Sea Circle Calendar, Year 1463 – Baterilla, South Blue.
The years after Badr's death did not break Sinbad. They tempered him, like the high-carbon steel the Baterilla smiths pulled from the coastal kilns.
At eight years old, Sinbad was already a physical anomaly. He stood a head taller than the other village boys, his frame lean and wired with a restless, kinetic energy that seemed to hum beneath his skin. The South Blue sun had moved past merely tanning him; it had bronzed his skin to a deep, enduring gold that shimmered when he broke a sweat. His purple hair—thick and unruly—was kept in a stubborn high ponytail that whipped behind him like a privateer's banner. Atop his head, that single, defiant ahoge flickered in the salt-heavy wind, a small rebellion against gravity that mirrored the burgeoning fire in his golden eyes.
Esra watched him every morning in the dirt yard behind their small, salt-crusted house. She held her wooden bokken loosely, but her stance was rooted deep, as unyielding as an old oak defying a hurricane. Shimotsuki blood—the lineage of Wano's legendary bladesmiths and swordsmen—ran cold and precise in her veins. She passed that heritage on to her son without flourish, and certainly without mercy.
"Again," she said, her voice like grinding stones.
Sinbad charged. The air hissed as his bokken cut a desperate arc. Esra didn't move until the very last second. She parried once, a sharp clack of wood on wood, then twice, redirecting his momentum with a flick of her wrist. She stepped inside his guard, the scent of dried lavender and sharp sweat following her, and tapped his ribs. It wasn't a tap; it was a strike that sent a bloom of heat and bruising pain through his side.
"You telegraph the feint with your eyes," she chided, her expression unreadable. "You look where you want to strike, rather than seeing the whole of the world."
Sinbad didn't complain. He didn't even rub the sore spot. He simply reset his feet, feeling the hot grit of the yard between his toes, breathed in the scent of drying kelp from the docks, and attacked again. And again. And again.
By the end of each session, his palms were slick with blood that seeped through fresh calluses. Esra would wrap them in clean linen later, her touch surprisingly gentle, but she never offered extravagant praise. In the Shimotsuki way, pride was a quiet thing—earned in the silence of a perfectly executed form, or the slight, approving nod she gave when his footwork finally mirrored the rhythm of the tides.
To the village, Sinbad was a marvel: a quiet, intense boy who could haul heavy nets with the strength of a teenager and mend roofs with a focus that bordered on the unnatural. But Esra saw the truth. She saw a prodigy who absorbed technique like parched sand drank the tide. By nine, he matched grown men in sparring matches behind the tavern. By ten, he surpassed them, his movements becoming a blur of purple and gold.
Yet, the past life lingered in haunting fragments. Late at night, when the house was still and the only sound was the rhythmic thrum of the sea against the cliffs, Sinbad would stare at the ceiling and remember. He remembered the hum of fluorescent lights, the chemical saltiness of instant ramen, and the hollow, gnawing ache of a life that had slipped away in a blur of grey office cubicles.
Yami Hirotoshi had died feeling small—a single gear in a machine that didn't care if it ground him to dust. Sinbad refused to be small again. He would not be a gear; he would be the hand that turned the world.
He began to feel the "currents" during those years. It started as a subtle tug behind his eyes, a pressure in his sinuses like a change in the weather. The sea whispered to him. He would look at a calm horizon and feel a jagged warning, prompting him to tell a fishing boat to stay in harbor. They would scoff, only for a freak squall to veer toward the island an hour later.
"Luck," the village began to whisper.
Luck, they said, when the twelve-year-old Sinbad hauled a net single-handed that usually took a team of four. Luck, when he warned the harbor master about a rogue undercurrent that would have dashed three merchant sloops against the jagged rocks of the bay.
Sinbad knew better. It wasn't luck. It was a resonance. Something within him was reaching out, beginning to map the world before he even touched it.
Sea Circle Calendar, Year 1467.
The heat shimmered off
The heat shimmered off the training yard in undulating waves, distorting the horizon where the turquoise sea met the pale, bleached sky. Sinbad, now twelve, moved through the advanced Shimotsuki forms bare-chested. Sweat carved glistening channels down his developing frame, dripping from his jaw onto the sun-baked earth.
The boyish softness was gone. In its place was the hard-won architecture of a warrior: shoulders broadening into a powerful V, arms corded with functional muscle, and legs turned to pillars of iron from endless miles of sprinting along the shoreline in weighted sandals Esra had fashioned from lead and heavy sailcloth.
Esra circled him, her own bokken a blur of weathered wood. She was slower now—the years and the salt air beginning to settle into her joints—but her precision remained lethal. She didn't fight with her muscles; she fought with the very air around her.
"Feel the flow, Sinbad," she instructed, her voice a low rasp over the rhythmic thrum of the cicadas. "The strike is the end of a journey, not the beginning. Feel the space between. The moment of intent before the muscle moves."
Sinbad closed his eyes. He stopped trying to see the wooden sword with his pupils. Instead, he reached for that familiar tug, that strange, internal whisper. He let the world go dark, focusing on the heat of her breath, the displacement of air as she shifted her weight.
When Esra lunged, he didn't react to the sight of her. He felt the intent—a sharp, jagged spike in the atmosphere to his left. He stepped aside with a grace that bordered on the supernatural. Her bokken whistled through the empty space where his temple had been a microsecond before.
She paused, the tip of her sword trembling slightly. A rare, genuine smile touched her mouth, softening the hard lines of her face.
"Good," she breathed. "You are starting to listen to the world, not just yourself."
That night, the village was a silhouette of thatched roofs and dying hearths. Sinbad sat on the porch steps, the rhythmic scritch-scritch of a whetstone the only sound. In his lap lay Maelstrom—the curved blade he had forged himself in the village smithy. He had spent months haggling for scrap steel, melting down broken anchors and discarded tools, fueling the forge with a stubborn will that frightened the local blacksmith.
It wasn't the legendary, wave-patterned scimitar of his future; it was a crude, heavy thing, still showing the marks of the hammer. But as he ran the stone along the edge, the steel seemed to hum back at him. It was an extension of his own soul, a physical manifestation of his refusal to be a victim of circumstance.
Esra joined him, the floorboards creaking under her weight. She set down two cups of steaming herbal tea, the scent of mint and ginger cutting through the metallic tang of the sword oil.
"You carry the weight of a man twice your age, Sinbad," she said quietly, staring out at the dark expanse of the South Blue.
He didn't look up from the blade. He didn't need to. "The sea doesn't care how old I am. Neither do the people who take things."
"And what is it you're preparing for?"
Sinbad finally looked up. The moonlight caught his golden eyes, making them glow like a predator's. "So that no one else gets taken. Not like Father. Not like... before."
She rested a hand on his shoulder. Her palm felt unusually thin, the heat of it startling. "Strength isn't only found in the edge of a blade, Sinbad. A sword without a sheath is just a tool for tragedy."
He nodded, but the set of his jaw told her he wasn't convinced. He didn't want a sheath. He wanted to be the storm.
Sea Circle Calendar, Year 1468.
The first cough came on a crisp morning when the dew was still frozen on the grass.
It was a small sound—dry, like the rustle of dead leaves. Esra dismissed it with a wave of her hand, blaming the dust from the yard. But Sinbad noticed. He noticed the way her chest didn't expand quite as far as it used to. He noticed the slight tremor in her lead hand when they crossed blades.
As the weeks bled into months, the decline accelerated. She tired more easily during their sessions. Her parries, once as certain as the sunrise, came a fraction of a second slower. Sinbad began to adjust without a word, pulling his strikes, shortening his reach, pretending he didn't see her struggling for air.
By winter, the "dust" had become a wasting sickness. The vibrant woman who had once stood like an oak was thinning, her sharp features growing skeletal, her skin turning the color of bleached parchment.
The village doctor, a man who had seen too many sailors die of consumption and rot, simply shook his head as he packed his bag. "It's in her lungs, Sinbad. The Shimotsuki pride can't fight a sickness that eats you from the inside. Keep her comfortable. That's all that's left."
Sinbad refused the reality.
He threw himself into a frenzy of motion. He ran until his lungs burned, thinking if he were fast enough, he could outrun the inevitable. He swung Maelstrom until his shoulders screamed and his vision blurred, as if the sheer force of his will could cut the illness out of the air.
At night, he sat by her bed, the room smelling of medicinal herbs and the cold, metallic scent of winter. She slept fitfully, her breath a ragged, whistling labor. Sinbad reached out with his mind, desperate, reaching for that "tug." He tried to feel her—to sense the sickness as a tangible enemy he could grapple with, a thread he could pull to unravel the decay.
But the sea was silent. The "whisper" told him only of the wind and the tides, indifferent to the flickering candle of a human life.
Sea Circle Calendar, 1469.
The end came when the cherry blossoms on the island's few imported trees were beginning to fall.
Esra could no longer stand. She sat on the porch, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket despite the mounting warmth of the spring sun. She watched Sinbad train.
He was a vision of dangerous grace now—tall, broad-shouldered, his every movement economical and explosive. His purple ponytail whipped through the air like a lash as he moved through forms that were no longer just Shimotsuki, but something of his own making—fluid, chaotic, and powerful. Villagers often gathered at the edge of the property to watch in hushed awe. They whispered that the boy was "touched by the sea," a changeling born of salt and ambition.
One afternoon, after a grueling three-hour session try, Sinbad stopped. The world seemed to tilt. The heat was oppressive, the scent of the blooming flowers cloying. He collapsed to his knees in the center of the yard, sweat pouring off him in sheets.
Suddenly, the "tug" didn't just pull. It snapped.
The world exploded into a terrifying, crystalline clarity. He wasn't just hearing the wind; he was hearing the vibration of the ants tunneling through the dirt beneath his knees. He felt the heartbeat of every villager within a mile—a rhythmic, chaotic drumbeat of life. He sensed the gulls high above, the tilt of their wings against the thermals.
And then, he felt the house.
He felt his mother's heartbeat. It was a faint, fluttering thing, like a trapped bird beating its wings against a cage. It was slowing. Skipping. Fading.
This was it. Observation Haki. It hadn't awakened in the heat of a duel or the glory of victory. It had awakened in the raw, bleeding throat of desperation.
He stumbled into the house, his new senses screaming at the overload of information—the smell of the old wood, the taste of the salt on the breeze, the agonizing weight of her diminishing life force. He dropped beside her bed.
"Mother…"
Esra opened her eyes. They were clouded, the once-piercing brown now veiled by the film of death, but they focused on him with a final, searing spark of pride.
"My beautiful boy," she whispered, her voice barely a thread of silk. "So strong. I can... I can feel it coming off you. Like a furnace."
He took her hand. It felt as light and fragile as a dried leaf. "I'm not strong enough," he choked out, the composure of a warrior shattering. "I couldn't stop this. I can't stop you from leaving."
"You are," she squeezed his hand with the last of her strength. "You are stronger than anyone I have ever known. Promise me, Sinbad... don't let this island be your world. Live big. Dream bigger than the sea itself. Become someone the world cannot ignore."
Tears cut hot, salty tracks through the grime and sweat on his face. He leaned his forehead against her hand. "I promise."
She smiled—a small, tired ghost of the woman who had once knocked him into the dirt for telegraphing a feint. Three days later, in the quiet hours before dawn, the fluttering heartbeat he had been monitoring with his new sense simply... stopped.
The funeral was a quiet affair. The village turned out in mass, recognizing that the pillar of their community was gone. Old Marine comrades of Badr sent letters of condolence from across the South Blue. Sinbad stood through it all like a statue of salt, his golden eyes fixed on the horizon.
That evening, he stood on the beach where he had once hunted clams with his father. The tide was coming in, the waves licking at his boots.
He was fourteen years old. He was a man grown in all the ways that mattered. In his hand, he gripped Maelstrom. It was still a crude blade, but it felt hungry.
Behind him, the house was empty—the fire cold, the training yard quiet.
Ahead, the sea stretched out, vast and indifferent, a graveyard for the weak and a playground for the bold. He felt the currents again, but they weren't just whispers anymore. They were a roar. Destiny was a river, and it was pulling him off the shore.
Sinbad took one step into the surf. Then another. The water was cold, but the fire in his chest burned hotter.
The sea had taken his father. The world had taken his mother.
in any universe, life Is fleeting and beautiful.
He looked out at the setting sun, his silhouette long and sharp against the sand.
The sea would take no more from him. It was time for Sinbad to start taking back.