After obtaining Pluto's design blueprints, Xiao suddenly remembered something—
The surviving members of the Blackbeard Pirates were still locked away in his prison.
That realization made him pause.
Those people were not disposable pawns.
They were essential chess pieces.
If he wanted to ignite a war large enough to engulf the world, he would still need to rely on them.
From the current state of affairs, although rebellion had begun to sprout across the seas, its foundational strength was still pitifully weak.
Yes, many people were now waving the banner of resistance—but most of them were nothing more than moss clinging to cracks in stone. At best, they amounted to scattered riots and small-scale chaos.
In this tide of resistance, there were almost no figures capable of truly carrying the banner.
Once the World Government became serious, once the admirals were dispatched in force, all of these rebels would be crushed beneath iron heels without exception.
And this was inevitable.
Because the center of the world's stage had never belonged to civilians, nor to so-called revolutionary forces.
In the world of One Piece, only two powers truly ruled everything:
Pirates.
The World Government.
The Navy and the pirates were the only camps that gathered enough top-tier combat power to influence the fate of the world.
All other forces—no matter how numerous—were little more than cannon fodder before these two giants.
This was a world where quality of power crushed quantity absolutely.
No matter how many soldiers you had, if you lacked top-level combatants, you were irrelevant.
If one truly wanted to throw the world into chaos, civilians alone were useless.
The pirates had to be dragged down.
Only by leveraging the pirates could one truly confront a World Government that had mobilized its full strength.
But even that was no easy task.
In recent years, whether intentionally or not, the World Government and the Four Emperors had jointly maintained a strange balance, causing the entire world to enter an era of superficial stability.
The possibility of a full-scale world war had dropped to its lowest point in decades.
And the root cause of this situation was clear.
The Four Emperors.
Rather than calling them "Pirate Emperors," Xiao found it far more accurate to call them—
Four losers.
The existence of the Four Emperors was not some glorious achievement.
It was the result of failure.
They had failed to win the battle for the throne of Pirate King.
They had failed to unite against the Navy.
Thus, these four powerful yet mutually hostile forces could only confront one another endlessly in the New World, locked in a deadlock with no victor.
Given this reality, the world had no choice but to grant them a title.
What made it even more amusing was that this so-called title of honor was, in truth, steeped in irony.
Whoever coined the term "Four Emperors" was undoubtedly a genius.
Calling a group of people unqualified to be kings by the title of emperors—
Was that praise?
Or mockery?
Think about it carefully.
Most pirates treated the Four Emperors as ultimate targets, believing that defeating one would allow them to become the next "Pirate Emperor."
It could only be said that these people were painfully uneducated.
They couldn't even hear the ridicule hidden in the name.
The fundamental reason the Four Emperors were losers lay in one fact—
Most of them had already abandoned the dream of becoming Pirate King.
On the Grand Line, ordinary compasses were useless.
The unique magnetic chaos of the seas made conventional navigation impossible. Crews could only rely on Log Poses, which recorded the magnetic field of an island and pointed the way to the next.
In the first half of the Grand Line, this system still functioned reasonably well.
Magnetic recording usually took only a few days.
But once a ship entered the New World, everything changed.
Recording an island's magnetic field could take months—sometimes even years.
At the beginning, pirates set sail filled with longing for the legendary treasure known as ONE PIECE.
But as time passed, as years piled up, that once-glorious goal drifted farther and farther away.
They couldn't find routes.
They couldn't determine direction.
And on top of that, the World Government suppressed them relentlessly.
Eventually, the pirates were forced to huddle within the Grand Line, struggling just to survive.
Under such conditions, internal conflict became inevitable.
Pirates began slaughtering one another.
Only by occupying territory could they endure.
The second half of the Grand Line turned into a bloody grinder, a battlefield where countless pirate crews annihilated each other in endless melees.
After this brutal culling, only four pirate forces survived.
They stood at the peak, blood-soaked and exhausted—
Thus, the Four Emperors were born.
These four forces were evenly matched.
They clashed countless times, yet none could decisively overpower the others.
So, they changed strategy.
Relying on overwhelming military strength and massive fleets, they began recruiting pirates from all corners of the world—people still obsessed with the myth of ONE PIECE.
In doing so, they stabilized their own power while ensuring no challenger could threaten their position.
As the years passed, the mentality of the Four Emperors quietly shifted.
Those once-ambitious conquerors gradually chose to lie flat.
Perhaps, in the beginning, they truly wished to become Pirate King.
But once their power solidified and their status stabilized, ambition gave way to comfort.
They stopped pursuing domination through constant war.
Each Emperor settled into their own territory, ruling like monarchs, living comfortably and securely.
As for the so-called "great treasure," no one truly abandoned the search—
But it was no longer their sole pursuit.
Now, all they had to do was dispatch fleets to continue exploring.
Their own lives of luxury and power were unaffected.
More importantly, every new island they reached allowed them to create a special navigational tool—
Eternal Poses.
These pointers permanently locked onto the magnetic field of a specific island.
No matter how the ship moved, the direction never changed.
With enough Eternal Poses, the Four Emperors could freely traverse the seas at will.
In truth, their lives were now even more comfortable than that of the Pirate King himself.
After all, what did becoming Pirate King really offer?
Gol D. Roger achieved it—and still ended up executed by the World Government.
Compared to that fate, being a Four Emperor was far more carefree.
Whether or not they ever became Pirate King had lost its meaning.
What they wanted now was stability.
And so, under the subtle guidance of the World Government, the Four Emperors transformed—
From dragon slayers of the past
Into the four great evil dragons of the New World.
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