After hearing Beckman out, Shanks fell utterly silent.
The dim warehouse lights stretched their shadows into twisted shapes.
He clenched Griffin's hilt at his waist, his knuckles creaking under the strain, the contours of his bones almost piercing the thin layer of skin.
He had not been persuaded by that grand, absolutely fair system.
Even now, he retained the fervor he had felt when he swore his oath before Captain Roger all those years ago.
Pursuing freedom remained his obsession.
Shanks knew perfectly well that the world Beckman described was a true paradise for ninety-nine percent of the ordinary people on these seas.
No pirates would break down doors in the dead of night to plunder fishing villages. No nobles would ride roughshod over people and impose taxes too heavy to survive. No children would become orphans because Sea Kings had swallowed their parents.
As long as they worked hard and followed the rules, even a fisherman's son from the lowest rung of society could rise above his station and attain a life he had never dared dream of.
But in his eyes, the foundation of this paradise was an iron cage Ross had forged out of his own selfish desires.
From on high, Ross had laid out every course, using welfare and stability to define what was good, what was bad, what kind of life deserved praise, and what choices deserved contempt.
Everyone raced down that prescribed track, growing increasingly alike, becoming well-functioning cogs in one enormous machine.
Smooth, standardized, replaceable cogs.
They had been stripped of the right to veer off course in a raging storm, stripped of the freedom to make mistakes. They would never understand the true freedom of sailing blindly into unknown waters and laughing aloud in the eye of a storm.
That freedom was