Beginning Training

Bell was one of CP0, the Celestial Dragons' strongest shield. Yet lately, he had been feeling deeply troubled.

Though CP0 was known as the Celestial Dragons' strongest shield, the gap in strength between individual agents was actually enormous.

It was rather embarrassing to say, but the weakest members of CP0 were the black-clad Bodyguards assigned to protect the Celestial Dragons. Bell was one such black-clad Bodyguard.

It couldn't be helped. Protecting Celestial Dragons sounded important, but in reality? How many hotheaded fools on the seas dared to provoke them? Following these Celestial Dragons mostly meant bullying men and women and oppressing commoners.

How much strength did that require? Anyone truly capable would surely disdain such acts of bullying the weak.

And among all the black-clad Bodyguards serving the Celestial Dragons, Bell had it especially easy.

The Donquixote family Bell protected, aside from the eldest son Doflamingo sharing the same hobbies as other Celestial Dragons, were all quite easygoing. Most of the time, they could even skip oppressing commoners altogether. They also treated their agents with a fair degree of respect.

Thus, Bell's life as a CP0 Special Agent was exceptionally comfortable. It was practically a dream job: little work, plenty of money, and no worries.

Yet recently, for some unknown reason, the young Celestial Dragon Doflamingo had gone mad. He had abandoned his hobby of training slaves and actually wanted to work out with Bell. He even wanted to learn the Navy Six Styles?

Heavens have mercy, were Celestial Dragons capable of enduring the hardships of physical training? Back when Bell had risen above the rest to become a CP0 member, even if only one of the weakest, who knew how much sweat he had shed, how much suffering he had endured, and how many injuries he had sustained?

During that time, the sweat he shed from training every month could nearly fill a large vat! There had never been a day when he had a single unbruised patch of flesh on his body! Every year, he used more bandages for training injuries than the clothes he had bought over all these years!

Could a pampered Celestial Dragon possibly endure that kind of suffering?

Honestly, Celestial Dragons who wanted to train themselves and become strong did exist. Or rather, the vast majority of Celestial Dragons had entertained such thoughts.

But as for those who could persist... well, in any case, the Celestial Dragons Bell saw in Holy Land Mary Geoise were still a bunch of useless trash.

In his eyes, his current young master was probably no different, just another case of fleeting enthusiasm.

So at first, Bell had no intention of teaching him anything real. He only planned to teach him a few movements similar to radio calisthenics and let him exercise a little.

Then...

"Is this the top-secret CP0 training method you taught me?" Doflamingo asked with a cold face as he looked at Bell, who had just demonstrated a full set of radio calisthenics.

"That's right, Doflamingo Saint. With your talent, as long as you train a little, you will be able to..."

"Have you gotten too comfortable? Do you want to taste what it's like for your whole family to become Celestial Dragon slaves?" Doflamingo sneered and directly cut off Bell's nonsense.

Bell immediately cracked. Dropping to his knees, he begged, "Spare me, Doflamingo Saint! What I taught you really is..."

"Stop trying to fool me. Tell me, if I train at this pace, when will I master the Navy Six Styles?"

"Uh!" Panic instantly appeared on Bell's face. He had never expected Doflamingo to know the Navy and CP0 training methods so well. He even knew about the Navy Six Styles. How was he supposed to keep making things up now?

With the flashy but useless moves he had taught him, Doflamingo would not master the Navy Six Styles even after eight lifetimes of training!

"Listen carefully, Bell." A gentle smile appeared on Doflamingo's face, and his voice was incomparably soft. Yet to Bell, both his expression and voice were as terrifying as a demon's.

"Either you train me properly and help me master at least three of the Navy Six Styles within five years."

"Or you can wait for your whole family to become Celestial Dragon slaves! I know quite a few fellow Celestial Dragons who love training slaves. When the time comes, I guarantee your entire family will beg for life and be unable to die!"

Hearing this, Bell trembled all over in terror. Deceiving and fooling Celestial Dragons was something these personal Bodyguards did quite often. After all, Celestial Dragons looked little better than idiots.

But if they were exposed, and a Celestial Dragon seized their whole family as slaves, CP0 would absolutely not say a word in their defense. On the contrary, CP0 would be the first to act!

With no other choice, Bell could only speak seriously. "Doflamingo Saint, even if I teach you properly, mastering three Navy Six Styles within five years is..."

"That's your problem. I'll train very seriously, but if the results fail to meet my expectations, I don't think you want to know what the consequences will be."

It was over. Bell felt the world spinning around him, his face like someone whose parents had just died.

Even a genuinely diligent and talented CP0 Special Agent would find it extraordinarily difficult to master three Navy Six Styles after five years of training starting at the age of seven, let alone a pampered Celestial Dragon who could not endure hardship.

Unfortunately, Bell had no other options at this point. He could only hope that future training would make Doflamingo retreat in the face of difficulty.

But if he trained Doflamingo too harshly, would Doflamingo immediately turn his whole family into slaves?

Caught in this dilemma, the helpless Bell began training Doflamingo.

What Bell had not expected was that Doflamingo's training was not merely talk. He truly did it, fully keeping up with Bell's training requirements and even performing better than expected.

In truth, the training methods Bell had learned from CP0 were simple and brutal: running, weight-bearing exercises, rock climbing, all kinds of strength training, and most importantly, sparring practice.

In One Piece, intricate and elaborate technical styles were simply not popular. Few people focused on training technique. What mattered was overwhelming strength.

No matter how fancy your moves were, if you lacked strength, then against those freakish physiques on the seas, you could not even break through their defenses. You would not even have enough power to scratch them.

Conversely, if your strength and speed were sufficient, then as long as you smashed down with a domineering punch, any enemy could be blasted to pieces.

The top figures on the seas, whether the Three Admirals, the Four Emperors, the Navy Hero, or the World's Greatest Swordsman, were all monsters with extraordinary physiques.

Even swordsmen, who should theoretically have paid the most attention to the subtlety of their techniques, only relied on great strength, fast speed, and at most a bit of profound artistic conception in their swordsmanship. No matter how elegant their move names sounded, their techniques still followed the simple, brutal path of splitting mountains and shattering seas.

This meant there were no great secrets to training in the Pirate World. Basically, as long as you did not train yourself to death, you trained yourself like you wanted to die.

There was no need to say anything about Doflamingo's physical talent. As someone firmly in the second tier when the story began decades later, aside from first-tier figures like the Four Emperors and Three Admirals, his talent was no weaker than anyone's.

As for his will to train, having suffered enough from Celestial Dragon abuse, the torment of a broken cheat, and the ravages of illness, he would not show the slightest weakness over such a small amount of pain.

Under such madman-like training, Doflamingo's rate of improvement was naturally anything but slow.

Humans in the Pirate World possessed physical potential far beyond that of ordinary worlds. This was especially true for exceptionally gifted individuals, who often displayed extraordinary traits from childhood.

Not to mention a super monster like Big Mom, who could defeat a giant hero at the age of five. Even the seemingly more ordinary three Luffy brothers were monsters who could chase wild beasts through the mountains at five or six years old.

At the Training Grounds, Doflamingo was practicing swordsmanship.

After several months of training, his height had shot up dramatically, leaving him little different from an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy.

His figure seemed to have grown much fatter than it had been a few months ago. But on closer inspection, he was wearing a thick layer of clothing that made him look somewhat bloated. It was actually weighted clothing made from special materials.

Gripping a wooden sword, he practiced slash after slash. The sweat dripping beneath his feet had already soaked the entire ground.

His once-focused eyes had gradually begun to lose focus, yet his slashing movements had not deformed in the slightest. He still mechanically counted, "9,981, 9,982, 9,983..."

Bell, standing to one side, already wore a slightly numb expression.

Ten thousand full-force slashes did not sound like an especially difficult task. In reality, it had taken Bell nearly half a year to achieve it back then, and he had not even been wearing twenty pounds of weighted clothing.

Most importantly, he had already been thirteen or fourteen at the time, while Doflamingo was only a seven-year-old child.

Comparing the two, Bell felt that all his previous years of training had been wasted on a dog.