Fade in on the gleaming white spires of Mariejois, serene and perfect from the outside. Cut inside — a hidden underground lab beneath the Holy Land, where pain and precision collide. This is not a place of healing. It's a sensory torture chamber, a lab designed for one purpose: to craft perfection through suffering.
Enter Vayne Kurōzu, no more than ten years old. Ears wrapped in cybernetic mesh, restrained, hooked to tubes, wires, and sensory amplifiers. The rogue scientist, obsessed with his project — The Perfect Listener — explains how sight only dulls instinct. True control is achieved through sound: heartbeat shifts, air displacement, even the silence before a lie.
“You’ll never need to see again,” he whispers. “You’ll hear the world break before it even begins to crack.”
Vayne is told he is not like the others — not just a slave. He's Celestial-blooded. The bastard son of a Donquixote noble and a broken slave woman. That’s why the project began: his unique genetics, his unnatural sensitivity to sound, made him ideal for the experiment.
The scientist calls him Donquixote Vayne, mockingly.
“Perfection born from filth.”
Quick flashbacks — distorted memories of his mother being taken, of his “father” sneering, of being handed off like an object.
Age 11. Vayne, now leaner, stronger, and deadly calm. He’s memorized every step, every breath, every voice in the lab. Using nothing but sound, he navigates in total darkness. The audience sees flashes of his internal map — a mental sonar of Mariejois' underbelly.
He performs surgery on himself in silence. The control chip — a spine-hugging nightmare — is extracted with a scalpel, a spoon, and sheer nerve. Blood runs down his back. He doesn’t scream.
Age 12. He makes his move. In one night, seven researchers are found eviscerated, sliced with surgical precision — each death a twisted autopsy. No cameras caught him. No alarms triggered. Just blood and silence.
He flees to the surface. But not before leaving a message scratched into the wall:
“I heard every lie.”
Now 16. The episode cuts between scenes of a now-older Vayne on a rundown ship, cloaked, face hidden by a blindfold, listening to the world. He tracks bounties by heartbeat, wins duels with sound alone, and operates on the living and dead with frightening curiosity.
His goal? Not treasure. Not fame.
He wants to reach Impel Down.
Not to free anyone — but to find the worst criminals in the world… and dissect them.
Final flashback: Vayne’s last memory of his brother — warm, kind, maybe the only person who treated him like a human. In the chaos of the escape, Vayne lashes out blindly and mortally wounds him.
Then… Doflamingo enters the memory. Cold. Laughing. Slaughters the rest of the family, calls them all “weak.”
To Doflamingo, Vayne is just a failed side project.
“You're just the echo of trash. But hey… echoes can still scream.”
Vayne, standing on the deck of a ship headed for the Grand Line. A storm is brewing.
“Impel Down holds them. The monsters. The worst of the worst.”
“I will carve them open… and maybe find myself inside their guts.”
Cue the Episode 1 Ending Theme.