The weather on the Grand Line was unpredictable, but at this moment, it generously granted them a cloudless sky. Sunlight poured unobstructed onto the sea, setting its deep blue ablaze with dazzling light that stretched to where the horizon met the sky, until the end of that curve blurred away. Yet this vast, monotonous sight, watched for too long, could leave a person with a peculiar sense of insignificance and emptiness.
Aaron Ball stood alone on the Blossom's uppermost deck, his hands resting on the railing at its foremost edge, his silver-white hair stirring in the sea breeze. Those "scraps" of memories about the Pirate King from another world seemed steeped in the boundless sea at this moment, growing heavy and clear: the Void Century, the Great Kingdom, that war that shook the world... A mad notion, something that had once existed merely as "lore," now gnawed at his reason with unbearable reality-this world had not always been a collection of islands divided by the Red Line and the Grand Line. In the distant past, it might well have had intact continents. The ancestors of the Celestial Dragons, Imu, had fought a decisive war against the being called Joy Boy... or the force bearing that name, shattering the very foundations of civilization. That unimaginable power had sunk the land, reshaping the broken plates into the Red Line that encircled the planet, like a colossal cage or dam separating the "inner sea" from the "outer sea," and utterly reshaping the course of life and civilization.
Sinking an entire continent, reshaping it... "Power" on that scale...
An almost physical shudder crept up his spine. Even though he could already control magnetic fields, crush Sea Kings, and threaten the structure of islands, everything he currently possessed seemed as laughable as a child's sandcastle