One Piece Vol. 36: The Ninth Justice
- ISBN
- 9781421534527
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 216
- Chapters
- 337–346
- Anime
- Season 8: Water Seven ep. 229–263
The title points at an organization the reader has not met yet, and meeting it changes what this arc is about. Chapters 337 to 346 have the Straw Hats break into the shipyard's headquarters to find Robin and settle whose side she is on, and find that somebody else has broken in first, after the blueprints to an ancient weapon. Until now Water Seven has been a story about a ruined ship and a city that turned on its visitors. From this book on it is a story about the World Government. The anime's eighth season covers chapters 321 to 377. Three singles cost $35.97 at Viz list and an Omnibus Edition book covers three volumes for $16.99, but Viz names the contents of only the first omnibus book, so which one holds this volume is our arithmetic and not the publisher's.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Cipher Pol No. 9 is the change. The masked intruders unmask as Robin and people who had been working at Galley-La, which rewrites the friendly scenes of the two books before this one, and it establishes how One Piece handles the World Government from here: it does not send an army, it sends people who have lived in the city long enough to be trusted with the keys. The blueprints they take are forgeries, and the real ones are held by Franky, a local eccentric the story has been keeping in the background. Robin's position is deliberately unreadable in this volume. She is doing the government's work and her reason is withheld until Vol. 38, which is the strongest piece of plotting in the arc. What the book costs the reader is comfort: the crew spends it losing, being wrong about who its allies were, and chasing a member who does not want to be found.
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