The King of Shipping's brazen confidence.
Seemed utterly ridiculous in the eyes of Spandine and his son, Moria, Crocodile, Enel, Lucci, and the others.
Indeed, every person who had become an underground king on the seas possessed extraordinary methods and courage.
Some of their methods and deeply intertwined power structures had even made the former World Government wary.
After running into obstacles several times, the World Government realized it could not swallow up these underground kings.
And was forced to abandon the idea of annexing them, instead choosing to coexist with them on these seas through cooperation.
These underground kings had developed a mistaken belief.
They believed that as long as they maintained the complexity and secrecy of their organizations, no matter how powerful another force was, it would be unable to do anything to them.
But that had been the old situation.
The seas were no longer operating under the old order.
Every illegal organization.
Required one crucial thing in order to exist: order.
Only under the protection of order could so-called gray industries and black markets arise.
But now, with sea levels constantly rising and wars breaking out everywhere, most of these seas had long since lost all semblance of order.
In truth, on the seas as they now were, in this era of warlords rising and fighting one another.
The forces controlled by the great underground dark kings had already been squeezed to their limits.
After all, when people could not even fill their stomachs, the thing most likely to arise was unrest.
And under such circumstances, those so-called underground gangs and interest groups had no ground left to prey upon the weak.
Dark forces needed order to protect them.
Once order was gone, however, amid chaos where no one knew whether they would survive the next