"The Pirate King, Gol D. Roger, has been captured!"
"Gol D. Roger, the Pirate King, will be executed in Loguetown!"
"The place where it began shall also be the place where it ends—Gol D. Roger will be executed in Loguetown!"
News birds soared through the skies, scattering newspapers like falling leaves. Papers that usually cost fifty Berries a copy were now freely drifting through the air, littering every corner of the world.
Rosinante casually reached out and snatched one from the sky.
"Gol D. Roger, huh? So the Great Pirate Era is finally about to begin?" Rosinante murmured as he stared at the headline.
His full name was Donquixote Rosinante, younger brother of the Warlord Donquixote Doflamingo, adoptive son of the Marine hero Sengoku, and the original wielder of the Silent-Silent Fruit.
But the Rosinante standing here today wasn't the same one from the original story—he was a transmigrator.
In his previous life, Sanders was just an ordinary college student who had just completed military training. When he woke up, he found himself inside Rosinante's body.
At that very moment, Rosinante had passed out from crying after witnessing his father's murder at the hands of his own brother. That was when Sanders's soul crossed over and merged with Rosinante's.
Once the fusion completed, Sanders's soul took control. After all, he was a mentally mature adult, while the young Rosinante's spirit had been weakened by grief, making it easy for Sanders to absorb his consciousness.
Gaining access to Rosinante's memories brought a wry smile to Sanders's face.
As one of the "Big Three" shonen manga series, One Piece was universally known. And because of Doflamingo and Law's popularity, Rosinante had become a memorable side character.
However, if you were to rank the top ten most useless Devil Fruits in One Piece, Rosinante's Silent-Silent Fruit would undoubtedly make the list.
The power of silence, which supposedly helped improve sleep quality? When Sanders first saw Rosinante in Law's flashback arc, he thought: Is this fruit just a gag? And combined with Rosinante's graffiti antics… Sanders was convinced—it was a gag.
But then came the real kicker. From Rosinante's memories, Sanders realized he had already eaten the fruit he considered a joke.
After the Donquixote family was expelled from the Holy Land of Mariejois and their Celestial Dragon status was exposed, they were relentlessly hunted down. Their home was torched, Rosinante's mother fell gravely ill, and with hunger gnawing at their bellies, Doflamingo dragged his little brother to scavenge for food in the trash.
That was when Rosinante unknowingly ate a strange fruit. All he remembered was that it tasted absolutely horrible—but he didn't think much of it at the time. After all, it came from a garbage heap; he just assumed it was rotten fruit.
Even now, Rosinante had no idea what he'd eaten. But Sanders, who was familiar with One Piece, knew instantly—it was a Devil Fruit.
After merging with Rosinante's soul, Sanders's spirit grew stronger and even gained the ability to evolve with the body. And it was thanks to this newfound spiritual strength that he could clearly sense the fruit's ability—it was indeed the Silent-Silent Fruit from the manga.
Transmigrating into this world wasn't the issue. Not becoming the protagonist or a powerful main character wasn't either. Even ending up as Rosinante was fine. If push came to shove, he could always cling to Doflamingo's or Sengoku's leg and eventually get his hands on a better fruit to boost his strength.
Even without Doffy or Sengoku's help, Sanders had enough knowledge to track down a couple of strong Devil Fruits himself. Sooner or later, he'd make a name for himself in the One Piece world.
But eating the Silent-Silent Fruit? That was a death sentence for anyone dreaming of power through Devil Fruits. Not only did it saddle him with the crippling weaknesses to seawater and Seastone, but it also sealed off the "power-up through fruit" route entirely.
Eventually, Sanders left the Donquixote family. Sure, staying with Doflamingo had its perks, but after inheriting this body, he also inherited a deep emotional scar—Rosinante didn't want to stay with Doflamingo.
Not because he wanted revenge—Doflamingo was still his biological brother. But after witnessing Doflamingo murder their father with his own hands, Rosinante had realized something terrifying: Doflamingo was a born demon. And he wanted nothing to do with him.
So, Sanders walked away from the Donquixote family. Although the Silent-Silent Fruit wasn't good for combat, it was a top-tier stealth tool. It could erase sound and conceal movements so effectively that no one in the entire Donquixote family even noticed when he vanished. Perhaps they didn't care. All they ever cared about was Doflamingo.
After leaving the family, fate took a turn—perhaps due to the butterfly effect of Sanders's transmigration—and he never encountered Sengoku.
Instead, he wandered the North Blue alone. He worked odd jobs and was cheated by heartless employers, became a thief and got chased through the streets, fought wild beasts for food, hunted pirates for bounty money, and was even pursued by the World Government—or more precisely, by the Celestial Dragons.
Doflamingo had once taken their father's severed head back to Mariejois, begging to be reinstated as a Celestial Dragon. But they rejected him. He nearly lost his life there.
Worse still, Doflamingo accidentally discovered a terrifying secret—the "National Treasure" of Mariejois. From that point on, the Celestial Dragons issued a kill order on the entire Donquixote bloodline.
As one of the last two remaining true Donquixote descendants, Rosinante was implicated. The CP agents came after him relentlessly. Luckily, with the Silent-Silent Fruit, he managed to escape both overt and covert assassination attempts time and again.
"Loguetown, huh? Guess I'll go check it out. I've been dropped into this world, how could I not go see something this historic for myself?" Sanders chuckled as he looked at the newspaper in his hand.
With Rosinante's background, joining the Marines was out of the question. Becoming a bounty hunter wasn't possible either. The only path left for him… was piracy.
Sanders had been expecting news of the Pirate King's capture for some time. Over the years, CP agents had never stopped hunting him. Perhaps their repeated failures had caused internal pressure, because they eventually sent a CP0 agent after him—and Sanders had nearly died at that agent's hands.
So when he saw the newspaper headline—Roger caught and set for execution in Loguetown—he finally let out a breath of relief.
Because the dawn of the Great Pirate Era would stir the seas into chaos. Countless people would rush to the oceans. The Marines and World Government would be overwhelmed, and only then would the pressure on him finally begin to ease.
...