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OP: AMP Ch. 38
🕑 Added 2025-08-22 01:12:40 +0000 UTCNami was still planning to act cute and use her charm to convince Marcus, but he cut her off before she could really get started. "If I'm no
Nami was still planning to act cute and use her charm to convince Marcus, but he cut her off before she could really get started.
"If I'm not mistaken, this is a Mythical Zoan-type, Model: Chimera. Based on market value, this Devil Fruit would be worth at least one billion berries."
Had he read some Devil Fruit encyclopedia? Of course not. He was simply reading the item description that appeared in his interface.
"One billion?!"
Marcus' casual words shocked everyone present. Even Nami's eyes went wide, and for a moment she forgot about trying to be cute.
"Actually, there have been strange things happening on this island for years," he continued, gesturing toward the bizarre animals they'd encountered. "Haven't you noticed that all these creatures look weird? Like that pig-lion thing we saw earlier? That's because of this Devil Fruit. Over time, it's been slowly fusing with the rock around it. The best way to describe it is like the rock itself ate the Devil Fruit. But since rocks don't have consciousness, the fruit's power just spread outward, affecting everything on the island."
Marcus' explanation suddenly made everything click for everyone listening.
Especially for Gaimon, he understood it perfectly. After all, he'd lived on this island for twenty years. What was most abundant here? Not just strange animals, but also plants he'd never seen anywhere else in his travels.
And their reproduction didn't follow any biological rules he knew about. Animals would just mate with whatever they felt like, regardless of species. They could give birth to live young or lay eggs, and sometimes the offspring looked nothing like either parent.
Like if a pig and a goat mated, the result might be a chicken. Completely bizarre.
On any normal island in the world, this would be a mind-blowing phenomenon that would have scientists flocking from all over.
Now a major mystery that had puzzled him for so long finally made sense.
However, when he looked at that Devil Fruit, his eyes showed no desire to possess it. He seemed content just understanding what had been happening around him all these years.
"Does anyone want to eat it?" Marcus looked around at everyone present, naturally including Gaimon in his offer.
"Oh, by the way," he added, "a person can only eat one Devil Fruit in their lifetime. Me, Alvida, and Luffy have all already eaten one."
"Me! Me! Me!" Nami immediately shot her hand up.
"Are you sure? If you're planning to eat it, you have to do it right here in front of me."
"Aw, can't I take it back to the ship and enjoy it slowly?" Nami asked, though her eyes were already taking on the shape of berry symbols.
Looking at her greed, the others just shook their heads.
Marcus glanced around and saw no one else speaking up, which puzzled him a bit.
"Usopp, you don't want to eat it? This is a Mythical Zoan-type Devil Fruit. That's incredibly rare."
Usopp scratched his head. "It's really tempting. But something tells me it's not meant for me, you know?"
"Is that so?"
Marcus looked at the others. His gaze fell on Zoro, who immediately shook his head. "My goal is to become the world's greatest swordsman."
It was a simple answer, but he understood completely. Once you ate a Devil Fruit, a swordsman's path wasn't pure anymore. Many swordsmen believed that relying on Devil Fruit powers was a form of weakness.
Then he looked toward Kira and Gaimon.
Gaimon seemed surprised. "Me too? Well... thanks for thinking of me, but I'll pass."
Finally, his gaze rested on Kira.
At that moment, Kira met Marcus' eyes, and her expression was conflicted, she wanted to, but also seemed hesitant.
"What's wrong?" Marcus naturally noticed her strange expression.
"It's just... I heard that a Chimera is supposed to be the embodiment of fear, evil, and calamity," Kira said quietly, wrapping her arms around herself.
"..."
Marcus had also heard some of the Chimera legends, lion's head, goat's body, snake's tail. Each animal was supposed to represent something different: the lion represented fear, the goat represented evil, and the snake represented calamity.
But over time, "chimera" had come to mean any grotesque fusion of different animals, or creatures whose features didn't match up properly.
"Legends are just legends, they're stories people made up. Eating a Devil Fruit won't make you—"
He stopped mid-sentence, falling into silence. His abrupt pause puzzled everyone.
"What's wrong?" Usopp asked.
Marcus waved his hand dismissively. "Eating a Devil Fruit shouldn't make you influenced by whatever the fruit represents."
But just now, he had looked at Luffy... and for a split second, he could have sworn he saw the shadow of Nika behind him.
He didn't know if it was because Luffy had always been that way by nature, or if eating the Devil Fruit had somehow been shaping him to become more like Nika over time.
At that moment, he also recalled something, one of the most popular theories that used to circulate online, that Devil Fruits had their own consciousness and would choose their own hosts.
In the original story, you could see from childhood that the Supernovas were perfectly matched to the fruits they would eventually eat.
Kid had loved robots and mechanical things since he was little, and he ended up eating the Magnet-Magnet Fruit.
Capone Bege had been obsessed with fortresses and castles since childhood, and he ate the Castle-Castle Fruit.
Scratchmen Apoo had loved music since he was young, and he got the Sound-Sound Fruit.
So it wasn't unreasonable to think that Devil Fruits might choose their users rather than the other way around.
And now, here was a fruit that had never appeared in the original One Piece story. Could Kira, who also never appeared, be the one this Devil Fruit had been waiting for?
Marcus looked at Kira carefully.
She was staring at the Devil Fruit in his hand.
Finally, she reached out and took it carefully.
"Can I... can I really eat this?"
Marcus glanced at the others. They all shrugged, no one had any objections. Even Nami, despite her disappointment about losing out on a billion-berry payday, nodded.
"It's your choice."
Taking a deep breath, Kira bit into the fruit. Her expression immediately twisted in disgust.
"What's wrong?!"
"It's... so... disgusting," she managed to gasp out, her face turning green.
She forced herself to swallow what was in her mouth, tears streaming down her face from the awful taste.
"You need to finish the whole thing," Marcus said with a strange smile. "If you don't believe me, ask Luffy, he ate his entire Devil Fruit. Alvida did too."
Both of them nodded in confirmation, with Luffy adding, "Yeah! It tastes horrible, but you gotta eat it all!"
So with a grim look, like she was marching to her execution, Kira forced herself to finish the entire Devil Fruit, gagging and crying the whole time.
After she'd choked down the last bite, they all waited for something to happen. But after several minutes passed, nothing seemed to change about her appearance.
However, Marcus noticed something happening that the others couldn't see. From everyone present except Gaimon, a massive amount of experience was flowing toward him.
In just a few seconds, he jumped to Level 30.
He was completely stunned by the sudden surge.
Holy shit.
This meant that before, Kira's changes had only slightly altered fate, not enough to significantly affect the Straw Hats' destined path. But now, clearly, a lot had changed.
Whether those changes would be for better or worse remained to be seen.
He quickly checked his newly unlocked features while trying to keep his expression neutral.
The first upgrade was exactly what he'd expected, his item stack limit had increased from 64 to 1000, including items stored inside chests. That was going to make resource management so much easier.
The second unlock was also something he'd hoped for, the Transmutation Tablet.
It didn't require crafting like most things. Instead, a new interface had appeared next to his main panel, showing the familiar Transmutation Tablet screen from the mod.
In the original mod, the left side was the charging slot, and the right was the grid for item transmutation. In the lower left was the EMC value display.
But this version had some changes.
EMC, Energy-Matter Covalence, was still EMC, but the charging slot now had an additional label: "Repair - Transmute." One glance told Marcus what this meant.
"Repair" was self-explanatory, it would restore durability to damaged items.
"Transmute" should allow him to convert things from the One Piece world into proper Minecraft items.
Curious to test it out, he immediately sold 640 cobblestones into the system.
The EMC value at the bottom became 640, just like he'd expected. Apparently, stone values were roughly the same as in the game's transmutation pricing.
He sold everything he had except his armor and weapons to build up a decent EMC balance.
Then he placed his damaged iron helmet in the repair slot.
He could see the EMC value decreasing slowly, but thankfully, repairs didn't cost much. It only took about thirty EMC to fully restore the helmet's durability.
This surprised him, but it also made sense. After all, this wasn't the pure Minecraft world, game difficulty and item acquisition had to be balanced differently. In the One Piece world, if he used the exact same mechanics as the original game, he'd probably suffer badly from the increased difficulty.
But when he tried to buy back an item he wanted from the Transmutation Tablet, he froze.
Cobblestone, which had been worth 1 EMC when he sold it, now cost 2 EMC to buy back. And every other item was the same, buyback prices were exactly double the selling price.
