DISCLAIMER: I don't own this, nor am I making any money from this. It all belongs to Eiichiro Oda and Shou Hinata. This is a fan made translation by yours truly with a lot of help from dictionaries (I know the grammar pretty well, needed help with the vocabulary).

And a big thanks to Black' Victor Cachat for checking this over for me to make sure my English made sense, as sometimes I'd get a little too caught up in translating.

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Okay, so hello and welcome to Novel A 1. This is a novel for One Piece made of three chapters about Ace's journey from the start of his crew to his departure for Fishman Island from Sabaody. Each chapter is just a single event/story in that trip.

These stories were originally published one at a time in the One Piece Magazine's three volumes, then bound into one book and published on April 4, 2018. Since I was in Japan at the time of release, I bought a copy, and trying to do something nice for the fandom, sat down and translated it all in my free time.

Be understanding about my translation in that I'm not fully fluent in Japanese at the time of this project, but know enough to get by.

A few notes for my translation of the novel are:

There were a couple of spots with extra space between paragraphs which are marked by a centered "o-o-o" since you can't have blank lines here.

I left 'Mera Mera no Mi' in original Japanese as I personally prefer the Japanese names of the Devil Fruits and at this point can't really stand a mix of the Japanese with the English 'Fruit.' Part of this has to do with certain Devil Fruit names, such as the Mera Mera no Mi, deriving from Japanese onomatopoeia (in this case the crackling sound of flames) and part of it is the express uniformity of the Japanese names always being two syllables versus the English attempt to be so (not that the official English translators don't do a great job picking English Fruit names).

However, I did use 'Fire Fist' over 'Hiken' as it is more common and accepted to do the English of epithets as they generally don't have the translational issues or lost nuances (except Whitebeard because 'hige' is both mustache and beard). And since Ace's epithet is taken from his technique, I have also used the English translations of his techniques .

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Thanks for reading this little intro and enjoy the stories!