Early on, One Piece's Eiichiro Oda established very clear rules about how the Devil Fruits work. Anyone who eats a one will gain extraordinary powers that could alter their body, cause an animal transformation or ruin their life entirely. However, this power comes at a cost as they will lose their ability to swim, become weak if they touch kairoseki stone, and if a Devil Fruit user eats a second one, they will die. Oh, and the fruits also taste super bad. But the incredible thing about these rules is how they're malleable enough to allow aberrations without breaking entirely.

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Devil Fruits-One Piece

After Whitebeard's last stand against Blackbeard and his newly formed crew of Impel Down prisoners, the man considered the strongest in the world took his final breath. Taking advantage of the situation, the vile pirates put a sheet over Whitebeard as Teach Blackbeard walked under it. When he came out from under it, he possessed power of Whitebeard's Devil Fruit, the Quake-Quake Fruit. With it came the ability to create tremors, in addition to Blackbeard's own power to control darkness from the Dark-Dark Fruit. Teach became the first person to ever possess two Devil Fruit abilities, and though it's still unclear how he was able to take Whitebeard's power or even be able to possess two without dying, there's one solid theory that comes from another Yonko.

When a Devil Fruit user dies, the fruit they obtained their power from regrows somewhere else in the world. There can never exist more than one Devil Fruit with the same power nor the same user. However, decades prior, Charlotte Linlin, better known as the Yonko, Big Mom, got her own Devil Fruit ability in a similarly unusual way. It all began where she grew up: on Elbaf, home of the Giant race, in an orphanage run by the nun Mother Caramel.

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The young Big Mom-- One Piece

In chapter 867, after an incident that forced them to leave Elbaf, the orphanage celebrated Linlin's 6th birthday with a delightful tea party. Linlin unknowingly devoured everything and, when she finished eating, her surroundings were empty and her family was nowhere in sight, but she now possessed Mother Caramel's Soul-Soul Fruit powers, giving her the ability to manipulate the souls of living beings. It's a horrifically morbid truth to behold, but Linlin must have devoured her entire family without realizing, which is how she obtained her adoptive mother's powers. With that being the case, it seems that a person can obtain a Devil Fruit user's power by eating them or a part them, so it could mean Blackbeard stole the Quake-Quake Fruit's power by eating part of Whitebeard or at least one of his organs.

This is only one possible theory on how one pirate acquired the other's abilities, but the fact that such an event is still theorized to this day speaks volumes about how much is still unknown about the workings of the Devil Fruits. Who knows how Oda will surprise us in the future.

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