I didn't wait long.
The fruit sat in my hands like a secret the world had dropped by mistake. I could have hidden it, studied it, taken it to a teacher and begged for answers.
Instead, I lifted it to my mouth and bit down.
The skin split with a wet crunch. The taste hit a heartbeat later—bitter, rotten, like someone had dried a dog turd in the sun and dared me to chew it. My eyes watered. I gagged, swallowed, spat to the side, and gagged again.
"Ugh." I wiped my tongue with the back of my hand. "That was a crime."
Nothing happened.
I stood in the clearing, listening to my own breath and the small sounds of the ridge—the tick of a beetle, a leaf's slow fall. The fruit sat heavy in my stomach. I waited for heat, for a rush, for lightning under the skin. I got none of it.
One second. Two. Three.
It's not poison, I told myself when I didn't keel over. But it's not… anything?
Disappointment sank into my knees. "Forget it," I muttered, and set my stance at the training post. If I couldn't eat power, I could earn it.
I threw a jab to clear my head.
On the second, chakra slid the way it always did—warm through the wrists, a pressure behind the knuckles. On the third, something caught.
A tightness formed around my fist, like a skin that wasn't there. The air in front of me looked wrong—bent, faintly rippled, as if I were punching through river water.
I hit that wrong place.
Pshh—krck.
Hairline cracks flashed across empty space. Not light; not sound. A shimmer like stress lines in glass.
I lurched back, heart climbing my throat. For a breath I only stared at my knuckles. Then I set my feet again and threw the same punch on purpose.
Pwuff. Pshhhh.
The air fractured. The fractures spidered outward, and with them came a push: a pressure wave I felt on my cheeks and teeth.
Grrm—grk—
The ground complained. Dust danced. Somewhere beneath my feet, soil shifted and settled with a whisper that felt too big for the little crack I'd just made in nothing.
I lowered my fist, mouth open.
"I felt it," I whispered. A laugh climbed out on its own. "I felt it."
I threw another punch. The shimmer bloomed again—small, no wider than my hand—and the training post trembled as if a deep sound had rolled through it.
Memories rose like waking fish. A white‑bearded titan on a battlefield. A fist that cracked the sky. Seas lifting, ships bucking as if the ocean had become a drum.
A Devil Fruit. Not just any. The quake fruit.
I pressed my palm to the space in front of me and pushed without touching.
Crk.
Fractures spread like frost.
Power leapt from that broken patch of air and ran in a line through the dirt. Grk—grk— A small fissure opened, no longer than my stride, then closed as the ground settled.
The world went still. My pulse didn't.
"Quake Release," I said under my breath, tasting the name. In this world we named things by what they did. This was no wind or earth or lightning. This was the faultline in between.
I needed to see what it could do.
I walked to the nearest tree and put three paces between us. I set my stance, drew chakra into my arm, and let that tight skin form around my fist. A faint, translucent halo shimmered there, barely visible in moonlight.
I struck at the air.
Boom.
My fist didn't touch bark. It didn't have to. The air met me like something I could hit.
Grrrm—grkkk—
Cracks webbed outward and vanished. The tree shuddered from root to crown, leaves loosening in a soft rain. Sap hissed inside wood. The trunk held, but the sound it made wasn't one I'd heard before.
I rocked back, breathing hard, grinning like an idiot.
"My power is small," I told the tree, because talking made the world feel less impossible. "But it's real."
I tried again. Jab. Cross. Palm heel. I tried a stomp and felt the tremor run underfoot like a startled animal. Each time, the halo formed faster. Each time, the fractures came a little wider, the push a little deeper.
The cost showed up too.
After a dozen tests my knuckles throbbed as if I'd been punching stone. My elbows ached. A high, soft pop sounded in my ears with every proper hit, like the pressure when a mountain pass opens on the other side. Sweat ran in lines down my neck.
Chakra use? Barely any. Less than a Substitution Technique, more than a breath. The work sat in the body: stance, timing, taking the recoil without shattering my own bones.
A bloodline limit, then. Not born—but grafted. A Devil Fruit recast as something this world could understand.
I stepped back and flexed my fingers. The moon picked out pale lines on the training post where dust had lifted from the surface.
If I develop this— The thought didn't finish. I didn't need it to. I could see it. Quakes in air, in water.
Impact without touch. The epicenter wherever I chose. I could break stone walls from the inside out.
I could turn a battlefield into a map of cracks only I could read.
I could, someday, crack the sky.
I closed my hand and reined that thought in hard.
"First I live long enough to graduate," I told the night. "Then we talk about the sky."
Training at night had other risks. The last thing I needed was an instructor—or worse, an ANBU patrol—asking why the ground had started whispering.
I made the next tests quieter. Smaller halo. Shorter push. I mapped what I could do without drawing eyes.
— If I kept the halo tight, the pop in my ears softened. The tremor stayed near my feet.
— The fractures traveled best through solid things. Loose brush just rustled; packed earth carried the push. A standing tree made the whole trunk sing.
— Indoors would be dangerous. The force echoed. One test near the shed made the door rattle on its frame. A second could have cracked the hinge.
— The recoil bit deeper the farther I reached. A short strike bruised skin. A long one tired the joint.
I filed each note away like it belonged to a class I actually wanted to study.
Stronger body, stronger quake. That part was simple. If I got faster—if I loaded the joints right, if I carried momentum through the hips and out the fist, if I learned to stop the halo where I chose—then the push would go where I sent it and not back up my arm.
The Eight Gates flickered through my head. The technique pulled power out of muscle and will, burned it all at once, and left you wrecked. If I could touch even the first two safely—and there was no guarantee—I could turn a quake from a shove into a hammer.
But I'd seen what the Gates did to bodies built stronger than mine. I wasn't about to tear myself open at eight years old.
Instead, I set a plan I could live through.
Mornings: stance drills, core work, footwork ladders drawn in dust with a stick. Afternoons: band work, short sprints, a thousand light strikes. Evenings: ten measured quakes, no more. Keep the joints honest. Keep the halo small. Keep the forest standing.
And secrets. Secrets above all. Power like this didn't exist in the books on the academy shelves. If the wrong person noticed, I might end up in a lab—or on a list.
A breeze moved through the trees, cooling the sweat on my back. Somewhere beyond the ridge, a patrol's sandals ticked over stone. Voices carried, then faded. I waited with my breath held until the night belonged to crickets again.
I turned once more to the training post and formed the halo without striking. It made the air waver a finger's length from my skin. I held it there, counted to ten, and let it go. The pop in my ears marked the pressure returning to normal.
Control mattered.
I looked down at my hands. They shook a little, not from fear, but from a body that had done more than it had yesterday. I liked that feeling.
I moved to the tree again and tested distance. One pace. Two. Five. The push reached farther than my arm, but past four paces it broke up, like sound scattering.
"Okay," I said. "Close is clean. Far is messy."
I tried a new form—open palm instead of fist. The halo formed across the heel of my hand. The strike sent dust ringing in a small circle.
Versatile. That made sense. If this was a bloodline, it worked like the others: a nature that could be learned, stacked on top of what the body and chakra could already do. My version just came from a fruit instead of a clan.
I thought of a different village far to the north, and of a man who wore lightning like armor. If I ever learned to move like him, to layer speed on strength, the quake would hit before anyone saw it coming.
My mouth went dry. "One thing at a time," I told the tree.
By the time I stopped, the stars had shifted. My arms felt like sandbags full of good ache. I gathered my bandages, brushed boot prints out of the dirt where the ground had cracked, and tucked my shirt straight. The clearing looked normal again if you didn't know where to look.
Back at the edge of the ridge I paused. The academy's rooflines made dark triangles against the sky. A lantern burned somewhere near the front gate. The village beyond lay in grays.
A week ago, the best future I could imagine was not dying. Tonight, I could imagine more.
I put a hand over my stomach where the fruit sat like a stone. "You're awful," I told it. "But thank you."
On the walk down, I kept my steps soft. A cat watched from a wall and decided I wasn't interesting. The patrol I'd heard earlier crossed a lane two streets over. I stopped in a doorway's shadow until they passed.
My room was what the village gave anyone they hadn't figured out yet: a square, a cot, a chest with two changes of clothes, a small window where the moon fit if you tilted your head. I closed the door and stood in the dark, hands open and empty and buzzing.
I needed a name. Not for the fruit. For what it made me.
Quake Release user was plain and right. It fit the world's logic, slid neatly beside Wood Release, Dust Release, the bloodlines that made history turn.
But I needed rules more than a name.
I lit a stub of candle and crouched, scratching notes onto a scrap with a school pencil.
Quake Release — working notes
Tells: faint halo at fist/palm; hairline fractures in air; ear pop at correct pressure. Dust ring at ground impact.
Costs: joint ache (wrists/elbows/shoulders); delayed bone bruise risk; minor chakra drain; big drain if I overreach.
Ranges: clean at 1–3 paces; messy beyond 4; stomp carries farther in packed earth.
Risks: indoor echo/backlash; collateral within 3–5 meters; attracts attention at night.
Training: body first (core, stance, hips); ten controlled quakes max per evening; measure, don't guess.
I stared at the last line until wax pooled and guttered and the candle went out on its own. The room slid back into soft dark.
Two years until the Second Shinobi War.
I had a path now. Not a safe one. Not a simple one. But it was mine.
I lay down on the cot without undressing and listened to the village breathe. My hands throbbed in time with my pulse. Sleep came fast.
In the morning, I'd test something new: could I set the epicenter inside a target and not just on the air in front of it? Could I pull as well as push—make two fractures meet and cancel? Could I ride the tremor's edge and move with it, a half step faster than the eyes that watched me?
Questions. Good ones. The kind that meant I'd be here to answer them.
I closed my eyes on the thought that had started as fear by the training post and ended as a promise.
I wasn't going to be a name on a stone.