One Piece Vol. 16: Carrying on His Will
- ISBN
- 9781421510934
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 137–145
- Anime
- Season 3: Introducing Chopper at the Winter Island ep. 78–92
Chapters 137 to 145, and the book where Tony Tony Chopper turns up, named in the title of chapter 139. The crew has come up a mountain looking for the island's only doctor, and what it finds is the physician rumored to be 140 years old, and her blue-nosed pet reindeer, who talks. He becomes the ship's doctor one volume later and has held the post for more than nine hundred chapters since, which makes this one of the few volumes in the early run that no reader can skip. Most of the book is not set in the present: a long flashback gives Chopper a past and gives the series its first sustained argument about medicine and who is allowed to practice it. Season 3 covers chapters 129 to 155, so the anime has been through all of it. Box Set 1 holds volumes 1 to 23, which Viz states outright, at $244.99.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The debut is not what the volume is remembered for. The back half leaves the present almost entirely for Hiriluk, the quack doctor who took in a reindeer nothing else would go near and kept him for a year. He is dying when he drives Chopper off, to spare him the watching, and Chopper, once he understands why, goes after a poisonous mushroom he believes will cure him. Hiriluk's last act is administrative and it is the one that counts: he arranges for Kureha to teach the reindeer medicine. Note the spelling. This site publishes Hiriluk, which is what the Library of Congress transcribed from the English books, and not the Hiruluk that most summaries of the series carry. Chapter 142 is 'Skull & Cherry Blossoms' and chapter 145 is 'Carrying on His Will', which is also the volume title, and the next book's title picks up the cherry blossoms from the first of the two.
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