Morning came.
Kael woke with a jolt, a rush of excitement he could not name bursting in his chest.
He, Kael Grylls, an ordinary nobody in his previous life, had landed in a world of miracles and wild encounters.
"Damn. I actually became a Devil Fruit user." He pinched his thigh hard. The sting made him bare his teeth, but he was grinning like a kid who just won the candy jackpot.
When the euphoria ebbed, a more urgent thought took over. Go to sea.
See the legends that existed only as memories. Stand on islands and shores he had only dreamed about.
Luffy. Zoro. Just thinking those names sent hot blood surging through him.
Reality promptly threw a bucket of cold water on his head. He looked around. Beyond his scruffy cave stretched nothing but jungle and beach. Not even a decent plank in sight, let alone a boat.
"I can't seriously build a ship myself, can I? If the quality is trash and it sinks, that's it for me." Kael deflated and flopped back onto his mattress of dry leaves.
He would have to wait for a ship to pass this deserted island.
Waiting did not mean wasting time.
"Devil Fruit…" Kael stared at his hands, eyes burning.
What exactly had that white fruit with the bioweapon flavor given him?
He had no memory of a fruit like that from his past life's knowledge.
"I need to figure out how to use it. Fast."
In the days that followed, Kael threw himself into experimenting with the fruit's power.
He tried mimicking the moves of Devil Fruit users he remembered. Nothing answered.
"Wrong activation method?" He scratched his head, frustrated.
He tried everything he could think of for days, even roaring at the sea. That only earned him a few contemptuous glances from seabirds.
Why is it that other transmigrators into the world of One Piece get a newbie gift pack with all three colors of Haki, swordsmanship, and a Devil Fruit manual, and I get nothing?
That day, Kael was in the middle of strength training. He grabbed a massive rock to hurl it like always, but days of failure had left his thoughts drifting. He stumbled. The rock slipped from his fingers and tumbled.
As it was about to hit the ground, a sudden, sharp irritability surged through him. He thrust a hand toward it on instinct.
Vmmm.
An invisible ripple spread from his palm.
The boulder did not crash like it should have. It started shivering from the inside. With a soft puff, it collapsed into a heap of gravel.
Kael stared at the pile, then at his hand. His heartbeat pounded in his throat.
"What… what was that?"
He chased that feeling, reached a hand toward a nearby tree as thick as his waist, and tried to recreate it.
Vmmm.
The unseen ripple swept out again. The trunk shook hard. Hairline cracks spidered across the bark. With a crisp crack the tree broke, and the crown slammed to the ground in a burst of dust.
"Yes." Kael leaped three feet. "That's my power."
This was not simple physical vibration. It felt like control over something more fundamental. Waves. Shock waves. Oscillation.
He forced himself to calm down and think.
He had only been a regular guy, but he did finish compulsory education and college. The definitions and properties of waves from physics class came flooding back.
Transverse and longitudinal waves. Mechanical and electromagnetic waves.
"If it were just a generic shock wave, it should blow the whole thing away, not make it crumble from within." He frowned and searched for that elusive thread.
A frequency. Resonance.
In a world where most people were illiterate and anyone who could read a little counted as educated, Kael's prior life's physics made him feel like Einstein visiting the Age of Pirates.
Powers that seemed like sorcery to others carried the scent of science to him.
He had often seen forum hotshots pontificate about two-dimensional physics with solemn nonsense. He had laughed it off. He had never imagined those weird bits of knowledge might one day become the capital he needed to survive.
People liked to say that Devil Fruits in the hands of brawlers who did not understand physics were a waste. Like a certain "kindergarten principal" who could move at the speed of light yet mostly kicked and shot lasers. Give that fruit to a physicist and you might see gravitational lensing, energy conversion, even time dilation.
Kael took the middle road. Fighting and scientific research were not the same job, but understanding the science behind a power could only help with deeper development and creative use.
"Logia or Paramecia?" Heat prickled in his chest.
If it was Logia, he could turn his body into waves and ignore physical attacks while controlling waveforms. That was top-tier Logia territory.
"Elementalization, then." He inhaled, focused, and pictured his body breaking down into a cloud of vibrating waves.
Nothing happened at first. He did not quit. Again. Again.
Finally, on a razor-sharp attempt, his body felt weightless, as if it had lost substance.
He looked down. His forearm was faintly transparent, like shimmering air. The edges rippled with a subtle wave pattern.
He picked up a pebble and tossed it at his arm.
Whoosh.
The stone slipped through as if nothing were there.
"Logia. It's really Logia." Kael almost cried from relief.
From then on, he devoted himself to training his Devil Fruit.
First came elementalization. At the start he could only turn parts of his body into a wavering form, and it was unstable, like the annoying pixelation in certain adult videos. With practice he gradually managed to become a seamless, invisible wave. He could not freely shape that form yet, but simple immunity to physical blows was enough to keep him safe in the early game.
Next was directional impact. He learned to compress vibrational waves and release them in a burst, producing something like an air cannon.
He kept tuning the compression and the release. The power climbed from snapping trees to shattering stone to heaving up walls of water several meters high.
High-frequency oscillation went well too. He found he could impose a specific vibration on objects to trigger internal resonance and make them fall apart. At first he could only powder pebbles. Later he could break a boulder taller than a man in a handful of seconds.
"This is made to crack ironclad warships and ability-user gear." Kael could not help picturing blades, armor, and helmets splintering under a casual wave of his hand. The corners of his mouth crept up.
Time slipped by as he trained day after day. He soaked up his old physics and his new experience like a sponge and dug deeper into the fruit's potential. He gave it a name that felt right to him. Logia Wave-Wave Fruit.
Today, as usual, he trained atop the island's tallest cliff.
Bare-chested, his bronzed skin shone in the sun. His muscle lines were clean and coiled with power.
He started with elementalization drills, simulating attacks from all directions and switching his body rapidly between matter and waveforms, gusts swirling around him.
Then he drew a steady breath and thrust both palms forward.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Three solid shock waves lanced out and struck three floating stakes he had set up dozens of meters off the shore. They exploded into splinters that rained down in a spray.
"The focus still isn't tight enough. I'm nowhere near a Starbreaker Cannon." He wiped sweat from his brow and muttered.
He was about to switch to high-frequency drills and try disassembling a strange metallic ore he had found when a speck on the horizon caught his eye.
Kael's heart twitched. He pushed his wave-sense to the limit.
A moment later his pupils shrank.
A ship's silhouette. A flag snapping in the wind at the bow. A fierce skull with two curved sabers crossed beneath it.
A pirate ship.
His heart thumped. Excitement surged up, impossible to hold down.
Heh. Three years are up. Time for the dragon king to hit the sea.