Lucien Graves stepped away from the light screen and forced himself to breathe. The rules and rewards had been scant, the prizes useless, and the punishments brutal. Still, the little interface had already given him enough clues to begin planning.
First, he needed to understand the world he had landed in.
The system allowed only one roll of the dice per natural month, and when luck turned, it handed out punishments as easily as rewards. Cancer worsening, useless cosmetic vials, and even forced advertisements — those were all possible. The tool was crude and capricious, but it was his only edge in an alien world. If he could complete the tasks it demanded — hunting Transmigrators, Reborns, and other marked targets — he would earn more rolls and higher luck. Those bonuses could mean the difference between staying alive and bleeding out with late-stage illness ticking away.
Lucien forced the thought down, keeping the anger in the cage behind his ribs. He could not rely on wishful thinking. He had already died once. If a second chance had been given, he would not squander it.
He scanned his surroundings. The Uncertainty Terminal spread in all directions, a monstrous landfill of rust, rot, and broken lives. The trash told him this was not a world of demons and magic in the conventional sense. It was a harsh, decaying place where people fought to survive, and where the law stopped at the city wall.
A scrap of paper lay nearby. Lucien picked it up and squinted at the print. The newsprint mentioned the Marine's four great officers, the names standing out like jagged teeth: Sakazuki, Borsalino, Kuzan, and Enel.
The names hit him like a cold fist. This was not some fantasy blended from novels — this was the One Piece world. From that paper, Lucien pieced together a rough timeline. The officers listed as Vice Admirals implied the era might be long before the full sweep of history he had half-remembered from fiction. If those figures were not yet fully ascended, the world here was an earlier slice of the canon, and it made the landscape, politics, and threats easier to predict.
He had to assume this: the world held powerful figures, and some of them might themselves be Transmigrators or Reincarnators, players who carried cheats of their own. Enel listed among Marines, for instance, suggested someone with a strange origin had crossed over into this timeline. That made the risk level spike. If powerful Transmigrators had already inserted themselves into key positions, survival became a more intricate puzzle.
All the same, Lucien refused to be crushed by the scale of it. Late-stage cancer could be fought in many ways in a world that tolerated devil fruits, haki, and strange miracles. He had a crude system and one working pistol, and he would make that count.
A shadow loomed close by. A hulking man stepped out between the heaps of refuse, nearly two and a half meters tall, holding a notched machete. A long centipede-shaped scar cut across his face. He had the kind of presence that made other people step back.
"You brat, get out of my territory," the man rumbled.
Lucien measured him. The machete looked old but vicious. The man's bulk and the savage set of his jaw made him clearly dangerous. Lucien's hand hovered near the pistol at his waist, his only certainty in a place where certainties were rare.
The handgun gave him a sliver of confidence. It was loaded, it worked, and he had no experience with guns. He had only ten bullets. He could not waste even one.
Lucien bowed his shoulders and retreated slowly. Fighting when retreating bought him a future, and survival was the only plan he had now. The man watched him go with boredom, not interest. To the thug, Lucien looked like a ghost already close to fading.
Once the immediate danger was behind him, Lucien moved through the trashfields like a shadow, keeping low and unseen. The Uncertainty Terminal offered no respite. He saw men fighting over found trinkets, and he followed the instinct that had kept him alive before — avoid risk, observe, learn.
A shout broke through the stench. "I found a string of jewels!" someone cried.
Within seconds chaos erupted. Men rushed toward the finder, and the scrap turned into a bloodied scramble for the prize. Lucien watched as the man who found the jewels was stabbed and left to puddle. Death here was casual and immediate. He had been in fights before, but this was different; it was raw, final, and indifferent. He tightened his jaw and moved on.
Roads in the Terminal forked toward the city wall. Lucien skirted the larger skirmishes and aimed for the gate that led into Edge Town. The place had a lawless air, but at the gate the world beyond was visible: neat stonework and taller buildings, the kind of order that had no place for people who smelled of garbage.
He was almost at the wall when a commotion ahead stopped him in his tracks. Three children darted past, pipes clutched in small hands, chased by a mob. They laughed and dared each other.
"Come and catch us!" one shouted. "Luffy, hurry up." "Ace, Sabo, wait for me."
Lucien paused, watching them slip into an alley. Their movements were energetic, fearless, and familiar. These were names he knew.
Luffy, Ace, Sabo. Children of Destiny, the system had said. Important supporting characters.
Lucien's pulse stilled with a cold calculation. Killing those three would be brutal and complicated; they were young but dangerous in ways that defied simple math. Yet the system rewarded those particular targets heavily. The dice rolls would multiply, and with enough rolls and luck he might salvage something to fight his illness, to buy medicine, or to alter his fate.
He reminded himself of the facts. Ace and Sabo were the same age, and Luffy was younger by three years. At the moment in the timeline he had glimpsed, Luffy would be around seven, Ace and Sabo around ten, an arrangement that matched many records from the One Piece chronicles. That detail anchored Lucien's plan to the timeline and let him estimate how events might unfold.
If he relied purely on force, he would fail. These children moved with a kind of reckless synergy that made them unpredictable. Instead, Lucien's only advantage lay in plot awareness, in the small edge a transmigrator might get from knowing how scenes tended to play out and which moments were pivotal.
He tucked his pistol deeper into his waistband. The late-stage cancer pulsed behind his ribs like a ticking clock, a private war he kept secret even from himself. He could not afford mistakes. Each step from now on had to be measured, each choice deliberate.
The Uncertainty Terminal reeked, the city walls stood indifferent, and somewhere within that maze the three children had vanished. Lucien tightened his fingers, feeling the faint assurance the system provided like a shard of glass in his palm. It cut, but it was his to use.
He would find them. He would survive. And when he could, he would roll the dice again.