Darkness.
An endless deep sea, black as congealed ink.
Teach stood on the water, staring down beneath his feet as the strange grin on his face slowly froze.
"Where is this..."
Thud.
A muffled sound rose from the seabed, as though something had struck the walls of a cage.
Teach's heart sank.
The next second, a giant eye opened in the depths of the abyss.
Then a second, a third... More shadows writhed slowly beneath the sea, stirring pitch-black currents.
That was no Devil Fruit power.
It was a living creature.
Teach suddenly remembered the last thing he had heard Imu say before he ambushed Rock.
Darkness is not power. It is a cage.
He had always believed the Dark-Dark Fruit was the most special Logia, capable of suppressing Devil Fruit Users and swallowing everything.
It turned out those were merely locks—the outer shell of a cage.
What was truly imprisoned at its heart was a consciousness.
David Jones, the king of that age, the overlord of the seas, one of the sources of the will of D.
Eight hundred years ago, Imu had been unable to kill David Jones.
All Imu could do was take him apart.
David Jones's consciousness had been sealed inside his Dark-Dark Fruit, while his flesh had been locked forever in the depths of the sea.
And the vessel best suited to rebuilding his body—the Octopus-Octopus Fruit, Mythical Zoan, Model: Kraken—had been sealed separately in the deepest reaches of the Holy Land, Mary Geoise.
Layer upon layer of seals had kept everyone away for eight hundred years.
Imu believed that as long as those two things never met, Davy would never return.
One lay in the ocean abyss, the other atop the continent.
One in darkness, the other in light.
For eight hundred years, no