Patience.
Once, I thought of it as a tool. A pause between devouring corporations, a breath taken before launching another hostile takeover. Never a virtue—virtue is for priests and fools—but a tactical lull, a predator's crouch before the leap.
Now? At the ripe old age of eight, I was learning patience as a prison sentence.
Power—true power—was not seized in a single night. It was spun. Layered. Woven. Thread by painstaking thread, until the web stretched so wide it was indistinguishable from the world itself.
And so I waited. And so I wove.
My room had long since ceased being a nursery. It was a laboratory masquerading as a child's bedroom. The pastel wallpaper was gone, replaced with corkboards and pinned sketches: crude blueprints of weapons that drew inspiration from the memory of my old world's tech, anatomical diagrams with notes scrawled in childish handwriting, half-finished gear designs that, if ever completed, would put even the Yaoyorozu family's engineers to shame.
The carpet was a battlefield, littered with micro-screws, stripped wires, and the skeletal remains of dismantled toys. A dollhouse had been converted into a scale model for urban assault scenarios. Where other children built pillow forts, I was drafting fortresses.
Each night after the kindergarten pantomime ended, I trained. Two fronts: quirk and body.
The strings obeyed me with increasing grace. Precision was my obsession. Where once I used a thread to reassemble a broken watch, now I could braid five at once, each weaving different metals into cords of varying tensile strength. I spun nets fine enough to catch dust motes, then wove cables stout enough to suspend myself from the ceiling. My room was an art gallery of invisible constructs, symmetrical patterns that dissolved into nothing with the flick of a wrist.
Incremental progress. A millimeter more reach. A fraction more reaction speed. I catalogued it all meticulously. I was scientist and prototype both.
My body, however, remained the cage of a child. Too soft, too fragile for the regimen I craved. Push too far now, and I'd sabotage my future. So, I laid the foundation. Isometric drills. Flexibility routines. Nutritional control enforced with the ruthless precision of a corporate accountant—much to the kitchen staff's despair. No sweets. No excess. Protein, iron, balanced carbs. The body would thank me later.
Haki, though…
Haki was the locked door. For months, I sat blindfolded, baiting my instincts with string-made traps, waiting for that primal spark. It refused me. This world's gilded cage cushioned me from the kind of hunger and terror that unlocked such depths. Maddening. But even doors yield to the right key, and keys always appear. I had learned patience.
The days bled into weeks, weeks into years. Slowly, the childish fat melted from my frame. Lean muscle formed. My reflection sharpened, promising the man I once was. The pale blonde hair I let grow long—familiar, correct—framed a face that no longer belonged to a round-faced toddler but to something in transition: a predator cub.
One morning, I flexed my hand. Five strings shot out, each snagging a different toiletry: comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, hair tie, cologne. They danced through the air, a symphony of motion executed without a twitch. I could stitch a wound or slit an artery now, both with surgical precision.
The door to godhood remained closed. But I'd grown patient. I'd grown hungry.
I descended the marble staircase, the scent of coffee and eggs Benedict already wafting up. The ritual of breakfast. A stage on which our family drama endlessly replayed.
"Good morning, Doffy," my mother, Seraphina, sang from her seat. She was elegance incarnate, still radiant, still wielding that dangerous blend of warmth and steel.
"Mother," I replied, sliding into my chair.
Father, Homing, was where he always was: eyes buried in financial reports, face creased with the weight of empire. He muttered without looking up, "The Hero Public Safety Commission is drafting new regulations for support item licensing. Bureaucrats tightening the leash again. It'll choke the market."
How quaint, worrying about the leash instead of the leash-holder.
I sipped my juice and spoke, tone mild. "Or it will create a lucrative black market for innovators unburdened by paperwork. Every regulation is a door closed—and a window opened, if you're willing to crawl through it."
That got his attention. He set down the tablet and studied me with wary amusement. "And how would you 'crawl through,' oh wise son?"
I spread marmalade across toast with delicate precision. "You don't fight the committee. Too crude. You buy them. Quietly. Investments in their private ventures. Endowments to their pet charities. Suddenly, their regulations align with your business interests. Innovation isn't strangled—it's monopolized."
Silence fell. Mother looked faintly horrified, as though I'd proposed assassinating the Commission outright. Father stared, unreadable.
"Doffy, darling," Mother tried, smile brittle, "that's… not very—"
"Polite?" I finished, biting into the toast. "No. Brilliant? Yes. Politeness never won an empire."
Father barked a laugh—sharp, short, almost disbelieving. "Gods above. They'll never see you coming, will they?"
I smiled thinly. "Seeing me coming would be their last mistake."
Mother's lips pursed. "You shouldn't talk like that."
"Why not? Because I sound like I mean it?" I tilted my head, meeting her eyes with mock innocence. "Mother, honesty is a rare commodity. Surely you can appreciate its value."
Her sigh was tired, fond, exasperated. "You are… impossible."
Father, meanwhile, leaned back in his chair, arms folded. "He's a Donquixote. Impossible is the baseline."
The conversation drifted to safer waters. Charity galas. Art acquisitions. Rumors of a villain attack repelled by a rising hero named Endeavor. They chattered, I listened. Every offhand remark was a data point, a thread in the growing map I spun of this world's politics and economics.
When Father mentioned supply chain disruptions caused by villain raids, I interjected: "Then stop relying on public infrastructure. Build redundancies. Private transport, discreet routes. If villains create chaos, sell stability."
When Mother gushed about a young pro-hero's rising popularity, I mused: "Popularity fades. Branding lasts. Heroes should invest in narrative control, not just feats of strength."
Their reactions fed me. Alarm. Amusement. Pride. Unease. It was all useful.
But beneath the intellectual sparring, something unexpected stirred.
Ownership.
Not of their fortune or name—though both were invaluable—but of them. The idea of some villain touching them, of some Commission official dismantling what they built… it sparked not strategy, but fury. Cold, protective, irrational.
They are mine. My cover. My resources. My… family.
I didn't love them. Love is an illusion, a string people willingly tie around their own throats. But they were mine. And I protect what's mine.
Breakfast ended. I dabbed my lips with a linen napkin, every movement calculated civility. "If you'll excuse me, I have projects to attend to."
As I rose, I heard Mother murmur, "He's so… intense."
Father's reply was thoughtful, almost grim. "He's a Donquixote, my dear. We've never produced anything ordinary."
I smiled as I walked away, a thin, sharp thing that never touched my eyes.
Ordinary is a cage. And I had already begun to chew through the bars. The web was expanding. Soon, heroes, villains, and the bleating masses between would all find themselves caught in its silken, invisible threads.
And when they realized it was too late—when they finally looked up and saw me smiling down at them—that would be the sweetest patience rewarded.