King of the Pirates: The Rise of the Red - Chapter 005

The red-haired boy sat in the center of the hut, his legs crossed on the cold, hard ground, his small hands holding a piece of soft, white pulp which he slowly and deliberately brought to his mouth.

Chewing slowly had become a habit—not for pleasure, but out of calculated necessity. His stomach, not yet fully recovered from the weeks of scarcity that preceded his arrival in that body, accepted food better when given time to recognize it. And there was something more, something he only realized after a few days: chewing slowly made the food last longer in his perception, not just in his stomach. The flavor lingered. Satisfaction arrived before the food was gone. In a world where each portion was earned with real effort, learning to inhabit it for longer was also a form of survival.

The ceiling, made of poorly fitted planks interspersed with dry straw, was riddled with small, irregular holes through which sunlight penetrated in thin, golden threads, laden with suspended dust. These oblique rays touched the earthen floor, creating islands of light that contrasted with the dense shadows accumulated in the corners—as if the space itself were divided between what could be seen and what preferred to remain hidden. The boy had learned to like this partial light. There was something honest about it: it didn’t hide the poverty of the place, but neither did it expose it with the cruelty of direct sunlight. It was a light that coexisted with reality without judging it.

The air inside the shelter was damp and heavy, laden with the familiar scent of old wood, ancient ashes, and the faint, lingering sweetness of coconuts opened in recent weeks. That coconut scent—which in the first few days had seemed merely the smell of food—had transformed into something akin to comfort. It was the scent of something accomplished. The scent that the plan had worked.

His eyes, a blue-gray color that seemed too attentive for a child of that age, slowly rose from the piece of pulp and fixed on the farthest corner of the hut.

There it was.

An organized pile of green and brown coconuts stood against the wall like a small fortress built with patience and risk. There were dozens of them—some still bearing traces of damp fiber from the forest, others already opened and partially consumed, their husks gathered aside like remnants of battles won. They had been acquired over weeks of calculated incursions, each visit to the forest an act of courage that needed to be weighed against the danger before being executed.

That pile represented much more than just food.

It represented time. And time, he had understood, was the scarcest and most valuable resource in that place—more than money, more than strength, more than any alliance he could form. With enough food for weeks, he didn’t need to accept any degrading work that came his way. He didn’t need to submit to the hierarchies of groups whose rules he didn’t yet know. He could observe, plan, choose. The pile of coconuts in the corner was his leeway, and it had been won with sweat, blood on his wrists, and the technique of an improvised climbing ladder that he had practiced until his arms stopped trembling halfway up.

The weeks that followed the initial days of confusion and hunger had been dense with learning—not the abstract learning of books or screens, but the kind that left marks on the body and rearranged priorities without asking permission.

Each foray into the forest had been an act of calculated courage.

He always went out at dawn or late afternoon—when the light still allowed sufficient visibility without the heat that drained what little energy remained in the mornings. He moved with light, cautious steps, his small body gliding along trails opened by animals, his bare feet learning the difference between firm ground and that which yielded treacherously under weight. Each outing had taught him something new: where the ground was safer, which sounds belonged to the normal background noise of the forest and which were signs of disturbance, how to recognize the difference between the rustling of the wind in the treetops and the movement of something heavy in the lower vegetation.

Wild boars were the central danger—he had known this from the beginning. He had seen the evidence in Mr. Pirate’s wagon, he had heard the warnings circulating in the port among those who had survived an encounter and those who passed on the stories of those who had not. They were animals of considerable weight, with curved tusks and a temperament that made no distinction between real threat and accidental intrusion. An eight- or nine-year-old boy, malnourished, with arms the diameter of thin branches—would be no challenge to one of these creatures.

But necessity outweighed fear. And fear, he had discovered, was more useful as fuel than as a brake—as long as it didn’t paralyze him.

He had developed a protocol. Before entering, he would stand on the edge for several minutes, listening, observing, letting his senses calibrate to the environment. He identified the wind direction—entering against the wind reduced the chances of being sniffed out before seeing anything. He always chose the same access point, at least for the first few weeks, until he knew that entrance well enough to safely vary it. He moved slowly, without sudden movements, stopping every few meters to listen again. And he always kept the return route in mind—not vaguely, but concretely: that tree, then that rock, then where the ground changes color.

With each expedition, his heart still pounded against his protruding ribs—that hadn’t changed. But there was a difference between the panic of the first few days and the heightened vigilance of the last few weeks. Panic was noise. Vigilance was information.

He had not confined himself to the forest.

In the gaps between risky forays, the red-haired boy had traversed what was called a city there—a tangle of alleyways, shacks, and makeshift structures surrounding the bustling port. He walked slowly, dissolving into the shadows of the adults, observing everything with eyes that carried the cold analysis of a twenty-nine-year-old man trapped in the flesh of a child.

He was searching for information. Any fragment that could help him decipher more precisely where he was.

Although the initial sensation had been of having traveled through time—a world without electricity, without machines, without the conveniences that defined previous life—he doubted this simple hypothesis. There were inconsistencies that didn’t fit into a clean time travel scenario. Languages ​​were the main one: he had heard, in squares and alleyways, people speaking languages ​​he had never heard before—guttural sounds mixed with fluid vowels, dialects that bore no resemblance to anything in his memory, foreign words exchanged between sailors of diverse skin tones and heavy accents. It wasn’t Latin, nor Old Portuguese, nor Medieval Spanish, nor any language he had studied or been exposed to. It was something entirely different.

This suggested not just another time, but another place. Another world, perhaps—a possibility that the analytical mind resisted as being too broad to work with, but which the accumulating evidence continued to point to with increasing insistence.

No geographical landmark, no overheard conversation had provided the definitive answer. Only loose pieces of a larger puzzle: names of ships that sounded exotic, references to distant lords, trade routes that seemed to connect islands and continents with no equivalent on the map he had memorized in a previous life. He absorbed everything, storing it in the adult mind that inhabited that small body, building an incomplete but growing mental map of the reality that now surrounded him.

A reality that, the more he understood it, the more he recognized as genuinely different from everything he had ever known.

It was during one of these discreet strolls through the port that he had acquired the knife.

The fishmonger—a burly man with calloused hands and a strong smell of salt and scales—was engrossed in negotiating with a group of sailors, his voice raised in the sales pitch while his hands gestured with the ease of someone who had spent his life selling and knew that selling is half negotiation and half theater. The knife, old, with its blade slightly rusty at the edges but still sharp enough for everyday work, rested on an improvised board at a distance the boy had assessed three times before acting.

With nimble fingers and his heart in his throat, he approached from behind a stack of crates, extended his small hand, and grasped it in a fluid, silent movement he had mentally practiced the entire way there. The weight of the object in his palm was a silent victory that coursed down his arm like an electric current.

He walked back to the alley without quickening his pace—he had learned that running after stealing was more dangerous than the theft itself, because the wrong move drew attention where calm usually went unnoticed. Only when he was far enough away and the fishmonger’s sounds had dissolved into the general noise of the port did he allow himself to breathe more fully.

That blade had changed everything.

With it, opening coconuts had become infinitely simpler: precise cuts in the green fiber were enough, controlled blows to separate the shell without wasting the sweet water inside. She used it carefully, always cleaning it after each use, hiding it among the rags of her makeshift bed where no one would look for such a small treasure. But the value of the knife went beyond its practical use with coconuts—it was the feeling of having a tool. Of not being completely unarmed in a world where disarmament was an invitation.

There was something psychological about it that he didn’t ignore. The knife didn’t turn an eight-year-old boy into a fighter. But it made him less vulnerable than an eight-year-old boy with nothing. And in that world of gradations, the difference between less vulnerable and completely defenseless was not trivial.

Besides its use with coconuts, the knife had allowed them to build something even more valuable: a sling.

The idea had come to him with the same naturalness with which other memories from his past life had surfaced—not when actively sought, but when the right problem met the right moment. On empty nights in his apartment, he had watched documentaries about ancestral hunters, about children in distant lands using strips of leather or sturdy fabric to hurl stones with lethal precision. At the time, he had watched with the comfortable detachment of someone who consumes someone else’s reality as entertainment.

Now I needed what I had learned without knowing I was learning it.

Using the blade, he had cut long strips from a piece of thick fabric stolen from a forgotten clothesline in a deserted alley—a petty theft that hadn’t kept him awake at night, something that slightly disturbed him when he thought about it honestly. He patiently braided the strips, forming the body of the sling, and reinforced the central pocket with a stiffer scrap he had found among the port debris.

The result was simple but functional: a fabric loop with two handles to twist and release.

He had practiced on the edges of the forest or in hidden clearings behind the cabin, out of sight. He would choose smooth, heavy stones the size of his palm, swing the sling above his head with his still weak arms, feeling the weight and balance, and release it at the exact moment. At first, the throws were inaccurate—stones flying far from the target or landing too close. But his adult mind guided the training with a methodology that a real boy wouldn’t have: he adjusted the angle, controlled the speed of rotation, compensated for the light wind coming from the sea.

Day after day, the accuracy increased.

Strength, too—not the brute strength of an adult, but an efficiency that allowed him to hit targets at surprising distances for such a small body. He could now strike tree trunks ten or fifteen paces away with enough force to crack thin bark or startle smaller animals. It was, perhaps, his first real weapon in that world: silent, cheap, easy to conceal, and potentially lethal in the right hands. It didn’t make him a warrior. But it changed the equation significantly enough to matter.

There was a specific satisfaction in training with the sling that he had been slow to recognize but which was real: the satisfaction of a body learning something new. The child’s body, despite its evident limitations, had an adaptability that the adult body he had inhabited before did not possess to the same extent. The muscles responded to the training differently, more plastically, memorizing the patterns with a speed that sometimes surprised him. It was as if the body knew it was being formed and collaborated with the process.

He finished the piece of pulp and stood still for a moment, his eyes scanning the interior of the hut with the methodical attention he had developed over the weeks.

The makeshift door with the gourd alarm—intact, the string still taut and ready. The irregular stone used to open the first coconuts in the early days, before the knife, now leaning against the wall like a museum piece from a bygone era. The knife, hidden among the bedclothes, invisible to any casual glance. The sling, rolled up and stored inside the inner fold of the clothes he wore—always accessible, never visible.

Nothing was permanent. Everything was fragile. But there was an architecture in that space that hadn’t existed when he arrived—an organization that reflected weeks of thought about what mattered and where it should be.

He rose slowly, feeling his muscles protest with the honest language of accumulated effort. His arms ached from climbing and training. His legs, marked by scratches from the dense vegetation, throbbed with a dull pain that had become so constant he only noticed it when he stopped moving. His stomach, accustomed to scarcity, received each portion with profound gratitude, even when the portion was smaller than he desired.

Sunlight, filtered through holes in the ceiling, painted golden stripes on the pile of coconuts in the corner, illuminating the fibrous shells as if they were something precious. And they were, in a way that anyone who had never felt real hunger would take time to understand: not the kind of hunger that arrives before dinner, but the kind that wakes up with you and doesn’t go away, that colors every thought with a low, constant urgency, that transforms anything edible into an object of involuntary attention.

That battery represented autonomy. It was the difference between having to accept whatever the world offered and being able to choose.

Choice was a luxury in that place. And he had bought that luxury with sweat and blood on his wrists.

But there was something the coconuts couldn’t buy, and it had become increasingly evident in recent weeks.

Information.

He had absorbed what he could during his walks around the port—fragments of conversations, patterns of movement, unspoken hierarchies revealed in who yielded to whom, who received greetings and who gave them, who could stop in the middle of the street without anyone protesting and who constantly had to detour. It was a social map he had begun to draw mentally, layer upon layer, each observation adding a new detail.

The Pirate Lord—whose presence was felt everywhere but whose figure he had not yet seen up close—was the axis around which everything revolved. His men patrolled with the casual authority of those who need not justify their presence anywhere. They collected taxes from merchants, distributed work, and resolved disputes with the speed and finality of those who are not subject to scrutiny. There was a layer below them—foremen, intermediaries, figures who bridged the gap between central power and the daily life of the port—and below that layer was everyone else: workers, children, prostitutes, slaves, beggars, and the invisible ones like him.

Understanding this structure was as urgent as keeping one’s stomach full. Perhaps even more so. Food sustained the body for weeks. Understanding the environment sustained survival for much longer.

I had identified figures worth observing more closely. An old man who sat every day in the same corner near the second dock, smoking his pipe and receiving visits from various people—merchants, sailors, sometimes even men who dressed better than the average port dweller. He wasn’t a man of apparent power: his clothes were humble, his place modest. But people came to him, and that meant something. In any human environment, people went to the sources—of information, of favors, of judgment. That old man was a source of something.

There was also the solitary boy I had observed in the first few weeks—perhaps eleven years old, working without a group, rummaging through the trash with the efficiency of someone who had developed his own system. He wasn’t the type to stand still waiting for opportunities: he had a method, a route he followed with small, calculated variations. A boy with method was a boy with a mind. And a solitary boy with a mind was potentially an ally—or potentially a competitor, depending on how the approach was made.

These were questions for the coming weeks.

For now, there was a more immediate issue that had been postponed long enough.

The sling needed to be tested on something other than tree trunks.

There were small animals in the forest—birds perched on low branches, rodents that crossed the trails with the indifference of those who had never been hunted. They weren’t easy targets, especially for someone still developing precision. But they were protein. And protein was what the small body needed most if it wanted to continue transforming training into real strength and not just accumulated fatigue.

The question wasn’t whether he would try. It was when and how.

The forest at dusk was different from the forest at dawn—the light had a different quality, the animals had different movement patterns. He had noticed, in the last few weeks of coconut-gathering expeditions, that the birds were more active in the early hours after the sun rose high enough to warm them, before the midday heat pushed them into the higher shadows. This was the time. Not today—he was too tired, and the decision to use the sling for the first time in a real hunt required a rested body and a fully present mind.

Tomorrow.

He recorded the commitment in the same methodical way he had recorded everything else: not written, because there was nothing to write with and because paper was inherently vulnerable, but engraved in his mind with the intention of not forgetting it. The adult mind had advantages that the body did not, and one of them was the ability to treat a thought as a task and a task as an obligation.

He wiped his hands on the rags and stood up slowly, feeling every muscle announce his presence.

The pile of coconuts looked bigger in the midday light. It was the fruit of perseverance—not a motivational abstraction, but a concrete result stacked against the wall, verifiable, countable, weighable. He had learned, in those weeks, to appreciate the concrete in a way that his previous life had not taught him. In air-conditioned offices, results were abstractions—numbers in cells, percentages in reports, growth represented by graphs that climbed to the right. Here, the result was a pile of coconuts and the absence of hunger.

It was less elegant.

It was much more realistic.

He turned his gaze to the cabin’s entrance, to the light filtering through the cracks in the crooked frame, to the movement of the harbor that existed beyond those walls as something that continued independently of his attention. There was a world out there that I still didn’t fully understand. There were unanswered questions about where I was, how I had arrived, what was really behind those borrowed memories from my previous body that sometimes surfaced without warning like dream images in the midst of wakefulness.

But there was also the pile of coconuts. The knife hidden among the rags. The strap in the inside pocket. The mental map of the port that grew larger each day. And the growing clarity—not certainty, but clarity—that he was moving in the right direction, even without knowing exactly what the destination was.

For now, that was enough.

He gave one last look at the corner where the coconuts were piled against the wall, illuminated by the oblique rays of the perforated ceiling. Then he turned, opened the frame with his shoulder, and stepped out into the warmth and noise of the world he had been waiting for.

The next step had already been decided. It just needed to be taken.