The ship was a small dark dot on a limitless blue, and three-year-old Monkey D. Luffy watched it like a strategist studying a frontier map. Salt spray spattered his face, but his gaze never wandered; the horizon was a library he intended to read, and every swell and wind gust a line of text. Garp had hammered something into him that no lullaby ever could: discipline that tasted like sea iron. But where the old Marine's training had carved muscle, Luffy's mind had been sharpened into something keener — an instrument that catalogued, analyzed, and rearranged.
He studied the vessel: hull lines, rigging knots, how the crew shifted weight when the deck rolled. He noted the wind's temper, the rhythm of the waves, the way light braided on the water. Every observation slotted into the small, racing calculations behind his eyes. A base here, an escape route there, people to trust and people to use — the scaffolding of plans he hadn't yet told anyone existed.
Fusha Village rose from the coastline like a promise: a scatter of houses, low windmills ticked by steady breeze, a harbor where nets sagged like sleeping mouths. The plain that fed the village spilled into woods and then into the blunt shoulder of Mount Colubo. It was the sort of place where storms were discussed with mugs of tea rather than fear, and where a child could learn more about the sea than any book might teach.
Curly Dadan met him at the edge of that plain — a mountain bandit by trade and a blunt kind of guardian by fate. She was shorter than the stories made her, but her presence filled a space like an old drum: immediate, impossible to ignore. Her voice was gravel and coal, but the grunt she gave Luffy when she took him in was a kind of reluctant benediction.
"You'll stay here," Garp said when he had an hour to spare between his duties and the world's bigger fires. The old man's bravado softened into something like a private weather. He had one hand on Luffy's shoulder and one on the small bag he handed over. "You'll be safe. You'll train. You'll not run headfirst into trouble unless you can take it out with both hands."
From that bag came more than a father's gruff blessing. Garp's gifts were practical and sharp: a worn Haki manual that smelled faintly of salt and discipline; a leather-bound guide to the six Rokushiki techniques, precise and inked with the kind of shorthand only fighters used; a compact training notebook from Bogard with blunt drills and blunt advice. He pressed small, grey stones into Luffy's palm — Seastone — and explained, half joking and half warning, that they were dangerous to some and might be useful to keep safe. His fingers ruffled Luffy's messy hair, twice as fond and twice as proud as he would admit aloud.
"Learn," Garp said. "Train. Remember how to laugh. Don't be a fool, but don't stop being stubborn either. And if you ever think joining the Marines is worth it… consider it. But whatever you choose, be strong."
He left without pomp. The sea took him and his silhouette shrank into the same blue he'd been reading since birth. Luffy watched until the mast was a needle, and then until the needle was nothing at all. The village, the plain, the windmills — those were his new geometry.
Dadan's laugh cut through his reverie. "So you a Marine's brat or a terror? Either way, you're mine until I say otherwise." She shouldered a pack and presented him with a look that meant: do not break whatever I am about to make you into.
Donden — the tinkerer who smelled of oil and little victories — was already there, shadowed by a mess of tools and half-finished rigs. He had a grin that read like a promise: trouble for him was a kind of toy. He inspected Luffy with the keen look of a man who liked machines and might, in time, consider the boy an interesting mechanism.
They didn't fuss with the origin of the manuals. Garp had handed them over; that was the end of that conversation. The books would be tools, not talismans. Luffy slipped them into his small pack the way a builder slips extra nails into a belt — with practical intent rather than sentiment.
Life in Fusha rearranged itself around the child as easily as water finds new paths around piles of rock. There were chores — endless, useful chores — and within each chore a lesson. Dadan's training would be blunt and effective: carry heavy loads, learn to stealth and strike when no one expects it, sharpen patience into a weapon. Donden's lessons came in small mechanical riddles: listen to a stubborn hinge, coax a rust-seized wheel back to life, measure and imagine before you cut. And underneath both, the manuals waited like scaffolds; Luffy would use their pages without pausing to wonder who wrote them.
He began a routine built of borrowed wisdom and his own appetite. From Master Roshi's charm he took the domestic discipline: chores became training disguised as life (balance a pot or face a scalding — do it wrong, and dinner would teach you humility). From Garp's regimen he kept the merciless conditioning: endurance and grit were forged in repetition and cold mornings. From the Saitama idea — absurd as it sounded — he took relentless repetition, but he learned quickly that the joke's kernel was true: limits move when you push them until they stop complaining.
Haki, Rokushiki, life return principles — none of the words yet had the full weight they would carry in years to come. For now they were drills laid out on a floor of curiosity. Luffy practiced Finger Gun until his fingers hummed; he tried holding the iron hardness of Tekkai until his muscles burned; he flailed into Geppo attempts that left him more often tangled in limbs than airborne. Each failure was a calculation revised. Each small success an experiment proven.
But he did not train as a blank slate. Something smaller and quieter had always sat at the edges of his perception: a predisposition for invention, for clever abuses of what existed. He watched windmills with a mechanic's eye and quickly understood gearing. He puzzled over water channels and improvised a charcoal-and-sand filter to make it clearer for the villagers. He braided ropes into a primitive pulley to hoist sacks without the usual groans. Practical inventions earned him eye-rolls from elders and a soft clap from Donden; they earned him more trust than some acts of brute strength ever could.
The village noticed the boy with silver-and-gold hair who moved like he had already read a map of the world around him. He was a mischievous spark and a methodical tinkerer at once — a contradiction the cove found disarming. Makino, the tavern's heart, treated him like a nephew and scolded him like a baker's apprentice; he helped clean, carried barrels as if they were weights in a joke, and stole tastes of stew that earned him a wagging finger.
Even in those first days, there were hints that more lay under his skin than ordinary potential. Cuts closed a touch quicker than they should have. Bruises faded with a stubbornness that embarrassed the bruise-givers. When he pushed his body into strange places it answered, not by breaking, but by rearranging itself around the demand. Dadan grunted and chalked it up to good food and hard work. Donden whistled and said nothing. Luffy only noticed with the same detached interest he applied to a curious gear.
When dusk fell and lanterns lit the faces of the villagers into soft moons, Luffy climbed a low headland, sat with sand between his toes, and watched the sea. He felt the horizon like a challenge and the quiet of the cove like a workbench awaiting tools. Tomorrow, the training would begin in earnest. Tomorrow, chores would be drills and drills would be lessons and lessons would be the scaffolding for something larger.
He did not yet know about the fall that would rearrange fate, the ravine that would open him like a book. He did not yet know that the memory of other lives would come to him like a storm. He did not yet know the full shape or weight of the secret that slept in his bones.
But he did know how to learn. He knew how to break things down and rebuild them better. He knew how to take a useless hinge and make it sing. And he liked the idea of testing the limits of a world that had only shown him a fraction of its edges.
So Luffy rose from the headland, pulled his little pack tighter, and went back to the village. Dadan barked orders that felt suspiciously like affection. Donden showed him a gear that squeaked and asked if he could imagine making it smoother. The cove had already begun to do its work.