One Piece: Jungle Juice

1st POV

Days passed and while I left the room they set up for me more and more, I never stayed out for long and I did meet more of the crew but...I didn't talk to them. A few were annoyed others looked at me with a worried expression as the vast majority of my face had been burnt to a crisp and combined with the bandages they couldn't tell what my emotional state was. 

While the doctor was talking with me again, the captain kept trying to get me to talk to them or any of the crew. Yet I decided to remain silent and kept waiting, waiting for their next stop so that I could finally leave and figure out what to do...what I could do with my life now.

I no longer felt worthy of pursuing the life of a scholar or anything related to it and yet I held onto the nearly ruined books tightly never letting them go even while I rested. I never let them out of my sight, not even once, and yet...I didn't know what was contained within. 

I just grabbed them because they were the nearest ones and well...I guess some part of me didn't want to leave it behind to be destroyed by the Navy, some part that overpowered my own sense of survival. Yet looking at it I wasn't sure it would be readable, not without a lot of research and maybe some guesswork. 

Honest;y it seemed like my scholarly instincts still screamed at me to figure it out, to rewrite it and make sense of the books I had. I hated it, I hated the fact that it was still a part of me, a human so unworthy of the knowledge still had these instincts to research, to understand it all. 

I think I cried...yes, I think somehow a single tear left one of my eyes as I stared at the books in my hand on one particular night. Then nothing afterward and yet I still sobbed quietly, at least to the best of my ability letting the cool night air be my only companion. 

I lost track of time a bit after that as the days blurred together and eventually, we reached a small island that only had a single village, I disembarked quietly avoiding the crew's gazes but I think Dcotor Natasha saw that I was preparing to leave as I found a small bag full of bandages and some basic medical supplies to treat my burns. 

The fact that even after not talking to them, after being rude for so long, she still gave me these items for free was more kindness than I deserved. 

Stepping foot on the island I was met by a few people, but mostly their curious gazes or mistrust of some kind. Walking through the village, and seeing all these happy faces made me a little envious of them, they still had their family, and their full lives ahead of them.

However, I was unworthy of even my name something I would need to address eventually. I needed to come up with something to call myself by, even if I knew the old doctor was right, I would need to talk to someone...anyone eventually. 

On my way out of the village, I picked up a few tools lying in the nearby dump, they were in decent condition, and I had enough knowledge on how to use them so I picked them and took them with me as I walked into the forest. I had basic enough knowledge of how to chop down a tree and how to create a decent log cabin, or at the very least a crude one.

It was useful to the traveling scholars in case they had to camp out in the woods for more than a month. In my case, it would be a temporary abode until I figured out why I was still alive and to see what knowledge I was at least able to save by grabbing these books. Maybe it has something useful for me to...do something against the navy, I had no right to try and uncover the secrets of this world.

For right now, though, perhaps it was best to figure out what the books actually said first. Then, I could figure out what to do. 

Going deep into the forest, I found a nice small clearing and sat my supplies down, making sure they were hidden from sight so that an animal or human wouldn't steal them. That or one of the other various humanoid species that inhabit this world, but this place was primarily dominated by humans so I was taking a guess that they were the only ones for miles around. 

Grabbing the axe I grabbed from the junkyard and went over to a nearby large tree and began chopping it down. I didn't care how long it took, I had all the time in the world.

*Two Weeks Later*

About two weeks into my stay on this island, I encountered no trouble so far in constructing my crude log cabin beyond some of the basic mishaps here and there. However a week into my work a few of the village kids hid themselves to spy on me, probably trying to figure out what my deal was or spread weird rumors of me over the island. 

I ignored them, and well everyone in a while I would see them point at me for one reason or another. It was weird...I didn't know what to think of it and I didn't know if I should wave at them or not. I decided not to and just kept on working only stopping to eat, sleep, or rest and plan out my next move. 

I did stop to try and reconstruct the text in the books everyone in awhile, wanted to see if I could try and read it after the construction of the log cabin was completed. While the language of the poneglyphes was the same, it was still a challenge to try and figure out what certain words were or what sentences were meant to be there, honestly, it was mostly guesswork in trying to make sense of it all. 

I didn't know if this would be worth it in the end, but I had to figure it out for myself but i'd know in the end.