The weather was lovely today, with bright sunshine and a cloudless sky.
"..."
So Donquixote Doflamingo was lying leisurely in the royal palace's back garden atop the King's Plateau, sunbathing and sipping tea.
This was where the Dressrosa palace stood, at the highest point in the Kingdom of Dressrosa. Together with its towering walls, it protected—and watched over—the entire town. It was also the Donquixote family's private residence. Any family member of officer rank or above was entitled to live here, and Doflamingo himself was more than that: he was the ruler of this place, the king of the Kingdom of Dressrosa!
"Whew..."
Looking up at the sun, taking in the scent wafting from the flower fields in the distance and the noisy uproar from the bullfighting colosseum nearby, Donquixote Doflamingo let out a breath and gradually fell into thought.
He was thirty-nine years old now. He still remembered how he had been born into a Celestial Dragon family as the eldest son of the Donquixote family. He had lived with his family in the Holy Land, enjoying all the privileges of the Celestial Dragons. His life had been good.
And yet...
One day, his father, Saint Donquixote Homing, had suddenly gone mad. He insisted that Celestial Dragons and ordinary people were all human, announced that he would give up his Celestial Dragon privileges, and took their family of four away from the Holy Land of Mary Geoise to live like ordinary people.
It was then that hardship first came crashing down on him.
After leaving the Holy Land, the family got by on the meager savings they had brought with them. But they had lost their former privileges, and the ignorant masses who had once suffered at the hands of the Celestial Dragons vented their resentment on the family.