Bounty of Nerona Imu – credible but non-canon

The throne at Mary Geoise is officially empty — that's the story the World Government tells to preserve the appearance of equality among nations. It isn't true. Imu actually sits there, the sole confirmed survivor of the Twenty Kings who ruled during the Void Century, and it's before Imu that the Five Elders kneel, Vivi's portrait in hand in chapter 908, asking which light should be erased from official history next.

The authority isn't theoretical. In chapter 1085's Reverie flashback, Imu and the Elders kill King Cobra and try to execute Sabo and Wapol. In chapter 1125, Imu alone strips Saturn of his immortality over a failure at Egghead, reducing one of the Five to a lifeless skeleton in front of the other four. No other character in the story, pirate or Marine, has ever exercised that kind of power over an Elder. It's also Imu, not any of the Elders, who orders the Mother Flame turned on the kingdom of Lulusia — the Elders only ever carry that decision out.

A bounty on this head would put the legitimacy of whatever organization issued it on trial: Cross Guild rates Marine officers, never the entity that secretly sits above the Marine itself. The registry neither excludes Imu nor confirms anything — a name revealed only in chapter 1179, after eight years as a silhouette, whose gender wasn't even confirmed until the chapter before that. Pricing a sovereign who denies its own existence would mean asking the state to testify against itself.