-Broadcast-
Kozuki Momonosuke had always been intelligent beyond his years. His father's death had taught him that the world was cruel, that strangers could not be trusted. This lesson manifested early as a deeply suspicious nature that would save his life.
When the other children on the ship accepted food and water from their captors, Momonosuke refused.
"You should eat something," a girl whispered to him. "You'll get sick if you don't."
But Momonosuke shook his head, watching the adults with narrow, calculating eyes. Something felt wrong. The way they smiled while distributing meals—too eager, too insistent. The way they watched afterward, waiting for something.
Within an hour, his suspicions proved correct.
The food and drinking water contained powerful sedatives. The children didn't know this, of course—it was simply another trick played by adults who viewed them as cargo rather than human beings.
One by one, the children's eyes grew heavy. They slumped against each other, consciousness fading, until the entire hold was filled with small, drugged bodies.
The purpose of sedation was practical: unconscious children were easier to load and unload. They could be sorted into batches and delivered to different laboratories without resistance. If alert children ran around and broke experimental equipment, Caesar Clown would become furious, and the experimenters around him would suffer severe consequences—beatings at best, "accidental" inclusion in experiments at worst.
Momonosuke alone remained conscious, hunger gnawing at his stomach as he watched the adults enter with carts. He forced his body to go limp, mimicking the drugged children around him, barely breathing as rough hands grabbed his arms and tossed him onto a transport cart.
Don't move. Don't react. If they realize you're awake, they'll shoot you.
The eight-year-old boy kept his eyes closed and his body slack as the cart rolled through corridors that smelled of chemicals and death.
Kozuki Momonosuke was transported along with the other children into the laboratory complex. From the moment they entered that area, the boy's instincts screamed danger. Every breath of the sterile air, every echo of footsteps on metal floors, every distant scream that occasionally penetrated the walls—all of it told him that sitting passively meant death. If he wanted to survive, he had to escape.
The experimenters were discussing something, their attention divided, when Momonosuke saw his chance. He rolled off the cart silently, landing on cold concrete, then scrambled on hands and knees toward the nearest exit that wasn't guarded.
The corridor led downward. Deeper into the facility. Away from the clean laboratories and into the facility's bowels where waste was discarded.
The stench hit him first—decay and chemicals combining into something that made his eyes water. Then he saw them.
Bodies. Dozens of small bodies wrapped in stained cloth or simply dumped in piles.
The mass grave.
Momonosuke's stomach lurched, bile rising in his throat. But behind him, he heard voices—adults searching for something, calling out that one of the children was missing.
In the dark garbage dump, the eight-year-old boy began to live with corpses. He had no choice. The alternative was being caught and subjected to whatever horrible experiments had killed these other children.
-Six Months Later-
Survival changed a person.
Momonosuke had learned this truth in the most brutal way possible. In the beginning, he'd survived on scraps of spoiled food occasionally thrown into the dump along with the bodies. Moldy bread. Rotten fruit. Things that made him violently ill but kept him alive.
When those scraps stopped coming, when hunger became so intense it felt like his stomach was eating itself, he'd faced an impossible choice.
He took the difficult first step toward cannibalism, overcoming emotions like nausea and psychological collapse. Kozuki Momonosuke gradually adapted to life underground. He accumulated experience from nothing—learning which parts of corpses were edible, how to preserve flesh in the cold corners of the dump, how to separate his mind from what his body was doing to survive.
This inhuman existence lasted for six months.
The boy who emerged from that experience bore little resemblance to the crying child who'd first hidden in the mass grave. His eyes had grown cold, calculating. His movements efficient and predatory. He'd become something darker, something forged by necessity into a creature that could do whatever survival required.
Not only corpses were thrown into the garbage dump, but also experimental waste and toxic chemicals. That Kozuki Momonosuke wasn't poisoned to death seemed like divine intervention. His tenacious will to survive would have shamed adults.
Then came the day his luck changed—or perhaps cursed him further.
An artificial Devil Fruit tumbled into the garbage dump, tossed carelessly by an experimenter who'd deemed it a failure.
Caesar Clown's artificial Devil Fruits, created for the Beasts Pirates, had an extremely high failure rate. Later, by enslaving the Tontatta Tribe, he would improve the yield. But even successful artificial Devil Fruits carried a terrible cost: a fifty-percent chance of granting no abilities whatsoever, with the side effect of erasing all emotions except the ability to smile.
Momonosuke watched the strange fruit roll past him. He didn't touch it.
More fruits followed over the coming days—experimental failures discarded like garbage. The boy ignored them all. For him, corpse flesh was safer. At least he knew it wouldn't poison him. Who could say what those bizarre fruits might do?
But then the supply of bodies stopped.
-Day Three Without Food-
The Sky Screen showed Kozuki Momonosuke in dim, grainy footage—a small figure covered in filth, barely recognizable as human. He hadn't had water to wash himself in months. What little liquid he could find went toward keeping himself alive.
He'd drunk his last drops of water three days ago. No fresh corpses had been thrown down since then. His preserved supplies were long exhausted.
Momonosuke lay on the garbage heap, too weak to move. The first day, he'd been able to sleep through the hunger. The second day, unconsciousness had eluded him—he'd simply lain there, staring at the darkness above. Now, on the third day, he couldn't even muster the energy to close his eyes. He just gasped for air, waiting for death.
The stench no longer bothered him. Various forms of rot, chemical toxins, decomposing flesh—he'd been marinating in it so long that he'd become part of the garbage dump. From any angle, the boy had unified with his surroundings.
If nothing changed, he would die here and join the other corpses he'd once fed upon.
Even someone as strong as Kozuki Momonosuke couldn't stop tears from leaking down his filth-caked cheeks as death approached. The cruelty of life's ups and downs was too much for a child to bear.
He missed everything he'd lost. His comfortable room in Oden Castle. His sister Hiyori's laugh when he'd tickle her. His mother's cooking, always perfectly seasoned. His father's strength, the way Kozuki Oden had seemed invincible.
Everything had been beautiful. Everything had been perfect.
Then it had all been destroyed in a single night.
Whose fault was it?
"Mother... Father..." Momonosuke's voice emerged as barely a whisper, his throat too dry to produce proper sound. "I can't hold on anymore. I really can't. I'm going to starve to death here. Why... why did I have to suffer all of this?"
His consciousness began to slip. Hallucinations took hold as his brain, starved of oxygen and nutrients, began its final shutdown.
A kaleidoscope of memories played through his mind. Beautiful scenes, warm moments. His mother Kozuki Toki prepared delicious food while humming a gentle melody. His father Kozuki Oden practiced his sword forms in the courtyard, powerful and graceful. His sister Kozuki Hiyori lay with her head on his lap, playing with a new toy he'd made for her.
Everything in Kozuki Momonosuke's fading vision was perfect. His family was there. Everything was there.
"Big brother, why are you crying?" Little Hiyori's voice sounded so real, so clear. She reached up with tiny hands to wipe tears from his face. "Aren't you happy living with us?"
Momonosuke stood frozen in the memory, unable to respond. His spirit was dissipating, consciousness fragmenting. In this moment, he didn't want to return to the dark garbage dump. He wanted to stay here with his family forever. His will to resist reality was collapsing.
It would be so easy. Just... let go. Stay here in this beautiful dream.
But then the scene shattered.
His family vanished. The warmth disappeared. And in their place stood the nightmare that had defined his trauma—the monster who'd destroyed everything.
Kaido's massive form loomed over him, one enormous hand closing around Momonosuke's throat.
"Your father was a fool, Your Highness." The King of the Beasts' voice was contemptuous, mocking. "After your death, the Kozuki clan will be completely finished. Go to hell!"
The pressure increased. Trachea and throat constricted simultaneously. Momonosuke felt suffocation—the same terror he'd experienced that night in Oden Castle when death had seemed certain.
But something was different this time.
Facing the invincible enemy again, the boy was not as helpless as during their first encounter. He overcame the fear of death in seconds. The will to live, the desire for revenge, the refusal to let his family's murderers win—all of it crystallized into pure determination.
"I am the man who will lead Wano Country!" Momonosuke's voice emerged not as a whisper but as a roar, defying the hand around his throat, defying death itself. "I will never die before my parents' revenge is complete! Kaido! Kurozumi Orochi! I will take your lives!"
The declaration shattered the hallucination.
Momonosuke's eyes snapped open—truly open, blazing with renewed purpose. The dying state released its grip on him as something fundamental shifted inside his spirit.
The intense emotional breakthrough triggered a transformation in his inner state. An aura of dominion over the world emanated from his young body. Haoshoku Haki—Conqueror's Haki—awakened in that moment. The spiritual pressure of one who possessed the qualities of a king, the aura of someone who could stand above millions, manifested in a child.
Black and red lightning crackled around Momonosuke's small form, arcing through the garbage dump's fetid air. Waves of Conqueror's Haki burst outward in concentric rings, creating miniature shockwaves that disturbed the surrounding refuse.
Dust exploded upward. Lighter objects were pushed aside by the invisible pressure. Heavier items shifted position with grinding sounds. The entire mass grave trembled as if recognizing the presence of royalty.
Then, as suddenly as it had erupted, the Haki subsided.
Momonosuke collapsed back onto the garbage heap, gasping for breath. The awakening had drained what little energy remained in his starving body. But his eyes... his eyes were no longer the empty gaze of someone waiting to die.
They burned with purpose. With rage. With the absolute conviction that he would survive this hell and make his enemies pay.
As his vision swam from exhaustion, something rolled into his peripheral awareness.
An intact fruit, dislodged by the Conqueror's Haki burst, had slowly tumbled down a pile of refuse to rest against Momonosuke's leg.
It looked different from the other discarded Devil Fruits he'd seen—the skin was almost iridescent, bearing swirling patterns that seemed to shift in the dim light. Something about it felt significant, as if fate itself had delivered this particular fruit to him in his moment of transformation.
Hard work pays off. Things had finally taken a turn for the better.
Momonosuke's hand trembled as he reached for the fruit, fingers closing around its strange surface. He'd refused to eat any of the discarded Devil Fruits before, too cautious, too suspicious of unknown risks.
But he wasn't that same frightened boy anymore.
He'd awakened something within himself—a king's will, a conqueror's spirit. He'd survived six months in hell through means that would have broken most adults. He'd stared death in the face and chosen revenge over peaceful oblivion.
What was one more risk compared to everything he'd already endured?
Kozuki Momonosuke raised the artificial Devil Fruit to his cracked lips and took his first bite.
The taste was unspeakably vile—like rotted meat mixed with bile and sewage. He gagged, nearly vomiting, but forced himself to swallow. Then another bite. And another. Until the entire cursed fruit was consumed.
For several heartbeats, nothing happened.
Then power unlike anything Momonosuke had ever experienced erupted through his body, reshaping him from within, transforming him into something more than human.
The boy who had entered the garbage dump to die would emerge as something else entirely.
A survivor. A conqueror. And eventually, though he didn't know it yet, a king who would reshape the world.