was on a whole different level. Even back in Luffy's beginner village, the mountains were casually roaming with beasts the size of houses.
Curled up in the dark, Bardock sliced off a small piece of the peach-like fruit and let it sit on his tongue. It tasted surprisingly good—sweet and incredibly fragrant. He waited about half an hour, and when his stomach didn't protest, he finally swallowed it. He waited another agonizing thirty minutes to be absolutely sure it wasn't poisonous before ravenously devouring the rest.
Maybe his new body was just starved, but even after polishing off all five massive fruits, he was only about seventy percent full. Still, venturing into the pitch-black jungle to find more was a death wish. He wasn't about to risk it. He would just have to endure the hunger pangs.
Clutching the pocketknife tightly against his chest, Bardock eventually drifted off to sleep. His dreams were restless, filled with the phantom sounds of massive, unseen creatures prowling through the brush just inches away from him.
Dawn broke early on the coast, but Bardock was already wide awake long before the sun came up. He was starving. The constant, guttural roars echoing from the jungle all night had kept him on high alert, and with his stomach growling furiously, sleeping had been impossible.
The moment there was enough light to see, he grabbed his knife and cautiously crept back to the fruit trees. After making sure the coast was clear, he harvested ten more of those giant peaches, bundling them up in his shirt to carry back to camp.
He inhaled nine of them in one sitting. Patting his comfortably full stomach, a small grin tugged at his lips. In this world, a massive appetite was practically synonymous with high potential. From Garp and Luffy to pretty much any top-tier fighter, they were all infamous gluttons who could eat a mountain of food and digest it instantly.
Now that his basic needs were met, Bardock mapped out his game plan for the day. He decided to patrol the shoreline three times—morning, noon, and night—just in case someone else had washed up alive.
His first patrol, however, turned up absolutely nothing. Frustrated, Bardock trudged back to his camp. He eyed the single fruit he had saved, planning to eat it before venturing deeper into the jungle. Living off fruit wasn't going to build any real strength; he needed meat. He also needed to locate a fresh water stream and gather enough dry firewood to finally risk a campfire.
'So much to do,' he muttered, running a hand through his hair. 'I just need to get a stable routine going so I can start training.'
He reached for his last remaining fruit—and froze.
"No way..."
Bardock stared at it, his eyes wide in disbelief. The fruit had completely transformed. It still retained its peach-like shape, but the skin was now covered in intricate, swirling arabesque patterns. It even seemed to give off a faint, pulsating glow.
'A Devil Fruit.' His mind raced, his heart hammering against his ribs. 'It literally just dropped right into my lap! But which one is it? Logia, Paramecia, or Zoan? Could it actually be the one I wished for?'
He picked up the strange, swirling fruit, feeling its weight in his hands.
'So, the million-berry question...' he thought, swallowing hard. 'Do I take a bite?'