…
"Why're you standing over there?"
Dad's voice cut through the sound of the surf and carried over the water, half curious, half amused. He's settled near the edge of the little fishing boat, one broad hand wrapped around his fishing rod while the other shades his eyes from the morning glare. The sea around us rolled in slow, lazy waves, blue and endless and way too close for comfort.
"We came all the way out here," he said, "and you're sitting there?"
I opened my mouth, closed it, then looked back at the water.
Because, unfortunately, I had reasons now.
Very stupid reasons. Very One Piece reasons.
A week ago, I'd jump at the chance to go out and have a great time, just a normal village kid with too much anime knowledge and not enough self-preservation. Then I ate the weird fruit, and it didn't kill me, which was honestly surprising given my track record with eating suspicious things. Instead, it gave me powers.
Powers based on Mahoraga.
Which was cool, very cool!
Dad clicked his tongue. "Kai."
"Thinking," I said absent-mindedly
"That has never once stopped you from moving before."
He snorted and pulled his line back. "Either come help me fish, or at least pretend you're here for something besides glaring at the sea."
I leaned a little closer, but not enough for the water to touch me. Dad noticed. Of course, he noticed. Parents always notice weird behaviour. It's like a passive skill; they all unlock after having a child or something.
He narrowed his eyes." Did you eat something weird again?"
"No."
"You trying to avoid work?"
"That one is insulting, because it suggests I need a reason."
Dad barked out a laugh at that, then turned back to the water. "Come on, then. Hand me the second basket."
A week ago, I would've thought none of this mattered. Sea was sea. Water was water. Fish were fish. Life was simple.
Then I ate the weird fruit, and now the sea and I have a complicated relationship or maybe "natural enemies" was more accurate. In the corner of my eye, I could see Dad watching me for another second, then he seemed to decide I was just being strange again and went back to fishing. That was nice about him. My parents loved me a lot, but they'd also long since accepted that I occasionally did weird things for no apparent reason.
I was a Devil Fruit user now. Technically. Which meant the sea was no longer just the sea. It was a weakness. A built-in flaw. A giant, world-sized middle finger from the setting itself.
And the question that had been eating at me for days was simple enough on paper.
Could I adapt to that?
If I could adapt to any and all phenomena, then, in theory, the sea should be no exception. That was the kind of sentence that sounded amazing until you thought about what "in theory" was doing in it. In theory, lots of things were possible. In practice, I was a thirteen-year-old on a fishing boat trying not to get folded by seawater.
Still, it had been about a week since my power awakened, and in that time I'd learned more than I expected. Not everything, obviously, not even close, but enough to start putting names to things.
I rubbed the palm of my right hand with my thumb. It still looked strange to me sometimes. The first thing I'd figured out was that adaptation wasn't instant, that would've been ridiculous, clearly. Cool, but ridiculous.
There was a point you had to reach first, a line you had to cross before the adaptation really took hold. I'd started calling that line the threshold, mostly because it sounded better than "the point where I suffer enough for something useful to happen." A bit less pathetic, no?
The threshold changed depending on what I was dealing with.
How dangerous the phenomenon was mattered, and how often I got hit by it mattered too. A relatively weak phenomenon with repeated exposure could be adapted to pretty quickly. Something stronger, stranger, or more complex took longer. Sometimes long enough that I had to stop and ask whether the testing was worth the pain.
The answer had mostly been yes.
Mostly.
"Still thinking?" Dad asked.
"Mm."
"That serious?"
"You ever wonder if fish think boats are weird?" I muttered.
Dad blinked at me. "No."
"I do."
He stared for a second, then shook his head again. "You've got stranger this year."
I smiled faintly, but my eyes drifted back to the sea.
The threshold was only the first part. The second thing I'd figured out was that adaptation happened in stages.
Four of them, as far as I could tell.
That was based on trial and error, which is a nice way of saying I spent the last week hurting myself in very controlled, very reckless ways.
The candle had been my starting point. After that first night, I kept going back to it. Repeatedly. At first, the flame hurt exactly as much as a normal flame should hurt, which was plenty. Then there'd be this small shift, very subtle, and the pain would lessen just a little.
Another stage, another shift, a little more resistance.
By the fourth, the flame barely did anything.
By the end, a clink would occur.
Full adaptation.
That had been the pattern with heat from the candle, and similar enough patterns showed up in the other tests I'd managed without accidentally killing myself or making my parents think I'd joined a cult.
Small cuts. Blunt impact. Heat. Pressure.
Each one seemed to progress through stages. Each one built toward something complete.
Even now, part of me kept waiting for some hidden catch to jump out and tell me I'd gotten ahead of myself. Because if this worked the way it seemed to, then my fruit was absurd. Not because it made me strong immediately, since it absolutely did not, but because it let me move toward strength in a way that stacked over time.
That was the third thing I'd learned.
Stored adaptations, or more accurately, a memory, were a thing as well.
I could hold onto more than one at a time, which was honestly one of the first things I'd prayed would be true. If I could only keep one adaptation total, this whole ability would be way more annoying to use. Thankfully, that didn't seem to be the case. I could keep several. The problem was that they weren't permanent.
After enough time, they faded.
Not all at once, from what I could tell. More as they slipped away once they were no longer being actively reinforced. That part was still fuzzy, and I didn't know the exact limit. Days? Weeks? More? Less? Hard to say. I hadn't had the fruit long enough to measure that properly.
But the important part was what happened after an adaptation disappeared.
The threshold didn't reset.
That was the beautiful part; the adaptations were like short-term memory.
Take the candle. The first time, I had to work for it. Repeated burns with gradual shifts, then finally a clink. After letting the adaptation fade and testing it again later, the flames were still hurting at first, but I crossed the stages far faster. Once the full adaptation had been reached before, my body seemed to remember. The threshold for that same phenomenon dropped significantly.
What had once needed repeated exposure could, the second time around, be pushed through with almost nothing.
Sometimes a single exposure.
Every phenomenon I survived and fully adapted to became easier to deal with in the future, even if I later lost the immediate resistance.
Which, yes, worked very, very well in my favour.
"Boy."
I looked up. Dad was watching me again, his line hanging slack over the water.
"What?"
"What is on your mind? I've called you many times."
He looked confused when he said it.
I let out a breath and sat up straight, though I still kept my weight centred and my eyes very aware of the sea around us. Dad returned to his fishing, and for a while the only sounds were the waves, the creak of the boat, and the distant cries of seabirds overhead.
I liked it.
Although now that I think about it, I have some more questions about my situation.
Like haki.
If adaptation could really apply to any and all phenomena, then what would happen if the phenomenon in question were haki? Will.
That was the weird part.
Haki wasn't just an element or attack type. It was a person's will made real, shaped into pressure, defence, presence, or force. So what exactly would adaptation even do with that? Would I become resistant to being overwhelmed by it? Would I develop my own version in response? Would my body learn the principle behind it through exposure?
Or would it sidestep the whole thing and generate some completely different answer that merely achieved the same outcome?
That was the problem with powers that sounded overpowered when summarised in one sentence.
And then there were Logias. Could adaptation let me hit one eventually?
That question was somehow even more annoying because there were layers to it.
In the story, the answer to Logias was usually armament haki, seastone, or exploiting a natural counter. Fire and water. Sand and moisture. Lightning and rubber. Sometimes brute force wasn't enough; you needed the right kind of interaction, like in pre-timeskip.
So where did my fruit fall into that?
If I fought a Logia user and kept getting stonewalled by their intangibility, would my power interpret that as a phenomenon to adapt to? Would I slowly develop the ability to make contact through some equivalent of haki? Would I develop a specific counter suited to that one fruit? Something situational, like a weird elemental answer? A water-on-fire kind of solution?
I hated that I didn't know, but I loved that I'd get to find out. I loved the anticipation!
I reached down absentmindedly and tapped the wood of the boat with my knuckles. Dad had brought me along because he liked the company, and because on Goat Island, "fishing with your son" was basically law once the weather was good enough. Normally, I liked it too. Today, though, being surrounded by my new natural weakness had turned the whole trip into a mental experiment.
Could I deliberately test seawater exposure without killing myself?
How much contact was too much?
Could I work up to it in small doses?
If the threshold was based on magnitude and repeated exposure, then maybe the sea wasn't impossible. Maybe it was just an absurdly high threshold. Maybe the problem wasn't whether adaptation could happen, but whether I could survive long enough for it to matter.
That was an important difference.
A very terrifying difference.
I stared at the water again.
If I dipped a finger in, what would happen? Draining? Pain? Would it start the process, or would the phenomenon be too broad to trigger meaningfully off something so small? If I sat in a tub of seawater up to my ankles like a complete lunatic, would that help, or would my parents send me to a psych ward, or the equivalent of whatever was closest?
That last one was possible.
I could already imagine Mum's face.
Actually, no, I didn't want to imagine that too clearly. Terrifying.
Dad suddenly grunted and pulled his rod up. The line went taut, and he leaned back slightly with a practised ease that made it obvious he'd done this a thousand times. I watched the motion automatically as he reeled in a wriggling silver fish, muttering something pleased under his breath.
"See that?" he said. "That's how it's done."
"I know how fishing works." I scoffed.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
He gave me a sceptical look. "You've been eyeing the sea like a fish will just fly in your hand"
"That's unrelated, just keep fishin'."
"Mm."
He unhooked the fish and dropped it into the bucket with a hollow thump.
I watched it flop for a second, then looked away.
...
End of Chapter!
Word Count - 2035