The cove had a rhythm to it: the tide in, the tide out, the lazy creak of boats, the clatter of nets, the gossip of fishermen. But that rhythm had been punctured by a fall down a ravine and the strange, sudden wideness behind Luffy's eyes. After that day nothing in the cove felt quite ordinary.
Dadan took Luffy and the little disaster he'd made of himself like a bandit takes a new recruit — with an assessment that was half curiosity and half suspicion. Donden fussed and checked and clucked like a tinkerer who'd found a machine that should have been dead but hummed anyway. They fed him, stitched his cuts, and then set to work breaking him down and building him back up.
Garp had left. He had said what needed to be said to the two:" do what you must, keep him alive, and don't make a cripple of him." The rest — the shaping, the beatings, the patience — belonged to Dadan and to Donden now. Dadan was a mountain bandit with a laugh like gravel and hands that smelled faintly of old leather and iron. She had been harsh with boys before; she knew how to strip softness and bake it into grit. Donden smelled of oil and glue and kept a pouch of little inventions that made children cackle and elders frown.
They were both practical people. Where Garp might have been ideological, Dadan and Donden were pragmatic. Luffy's awakening left them wary in different ways: Dadan because a clever child was more likely to break a rule or a fence, and Donden because clever things tended to either break or become something wonderful.
"Kid's got too many ideas floating in his noggin," Danden — no, Donden — muttered while poking through Luffy's sand drawings. He kept a squint reserved for gears and unnatural sentences. "If he keeps thinking like this, he'll either invent a better plow or invent a bomb. Both have merits."
Dadan rolled her eyes. "Then make him useful. Break his pride, teach him to eat mud if needed, and put him to work before he starts rewiring the village."
So they trained.
Not just pushing, not just the rote, but layered — like the way a craftsman lays grain across grain until the wood sings. Luffy's mornings became circuits: chores, conditioning, study, improvisation, and then more conditioning. Nothing happened by accident. Every chore was doubling as training, every game was a lesson. The simplicity of Dadan's rules — shovel until you can dig through stone, climb until the cliff spits you back, run until the sea feels slow — hidden beneath Donden's small mechanical challenges, fused with the structured exercises Luffy had quietly remembered from his manuals. The manuals were not named aloud; they were shelved like used tools. Luffy used their contents, not their origins.
The first month after the ravine was forgiveness by exhaustion. Dadan had him hauling nets, carrying barrels, running errands, and practicing balance by carrying water jugs along the most crooked of paths. "A pirate can't be fancy if he can't keep water in a bucket," she said, slapping his back enough that he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. "And if you drop it, you fetch more. No whining."
The mountain-bandit regimen was merciless. She taught ambush: how to read a path and become a shadow at the lip of it, how to step where the earth would not give a sound, how to take from the greedy and give to the hungry without becoming a thief of heart. Luffy learned to move with purpose, to tuck his weight in, to use momentum like a secret friend. Dadan's training was often more about temperament than bruises: patience, timing, cunning. Those lessons melted into Luffy's bones.
Donden's lessons were subtler and smelled of metal shavings. He fixed nets and tinkered with fishing frames, but he also gave Luffy puzzles. "If you can fix a hinge with one nail and a prayer, you can build trust with any gear," he would say. He taught Luffy to listen — not with ears but with fingers — to a wheel's whisper, to the little shimmy that told you a bolt was failing. Luffy learned to coax a stiff hinge, to balance a weight, to fashion a lever. Those small mechanical truths became metaphors for leverage in combat: the right point, the right angle, the right patience.
Behind these simple, practical lessons roared a deeper discipline, pulled from the thin, worn pages Luffy kept folded into his shirt. He ran drills he had read about and adapted them with the cunning of a child who remembered more than just names — he remembered patterns. He took Rokushiki movements and made them into games; he practiced Soru by setting up a corridor of tree stumps and zipping between them blindfolded, trusting smell and wind to paint the world. He tried Tekkai by standing toe-to-toe with stubborn animals, arms locked with a goat until his skin throbbed and his breath steadied.
The influence of the three manuals — Rokushiki, Garp's regimen, and the Haki guide — was like a scaffolding. Luffy climbed it, using his odd memory as a map. He practiced Tekkai, but Dadan's approach twisted it to endurance work: he would hold a plank on his back while Dadan and Donden threw sacks at him. He learned to harden where needed and keep it flexible where not. The false contrast between iron and rubber was not his to play with yet; he trained a human body's capacity as if one day it might be expected to hold more than a usual child's weight.
There was a moment, in the early weeks, that made Donden sit back and whistle. Luffy had fashioned a small wooden box, tied weights to his ankles, and sprinted through the forest with a grin like someone who'd stolen the sun. He leapt, using the box as ballast to increase explosive power — Geppo practice chewed into his calves — and then, midair, he corrected an instinctive flick, angling his toes to use the wind against him. He stalled fractionally, a trick of balance and patience that should have taken months. Donden tapped the side of his head as if to ask, who taught you to cheat gravity like that?
Luffy's past-life fragments were the secret lubricant of his progress. He called his memory flashes "ideas" or "funny thoughts." He didn't tell Dadan that he'd once been an engineer who could feel the hum of a reactor in the teeth of a storm. He didn't tell Donden that he knew the algorithm of a gear before a gear was even named. He simply used the knowledge to invent small asymmetries — a way to kick that snapped a rankyaku's arc into a tight blade, a way to tense his palm for a hand technique that bit through driftwood.
But training was not just physical repetition. Luffy was given tasks rooted in balance between realms: the One-Punch Man truth that repetition equals results, Master Roshi's idea that life-skills were training in disguise, and Garp's blunt, old logic that a child needed to outwork his luck.
Every morning Luffy woke before dawn, ran like the tide until his lungs sang, then did 100 push-ups because Dadan liked the look of children who could complain afterwards. He would carry sacks of grain up the cliff until his legs trembled — repetition for condition. But Dadan added a twist: he had to do the climb with a blindfold while listening to Donden's tiny metronome, teaching him to find rhythm in chaos. Master Roshi would have applauded the domestic chores turned training: Luffy mastered cooking on a fire with a pot that would tip if not balanced just so, a discipline of concentration that translated into hand steadiness in combat.
The One-Punch Man portion of the regimen came as absurdity: run, push, squat, repeat, and then do it again with a stone chained to the waist. It was ridiculous and brutally effective. Luffy discovered that beyond the humor there was truth: limits moved when your mind stopped calling them limits. He laughed at the pain, then learned to keep laughing with a steady breath.
And then there was the Haki manual — Bogard's terse, sharp exercises hidden in thin paper. Luffy didn't understand the word Haki fully at first; he understood it like the taste of salt on his tongue. Donden would place a feather on a plank and tell Luffy to feel the wind that made it skip. Luffy would sit with his eyes closed and breathe until the feather's motion matched the motion within his chest. Observation was taught as a game: feel the rabbit before it moved, name the scent of the ocean two billows away. Armament came as contact: press your palm into the sun-warmed rock until you felt the stone answering with its stubborn coolness. He began to intuit the radiance of the living and the chill of the inanimate.
Luffy's experiments became famous in the cove for their unpredictability. He mixed Donden's tinkering with Dadan's practical cruelty. He would place weights around his legs, tie ropes to trees for simulated Rankyaku resistance, and lash together old fishing nets to practice Kami-e — letting himself be caught and learning how to free himself. Sometimes he failed spectacularly and wound up in the soup-pot that Makino would later scold him out of; sometimes he surprised even Donden with a new trick that made Dadan grunt.
He invented the Hand Gun because one afternoon he smashed his palm into a boulder and, guided by reminiscence, found the idea of channeling force through the fingers efficient. Not mystical yet — just efficient. He practiced making the muscles of his forearm contract in a sudden, lightning-tight pattern that sent a concussive pain through his palm and fractured a small stone. He laughed at the sound and kept practicing.
From those early practices came Vibration Hand — the idea that tension and release at speed could create heat and, by extension, a cutting effect. At first it was a curiosity: strap a chunk of scrap metal and see what happens. Then it turned dangerous: the metal warmed, then browned, then glowed with a faint blue edge that made Donden whistle and Dadan narrow her eyes. "Don't burn the place down," she said, though there was pride under her scold. Luffy learned to control friction not as a byproduct but as a tool.
Compression Hand was a different kind of obsession. After reading, without thinking much of it, about pressing charcoal into denser shapes in the margins of one of the manuals, Luffy found a method to crush and compress black dust. It was crude at first. He gathered charcoal, pressed and stomped, and then, using a crude lever Donden had fashioned from a broken mast, he began to force the carbon into an almost cohesive block. The first blocks were crumbly; the second were denser. He learned to add binding material — resin from certain trees — and to compact in layers. Donden laughed and called it play; Dadan called it more work. Luffy smiled and called it progress.
Diamond Tekkai — the legend he could not yet speak of fully — was the whisper at the edge of his experiments. The idea that compressing charcoal, imbuing it with will, and then applying Life Return's cellular control might one day make a body take on diamond's qualities was a line on a far horizon. For now, he merely learned the taste of patience in compression. He learned how heat and pressure changed shapes and how intention could steer the tiniest cracks away from failure.
There were moments of childlike wonder between the relentless routine: he would trace circuits in the sand that were impossibly complex for a child, then hum a problem until his fingers tapped out a solution. He would design a lever that made hauling firewood trivial, then teach a village elder the trick, who would snort and call it witchcraft. He would sit by the sea and imagine currents as ribbons of blue energy and then try to owe them a bow and a thank you for not capsizing the boy.
Not every experiment had science behind it. Some were pure faith. He learned Flow Combat — Kami-e turned active — by sparring with the wind. He would let a net snap at him and twist, not to evade but to redirect the net's energy so the next strike fell into a different path. He practiced Phantom Shift until his body felt like a loose sleeve, slipping threads of movement into misdirection. He began to feel the architecture of fights: the hinge, the fulcrum, the invisible line you only saw when your eyes were steady and your heart quiet.
His nascent Observation Haki was a radio dial he hadn't learned to tune. Once, while hiding in a pile of nets as a game, he felt Dadan's pulse find him like a hummingbird finds sugar. He wasn't surprised; he was delighted. He learned to sense small things: the tremor of a footfall, the soft exhale of a sleeping dog, the way a rope would sigh before snapping. It became a habit: before any climb, before any leap, Luffy would sit very still and listen to the small music of the world.
And there were setbacks. The body had limits. Sometimes he simply failed. He would overreach and split a knuckle, or the compressed charcoal would fracture in a way that shredded his hands. The village caught him practicing Hand Gun on driftwood instead of using it to help them, and the old men swore at him for wasting time. Dadan scolded and then told him to make amends. He would carry fish further than anyone had to, even if he nearly fell down from exhaustion. The balance between invention and community responsibility became part of his training: you become strong, yes, but you owe the strength to the people who feed you.
The social moments of his childhood were simple and sharp. Dadan was the gruff teacher, but also the occasional soft place: she would sit with Luffy when thunderstorms made the sea a white roar and feed him stew that burned his tongue. Donden would stay up late, showing Luffy the secrets of gears and glue and how a well-oiled hinge could make a whole life easier. Makino would scold him for leaving tools in odd places. The villagers accepted him the same way they accepted a storm: a force that uprooted and planted new things.
As months passed, the boy became a different shape. He was still small; he still had the pranks and the laugh that made children run and dogs chase. But his mind moved with an odd economy, like a sparrow that had already learned to count the beats of a falcon's wings. His progress was visible in small triumphs: a perfectly balanced pail, a cleanly cut planking, a net mended so well that the sea seemed to respect it. He slept with sand in his hair from training and woke before dawn with new plans.
At five, he began integrating movement into machinery. He made a simple pulley that could hoist sacks twice as fast and practiced Soru while running the rope between his legs. He called the movement "Cleave" when he used his hand-kicks to shear the air; he called a rapid, contracted fist "HanGan." Names stuck in his mouth like new spices, and sometimes he would invent a name, taste it, and find it fit.
He continued to learn from memory the broader techniques that were not everyday practices: Form 0 — a clean, disciplined movement that combined swordplay precision with unarmed strikes — became an exercise he translated into strikes and footwork. Cosmic Breath, a synthesis of focused breathing and motion, found its echo in how he learned to steady a throwing net with one breath and then to exhale into a kick that felt like a gale. These were not full mastery; they were impressions, early sketches on the wide canvas of experience.
One night, months after the ravine, Donden brought him a small, dull shard that glimmered like the inside of a beetle's shell. "Found it in a pocket of the cave," he said, eyes gleaming. "Little ore. Nothing fancy."
Luffy took it like someone who had inherited the secret of how to make fire with two stones. He felt its warmth at the core. The shard hummed faintly under his palm. He did not know its name, but the shape and sound answered something already waiting in him. He pressed his palm against it and felt a whisper of resonance. It was nothing dangerous yet. It was opportunity.
He took to experiments with Aetherium — if that was what it was — as if the metal was a teacher with a cruel sense of patience. He tried to channel a small measure of his Haki into the metal and felt the boundaries of his will striking the ore like a bell. It sang. The song was tiny, but it told him that the world would answer if he asked properly.
By the time he was leaving his fifth year behind, rumors of the boy with silver-gold hair who could fix boats and break boulders had spread past the cove. Fishermen told stories of how the boy had stood in a storm and simply laughed. Travelers said he could make a pulley out of nothing and that Donden was secretly proud. Dadan only grunted and kept him working.
And tucked inside Luffy was a private truth: the seed of adaptation. It showed itself in small mercies. A cut would heal a little faster than it should. Bruises faded quicker. When he pushed his body hard enough, something inside him shifted to accommodate the strain. It was subtle — a tuning that made him less likely to break and more likely to bend. He chalked it up to youth, to good food, to the kindness of Dadan's stew. The true nature of that trait — the perfect, adaptive bone and will — was a locked door he had not yet found the key to.
Time, however, does not bend to secrecy. With age came readiness. Luffy's sixth birthday arrived like a low tide leaving treasures behind. Dadan allowed him a day's reprieve: no chores at dawn, a clean shirt, a breakfast where Makino did not scold him for flour on his ears. He was given, as tradition and mischief allowed, a small token: a simple ring made from a twisted bit of silvered wire Donden had polished. It looked like nothing, and it was everything.
That afternoon Luffy went to his usual cliff overlooking the harbor, feeling the ease of muscle and the tightness of patience. He sat cross-legged and traced circles in the sand with a stick, drawing movements and designs that belonged to a boy who remembered three lives. The sun was a hard coin. The sea rolled its practiced applause. The world seemed to breathe with him.
Far on the horizon, something shifted.
At first it was only a darker smear against the blue. Then a mast. Then sails that caught a wind different from the usual trade breeze — a wind scented with daring and laughter. Luffy's chest tightened. The Observation thing — the small radio dial he had not yet learned to tune — clicked and hummed faintly. He felt a pull, a recognition in the bones rather than in memory.
Daden's voice behind him, rough as gravel: "Ship far out. Smells of freedom and trouble."
Donden, peering through a little spyglass, made a sound that was half laugh and half worry. "That one's… interesting. Small. Red in the distance."
Luffy's palm went clammy for reasons he could not name. The horizon was only a smear then a shape then a ship drawing nearer, and as it did something loosened inside him like a thread drawn free. Not the Doomsday seed — that would sleep for another decade. Not the manuals. Not the full scope of what he had been told or remembered. Just a small promise, like the first breath before a shout.
He stood, small against the swell of sky, and grinned. It was the kind of grin that could be a shield.
Dadan watched him with an expression she rarely allowed herself to indulge: a look that mixed something like hope and an old, sharp, reluctant pride. "Keep your head, brat," she said. "Don't go poking at people with sharp things."
Luffy laughed. "I won't. I'll just make them laugh instead."
Donden lowered the spyglass. "Red sails," he said. "Keep the nets tight."
On the sea, the ship's silhouette grew sharper, and the cove held its breath. The cove had been reshaped into a workshop and a training ground; it had hardened a boy into something more than a prankster. It had smoothed his edges with the steady hands of Dadan and Donden until his will sat like a stone ready to be flung.
Luffy's sixth year Birthday ended with him looking out over the water and feeling the tug of something beyond the cove. The ship on the horizon promised a different sort of lesson — one that would not be taught with ropes or planks but with laughter and danger, but that was a story for tomorrow.
For now there were chores to do, a pulley to finish, and a lesson in red-hot patience to practice. The boy with silver-gold hair tightened his fingers around the stick in the sand and drew a last line — a horizon line — that felt very much like an invitation.
He did not yet know the shape of the man and his crew who were drawing nearer. He did not yet know about a certain fruit that would one day make his body stretch like a legend. He did not yet understand the full weight of the perfect adaptation sleeping in his bones — a silent promise etched into him long before he learned to speak.
But something inside him felt the approaching change.
A faint surge, a flicker of recognition, stirred beneath his skin — the first whisper of a secret power he did not yet have a name for. It pulsed once, like a heartbeat answering a distant call. Unseen, unnoticed, but undeniably awake.
He had learned how to build, how to break, and how to stitch himself back together again. And now, deep within that small, stubborn body, a hidden potential shifted — patient, ancient, waiting.
He was on the cusp of a journey he could not yet comprehend, a path that would transform him into a force of nature and carve his name into the bones of the Grand Line.
And the world had no idea what was coming.