Disclaimer: I don't own One Piece Oda Eiichiro does. I don't own the character of Victor Von Doom he belongs to Marvel. I don't own Mass Effect, it belongs to Bioware and EA. I don't even own this brain that I'm using to write really, it was all wrinkled when I got it, I've been wondering "Who wrinkled me this brain?" my whole life.
Author's Note: Yeah I skipped most of the training montage and instead of showing it to you I decided to tell it instead. It seems my writing style of showing everything in detail step by step can get tedious to write and I can only assume it might get tedious to read too, so I skipped it this time, I will try not to do so too much. In my defense I was impatient to get to canon and next chapter we are going to be hitting canon like a cannon.
After I reached the mansion, I made my way all the way over to the left side of the mansion where the side door led into the kitchen and pantry, still dragging the corpse of the boar leaving a blood trail behind me. There I came up on an oven and a barbecue grill right outside door leading into the kitchen of the mansion.
I dragged the boar's corpse into the middle of the area, dropped the sack filled with fruits next to it and made my way inside the kitchen. The kitchen was a decent sized one with all the things you could need a gas oven with a stove top, a freezer which I had unplugged 5 months ago when I left, a wide double sink, plenty of cupboards stocked with utensils, a large table in the middle for laying out ingredients and utensils and lastly a door leading to the pantry and then further into the mansion.
I plugged the freezer back in and then made my way over to one of the cupboards and pulled out the extremely tall and sturdy stand used to hang and bleed animals that could only be common in this crazy world. I then grabbed a large steel basin from the same cupboard and on the way out grabbed the knives case with hunting and skinning knives in it, hanging near the door to the outside.
"I should have brought one of these knives with me, I could have saved a bullet and put down the bear, eh live and learn." I made my way back to the boar's corpse and quickly setup the bleeding stand and with a brief struggle managed to mount the boar on to it. I slid the steel basin underneath it and started making my way to the side wall of the mansion where a large round valve was sticking out of the wall.
This valve controls the inflow from the underground canal running to the mansion from a river up the mountain. The water drains from the river up the stream in the mountain and flows down to the mansion and on the way it turns the turbine blades that generates electricity which is then stored in the batteries in the mansion. Once the water reaches the mansion it fills up the storage tank and then the canal continues out the back of the mansion, now with a second smaller sewage pipe which then turn and travel straight down the sheer cliff face. The water canal merges back into the river downstream on the lower grasslands and the sewage pipe continues all the way to the sea shore and empties out to the ocean where all the sewage pipes from the village down on the grasslands also empty out.
As I turned the valve I thought out loud. "Man, the technology level of this world is all over the fucking place, I remember reading that there's a mechanism for drawing and desalinating water AND generating electricity by using manual pedal force on the Going Merry and yet Alabasta is somehow dying to a drought. How the fuck does an island nation suffer that severely from a drought?."
"I mean I get that there's countries that face water scarcity back in my old world too but that's because those countries can't afford the costs of setting something like that up. Alabasta did not seem like it was a poor country before the whole rebellion thing kicked off, they should have been able to afford at least some measure of relief through desalination plants." I thought and then shrugged as I finished turning the water back on. "Maybe they did have them at some point and Baroque Works sabotaged them? Questions for later I guess."
I walked back to the boar and picked up the knives and started the skinning process but then stopped mid-way and looked at my hands. "Would that work?" I touched the part of the flesh I was trying to separate from the bone and willed my power to separate a slice of the flesh away and suddenly the flesh rippled and a slice separated.
I brought the slice away. "Okay, that was creepy as hell." I said and shuddered.
"Hmm, my power works on flesh but does it only work on dead flesh or living flesh too? I seriously doubt that, I don't think that asshole would make things this easy for me but it doesn't hurt to check." I reasoned out loud and then looked around to figure out a way to check just that.
I noticed the sack filled with freshly picked fruits in it. "I remember reading somewhere that freshly picked fruits and vegetables are still technically alive since they continue to perceive light." I chuckled a little as another memory came to me. "I remember thinking that that baby carrots die in your stomach acid and had a little laugh about it. Kinda messed up but you don't become a revenge driven mass murderer without a dark sense of humor."
I picked up the sack and fished a pink pear and blue topped mango out of it. I held the pink pear that I had tasted in my right hand and set the blue topped mango nearby on the ground. I willed my power to peel away a slice of the pink pear and as I expected it didn't work, I tried a bunch of other things like changing its color, twisting its shape and just turn it into iron and nothing worked. I then picked up the mango and got the same results.
"It seems I was right, so it works on dead things but not living but it works on me. So either my power thinks I'm dead or this damn devil fruit is fucking manton limited somehow. Manton limit is a worm thing but I do remember Shiki's devil fruit ability having a similar limit and even though that whole movie involving him was non-canon, the devil fruit and the character was in fact canon. Considering the source of it either of those may be true and I have no idea, whatever, too hungry to think right now." I groaned out and then went back to skinning the boar traditionally since I still wasn't practiced enough with my devil fruit abilities.
I skinned and butchered the boar as thoroughly as I could since even though my "grandfather" owned a restaurant I was never much of a chef, I mostly dealt with the logistics and paperwork of the business. Still, you can't be raised in a restaurant for over 20 years and not pick up a few things. I went back into the kitchen and grabbed some trays and plastic wrap, I wrapped up the parts of the boar except for one rear haunch and put them onto the trays. I carried the trays and the haunch back into the kitchen and put the trays into the freezer and noticed it wasn't cooling yet and remembered.
"Right, didn't flip the fucking breaker." I noticed I was making a lot of mistakes and disregarding things due to the hunger today and forced myself to consider the problem despite my booming hunger.
"I should not be this hungry right now, even if I consider the devil fruit to have zero nutritional value I have still gone for much longer and done much more strenuous activity during the training from hell and then multiple times during my murder spree." I reasoned after thinking about only one conclusion made sense.
"It must be because of this new body, ROB said that he was making my body standard for this world and considering the absurd recovery rate of people in this world, all that energy must come from the food." I re-examined my body and combed through my experience in this world to see if I noticed any discrepancy in my body somehow.
"I don't feel any different but even though I didn't think about it at the time I did just kill a car sized boar pretty easily, which means my body is most definitely different." I raised my arms to look at them and realized. "This is not my old body."
"It feels the same, probably looks the same since I haven't checked it out in a mirror yet but it doesn't work the same. This is a body from One Piece world that has been trained by a Marine Admiral for 20 years and even though my grandfather wasn't as crazy about my training as Garp after the whole experiment incident, this body is still not a joke." I realized with some awe. "ROB did this so cleanly that I didn't even notice it until now, that is kinda scary."
I thought about that for a moment until my hunger broke my train of thought again and started walking to the breaker box in the back of the mansion in the storage room. "This hunger thing is going to be really fucking annoying." I grumbled as I flipped the breaker and saw the red light, light up on the box.
I made my way back to the kitchen and checked the freezer and saw that it had turned on. I then turned back to the boar haunch and decided to do something simple with it. I pulled out some salt and spices, a bottle of oil and a tray from the various cupboards.I grabbed the haunch from the table top and brought it to the sink I turned the tap on and I was about to run the haunch in the water when I noticed the rusty stale water it was spitting out.
"Ew, that's five months of gunk right there." I waited until the water cleared, then scooped some out into my palm to make sure then cleaned the meat. I then put the haunch on the tray on the table top, I oiled the meat and rubbed some salt and spices on to it and then put it in the oven and set it to medium and a slow cook and turned the oven on.
I looked at my dirty clothes and hands caked with mud and blood. "Right, time for that shower and to examine any other changes I might have gone through."
I made my way up the stairs to my room and pulled out some clothes, which seemed to match my wardrobe from my old world pretty accurately, all dark blues, greys, blacks and the occasional red and purple. The whole wardrobe equally divided in jeans and t-shirts and formal pants and shirts. My fashion sense is pretty boring if I'm being honest. I picked the black jeans and blue t-shirt with some underwear and made my way to the bath room.
As I made my way inside the bath room I looked longingly at the luxurious bath tub sitting there. "No more warm baths for me, I really should have had a long bath before eating that cursed fruit." I lamented as I took my clothes off.
I stood in front of the full length mirror and took a good look at myself I noticed all my scars from my old life were all gone. Over the last four years I had been shot, stabbed, burned (both with acid and fire) and scraped multiple times and all of those incidents had left their own unique little marks on my body. "I always thought of those scars as accomplishments, that I went through something most others wouldn't survive and walked out alive and usually successful in making sure my target did not survive." I thought as I absently traced the right side of my chest where the final fatal shot I had received. I shook my head to clear my thoughts and continued my examination.
I ran my hand through my hair and noticed that the small bald spot, about a third of an inch wide on the right said of my head was still there I then ran my hand through the hair on the left side of my head and to the back of my head and the result was the same four small bald spots in a circle around my head. This was a result of what is called "Neonatal Alopecia" this happens due to injuries on the fetus scalp sustained during a complication in the labor process which makes it so that the spot on the head becomes incapable of growing hair. In my case this was due to the marks left by some kind of forceps.
"This is weird; those are technically injuries too so why haven't they healed?" I thought about the latest bit of strangeness to come my way. After a long while I could only come up with one theory.
"Well, that's a depressing theory though, it would explain the whole passive regeneration thing." The theory I had come up with was that Devil Fruits work conceptually. For example, the Flower-Flower fruit somehow sprouts limbs instead of flowers, the Human-Human fruit doesn't change Chopper completely into a human instead a weird human looking monster, the Smooth-Smooth fruit somehow makes you lose weight and the Revive-Revive fruit doesn't let you revive dead people. My theory is that some mechanism of a devil fruit ability is fixed while other parts are up to the user's subconscious thought process when they ate the devil fruit. Since Chopper doesn't want to be a human but fit in with his pack he turns into something halfway human, since Brook thought the revive fruit would only revive him so it does only that and less said about Alvida the better.
In my case since I think because I don't particularly like who or rather how I am the fruit is responding to my subconscious desire to better myself and is constantly trying to "Alter" me into a better person but since the devil fruit ability can't change the way my mind works its doing what it can to keep me from getting any worse by constantly keeping me at my peak and since I had always considered the little bald spots on my head as simply part of me the devil fruit ability isn't affecting those.
"Either that or it's ROB fuckery. Yeah, I think I'm gonna stick with ROB fuckery, I don't think I'm ready to accept that I dislike myself severely enough to change how my devil fruit ability works. So yeah, damn that ROB and him fucking with me." I concluded and decidedly stopped thinking about that topic anymore and moved over to stand under the shower and as I was about to turn the shower on I remembered the sink from earlier and stood to the side before I turned it on.
As the shower spit out the same rusted gunk as the kitchen sink earlier. "Oh good, I haven't lost all of my mental faculties because of the hunger." I wryly remarked then waiter until the water cleared up and took a long cold shower. Good thing it was summer right now because I had completely forgotten to plug the water heater back in.
After the shower I dressed and went down to the kitchen again my hunger increasing substantially after the shower and hoped the meat was done cooking. I looked into the oven and saw that it did indeed look it was about done, so I closed it back up and set about peeling and slicing the fruits as a side dish once I was done I pulled out the meat from the oven and checked to see if it was cooked all the way through by slicing it and thankfully it was cooked completely because I don't think I could have waited for much longer. I ate the food right there on the kitchen table top after grabbing some cutlery form the drawers and quickly rinsing it off in the sink. The meat tasted better than all the steaks I have ever eaten put together, I don't know if that was the hunger talking or if the food in this world is just plain better. I tasted the blue topped mangos and found that they tasted much like what I expected but with a slight spicy aftertaste, 'This world is fucking weird'.
Once I was done eating and finally got rid of my hunger I noticed I had finished off the all the meat and only two pink pears were left. "At this rate that boar meat isn't gonna last a week." I complained.
Once I cleaned up I made my way back to the study and noticed the box with the manuals still resting on my jacket on top of the study table. "Right now that I can think properly I should probably read these through thoroughly and start with my training." I decided.
It has been a week since I have been in this world and my training has finally started in earnest not that I hadn't been training until now but today I finally received the shipment of huge amounts of metal I had ordered.
See, on that first day once I familiarized myself with the Rokushiki training manuals I decided to do a bit of exercise and noticed something very interesting. Once I had started to feel some pain and fatigue from the strain of the exercise I took a light break and less than a minute later all the pain and fatigue was gone which is when I realized that my devil fruit ability had healed me back up. At first I worried that no matter how hard I worked my body would just reset back to its "default" state even though it would invalidate my asking for the Rokushiki manuals from ROB but hey can't put anything past that asshole.
Regardless, I continued my hellish training and noticed another little side effect, I had started to get hungry pretty quickly after the strenuous exercise so I ate some more and continued exercising. After a few days I breathed a sigh of relief when I noticed a tangible increase in my fitness and a change in weight. So I concluded that I would be able to accelerate my training significantly by ignoring all safety precautions in place to prevent damaging my body since my devil fruit ability would just heal me back up anyway while still retaining the improvements from the exercise albeit at a significant cost in food. Meaning that estimate of boar meat lasting a week was absurdly generous and I had to go hunt for food on the third day, this time finding some sort of nightmarish cross between a turkey and an ostrich, damn thing was fast and brutal but ended up in my stomach in the end anyway.
I also realized that I had done all my experiments with my devil fruit on an empty stomach and that the exhaustion cost for changing that cube of stone to cube of iron was a bit less than a third of my original estimate. I also finalized my devil fruit abilities into three general categories shaping, regeneration and transmuting
Shaping is what I called the ability to alter the shape of things for example turning an ingot of processed steel into a bar I could use for weight training. This ability required little to no energy at all. I used this ability to make a .50 Caliber revolver on my third day before I went to hunt for more food. I recycled some old metal furniture with my ability to conserve the energy use since I was already running out of food. I was planning to train this ability to work faster and as precise and intricate as I could in the coming year.
I called the passive healing and recovery ability Regeneration, this ability kept me healthy, healed any physical harm to my body and recovered my stamina and relieved fatigue. This ability used a moderate amount of energy which meant that if I was ever starving and wounded I would not be able to heal myself full. I have yet to test this but it made sense to me given everything else.
Transmutation as the name implies I called the ability to change the nature of things like turning stone to metal and metal to stone, once I got my metal shipment today I tried turning an ingot of steel into an ingot of plastic and what I got was a plastic ingot roughly 8 times the size of the steel ingot I had used, I had some interesting ideas about that. I had also used this ability to make myself a personal computer with a full holographic display. The drain on my energy was noticeable, not as severe as I initially thought but still nothing to scoff at. The training goal for this ability was to use it repeatedly in hopes that as I get used to it I could lower the energy demand and to be able to it in combat since the concentration required to use this was no joke and would be a death sentence mid fight.
To my mixed relief and initial suspense, I did not dream about the Mass Effect universe the next day or the day after when I went to sleep but only on the third day in this world and yesterday. The contents were much the same as the other time on the third day but yesterday's dream had me meet Shepard herself and yes she was a she in this world. She was still an ensign though and not a commander yet. As far as technology, I got the tech for the gloves that you use to interact with holographic tech on the third day, yeah apparently that computer would have been completely useless to me without the gloves since you can't interact with the holograms without the sensors in the gloves telling the computer what you are interacting with on the screen. Yesterday's dream got me the design for a super-efficient power cells which included designs for a super conductor which was used in the super capacitor in the power cells, this thing was amazing, it was a five foot cube sized and could easily power three blocks of residential areas back in my old world for a week. Still no Element Zero though.
Another aspect of the technological knowledge I realized was that the knowledge was thorough in some ways but lacking in other. For example I knew how to make the super conductor with my ability since I knew its exact structure but I had no knowledge on how it was traditionally processed in that world since that wasn't included in the dream info dump. I also knew how to make processors courtesy of the computer design I got on that first day so I could also use it to make smart phones or even calculators since I knew how to make a computer and received all the technical knowledge how it functioned with one major problem. I don't know how to make LCDs or LED screens so the smart phone and the calculator would have to have a holographic interface. I could also make holographic light bulbs so mixed bag all around.
I had visited the village on foot on the second day to purchase some essentials and just to see the village. It was bigger than it looked from the cliff but other than that it was pretty quaint and unremarkable. I had setup a regular delivery of fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk and occasionally spices and setup a delivery for metals with the blacksmith which had arrived today. I had checked my finances before heading down and based on the prices of things in the village I don't think I will have to worry about money for the year of training I have and even then I would have a significant chunk left over.
My one year of training is finally up. I had been preparing to leave for the past week so as I got up this morning I had packed up and readied myself to leave already.
This past year of training has been amazingly peaceful especially after my hellish four years. Peaceful doesn't mean I slacked off on the training, on the contrary with tangible results being visible so quickly due to my unique training method I worked day and night on the training instead. There is something uniquely satisfying to see the results of hard work that you don't have to wait a year or so to see.
As far as results go, still no luck with Haki, I got weird vibes before I got ambushed by some predators on the mountain once or twice but I might have been imagining those other than that absolutely no progress so far, still haven't given up on it though. For Rokushiki I only made progress on Geppo and Soru. I managed to master Geppo enough that I can consistently make at least 4 jumps in the air after that it starts to take a toll on my knees and chances of falling down increase. Soru on the other hand only works a third of the time and even then I can only manage 4 kicks at a time and when I fail I usually end up falling face first. No luck on the other arts, only broken fingers and assorted other bones.
I was wearing a black leather trench coat with a blue t-shirt and black jeans. The trench coat was only partly a fashion statement and partly because it was lined on the inside with half inch thick plates of Tungsten, the densest and hardest metal I had painstakingly transmuted over the past year to exploit the increased return when I transmute it into less dense metals like steel. I had briefly considered Osmium but it was far too brittle to be practical. I was carrying to .50 caliber revolvers and a giant rifle that looked eerily similar to the one that had killed me on my back except this one was powered by Element Zero so it was even more deadly.
I had finally gotten Element Zero about five months after I had arrived in this world. I had damn near passed out when I had tried to transmute it however. It took nearly all my energy just to transmute 5 grams of stable and processed Eezo. Which is why my revolvers are still classic ballistic guns and only the rifle on my back is Eezo powered. I have carefully generated a very small reserve of Eezo over the last seven months which I am carrying in a secret pocket in my coat for future projects.
As I made my way outside with my hefty backpack and three other bags of luggage I waited for the knock of destiny ROB had mentioned when I heard a distant bang. I looked towards the village and saw a ship on the ocean approaching the village, I quickly formed a small foldable telescope and looked at the ship and noticed the familiar looking mark on top of the main mast. I smiled and closed the door of the mansion one last time then tapped it to quickly form a message for anyone that comes looking put my bags in the cart standing nearby and started running to the village at speeds that would have been impossible in my old world while pulling the cart. A white sign left sticking on the door to the mansion that had served as my home for a year and maybe would again someday, the message on the sign read:
"Gone Fishing"