It was a little after ten o'clock at night in Manhattan, New York, in the year 2008. The grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel glittered under crystal chandeliers as a private cocktail reception unfolded behind guarded doors.
The event wasn't an ordinary party. Nearly everyone present belonged to the uppermost tier of society, the kind of people who shaped markets and influenced governments. Wall Street financiers mingled with senators, corporate executives traded quiet smiles with media tycoons, and several well-known figures from the technology world circulated with glasses of expensive champagne in their hands.
In a room filled with power, almost every guest possessed wealth measured in hundreds of millions. A few individuals present likely controlled fortunes that stretched well beyond that.
At the center of the reception stood a blond young man who looked barely past his mid-twenties. Despite his youth, the crowd around him consisted mostly of men and women in their forties and fifties, seasoned figures who normally commanded respect wherever they went.
Yet here, they surrounded him.
The young man spoke in a calm, measured voice while wearing an easy smile. The people around him listened attentively, nodding frequently as if every word he said carried weight.
Under normal circumstances, a gathering of older elites crowding respectfully around someone so young would have looked awkward. In this room, however, not a single person found it strange.
Because the young man's name was Aldrick Morgan.
The Morgan family name carried enormous influence across the United States. Their banking empire stretched back generations, and their investments touched everything from energy and defense contracts to international finance. As the first heir to the family's vast fortune, Aldrick Morgan represented not just wealth but power.
That single surname alone was enough to earn the attention and courtesy of everyone present.
Crystal glasses clinked softly as conversations flowed around the room. The atmosphere was relaxed, even celebratory, as guests enjoyed the evening and the prestige that came with being invited.
Then a sharp sound cut through the ballroom.
Bang!
The crisp shatter of breaking glass echoed across the hall.
For a brief moment, people simply turned their heads in confusion. The sound had come from the center of the reception.
Then someone screamed.
"What—?!"
The sudden cry of panic ripped through the room like a knife. Dozens of heads snapped toward the source of the disturbance, and what they saw made the entire ballroom freeze.
Several guests widened their eyes in shock. Others stared in disbelief, their bodies going rigid. A few people lost their grip on their wine glasses entirely, the crystal tumbling from their hands and shattering against the polished marble floor.
No one could believe the scene in front of them.
At the very center of the reception, Aldrick Morgan lay sprawled on the ground.
A dark bullet hole had pierced straight through his forehead. Blood flowed steadily from the wound, spreading across the white marble floor beneath his head and forming a growing crimson pool.
For a heartbeat, the entire ballroom fell into stunned silence.
Then chaos erupted.
People began shouting. Some rushed backward in panic while others dropped to the floor instinctively, convinced that gunfire might follow. Security personnel lunged forward while several guests scrambled toward the exits.
The elegant cocktail reception instantly collapsed into pandemonium.
Three kilometers away from the Hilton Hotel, high above the city streets, a lone figure stood on the rooftop of a skyscraper.
The wind swept across the rooftop as the man lowered a massive sniper rifle from his shoulder.
Ethan Blake smiled faintly and gave a casual whistle.
"Job done."
He flicked his wrist lightly. In the next instant, the enormous CheyTac M200 sniper rifle vanished from his hands as if it had never existed.
Ethan didn't rush to leave the rooftop. Instead, he closed his eyes and allowed his awareness to sink deep into his own mind.
Inside his consciousness, a strange interface hovered in the darkness.
At its center was a progress bar.
The bar now displayed a complete value.
100%.
Ethan opened his eyes slightly and chuckled under his breath.
"That guy alone gave almost two percent energy," he murmured. "Figures. Someone like him was definitely rotten to the core."
There was no guilt in his voice. If anything, he sounded faintly amused.
After all, he considered what he had done tonight to be public service.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Time for a summon."
With a simple thought, something materialized in his hand.
It was a red fruit shaped vaguely like a curved banana, its surface covered in swirling, unnatural patterns that looked almost alive.
A notification appeared inside his consciousness.
Successfully summoned.
Bison Fruit – Bison Form.
Animal-type Devil Fruit. Consuming it grants the user the physical traits of a buffalo, including immense strength, charge speed, and enhanced durability.
Note: All Devil Fruit users are cursed by the sea.
Ethan turned the strange fruit over in his hand and studied it carefully.
A trace of regret flickered in his eyes.
"If it had been something like the Rumble Fruit or the Glint-Glint Fruit, I'd eat it without hesitation," he muttered. "Even a Mythical Zoan would've been worth the drawback."
He sighed lightly.
"But a basic Bison Fruit?"
That wasn't enough to justify the cost.
Eating a Devil Fruit meant permanently losing the ability to swim. In a world like this one, that kind of weakness could easily become fatal.
Ethan had lived in this world for more than twenty years.
When he first arrived here, he believed he had simply been reborn in the United States during the late 1980s. Because of the strange circumstances of his rebirth, he had started life again as a small child with the memories of nearly forty years from his previous life.
At the time, he hadn't been worried at all.
With decades of future knowledge, becoming rich in America would have been easy. All he had to do was wait until adulthood and invest wisely, and billions of dollars could practically fall into his lap.
That had been his original plan.
Everything changed when he discovered Stark Industries existed.
Soon after, he learned something even more shocking. Captain America wasn't just a comic book character in this world.
There was a Steve Rogers memorial museum in New York.
That was the moment Ethan realized the truth.
He hadn't simply been reborn in modern America.
He had been reborn inside the Marvel Universe.
The implications of that realization were terrifying. This was a world filled with alien invasions, superhuman battles, and catastrophic threats capable of destroying entire cities.
And somewhere out in the vastness of space lurked a purple warlord obsessed with wiping out half the universe.
Compared to those dangers, becoming a billionaire suddenly felt meaningless.
From that moment on, Ethan abandoned his plans for a comfortable life.
Instead, he chose a path that would make him stronger.
When he reached adulthood, he enlisted in the military without hesitation. The battlefield offered the fastest way to grow capable in a dangerous world.
After four years of service, he left the army and joined the FBI.
Over the following years he built an impressive reputation. Through a combination of skill, determination, and results, he rose through the ranks faster than almost anyone else.
Now he served as the Chief Agent of the Criminal Investigation Division at the FBI's New York branch.
Within the entire New York field office, he ranked among the top five most powerful figures.
But Ethan's success had never come from hard work alone.
Shortly after his rebirth, he discovered something unusual hidden inside his mind.
A progress bar.
Whenever that mysterious bar reached one hundred percent, it allowed him to summon something.
Items, abilities, knowledge, or powers. Almost anything was possible.
The only fuel required to fill the progress bar was soul energy.
More specifically, the energy of sinful souls.
The darker and more corrupt the soul, the more energy it provided.
Ethan had tested the system many times over the years. Through those experiments he discovered that an ordinary murderer typically provided about 0.1 percent progress.
Which meant the man he had just killed tonight carried roughly twenty times that level of sin.
Naturally, killing someone didn't automatically create a sinful soul.
Morality was complicated.
What counted as sin depended heavily on whether the person understood their actions to be wrong yet chose to do them anyway. When someone knowingly committed evil despite understanding it fully, their soul became exactly the kind of fuel Ethan's system could absorb.
That realization had shaped many of his life choices.
If he had stayed an ordinary civilian, it would have been difficult to gather that kind of energy in a place like New York without becoming a criminal himself.
Joining the military and later the FBI solved that problem perfectly.
In both organizations, Ethan spent years on the front lines confronting dangerous criminals. Over the past decade, he had personally eliminated many of them.
Every one of those deaths had quietly fueled the progress bar.
So far he had completed more than ten summons.
Some of the rewards he obtained were extremely valuable.
One of them was the legacy of Floyd Lawton, better known as Deadshot. That inheritance granted Ethan extraordinary marksmanship, allowing him to hit targets with terrifying precision even without looking directly at them.
Another reward was the Perfect T-Virus Enhancement Serum.
After injecting it, his body's physical capabilities increased to five times the peak limits of normal human performance. It also granted a small chance of awakening telekinetic abilities.
He had also obtained Observation Haki, a sensory power that sharpened his perception to extraordinary levels. With it, he could detect the presence and emotions of nearby people and even sense danger moments before it happened.
Among the more practical items was a small bag of Senzu Beans.
There were twelve beans inside. Eating just one could eliminate hunger for ten days, restore stamina instantly from extreme exhaustion, and return the body to perfect condition.
Even severe injuries could heal rapidly after consuming one.
Ethan turned the Bison Fruit over once more before finally making his decision.
He wasn't going to eat it.
With another flick of his hand, the fruit vanished and was stored inside his personal space.
The Golden Storage Space initially measured two meters in every direction, giving him eight cubic meters of portable storage. The space could expand, but doing so required feeding it an equal volume of gold.
One cubic meter of gold increased the space by one cubic meter.
After storing the fruit, Ethan prepared to leave the rooftop.
Just then his phone vibrated in his pocket.
Buzz. Buzz.
He pulled it out and glanced at the caller ID. A faint smile appeared on his face before he answered the call.
"Wilson," Ethan said casually. "What's up?"
Wilson's voice came through the phone, tight and serious.
"Ethan, what happened to Aldrick Morgan… you did it."
....
Join my P@treon and get 60+ advanced chapters.
Link: p*atreon.com/0LordSilvere0 (Remove the *)
Free members get 2 chapters free.
Join Right Now