CHAPTER ONE: THREE WISHES AND A NEW DAWN
The roadside market on Creston Avenue smelled like old rain and cheap incense.
Arian had walked past this particular stretch of stalls a hundred times before — past the woman selling hand-stitched wallets, past the old man with bootleg phone cases, past the kid hawking friendship bracelets that would turn your wrist green by Tuesday. He never stopped. He was always running late, always had homework, always had *something* pulling him in the opposite direction.
But today was different.
He couldn't explain why his feet slowed. He couldn't explain the way his eyes landed on a small, cluttered table tucked between a phone repair stand and a lady selling pickled vegetables. The table was covered in junk — old coins, cracked compasses, a toy robot missing one arm, a snow globe with no snow left inside it. Normal flea market garbage.
And then there was the ring.
It sat inside a small plastic bag, the kind you'd normally find around a single garlic clove at a grocery store. It was dark — almost black — with faint markings carved into its surface that Arian couldn't quite read no matter how he tilted his head. It looked old. Ancient, even. Completely out of place among the cheap trinkets surrounding it.
"How much for this?" Arian asked, holding up the bag.
The old vendor — a wrinkled man with kind eyes and a smile missing two teeth — glanced at the ring, and something flickered across his face. Not recognition exactly. More like *relief.*
"Two dollar," the man said.
Arian fished the crumpled bills from his pocket without thinking twice.
---
His apartment was quiet when he got home. His mother worked the evening shift at the hospital, and his older sister was away at university, which meant Arian had the place to himself — a condition that usually led to him sprawling on the couch watching anime until midnight. He was seventeen, a junior at Westfield High, and deeply, unapologetically a creature of habit.
He dropped his backpack by the door, kicked his shoes off in approximately the right direction, and sat down at his desk.
The ring sat in his palm.
Up close, it was stranger than he'd realized. The markings weren't just decorative — they seemed to *shift* when he wasn't looking directly at them, rearranging themselves at the corner of his vision like they didn't want to be read. The metal was warm, which was odd considering it had been inside a plastic bag inside his jacket pocket, not exactly a heat-retaining environment.
"Weird," Arian muttered.
He grabbed the hem of his shirt and started rubbing the ring clean. There was a thin layer of grime on it — decades of it, maybe — and it came off slowly, revealing the dark metal beneath, those strange shifting symbols growing clearer and—
Light exploded from the ring.
Not a flash. Not a spark. A *torrent* — warm and golden, like someone had cracked open a small sun right there on his desk. Arian fell backward off his chair, hit the floor hard, and stared up at the coiling column of light that was filling the corner of his room.
It took shape.
Not the dramatic, enormous form he'd seen in movies. The figure that solidified out of the light was roughly human-sized, dressed in robes that seemed woven from smoke and starlight, with eyes that glowed the faint amber of embers. It looked ancient and impossible and completely, utterly real.
"I," the figure said, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, "have been waiting a very long time."
Arian blinked from the floor.
"...For *me* specifically?" he asked.
The Genie tilted its head. "For someone worthy of holding that ring. Whether that is you specifically, I cannot yet say." A pause. "You may stand. I am not a threat."
Arian stood slowly, rubbing the back of his head where it had met the floor. He looked at the being, then at the ring still warm in his hand, then back at the being.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. So. Three wishes. That's how this works, right?"
"Three wishes," the Genie confirmed. "Each will be granted in full, within the scope of my power, which is considerable. Upon the granting of the third wish, the ring will be destroyed, and I will be released." Something in those ember eyes looked tired in a way that went beyond ordinary exhaustion. "Choose carefully, Arian."
Arian sat back down on his chair. His brain, to its credit, was working very quickly.
He'd grown up on anime. He knew the stories — wishes and rings and genies, and the fine print being where everything went wrong. He also knew, somewhere in the part of his mind that was still seventeen and sitting in a perfectly normal apartment in a perfectly normal city, that he should probably be more shocked than he was.
But the ring was warm, and the Genie was real, and Arian had spent enough hours thinking about fantasy worlds to already have opinions about them.
"Alright," he said. "First wish."
The Genie folded its hands. Waiting.
"I want a system," Arian said. "The Rimuru Tempest template — from *That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.* Great Sage, Predator, every skill, every unique skill, every innate ability. The complete package." He held the Genie's gaze. "But here's the important part. I don't want it handed to me all at once. I want to *earn* it. I want to start from the bottom — genuinely low-powered, no cheats, no shortcuts — and grow into it naturally over time, the way Rimuru did. The abilities unlock as I grow, as I fight, as I *earn* them. By the end of my journey, I have everything. But not before."
The Genie was silent for a moment that stretched.
"...You are aware," it said slowly, "that most humans wish for wealth, or love, or long life."
"I'm aware," Arian said. "Do I get the wish or not?"
The amber eyes glimmered with something that might, in a being that ancient, have been genuine amusement. "Granted. The template is yours — dormant, patient, waiting for you to catch up to it. You will begin with the bare bones. What you become is entirely your own business."
The warmth spread through Arian like drinking hot tea on a cold morning — gentle at first, then deeper, settling into something that felt like a second layer of awareness humming quietly at the back of his mind. Not loud. Not powerful. Just *present.* A seed, not a tree.
*[System initialized. Current status: Dormant. Available skills: Basic Analysis. Unlock conditions: Growth required.]*
He took a breath. Just one skill. He almost laughed.
"Second wish," he said.
"Speak it."
"I want to keep my gender as male." He looked up at the Genie directly. "And I want a physical form that reflects the absolute best version of what I could be. Tall, well-built, clean. Healthy. Handsome — genuinely, unreasonably handsome. The kind of face that looks good in any world, any era." He paused, then added quietly, almost to himself: "Like those Korean models. The kind of face that people remember the first time and can't quite forget."
A silence fell.
Then the Genie said, with something that was unmistakably, definitely a small smile: "That is perhaps the most quietly confident second wish I have granted in several centuries. Granted."
The change wasn't painful. It was like the world recalibrating — stepping from a blurry photograph into a sharper one. Arian didn't need a mirror to know something had shifted. He could feel it in the settled confidence of his own body, the way he sat differently in the chair, the way the room seemed to arrange itself around him rather than the other way around.
He looked down at his hands.
The same hands. But better. The best version.
"Third wish," the Genie said, and its voice had dropped slightly. More careful now. More deliberate. "This is the last. Think well."
Arian had been thinking about this one the longest.
He looked at the ring lying in his palm. He thought about his mother, working night shifts. His sister, studying hard. His life here — ordinary, quiet, safe. He thought about all of it without bitterness, without regret, the way you look at a photograph you love but know you're leaving behind.
He thought about a boy with a straw hat and a laugh like sunlight.
"I want to be reborn," Arian said, "into the world of One Piece. Not dropped in. Not transported. *Reborn.* As a child — around seven years old, the same age as Luffy at the start of his story." He met the Genie's ember gaze. "I want to arrive in Foosha Village. Windmill Village. With my memories intact and my system dormant inside me, exactly as granted. I want to grow up there. I want to be *part* of that world from the beginning."
The Genie looked at him for a long, measuring moment.
"You understand," it said carefully, "that the One Piece world is not gentle. The seas are alive. The powerful rule. Death there is not a narrative device — it is a constant, present reality."
"I know," Arian said.
"You will be a child. Small. Weak. With one basic analytical skill and a face that, however handsome, will not stop a cannonball."
"I know that too."
"And you still choose it."
Arian set the ring down on the desk.
"Yeah," he said simply. "I do."
The Genie was quiet. Then it drew itself up — taller, more present, filling the room the way a tide fills a shore — and when it spoke next, the words had *weight* to them, the kind that pressed against the walls.
"Then it is granted." The ember eyes blazed, bright and final. "Live well, Arian. Cause trouble. Make noise. Struggle until struggling is all you know and then find something beyond it." A pause, as though the ancient being was choosing its last words with care. "The sea will learn your name."
The ring shattered.
The light consumed everything.
And Arian was gone.
---
The first thing he felt was wind.
Real wind — not the city kind that funneled between buildings carrying bus exhaust and food cart smell — but wide, open, *salt* wind, the kind that had traveled a long way over open water before deciding to arrive here, in this village, on this hill, on this particular afternoon.
The second thing he felt was grass under his hands.
Arian sat up slowly.
He was on a hillside. Below him, Foosha Village spread out in its entirety — wooden buildings, a windmill turning lazily in the sea breeze, a dock with a few fishing boats knocked gently against each other by the tide, and beyond all of it, stretching to the edge of the sky, the East Blue. Enormous and silver-green and absolutely, breathtakingly real.
He looked down at himself.
Small hands. Shorter arms. The body of a seven-year-old, which was deeply, profoundly strange to inhabit when your mind was seventeen. His clothes were simple — plain shirt, dark pants, worn shoes that fit him well enough. His dark hair fell across his forehead in the breeze.
*[Basic Analysis: Active. Current physical status: Healthy. Age: 7. Location: Foosha Village, East Blue. Threat level in immediate vicinity: Low.]*
One skill. He almost laughed again, this time all the way through.
He was genuinely, actually, completely starting from zero.
*Good,* he thought.
He stood up, brushed the grass off his knees, and looked at the village below him. Somewhere down there was Makino's bar, and inside it, a bowl of rice, probably, and somewhere in or around it, a seven-year-old boy in a straw hat who didn't yet know that Arian existed.
He started walking down the hill.
---
Makino's bar — officially *Party's Bar,* though to Arian's knowledge no one in the village called it that — was the kind of place that felt lived-in rather than run. The wooden floors were scrubbed clean but had the gentle warp of age. The bottles behind the counter were arranged without particular system. The light was warm and yellow-orange, the late afternoon kind, and it fell through the windows in long slanted bars that made the dust motes look deliberate.
Makino herself was behind the counter.
She was young — early twenties, Arian thought, though he hadn't spent much time calculating her age in the anime. She had the kind of face that was easy to trust on instinct — practical and warm at the same time, the face of someone who had learned the world had sharp edges and decided to be soft anyway. She was wiping down the counter and talking to someone small sitting on one of the bar stools.
The small someone was wearing a straw hat.
He was scrawny in the specific way of kids who ran everywhere and ate enormous amounts and somehow remained entirely unaffected by either. Dark eyes, wide and currently fixed with complete intensity on a glass of what appeared to be fruit juice. He was maybe seven — exactly seven — and he radiated a kind of loud, uncomplicated energy that was somehow present even in total silence.
Arian stopped in the doorway.
Luffy.
Monkey D. Luffy was sitting three feet away from him, drinking juice, and it hit Arian somewhere behind the sternum like a slow tide rather than a wave — not the sharp shock of surprise but something more patient and profound. *This is real. He's real. All of it is real and I am standing in it.*
He stepped inside.
Makino looked up first, the way adults in small villages always tracked newcomers without making a production of it. Her expression shifted into something immediately warm and slightly puzzled.
"Hello there," she said. "I don't think I've seen you around before. Are you new to the village?"
"Yes," Arian said. His voice was a child's voice — lighter than he was used to, though the words came out steadily enough. "I just arrived. My name is Arian."
Luffy spun around on his bar stool with the complete absence of caution of someone who had never once in his life considered that spinning on a bar stool might end badly.
He stared at Arian.
Arian stared back.
Luffy's dark eyes swept over him with the guileless, total directness of a child who hadn't yet learned that staring was considered rude — taking in his face, his clothes, the way he was standing, all of it processed in approximately one second before Luffy arrived at his conclusion.
"You've got a weird face," Luffy announced.
"Luffy," Makino said, with the patient, practiced tone of someone who had said variations of this boy's name in this particular tone many, many times.
"It's not bad," Luffy added immediately, apparently deciding this clarification was important. "Just really — " he made a vague gesture at his own face — "like, *a lot.* Your face is a lot."
Arian blinked. Then, quietly, he laughed — a real one, surprised out of him, the kind that comes before you decide to have it.
"Thanks," he said. "I think."
Luffy grinned at that — the full, uncomplicated, missing-a-tooth grin that Arian had seen a thousand times on a screen and somehow had not been remotely prepared to receive in person, directed at him, in a real room, over a real bar counter.
"I'm Luffy," Luffy said, with the gravity of a formal introduction. "Monkey D. Luffy. I'm gonna be King of the Pirates."
"I know," Arian said, without thinking.
Luffy blinked. "You know?"
Arian caught himself. Seventeen years of anime-watching instincts clashed briefly with the reality of being a seven-year-old who had just arrived in a village and could not, under any reasonable circumstances, already know this boy's full name and life ambitions.
"I mean — " he recovered smoothly, " — you said it very confidently. Like you already know it's going to happen."
Luffy considered this for exactly one second.
"Because it is," he said, completely seriously.
"Then I believe you," Arian said.
That seemed to settle something for Luffy in the deep, instinctive way things got settled for him — not through deliberation but through gut feeling, immediate and absolute. He pointed at the bar stool next to him.
"Sit down," he said. "Makino's juice is really good. She'll give you some."
"I'll be happy to," Makino said warmly, already reaching for a glass. She glanced at Arian with that subtle, gentle attention of hers. "Are you here alone, Arian? Where are your parents?"
The question landed the way he'd known it eventually would. He'd thought about this on the walk down the hill, turning it over with the small, quiet assistance of Basic Analysis helping him organize his thoughts.
"I don't have any," he said. Not sadly — straightforwardly, the way Luffy would have said it, the way kids in this world said hard things without making them into spectacles. "I don't really remember much. I just — ended up here."
Makino's hands stilled briefly on the glass.
She looked at him — really looked, the way she'd look at Luffy when he said something that required being heard rather than just answered. Then she set the juice down in front of him and leaned on the counter with both forearms, and her voice was the same warm, unhurried thing it always was.
"Well," she said simply. "You're here now. That's a start."
Arian picked up the glass.
The juice was cold and slightly sweet, the kind of thing that tasted like it had been made the same way in the same kitchen for years. Outside the window, the windmill turned. The East Blue glittered in the last of the afternoon light.
Luffy leaned sideways on his stool to peer at Arian's face again at close range.
"Are you gonna stay in the village?" he asked.
"I think so," Arian said.
"Do you wanna be a pirate?"
Arian looked at him. At the straw hat, tilted slightly sideways on his head. At the dark eyes, completely earnest, waiting for an answer the way Luffy always waited for answers — without the performance of patience, just genuine and present and right there.
He thought about the long road ahead of them. The mountain bandit chief. The man in the red coat. The sea. The Grand Line. All of it — the whole enormous, brutal, beautiful weight of the story he'd watched a thousand times and was now, impossibly, standing inside.
He was seven years old. He had one skill. He could run and read and think clearly and that was roughly it.
He had never been so far from the ending.
He had never been so ready to begin.
"Not a pirate," Arian said. "But I think I'll end up at sea one way or another."
Luffy stared at him for a moment longer.
Then he nodded, once, the way he nodded at things that made complete sense to him even if he couldn't explain why.
"Okay," he said. "Then we can be friends."
He stuck out his hand — small, slightly sticky from the juice — with the total, unguarded confidence of someone who had never once considered that the hand might not be taken.
Arian looked at it.
Then he reached out and shook it.
"Yeah," he said. "We can."
Outside, the windmill turned. The sea stretched to the horizon. And somewhere in the East Blue, a long way off, the world continued on without any idea of what had just quietly, undramatically, irreversibly begun.
**END OF CHAPTER ONE**