On the calm waters of the East Blue.
Gern sailed alone aboard a small sailboat he had "borrowed" from an East Blue branch, drifting slowly with the waves.
He lay on his back in a deck chair, wearing sunglasses as he searched for an "old acquaintance" who had been hiding for years.
To be honest, the Four Blues were no small place in the world of the Pirate King.
At least in the vast East Blue, finding someone who was deliberately hiding-especially someone who could fly through the sky-
Was like finding a needle in a haystack, difficult beyond measure.
But since Gern had come, he naturally had a way.
He leisurely sat up in his deck chair, picked up the notebook beside him, and flipped through it again.
The notebook was densely packed with information he had gathered through various channels over this period.
Most of its contents were eyewitness reports from islands, towns, and fishermen across the East Blue.
[In the waters near the Goa Kingdom, fishermen claimed to have seen a massive dark shape passing through the clouds after a storm, seemingly the outline of an island.]
[Children in Shells Town reported seeing a "flying mountain," but the adults dismissed it as childish nonsense.]
[A merchant ship in Orange Town reported seeing an island inexplicably flying, with the sky turning an unusual color...]
[...]
These fragmented, vague reports, most of which the locals dismissed as jokes or hallucinations, would never be considered credible by any legitimate intelligence agency.
That was precisely why Golden Lion had been able to remain hidden in the sky for so many years with the power of his Float-Float Fruit.
So Gern had taken these seemingly useless reports and cross-referenced them,
Analyzing their frequency and locations to sketch out a rough area where