King of the Pirates: The Rise of the Red - Chapter 003

He woke up with his body still curled up on the uneven straw.

The cold of the earth rose up his protruding ribs like invisible fingers stealing the little heat accumulated during the night—heat that his small body produced with difficulty and lost easily, as if his thin flesh were no match for the ground. He lay there for a moment without moving, letting consciousness return in layers: first the smell of damp wood and old straw, then the dull pain in his temple that had lessened but not disappeared, and finally the familiar weight of everything he had understood in the last few days reasserting itself on him like a wet blanket.

Three days.

It had been approximately three days since he first opened his eyes in that strange world, and each dawn seemed heavier than the last. The wound on his forehead was healing—a pink line, sensitive to the touch, which he sometimes brushed unintentionally with his fingertips. But the real pain lay deeper than the flesh. It resided in the mind that carried the memories of an adult man and now inhabited the fragile flesh of a child: the erratic reflexes, the hands too small, the voice that came out thin when he expected a deep one, the knees that trembled with the slightest physical exertion. Every time he lifted a slightly heavier object, every time he needed to run, he felt the abysmal distance between who he had been and who he was now.

He rose slowly, his movements still clumsy. It was like inhabiting a garment that hadn’t been made for him—small muscles that needed a moment to remember their own existence, his balance still imprecise, his bare feet touching the cold earth with a sensitivity that surprised him every time. The cabin remained the same: warped boards, cracks that let in the gray morning light in oblique threads, the persistent smell of mold and damp wood. Nothing had changed. And yet, everything had changed.

He stepped out cautiously, his bare feet feeling the compacted earth, still cold with dew.

In the preceding days, he had explored the harbor several times, always keeping his distance, always observing from the shadows. What he had seen only reinforced the grim vision that was forming in his mind—layer upon layer, like sediment that settles to the bottom and darkens the water above.

Beyond the slavery displayed on the platforms and the child labor that transformed small bodies into disposable tools, the port teemed with an underground violence that never slept. It was a different kind of violence than he had seen depicted in films or read about in newspapers—not the spectacular violence of explosions and battles, but the small, constant violence that settled in the corners and cracks of the lives piled up there.

Clandestine dogfights erupted like open wounds: sickly children forced to face hungry dogs, their grunts and screams echoing among the shacks; drunks exchanging blows in dark alleys where sailors and pirate-like figures huddled in tight circles, coins passing from hand to hand in cruel bets. The first time he had witnessed one of these scenes, horror had paralyzed him. His mind—still anchored in the values ​​of a previous life, where violence was distant and regulated, mediated by cameras and news reports—could not comprehend how human beings could reduce each other to that animalistic state. He had seen a man beat another to death with his fists and pieces of wood, the wet blows echoing until the end, and then the body being dragged and thrown into the ditch like a sack of rotten potatoes, the blood mixing with the mud without anyone blinking.

Nobody blinked.

That detail was what disturbed him most when he tried to sleep. Not the act itself—brutal as it was—but the indifference surrounding it. The way life went on afterward, immediate and relentless, as if the dead man hadn’t existed long enough to deserve even a second of pause.

But the port wasn’t made only of chains and blood.

Misery intertwined with other vices, each feeding the next in a chain that seemed to have no beginning or end. Cheap prostitution spread through the alleys—women with faces marked by hunger and disease offering themselves for coins or a piece of bread, leaning against walls that seemed to absorb moisture and despair in equal measure. Narrow alleys hid clandestine gambling dens where addicts jostled, spending their last penny on illusions of fortune. There were variations he had observed from afar: the man with the three cups, spinning the containers with nimble fingers, a supposedly hidden pebble, attracting fools with promises of easy victory; dice games on improvised boards, anxious faces under the light of smoky torches; bets on cockfights or races of captured rats.

Everything there was merchandise.

Meat, luck, pain, hope. Everything had a price and a buyer. And he, with his adult mind imprisoned in the bones of a child, saw the devouring cycle that sustained the place—he saw it with the analytical clarity of the accountant he had been, the one who saw patterns in columns of numbers and knew how to identify where the system bled and where he prospered.

Back at the cabin, he paced back and forth in deep thought, his short steps tracing an invisible path across the packed earth.

I needed a method.

The three days had been spent observing and surviving immediately, living off what the previous body had left behind. In the folds of the pseudo-pillow—a bundle of cloth that looked like just an old pillowcase stuffed with straw—he had discovered moldy bread, hardened at the edges but still edible in the center. He ate slowly, tearing off pieces with his small teeth, feeling the sour taste fill his mouth while his stomach rumbled with gratitude. Water had been more difficult, but the previous body had provided a solution: a thick fabric gaiter—probably stolen from some dark alley, as nothing else could have come into a child’s hands except through theft or extreme luck—adapted to carry liquid. And a dented metal mug, found discarded among the port’s garbage, had provided relatively acceptable water, collected from a cleaner stream flowing from higher ground.

Thanks to this, he had so far escaped the fevers and diarrhea that claimed the lives of the weakest.

But his reserves were nearly depleted. The bread had run out the previous morning. The water in his mug was half full. And his small body demanded more than he could provide—it complained with constant snoring, with dizziness that came on suddenly when he stood up too quickly, with that weakness in his limbs that reminded him, every hour, of how precarious the margin was between him and collapse.

He stopped in the center of the cabin, his small hand resting on his pointed chin in a gesture of reflection that seemed to belong to another body—to the body he had been, the man who weighed options before spreadsheets under cold light. The gesture came automatically and for a moment sounded almost comical: a child with prominent bones, with clothes too big hanging from his narrow shoulders, posing as an executive deliberating on a merger.

There was no humor in it. He knew that. But the irony was there nonetheless.

Since his arrival, one truth had become crystal clear: the secret to surviving there was not brute force alone, but the refusal of solitude.

I had observed the groups of children huddled together, their thin bodies pressed against one another seeking warmth and protection. There was always an older one in the center—the leader, the decision-maker, the one who received the lion’s share of the profits. They worked together at the port: carrying messages for merchants, pulling ropes on ships, scavenging through the garbage for something sellable. The coins they earned were few and soon dissolved into food, sometimes into protection money paid to higher-ups who tolerated their presence in exchange for a percentage.

It was a system. Primitive, brutal, but a system.

And he, with his mind trained to identify systems, recognized both their flaws and the possibilities they offered. A group protected. A group shared the risk. A group could accumulate what an individual alone could never achieve. But joining an existing group meant being at the bottom of the hierarchy—the youngest, the weakest, the one who received the worst jobs and the smallest share. It meant depending on the generosity or self-interest of others, and he had seen enough in the last three days to know that generosity there was a luxury.

There was another option: to form their own group.

The thought came with a clarity that surprised him. It wasn’t arrogance—it was calculation. He had something none of the other children had: the cognitive experience of an adult. He knew how to read patterns. He knew how to identify risks. He knew when to retreat and when to advance. He had neither physical strength nor reputation, but he had something that, used correctly, was worth more than both.

Time. And observation.

He returned to thinking about the port as he walked to the entrance of the cabin and leaned his shoulder against the crooked frame, looking out.

The place was bigger than it had seemed in the first few days—relatively spacious, with docks stretching for long stretches, makeshift warehouses, and alleyways branching out like pulsating veins. There were areas I hadn’t yet fully explored, zones where the activity was denser and the larger men seemed to circulate with more authority. Somewhere within those structures, there was a center of power—not just the Pirate Lord everyone spoke of in hushed tones, but the middle ranks, the foremen, those who organized the work and distributed the coins.

Understanding this hierarchy was as urgent as finding food.

He made a mental list, like he used to make a numbered list before going to sleep in his previous life. What he had: intelligence, observation skills, the harmless appearance of a small child, and the fact that nobody noticed him—which in certain contexts was both protection and advantage. What he lacked: money, strength, allies, reputation, and any kind of useful physical skill in that environment. What he needed to acquire first: enough food to keep his body functioning. What he needed to understand before any major move: the real risks of each available option.

The options were reduced to three.

Stealing. Working. Venturing into the forest.

Each one carried a different price and a different type of risk.

Theft was the most immediate option.

He had seen children do this with a dexterity that came only from years of practice—hands that moved like birds among the folds of a distracted person’s clothing, fingers that glided over displayed merchandise with the lightness of feathers. He didn’t have that dexterity. He had the hands of a child who had spent years pressing keyboard keys, not engaging in shoplifting in medieval markets. A botched attempt would be disastrous. He had seen what happened to those who were caught—and it wasn’t prison or a trial. It was immediate, public punishment with no appeal.

Furthermore, there was something more subtle than moral discomfort—something he recognized as long-term calculation. Getting caught stealing, even petty theft, created a reputation. And reputations in places like that were hard to erase. He needed one that would open doors, not close them.

But theft wasn’t impossible. It was a matter of choosing the right target, the right moment, and ensuring the exit was clear before entering. Drunken merchants at dusk. Goods dropped in alleyways that no one would claim. Discarded food that still had enough value for a hungry stomach. There was a margin there that didn’t require the same skill as taking something directly from a person.

He mentally noted: possible, but only as a last resort or with a low-risk target.

Work was the most legitimate option — and the slowest.

The children who worked at the port were paid little, treated as disposable extensions of the adults, and the work demanded a body that already knew what it was doing. He didn’t. He didn’t know the knots in the ropes, he lacked the balance necessary for the swaying decks, he didn’t understand the tacit signals and codes that experienced workers exchanged without words. Learning would take time. And time was what his stomach refused to grant.

But work built trust. And trust opened access to places and information.

He noted: necessary in the medium term, but insufficient as an immediate solution.

All that remained was the forest.

He turned his gaze to the line of trees that rose beyond the boundaries of the cluster of cabins.

The forest seemed uninhabitable—a dark green wall of dense trees and impenetrable shadows that began where the buildings ended and stretched inland like territory governed by other rules. From fragments gleaned from conversations overheard in the dark and discreet observations, he had pieced together the picture.

Someone—in times past, no one knew for sure who or why—had had the disastrous idea of ​​releasing an exotic species on the island. Wild boars had spread like a plague, multiplying uncontrollably in the absence of sufficient natural predators to contain them. Over time, they crossbred with domestic pigs that had escaped from farms, and the result was creatures that defied usual categories—larger than common boars, more aggressive than domestic pigs, with the territorial instinct of the former and the enormous size that generations of good food on the island had given to the latter.

They turned the forest into dangerous territory.

Whispered tales spoke of drunkards who ventured in seeking privacy or fruit and never returned—found days later, or never. Desperate, hungry children who entered the vegetation and disappeared, leaving only echoes of distant cries that the wind carried back to the harbor as a warning. No one went alone. No one returned unscathed when traveling in a small, unprepared group.

The previous day had shown him what these animals represented in practice.

He had seen a group of Lord Pirate’s men pass by on the main street pulling a reinforced cart. On the wood lay a slaughtered boar of impressive proportions: not an ordinary pig, but a hybrid beast that surpassed all expectations. The heavy body—he easily estimated four hundred kilos—displayed long, curved tusks protruding from the jaw, thick, dark fur like armor, muscles still tense even in death. An axe remained embedded in its skull, the handle wrapped in blood-stained leather. The men laughed loudly, recounting how they would have an enviable feast that night, the meat roasted over bonfires, the fat dripping and fueling tales of glory that would grow with each drink.

He recognized the creature from memories of another life: documentaries about environmental plagues, especially the wild boar-domestic pig hybrids that ravaged distant regions. Prolific animals, larger than their ancestors, capable of devastating entire ecosystems with the mechanical efficiency of those who have no natural enemies. There, on the island, they had adapted and grown beyond normal—and the forest was as much theirs as the port was the pirates’.

And yet.

The coconut palms stood tall, visible even from the edge of the forest, laden with green spheres that promised fresh water and nutritious pulp. There were wild fruits—he had identified them on the edges, before the deep shadows—possibly edible roots, the possibility of resources that required neither money nor subservience. It was food that belonged to no one, that did not need to be stolen or traded.

Just achieved. With the risk that this implied.

He stood at the cabin entrance for a long time, the light wind carrying the salty scent of the sea mingled with the damp green of the forest—two worlds pressing from opposite sides, each with its own demands and its own dangers.

The sun had risen high enough to gently warm his pale skin, and he felt the warmth with a gratitude that surprised him. Small things like that—the sun, the wind, the smell of the sea—seemed to have a different quality on that body. More immediate. More present. As if the thin skin and the absence of fat made the world closer to what it had been before.

Three days had been enough to understand the fragility of his position.

But there was something else he had understood—something that wasn’t weakness, but something that demanded to be acknowledged before any move. The cruelty he had witnessed in recent days wasn’t merely an external context to be navigated. It was something that shaped the people who lived within it. Children who had worked at the port since they were little developed a different perspective—not the calculated innocence he carried as an inheritance from the adult he had been, but a hardness that came from within, a layer of protection built blow by blow. Women on street corners who had already cried all they had to cry and now operated in a mode of mere continuity. Men who gambled on the lives of others because their own seemed worth no more than the next round of drinks.

He didn’t want to become that.

Not out of naive idealism—he had left that behind on the morning of the second day, when he saw the body being dragged into the ditch. But because he understood, with the analytical coldness that was perhaps the only genuinely useful legacy of his previous life, that complete hardness was also a form of blindness. People who saw nothing beyond immediate survival made poor long-term decisions. They lost the ability to identify patterns. They lost the ability to plan beyond their next meal.

He needed to survive without losing his long-distance vision.

It was easier said than done. But it was the only gamble worth taking.

She clenched her small fists, feeling her nails dig into her palms.

There was a decision to be made, and his stomach was demanding it with increasing urgency. It wouldn’t be the forest yet—not without more information, not alone, not without some way to defend himself or orient himself within the vegetation. It would be a waste of resources he couldn’t afford to squander.

It would be the port. For a few more days. With more attention, with more method.

He had observed quite a bit. It was time to start interacting—carefully, sparingly, choosing each conversation as if it were an investment. There were faces he had begun to recognize, routines he had begun to map. An elderly woman who sold dried fish near the second dock and who sometimes left scraps on the ground without picking them up. A boy of perhaps eleven who worked alone—without a group, without a leader above him—sifting through the trash with an efficiency that suggested experience but also a solitude that could be an opening. A spice merchant who arrived early every morning and who, before setting up his stall, left his car unattended for a predictable interval.

Details. The world revolved around details, and details were the only currency he possessed in abundance.

He took a step out of the hut, his feet touching the cold earth with deliberate firmness.

The cabin behind him seemed smaller now—a temporary refuge that served its purpose but could not be his destination. Ahead, the harbor pulsed with its brutal life, and the forest whispered its dangerous promises beyond the boundaries of the buildings. Somewhere between the two lay a path he still needed to find.

He didn’t yet know how to navigate it.

But he knew he had begun to see the ground.

And for the time being, in that world where most couldn’t even achieve that, it was enough to take the next step.

The day unfolded before him, as unforgiving as all the others. He charged into it with the only weapon he truly possessed: the refusal to stop thinking.