Chapter 1: Second Breath
Anchor Island, East Blue — Day 1, Early Morning
Water filled his lungs.
Not slowly. Not the gentle creep of a bathtub. The river hit his chest like a fist — cold, black, absolute — and his mouth opened on instinct and that was the end of the argument. He went under. The current spun him. His lab coat billowed out like wings that couldn't fly, and the bridge railing he'd been leaning against was already twenty meters gone, receding into December rain and Tokyo streetlight. The Sumida River took him the way it took everything: without asking, without pausing, without caring that he had a centrifuge running on the third floor and a half-eaten bento in the break room fridge.
This is stupid, was his last coherent thought. I slipped. I slipped on wet concrete and this is how it ends.
Darkness.
Then air.
The wrong air. Salt-thick, warm, saturated with something organic — tar, seawater, old wood. His chest heaved. Coughing, except nothing came up because there was no water in these lungs, and his hands were gripping sheets that smelled like someone else's sweat, and the ceiling above him was planked with timber held together by iron rivets the size of his thumb.
He jackknifed upright. Pain bloomed down his spine — the kind of ache from sleeping on a bad mattress for too many hours. His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs and forced himself to breathe.
In. Out. Count to ten. Japanese first. Ichi, ni, san, shi —
The room was small. Four bunks, two stacked on each wall, barely enough floor space to stand. Harbor noise bled through the single window: gulls, rope creak, men shouting in a language he understood but didn't recognize the accent of. His bunk was the lower left, blanket kicked to the floor, pillow damp.
Nobody else here. The other three bunks had been slept in — sheets rumpled, a jacket draped over one railing, boots lined up beneath another. His bunkmates had already left for the day.
Okay. Okay.
He swung his legs over the edge and his feet hit cold floorboards. Bare feet. Not his feet. These were wider, tougher, calloused on the balls and heels the way feet get when shoes are a sometimes thing. He stared at them for six seconds.
Not my feet.
He stood. The body responded. Young, lean, shorter than he was used to — he'd been 178 centimeters and change, and this frame topped out at maybe 172. His hands came up in front of his face. Brown. Sun-darkened, rougher than any pair of hands he'd owned, with calluses across the fingers and palms that spoke to rope work and heavy lifting. A dock worker's hands.
The shared washroom was two steps from the bunkhouse door. A hallway of warped planks, a bucket of rainwater with a ladle, and a mirror nailed to the wall — clouded glass, cracked in one corner, but functional.
The face staring back was not his.
Younger. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Angular where his had been round, sun-weathered where his had been fluorescent-pale. Dark hair cropped unevenly, like someone had done it with a knife and no particular investment in the result. Sharp jawline. Eyes that were his only in the sense that they moved when he told them to.
His knees buckled. He caught the wall with one hand and slid down until he was sitting on the washroom floor with his back against the timber. His breathing had gone ragged.
Three seconds. You get three seconds.
One.
Two.
Three.
Okay. Data collection.
He pushed himself up on legs that wanted to shake and walked back to the bunkhouse. The jacket on the opposite bunk wasn't his — too big — but the coat hanging on a hook near the lower right bunk had pockets that jingled. He patted them down. Coins. Odd shapes, odd colors, not yen. He pulled a handful out and stared.
Round. Metal. Stamped with a symbol he didn't recognize and a denomination that read "B."
B.
Berries.
His hand closed around the coins. He counted them mechanically, the way he'd count reagent vials. Three hundred and forty berries. Not a lot, not nothing. Enough to eat for a day or two if the local prices were anything like what he dimly recalled from —
He stopped counting.
The newspaper was on the table between the bunks. Folded once, dated, smudged with someone's breakfast. He picked it up with hands that had gone completely still.
The date wasn't familiar. The calendar wasn't Gregorian. But the headline — the headline knocked the air out of him a second time.
MARINE CAPTAIN "AXE-HAND" MORGAN TIGHTENS SHELLS TOWN SECURITY — BOUNTY HUNTERS WARNED TO AVOID 153rd BRANCH JURISDICTION.
He read it twice. Three times. The words didn't change.
Morgan. Shells Town. 153rd Branch.
He sat down on the bunkhouse floor with the newspaper in his lap and didn't move for a long time.
Not because he'd panicked. The panic had come and gone in the washroom — three seconds, as promised. What replaced it was something colder, more precise: the rapid mechanical process of a researcher confronting an impossible dataset.
If Morgan is active at Shells Town, this is pre-Luffy. Early. The boy hasn't left Foosha Village yet, or he's just leaving. The East Blue Saga is either starting or about to start.
He looked at the newspaper again. The currency. The harbor sounds — real harbors, with real ships, and outside the window a flag was visible on a mast in the distance. Black fabric, white skull, crossed bones beneath. A Jolly Roger. Not decorative. Not cosplay. A working pirate flag on a working pirate ship in a world where that meant something specific and deadly.
I'm in One Piece.
The thought landed with a weight that should have been absurd. A manga. A story he'd read on the Chuo Line between Kanda and Ochanomizu, standing room only, phone held at eye level absorbed in twenty-minute increments between the lab and his apartment. He'd liked it. The fights were good, the world-building was inventive, the characters had heart. He'd followed it the way millions of people followed it — casually, warmly, without it being the center of his life.
And now he was inside it.
He sat on that floor for forty minutes.
Not crying. Not screaming. Not laughing. Just cross-referencing. The harbor outside had four ships visible from the window — one pirate sloop, two merchant vessels, one fishing boat. The architecture through the glass was wood-and-stone, vaguely colonial, consistent with East Blue port towns. The air temperature was warm enough for the thin shirt this body was wearing but not hot. Trade winds. Tropical-adjacent latitude.
Anchor Island. The name surfaced from a memory he couldn't pin to a specific chapt er — background text in a map panel, maybe, or a mention in an SBS column. Minor island. East Blue. No canon significance. The kind of place that existed in the world without the story ever needing to visit it.
The coat pocket yielded one more item: a rice ball wrapped in a strip of cloth, half-eaten, cold. Someone else's yesterday. He unwrapped it slowly and took a bite. The rice was stale. The seaweed was salty and slightly chewy. The filling was pickled plum, tart enough to make his jaw tighten.
It was the best thing he'd ever tasted.
Not because the food was good. Because it was real. The texture, the salt, the way the grain stuck to his teeth — his brain could not fabricate this. No dream produced this level of sensory coherence. No hallucination sustained for forty minutes with zero inconsistency.
He finished the rice ball sitting on the floor of a dead man's bunkhouse — or a vanished man's bunkhouse, or whoever had worn this body before him — and folded the cloth neatly and put it back in the pocket.
Okay.
Here's what I know. I'm in East Blue. It's early in the timeline. I have no money worth mentioning, no allies, no combat ability, no Devil Fruit, and a body that's healthy but couldn't survive a bar fight with a drunk fisherman. I was a pharmaceutical researcher who spent sixty hours a week in a temperature-controlled lab. The most dangerous thing I handled was concentrated sulfuric acid, and that had proper PPE protocols.
Here's what I also know. I know where every major player in this ocean is right now. I know what Luffy will do, where he'll go, who he'll fight, and roughly when. I know which islands have Devil Fruits, which seas have Sea Kings, which Marines are corrupt and which ones are dangerous. I know the Grand Line. I know the New World. I know the Void Century secrets that won't be revealed for years.
I know everything.
And I can't do a single thing about any of it.
He stood up. Folded the newspaper. Put it in his pocket beside the empty cloth.
The door of the bunkhouse opened onto a wooden walkway that led down to the docks. Morning light hit him full in the face — golden, clean, filtered through clouds that moved too fast in a sky that was too blue. The harbor spread out below: ships, rope, crates, men hauling cargo in the humid air. A foreman's whistle cut through the gull noise.
His shift. This body had a morning shift. Dock work. Loading and unloading. The kind of labor that paid just enough to keep the bunkhouse bed and put rice in the pocket.
He needed that paycheck. He needed the routine. And more than either of those, he needed to stand at those docks and watch every ship that came into this harbor, because somewhere in the East Blue, a boy in a straw hat was climbing into a barrel and drifting toward the rest of his life.
Ino walked to the docks. The sun was warm on someone else's skin.
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