Oda overlays a real-world folk legend onto a location’s geography: the Dragon Gate (Chinese 鯉躍龍門 / Japanese 登竜門) — a carp that ascends the waterfall becomes a dragon, a metaphor for perseverance and transformation. The koikoku/koi imagery saturates the chapter (Sanji’s koi recipes; the koi-ride approach). This is a classic fairy-tale-overlay / background-symbol seed: a location’s physical gateway is the legend, pre-loading Wano’s central dragon motif. (Note the resonance with Garp’s own etymology — “Garp” = carp that climbs the Dragon Gate → his son Dragon.) The visual-silhouette layer (0910 ↔ 0981) shows Oda re-running the exact splash composition with a different crew, so the gateway-as-Dragon-Gate reading is reinforced compositionally, not just symbolically.