Marshall D Teach’s Bounty at 3,996,000,000 Berries

This raise was published alongside the new map of the Emperors. The day the world learns that Kaidou and Big Mom went down at Onigashima, it also learns that Luffy and Buggy have taken the empty seats, and all four figures come out together. Blackbeard is the only one of the four whose place was not decided in Wano, and the only one whose number moved anyway.

That is the most economical reading available: two of the four are gone, whatever is still standing gets re-priced at the same moment, and the man who was not there rises on his own. His contribution to Wano was to be elsewhere. He had laughed at the paper not long before for calling Luffy an Emperor already, thinking it premature. The two names are now printed side by side.

Elsewhere did not mean idle. In the same window he sent Van Augur and Kuzan into Totto Land to seize Charlotte Pudding, whom he has held ever since, and he had already locked Gecko Moria up on Hachinosu after Moria came looking for Absalom and refused to join him. What followed is not inside this number: Amazon Lily and the Mero Mero no Mi, Koby held prisoner on his island, Law beaten and his submarine destroyed on the road out of Wano all come later.

He lands second of the four, fifty-two million nine hundred thousand short of Shanks. For a man whose whole method is to act where nobody is watching, a bounty that climbs because other people fell is not an accident of timing.