The crack of the whip split through his thoughts like a blade through fog.
Pain bloomed across his back, sharp and immediate, dragging him fully into consciousness. Into this body. Into this world.
"Ornn! You lazy wretch — goofing off in my factory?!"
The voice belonged to a man with a face like a stretched donkey, wrapped in black leather armor stamped with the mark of the Beasts Pirates. A low-ranking warden. The kind of man who mistook cruelty for authority.
Ornn — or rather, the one who now inhabited that name — swallowed the fury rising in his chest. He rose from the floor without a word, steadied himself, and walked toward his station.
The forge blazed ahead of him, indifferent and eternal.
Not yet, he told himself. Not yet.
He knew exactly where he stood. The One Piece world. Wano Country. Onigashima's weapons factory, deep in the year 1516 of the New World calendar. He hadn't fully digested all the memories of the body's previous owner, but the important pieces were already falling into place.
Eric Ornn. Twenty-two years old. Low-ranking craftsman, forging division.
Son of a blacksmith from a spring island somewhere in the New World. At a young age he had eaten a Devil Fruit — the Goat-Goat Fruit, Animal Class. A former Calamity had spotted him during a raid and, amused by the goat transformation, dragged him back to Wano rather than simply killing him. His entire homeland had been reduced to ash and silence.
The Beasts Pirates had expected him to break. To beg. To submit.
He never did.
So they threw him into this factory and waited. They were still waiting.
Ornn picked up the tongs with practiced ease. His body moved with the memory of a craftsman — precise, unhurried. He drew the heated ingot from the coals, clamped it against the anvil, and raised the hammer.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The warden watched for a minute, satisfied by the rhythm of obedience, then turned and disappeared into the smoke.
Ornn kept hammering.
Somewhere beneath the foreign memories and the sting of the whip, something old and quiet stirred in him. The rhythm of the forge had a heartbeat to it. He felt it in his palms, in the reverberations climbing up his forearms.
Then the anger came.
It crept in with the memories — a homeland razed, a father's forge left cold, chains around ankles that had never deserved them. His grip tightened. The hammer fell harder.
Clang. Clang. CLANG.
The veins along his forearms rose like iron cable beneath the skin.
And then something else rose with them.
Gold. Viscous, burning gold — seeping from between his knuckles like sunlight from a cracked mountain. In seconds it swallowed the tongs. The hammer handle dissolved. The head struck the stone floor and left a shallow crater.
Ornn stared at his hands.
The outermost layer had already cooled into orange-red lava, cracked along the joints, but beneath each fissure, golden magma still pulsed and flowed. It dripped from his fists to his forearms in slow, glowing rivulets. It should have been agony.
It felt like warmth. Like coming home.
He caught his reflection in the water basin nearby and went still.
His frame — already broad — had nearly doubled. His skin had shifted to a deep, strange purple, the color of a storm over open ocean. His hair, once black, burned dark red at the roots, the color of cooling lava. A beard had erupted from his jaw in the span of a breath, thick and wild.
Then the strength left him all at once.
His legs gave out. The world tilted. He hit the floor, and the moment he did, the transformation reversed — the magma receding, the mass contracting, until he sat on the ground looking exactly as he always had.
Except for the crater. And the melted hammer head. Those remained.
He sat there for a long moment, breathing.
Then, carefully, he scanned the workshop. Small. Suffocatingly hot. No other workers nearby. No one had seen.
He exhaled slowly.
Good.
What he didn't notice — couldn't notice — was the shadow that flickered briefly across the exhaust vent above him, then vanished.
He found a spare hammer and returned to work. His hands moved automatically. His mind did not.
Goat Fruit. Animal Class. Goat form. That was what the body's previous owner had eaten. A perfectly ordinary Zoan. Nothing that should have produced magma, or mass, or that impossible golden light.
Unless—
He thought back to the moment before crossing over. An internet cafe. A ranked match going sideways. His main champion banned. His jungler calling him deadweight. He'd hovered over the champion select screen, frustrated, and had landed on a pick almost as a joke.
A ram. A forge god. A demigod who shaped weapons from living fire and walked battlefields like a mountain given legs.
Same name. Same fruit. Same calling.
"The Goat-Goat Fruit... Mythical Beast Class... Ornn Form."
The words landed in his mind like a hammer strike on hot metal.
If he was right — if the fruit had somehow resonated with him at the moment of crossing, mutated by the sheer force of memory and desire — then what he now carried wasn't a simple Zoan.
It was something far older. Far heavier.
The god of molten forging. Master of the First Fire. A being whose power ran deeper than destruction — whose true domain was creation itself.
His gaze fell to the red ingot still glowing on the anvil.
Ornn pressed his palm flat against it.
No burning. Instead — information.
[Sake Iron Ingot: A basic forging material derived from Sake Iron Ore following primary treatment. Carburizing and hammering thirty times yields low-grade Sake Heart Steel. Fifty times, medium-grade. One hundred repetitions produces high-grade Sake Heart Steel — a viable base material for legendary-tier creations.]
[Assessment: Insufficient. Not remotely qualified.]
Legendary creations. The phrase rang through him like a struck bell.
Before he could examine the thought further, something shifted deep inside his mind — a resonant tremor, as though a vault had been unsealed somewhere behind his eyes. Pages unfolded. An illustrated catalog, vast and still expanding, blooming outward from some quiet archive he hadn't known existed.
Weapons. Equipment. Armaments drawn from every story he had ever loved.
Mythical arms. Spirit-bound blades. Imperial Treasures. Artifacts from games and legends and worlds he had consumed across an entire previous lifetime — all of it catalogued, preserved, waiting.
Every one of them, potentially his to forge.
Ornn stared into the fire of the forge for a long, silent moment.
The warden would return eventually. The chains were still on his ankles. The island was still a prison.
But the First Fire was burning in his blood now.
And a god of the forge had just been given an anvil.