Shanks’s Bounty at 1,040,000,000 Berries

This poster stayed in circulation for the whole year the man on it spent drinking in a village bar in the East Blue, and no garrison ever came to collect. Shanks bought rounds at Makino's counter in Foosha Village, took a bottle of sake poured over his head by a mountain bandit named Higuma without lifting a hand, and was called a coward for it by a seven-year-old.

The figure predates most of what people associate with him. Shanks was named an Emperor only six years before the present of the story; this number was already current twelve years ago, a full six years before that. It prices a New World captain with no title and no recognised territory, raised aboard Gol D. Roger's Oro Jackson, who at that point was crossing swords with Dracule Mihawk almost daily. Sanji, after Onigashima, is still posted eight million short of it.

It is also the poster in force the day he lost his left arm. The Lord of the Coast, the Sea King that hunted the water off Foosha, had just swallowed Higuma whole and turned on the child. Shanks went in after Luffy, pulled him out, and drove the creature off with a look, at the cost of the arm below the shoulder. He never killed it. Ten years later Luffy dropped the same animal with one punch on his way out to sea.

What he left on that shore was a straw hat, handed over with a condition attached: give it back once you have become a great pirate. Twelve years on, the boy who took it carries a poster of his own, and the hat is the only thing the two of them genuinely share.