One Piece Vol. 31: We'll Be Here
- ISBN
- 9781421534473
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 208
- Chapters
- 286–295
- Anime
- Season 6: Skypiea ep. 144–195
Chapters 286 to 295, and the point where a long battle stops to explain itself. Oda interrupts the fighting for a flashback to Montblanc Noland's arrival on the island, long before it was in the sky, and the golden bell the war is being fought over acquires a reason. That interruption is why this stretch reads better collected: a reader with the book in hand crosses from the history back into the battle in an afternoon, where the magazine audience waited weeks between the two. The volume takes its title from chapter 291. The anime's sixth season covers chapters 218 to 302, so a viewer has been through it. Viz lists 208 pages at $11.99, and buying volumes 24 to 46 as singles costs $275.77 at list against $244.99 for Box Set 2, which covers exactly that span.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The flashback is the argument of the whole arc. Noland cures a plague among the Shandians, is befriended, leaves, and is executed at home for lying about a city of gold that was real and had gone into the sky with the island, and the descendants of the people he helped are still ringing a bell for a man who is long dead. That is a shape One Piece returns to constantly: a record that survives in the wrong hands, and people fighting over an object because the explanation was lost. Cricket's insistence down on the sea that the city was real reads differently once this is known. In the present, Luffy does the thing nobody on either side has proposed, which is to treat the bell as something to ring rather than something to win, and the book takes its title, 'We'll Be Here', from chapter 291. The fighting is not over: the resolution is in Vol. 32, and the two books should be bought together.
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