>>280650274
also, I don't think there was ever an actual nika religion prior to someone eating the nika fruit. I think devil fruits were an invention of the lunarians to induce artifical evolution, and that not only the name "devil fruit" but also all the names of individual fruits were not what they were really called. To put in another way, I think the Lunarians made an Evolution Inducer that granted a powerful, rubbery body, and it was a particularly high grade one. But due to a flaw in the creation process, the flaw that resulted in all the fruits that came to be called "Zoans" possessing a latent will of their own, the fruit managed to 'escape', where it fell down into the slave mines of the god of earth and got eaten by a starving slave, who used his newfound strength to break free at the crack of dawn. The slaves, in their own language, began calling that guy "Nika" and "God of the Sun" and celebrating the day of their freedom with a big party that over the generations became a religious festival. and so the next time someone ate that fruit and demonstrated those powers, those that had read the accounts of those escaped slaves went "hang on, those are Nika's powers. so what he ate must have been the Nika fruit"
the original name of the fruit was probably something clinical like "Forced Evolution Inducer DX no.562K."
