Devil Fruit

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Settle in, take your time, and let's see what waits in the dark 🖤

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Late that night, the liquor was gone and the dishes were empty.

Shanks and Yasopp finally left.

Before they parted, Corvin promised Yasopp that he would cherish the gun as if it were his own son.

Then, after Yasopp was gone, Corvin silently gave the smoothbore musket a new name.

Usopp.

As the night deepened, Corvin lay in bed, satisfied now that he had both a gun and ammunition. Sleep slowly crept over him.

From somewhere below, he could vaguely hear Sol shouting that he had been tricked and cursing over the fact that all the liquor was gone again.

None of that mattered anymore.

What mattered was that Corvin had a gun, he had bullets, and he had taken a major step toward his second hunt.

The next morning, Corvin woke early again.

He finished several sets of high-intensity exercises before going downstairs.

By then, Sunny had already prepared a breakfast so rich it looked almost excessive, while Sol had gone out early for his morning exercise in the pleasure district.

The food at the shop was absurdly good.

Somehow, Sunny could eat that much without seeming to gain an ounce.

Strange or not, his mouth did not stop.

After wolfing down breakfast, he cleared the table without waiting for Sunny to tell him, then swept the shop as usual.

Since there was still time, he also cleaned the corridor and the stairway.

After that, Sunny came downstairs and once again took out her thin ruler to measure the position of every item in the shop.

Once all of that was done, the shop opened for the day.

Naturally, just like the day before, several hours passed without a single customer.

After seeing Yasopp spend five million Berries on two guns yesterday, however, Corvin had changed his opinion of the shop.

This was clearly a boutique weapons shop. It could stay quiet for three days, then earn enough in one sale to eat for three years.

With nothing else to do, Corvin either sorted through his memories or did another set of exercises.

Sunny sat behind the counter and read the day's paper closely.

She ignored his training inside the shop and did not interfere.

The loose management style suited Corvin perfectly.

Near noon, the door opened.

Corvin thought Sol had finally returned from his morning exercise. When he looked up, however, the visitor was Arthur the undertaker.

Arthur stepped into the shop, pulled the door mostly shut behind him, then looked at Sunny and Corvin.

"Sol back yet?"

"No."

Sunny lowered the newspaper and answered.

Arthur sounded surprised. "At this hour? He still isn't back? The older he gets, the younger he acts."

Sunny said nothing.

Arthur did not mind. He walked to the counter, leaned against it, and started complaining as if no one had asked.

"Nearly a thousand slaves were killed or injured in that mess at the Pig Farm yesterday. I'm exhausted. I don't know what those slaves were thinking. Was living quietly so hard? Now look at it. So many dead and injured, the Pig Farm won't keep up production for a while, and the unlucky ones will be the slaves who survived."

Hearing him say slave again and again, Sunny's expression slowly turned cold.

Arthur noticed, tapped the mask on his face, and offered a completely insincere apology.

"Sorry, sorry. Nearly forgot you don't like hearing about that."

Sunny snorted and stopped paying attention to him.

Arthur smiled as if the atmosphere did not bother him at all. He took a plain little booklet from his pocket and set it on the counter.

"The auction house released this today. I think Sol will be very interested. Tell him for me that I'll be waiting at the auction house entrance at the end of the month."

"Fine."

Sunny's tone was cold.

Arthur shrugged and turned to leave.

Before he went, he glanced back at Corvin and said in a gloomy voice, "Kid, you'd better stay off the streets for a while. Wouldn't want someone dragging you to the Pig Farm to make up the numbers."

With that, Arthur left, remembering to follow the shop's unspoken rule by leaving the door mostly shut behind him.

After he was gone, Corvin came to the counter.

"Sunny, what kind of place is the Pig Farm?"

"Some of the meat you ate this morning came from there. What do you think it is?"

"But what does that have to do with slaves..."

Halfway through the sentence, Corvin connected it to certain images that would have been better left unimagined and went pale.

"That meat isn't...?"

One look at his reaction told Sunny exactly where his mind had gone.

"What are you thinking? It's a food production base. Proper livestock, proper crops. Most of the people working there are ordinary people taken from different places by slave ships and pirates. A few are Marine soldiers captured by pirates. That's why people gave it that nickname."

After explaining that much, Sunny glanced at the bandages Corvin still had not removed and said pointedly, "To those animals, badly injured targets aren't worth much. Sometimes, once they factor in the cost of transport, they don't bother sending them to the black market at all. They just throw them into the sea."

She paused, then said calmly, "So you're lucky, Corvin."

"Lucky..."

Corvin looked thoughtfully at the scar across Sunny's face, then nodded.

"Yes. Waking up here was lucky."

"Actually, you should thank Sol. He..."

Sunny opened the booklet Arthur had left behind, but stopped halfway through her sentence. Her expression suddenly sharpened with excitement.

"A Devil Fruit. This auction actually has a Devil Fruit!"

"What?"

Corvin's brows lifted. Ignoring the usual boundary, he stepped behind the counter and looked at the catalog in Sunny's hands.

He saw an image of a fruit covered in strange spiral patterns.

The moment he saw it, Corvin went still.

A Devil Fruit.

For most people, it was the shortcut to power they dreamed of.

Unfortunately, with what he had now, getting that fruit was nothing more than fantasy.

Corvin did not even dare think about it for long. He quickly calmed down.

Then he noticed Sunny's fingers tightening around the catalog until they turned pale, and he could clearly feel her excitement.

That excitement came from an urgent desire to become stronger.

'A Devil Fruit is far beyond me for now.'

Corvin looked away and stopped focusing on the catalog.

A Devil Fruit would let him step onto the path of hunting and growth faster than anything else. But he had no money, and he had nowhere near enough strength to steal it. There was no point dwelling on it.

Even so, he was still interested in the auction at the end of the month.

He had no money, but there was nothing wrong with watching from the sidelines.

Besides, with a Devil Fruit involved, who could say the auction house would stay peaceful?

If a stray shot from Usopp killed someone during the chaos, it probably would not attract much attention.

'There are more than twenty days until the end of the month. If I can hunt a few targets before then...'

Corvin considered the possibility.

Just then, the shop door opened for the second time.

The visitor was still not Sol. It was a strange man with long blond hair and a blue mask pierced with holes.

Corvin recognized him at once.

It was Killer, the future Supernova from Kid's crew.

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