One Piece: Silent-Silent Fruit

Rosinante turned the Devil Fruit over in his hand, a quiet satisfaction settling across his face.

He had wanted the Fuwa Fuwa no Mi for well over a decade. Now it was finally here, sitting in his palm. It wasn't as critical to him as it once might have been, his own abilities had grown far beyond what it could offer him, but it remained an exceptional fruit. And he already had someone in mind for it.

"He actually did it," someone said, still rubbing their eyes as though that might help. "He really pulled the Devil Fruit out of a dead user's body. That's actually possible?"

"He just did it in front of all of us," Lambo said. "I still can't believe what I'm looking at."

"Is there anything the Dragon King can't do?" Garde said, shaking his head slowly.

Today had handed Garde one impossible thing after another, each one landing before he had finished processing the last. He was starting to genuinely wonder if he was still awake. And looking at the faces around him, he wasn't alone in that. Lifting an entire island with bare hands and using it as a hammer. Dissolving a sky full of falling islands with a single technique. Dispatching a Fuwa Fuwa no Mi user without breaking a sweat. And now extracting a Devil Fruit directly from a corpse. Any one of these things, seen on its own, would have been the talk of the sea for months. Witnessing all of them back to back was something the mind kept refusing to fully accept.

"The world is going to erupt over this," Kenny said. "If word of what he just did gets out, every power in existence is going to want that ability for themselves. Has he thought about what comes next? Doing something like this out in the open, in front of all these people... the consequences aren't small. Every faction worth mentioning is going to covet this."

"He has thought about it," Oubaron said. "He simply doesn't care. He's the Dragon King. The number of people who could actually force him to hand anything over is very small, and even they would have to think twice about trying."

"Even so, this isn't going to settle quietly," Kenny said. "Nightless City is about to become the center of a storm. Spies from every major power will be on their way to Sabaody before the week is out. Are we really staying here?"

Oubaron didn't answer right away. The silence stretched.

Rosinante wouldn't lose sleep over whatever came. But they were a different matter. The moment every major faction turned its attention to this place, their presence here would be exposed. What the Big Mom Pirates would do with that information was something he genuinely couldn't predict.

Rosinante paid none of the murmuring any mind. What he had done was extraordinary to everyone watching, but to him it was simply the application of a principle he understood well. When a Devil Fruit user dies, the fruit separates from them. In that window, he had applied a high-order sealing technique to hold it in place, then guided it into the apple. Once the fruit accepted the apple as its new vessel, the process was complete. There was no great mystery to it.

"Impossible," Indigo said, his voice strained to breaking. "That's completely impossible. How could something like that be done?"

He was staring at the fruit in Rosinante's hand. He knew it better than almost anyone alive. It was unmistakably the Fuwa Fuwa no Mi. The proof was right there in front of him, and he still couldn't make himself accept it.

"You're being loud," Rosinante said, glancing toward him.

It was only a glance. Nothing more than that.

But Indigo felt something tear through him the instant it landed, something vast and coiling and cold, like a great serpent driving straight through his body at the level of the soul. The world went dark behind his eyes by degrees, and then his breathing stopped.

The people around him had no idea what had happened. From where they stood, Rosinante had simply looked at Indigo, and Indigo had collapsed. The first assumption, shared quietly between several onlookers, was that the man had been frightened to death. But he had no breath left, and that wasn't something fear alone explained.

Had he actually been scared to death?

The question moved through the crowd without finding an answer. But after everything today had produced, most people found they had spent their capacity for shock. Rosinante doing something inexplicable had simply become the expected pattern.

What had killed Indigo was a technique of Rosinante's own invention, one he called Dragon Candle. It was a form of illusion that operated not on the senses but on the soul directly, bypassing everything else and striking at the core of a person. It worked only against those whose will was not particularly strong, but against them it was absolute. Killing Indigo with it had been, by any measure, the smallest thing Rosinante had done all day.

...

He walked over to where Elsa was standing and crouched slightly, holding out the fruit.

"Little Elsa. How would you like to fly wherever you want, as free as you please?"

Elsa's eyes lit up immediately. "I want that!"

"Then eat this. Fair warning though, you'll never be able to swim again afterward," Rosinante said.

There was a deeper possibility, one he didn't mention yet. With enough time and dedication, a Devil Fruit ability could be integrated so completely into the body, and eventually into the soul itself, that even seawater could no longer fully suppress it. Rosinante had spent decades reaching that point himself. It wasn't something to explain to a child holding a strange fruit for the first time.

Elsa turned it over in her hands, studying it with open curiosity, then bit straight into it.

Her face scrunched up immediately.

"It's so gross!"

"They all taste like that," Rosinante said, smiling. "How do you feel? Anything different?"

The crowd had gathered their attention on her, curious despite everything, watching to see what would happen.

The reasoning was sound enough. Scarlet had just died, and the apple sitting beside him had become a Devil Fruit almost immediately. Every sign pointed to it being the Fuwa Fuwa no Mi. But aside from the now-dead Indigo, nobody present actually knew what the Fuwa Fuwa no Mi looked like. The only way to confirm it was to watch what the fruit did to the person who ate it.

Elsa stood quietly for a moment, feeling something shift through her body in a way she didn't have words for yet.

Then, slowly, her feet left the ground.

Nobody questioned it after that.

...

-------------------------

Patreon Advance Chapters: patreon .com / ElvenKing20