-Real World-
The appearance of Im above the sky had not given most Marines time to brace themselves. The scene had detonated without warning, and the shockwave of that revelation was still rippling outward — through the Grand Line, through Mary Geoise, through every institution that believed it understood who ruled the world.
The Holy Land was no exception.
The World Government's holy seat had received the same information as everyone else. Its occupants were mortal bodies with no psychological preparation, and their inner worlds had fractured accordingly.
CP0 — the most loyal instruments of the Celestial Dragons, the shields of the heavens — had lived their entire careers without knowledge of Im's existence. That fact alone said everything. To call them the Celestial Dragons' shield was a generous framing. The truth was simpler: they had never been admitted to the core. They were tools kept outside the room where the real decisions were made.
Most Celestial Dragons fared no better. The majority of those residing in the Holy Land had spent their lives eating, drinking, and drowning in whatever pleasures their servants arranged. Their existence was a carefully constructed information cocoon — a comfortable, airless world from which nothing inconvenient could enter. Since the Sky Screen appeared, that cocoon had been slowly dissolving. Now, with Im revealed, it was gone entirely.
These Celestial Dragons had no record of Im anywhere — not in family histories, not in the annals of their ancestors. They had searched after the first broadcast hinted at the truth. They found nothing. The descendants of the Twenty Kings had been lied to from the very beginning, deceived so thoroughly and for so long that the deception had calcified into the shape of reality itself. The Five Elders had managed this lie for centuries, and the Celestial Dragons had paid them handsomely for the privilege.
Saint Mjosgard was seated with his father when Im appeared on the Sky Screen. Father and son had been sharing afternoon tea — a quiet, planned moment that was now thoroughly ruined.
"Im?" Mjosgard kept his voice low. "Was there an ancestor of the first twenty kings by that name?"
He was young. He had not devoted much attention to history, and the pampered life of a Celestial Dragon had never demanded it. That he remembered even one ancestor's name at all might be considered a form of filial gratitude.
His father did not answer.
The answer was already settled somewhere behind his eyes — but who could guarantee that the Five Elders had not installed monitoring devices in this room? The Donquixote branch had already been made an example through Doflamingo's family. Any branch that moved too aggressively risked being targeted next. The God's Knights held the power to sit in judgment over Celestial Dragons, and that kind of trouble was not something a father and son without military backing could afford to attract.
"We need to find Wendy first," his father said finally, setting down his teacup. "Without an Admiral who carries our name, we have no voice — not at the Five Elders' table, not anywhere."
Power, in the Holy Land, had always been controlled by five surnames. The Five Elders' chairs had not rotated in living memory. The five old men had locked those seats through sheer accumulation of years, and no Celestial Dragon below them had ever managed more than the role of a well-dressed servant to the God of their gods.
Across the Holy Land, similar calculations were running behind similar polite facades. The Rozward Saint family, who had recently threatened to retaliate against Mjosgard, quietly set that ambition aside. Infighting was a luxury for stable times, and these were not stable times.
The more pressing concern was Im himself. They had never met this ancestor. They did not know his temperament. He had lived since before the World Government's founding — limitless years, limitless accumulated power. A man with that kind of existence could determine the fate of entire bloodlines with no more effort than brushing dust from his sleeve. When the Sky Screen had first exposed him, no one had dared raise their voice.
The Celestial Dragons who had harbored ambitions toward the Five Elders' seats began to understand the shape of what they had been looking at. Those five chairs were not seats of power. They were operational posts — the face shown to the world while the real authority sat elsewhere, in a room full of flowers, watching butterflies land on his sleeve. To fight your way to one of those chairs was simply to fight your way into a more ornate form of servitude.
Im had existed since the founding. Each of the Five Elders, in succession across the centuries, had become his instrument. The method was patient and complete — more patient than any human institution had a right to be, more complete than any conspiracy deserved to succeed. The Celestial Dragons with genuine political appetite felt something cold move through them as they understood it.
From the very beginning, Im had broken the oath of the Twenty Kings. He had taken the Empty Throne alone, and the lie had continued, and might continue still, until someone came along with enough force to end it.
Inside Pangaea Castle, the Five Elders stood in silence, and the silence was worse than a reprimand.
They were waiting for instructions from Lord Im. None had arrived. The absence of orders from the Flower Palace was more unsettling than direct punishment would have been — a scolding, at least, would have confirmed they were still being addressed.
"If Lord Im were to rebuke us, I could accept that." Saint Peter spoke first, breaking the quiet that had stretched past the point of dignity. "What I cannot bear is this silence. It makes a man's thoughts go somewhere they shouldn't."
It was exactly what the other four had been thinking. Had Im, upon being exposed by the Sky Screen, simply decided to go cold — to withdraw and leave the five of them to manage a crisis without guidance, without sanction, without even the comfort of knowing their actions had a direction?
Im held their lives in both hands. He could withdraw what he had given them at any moment, regardless of distance, regardless of circumstance. Life and death, for the Five Elders, had always been a matter of Lord Im's attention.
"Perhaps we should request an audience again," one voice offered.
"We have requested three times." Saint Nasujuro's tone closed the subject. "Lord Im has not responded. A fourth inquiry will not produce a different result — it will only register as an annoyance."
The five old men held their silence.
Saint Saturn, for his part, found one thing worth satisfaction in the chaos.
The second-generation Seraph — Homelander — had performed beyond expectation. The broadcast had shown him facing Tien Shinhan, King Ant, and Garou in a three-on-one, and he had handled it without requiring assistance. Vegapunk had created something extraordinary, whatever else the man was.
The problem was exactly that: whatever else the man was.
Vegapunk and his satellite clones had been conducting small acts of quiet defiance for too long. York's death, Stussy's harboring — each incident was a grain of sand in a wound that had not been allowed to close. Saturn's patience was not infinite. The Seraph project's progress had slowed to an unacceptable pace, and the cause was not insufficient resources.
The Giant God Soldiers shown on the Sky Screen were a separate concern. Their physiques dwarfed even giants, and while the broadcast had not revealed the full range of their capabilities, the scale alone was enough. Biological weapons of that magnitude should not be developing inside a Marine facility with the World Government kept at arm's length. Caesar Clown, Saturn had decided, was a more suitable candidate for that project — someone who could be placed under direct Celestial Dragon control, rather than left to accumulate leverage in a Marine laboratory.
It was a problem that could be solved. Most things could be solved, given the right application of pressure at the right moment.
In the Flower Palace, surrounded by blossoms, Im had not moved.
The butterflies drifted between flowers without concern. He watched them. His fingers turned one of the Marine bounty notices over slowly — Captain Luffy of the Straw Hat Pirates, the red cross he had drawn cutting through the young man's grinning face. On the floor nearby, scattered like fallen leaves, lay dozens more.
The newspaper featuring Princess Vivi rested beside Luffy's wanted poster. He looked at the two of them for a long time.
"Interesting," Im said, to no one. "Interesting, Buggy. I wonder how many more surprises you have left in you."
His voice disturbed no one. The butterflies continued to move among the flowers, indifferent to the weight that lived behind those red eyes, to the centuries of patience resting behind that stillness, to the particular quality of attention he was now giving to two very ordinary-looking young people on pieces of paper.