Goa Kingdom
The forest near Foosha Village was still damp with morning dew. Golden sunlight pierced through gaps in the foliage, falling in speckled patterns onto the ground covered in wild grass. No human voices could be heard there, only the calls of birds answering each other and the rustle of leaves stirred by the morning breeze.
In the middle of that forest, Luffy was training his body, following instructions from a training manual written by his own grandfather, one he'd obtained from the System a year ago.
His body was already vastly different from before. No longer thin and lanky as it once was. Now, dense muscle wrapped around his frame, clearly holding an explosive power ready to be unleashed at any moment. It had been a year since the System first appeared in his mind, and he hadn't wasted a single day of it.
Besides physical training, Luffy had also been studying Rokushiki. In his view, the technique was extremely useful and could be blended with his own fighting style. Soru, for example, let him move at nearly instantaneous speed.
He'd learned Geppo just in case. If he ever found himself stranded in the middle of the sea with nothing to stand on, he could use Geppo to step through the air until he found somewhere safe to land.
He'd even managed to combine Soru and Geppo, mimicking what Lucci did in the fragmented memories he'd absorbed from Kevin. That Rokushiki variant, called Kamisori, let its user move rapidly through the air in a zigzag path, making his movements nearly impossible for an opponent to predict.
Rankyaku hadn't escaped his training either, though he chose to use his hands instead of his legs like CP9 members typically did. The reason was simple.
Luffy didn't really understand where that person came from, but the slashing technique looked incredibly cool.
And to Luffy, that reason was more than enough to give it a try.
"This is so cool," he'd muttered the first time he tried it, grinning widely at the blade of air that shot out from his own hand.
He'd also tried developing Seimei Kikan: Kami-e Kai, the technique Lucci normally used. The difference was, he had his own idea. Instead of just enlarging his hand to attack, what if he enlarged his entire body, then shrank it back down again? Wouldn't that mean his entire physical strength would surge, not just the part doing the attacking?
Unfortunately, he hadn't succeeded so far. A technique that required its user to control their own cells at will was no simple task, even for someone like him who had memories from another world to draw on.
This past year had still yielded plenty of results, though. Not just from physical training and Rokushiki, but also from his growing understanding of the System.
One day, while training in the forest, he'd casually tried pulling a bullet fired at him directly into his inventory. It worked. But when he tried the same thing with a sword someone was swinging at him, the attempt failed completely.
He'd furrowed his brow, tried a few more times before finally arriving at one conclusion. It seemed objects currently being held or controlled by a living being couldn't be pulled straight into the inventory. But once an object had left someone's grip, like a bullet flying freely through the air, he could still store it.
His curiosity hadn't stopped there. He'd then experimented with measuring just how large the inventory could be expanded, and found the space could stretch to one meter long by thirty centimeters wide.
His next experiment took him to the shore near Foosha Village. That evening, the sea was calm, the waves small, and the sky beginning to turn orange at the horizon. No one else was there besides him.
Around his arm, a transparent blue layer from the Inventory wrapped his skin like a thin cloth. He then dipped that arm into the seawater.
A few seconds passed. None of the usual weakness that normally struck his body the instant it touched seawater hit him.
"Hmm, I don't feel anything," he muttered, pulling his hand back and checking the contents of his inventory.
Sure enough, it was true. The seawater he'd touched had been stored neatly inside. Realizing his experiment had worked, he grew even more excited and tried wrapping his entire body in the inventory before diving into the sea. Unfortunately, he only managed to cover half his body before hitting the storage space's capacity limit.
Even though he'd already suspected the result wouldn't be perfect, a flicker of disappointment still crept in. He let out a sigh, looking down at his half-wrapped, blue-coated body.
"Well, at least I'm half immune to seawater now, right? Shishishi." His signature laugh returned just as quickly as the disappointment had faded.
"Alright, let's try the next thing."
He extended one hand forward, trying to release the seawater stored in his inventory, hoping it would shoot out with strong pressure, like a bullet fired from a gun. Reality fell far short of that hope. The water just trickled weakly onto the sand, then slowly found its way back to the sea.
Honestly, he'd already expected a result like this. Back when he'd tried releasing the bullet he'd stored in his inventory, he'd hoped it would fire out like a real gunshot. What actually happened was the bullet dropped awkwardly onto the ground, right in front of a group of thugs who'd attacked him at the time. Fortunately, he hadn't actually relied on that trick to fight.
There was one more thing he'd managed to confirm. Water he drank could apparently be stored in his inventory without any issue. That meant, if some foreign substance ever entered his body, poison, for example, he might be able to pull it out the same way. That thought made him quietly file the information away for future reference.
He'd also come to fully understand the limits of his inventory's overall capacity. There were ninety-nine slots, and each slot could only hold up to ninety-nine identical items.
As for the simulation function, so far he hadn't found any unique way to use it beyond copying every wild animal in the forest as sparring opponents. Every night, two hours before bed, he'd enter that simulated world to fight all-out against the animals he'd copied.
The results felt real. His combat strength surged far faster than if he'd just trained alone in the real world. He'd also started getting used to using Soru, Geppo, and Rankyaku directly in the middle of combat, rather than just as memorized moves performed by rote.
After managing to defeat every wild animal in the simulation room, he began thinking about finding stronger opponents. Several times he'd made trips to Goa Kingdom's capital, hoping to find someone tough enough to copy and use as a training opponent.
Unfortunately, he never found anyone like that. But his trips to the city weren't entirely wasted. Besides searching for strong opponents, he had another reason for stopping by so often, stealing money from the nobles.
He always took just one or two bills from each target, small enough not to be noticed. So far, not a single one of them had grown suspicious, probably because those nobles had so much money that losing a bill or two never registered, let alone bothered them.
He kept up that habit for a full year. And now, his total haul had reached roughly two hundred fifty million berry.