Disclaimer: I don't own either Bleach or One Piece, neither am I making any money off the distribution of this writing.


Ichigo opened his eyes to complete darkness. Squeezing them shut he shook his head and blinked rapidly trying to clear his vision. No change. It was still so dark that he couldn't even make out the motion of his hand waving in front of his face.

'Perfect,' he thought, 'Just perfect.' Sucking in a deep breath, or what amounted for a breath in this black place, he picked a direction and started walking. There was hardly any point in standing around and waiting for something to come to him. (Move forward and never stop, his soul whispered) Ichigo kept one hand held out in front of him in hopes of avoiding bumping into anything. He had only been walking for a few minutes when he realized that there was no landscape, he shouldn't be able to walk as if there was something under his feet. He would walk forward on what felt like a flat surface, but when he turned around and tried to retrace his steps he found himself walking uphill.

As soon as he realized that he pitched forward and plummeted. It was only through the tug on his clothes he felt any form of gravity. Franticly the ex-shinigami tried to think of how to stop. No sooner then he pictured Unohana-taicho's white path across the Dangai did he find footholds for him to stand on. It would have been identical to that path were it not for the fact that the path was neither white nor glowing. 'Is this what it feels like to be blind?' he wondered.

Given that everything seemed safe for now Ichigo tilted back his head and tried to think of a way out. Wherever he was at it seemed to react to his thoughts, if he thought something should be possible it happened. Experimentally he let his eyelids droop and thought firmly. 'Light. There should be light.' Then he drew a deep breath and opened his eyes.

Nothing had changed; he was still surrounded by black. Ichigo had never really considered true darkness before, but now he found himself realizing that his room at night with the curtains drawn and the lights off would have positively bright compared to this. Now, he was learning what cave black meant.

"Well, that's one plan scuppered." Ichigo commented out loud. Continuing to voice his thoughts; anything to stop this near complete sensory deprivation, he pursued his earlier thought. This place was a lot like the Dangai, the place that existed between times and worlds, where he had lost and gained parts of his soul before. The teenager shuddered at the memory and firmly turned his thoughts somewhere (hopefully) productive. "But if that's true, then I should have been swallowed by the currents. After all," he continued bitterly. "It seems I don't have reiatsu anymore."

"Well, that is not strictly accurate, Kurosaki Ichigo," A voice interrupted his musings.
Ichigo would later deny to his dying breath that the noise that came out of his mouth ever happened. What little dignity that he retained was desperate to ignore the high pitched scream of fright that escaped him in a manner reminiscent of a elementary schoolgirl frightened by a spider. He jumped three feet in the air, whirling midair while instinctively reaching for his Zanpakuto. His hand met nothing but air; he had forgotten that when he lost two thirds of his soul - a loss that he suspected he would never 'get over' as Tatsuki had once advised in an ill thought out attempt at comfort- he had also lost the hard won ability to protect himself and others.

"Who's there!" Ichigo shouted with forced bravado.

"In answer to your statement Onii-chan," A little girls voice spoke, a slight lisp forming on her 's's, "You may no longer have reiatsu now but you did as long as your body could anchor you, and you may have it again. Of course your body is not here and in this place no one has reiatsu."

"Come out and face me you coward!" the teenager screamed into the black. He wouldn't listen to the half-hinted promises and explanations the words gave - not when the being wouldn't answer a single question.

A deep sonorous chuckle me his demands, "Why are facing that way, hero of the winter war? I am not there."

Indeed the voice was coming from his right, but when the carrot top swivelled to face that direction all he could see was black. Ichigo felt a new found empathy for Tousen - not a thought he had ever expected to have.

A bright giggle, that sounded like a five-year old girl, resounded again, "I am not there either, shinigami." But then again, Tousen could sense people with his reiatsu. Ichigo would save his pity for himself.

"Didn't you get the message? I'm not a shinigami anymore!"

"You once were, vizard, and for me what one was, what one is and what one can be are all truths. Despicable little hollow,-" (It took Ichigo a moment to realize he had been insulted, when the intonation of the speaker didn't shift from a gentle cheerful tone.)

"I'm not a hollow-"

"you have come to the place beyond the Dangai." The voice continued without showing signs of the interruption. "Look around, you are not in Heuco Mundo, nor Seretei or Rukongai, nor the human world. You are beyond, floating between thousands of millions of billions of realms."

"Even if that is true what am I doing here!"

The voice was silent for such a time that Ichigo began to wonder if he would ever receive an answer. Then it spoke, "You were born between mortal and immortal, alive and deceased. Thrice you have knocked on my door, and now you have entered. There is no going back to the worlds you knew from your soul death. And do not be mistaken Captain-san, your soul is dead."

"I was never a captain." Ichigo chose to ignore the rest of what he had just heard; it wasn't as if he had understood most of it, and what he did understand was not something he had ever expected. What did it mean when one's soul was dead, not just the body?

"Of the 13 court guards; perhaps not." An aged man's voice hummed non-concomitantly.

Ignoring this last bit of cryptic non answer Ichigo focused instead on what was happening around them - whenever this was. Actually, now that he thought about it, he could see how the beings sense of time could get skewed in this place, especially if it truly knew ones past and future as if it were the present.

"If my soul's dead, then why am I here?" The soul, as Ichigo had learned over the past few years, was all that mattered. Everything else was ephemeral, but the soul defined you, a soul could be a shinigami, a hollow, a human or even a ghost and the state of the soul determined what you are and what you could become. If he had no soul he shouldn't exist. "For that matter, how did my body dying kill my soul?"

"Ichigo Kurosaki's soul died one year, five months and four days before his body finally expired. We are sure you have some idea of how rare this is. When the echo of your soul was severed from its shell... it died quickly without reiatsu to support it. You are here because your soul is dead, not gone." Ichigo opened his mouth to question this, but the voice answered his query before he could raise it, "Do not question the logic behind this, you will not understand. Suffice to say it is true; it is possible. We remember your soul as it was when you were born, and I can recreate a form for it to go back to, any form that is yours will/could be/was," three different voices said at once, "yours again.." The former vizard steeled himself, unwilling to bring his hope back up.

"You mean you can bring me back to life?"

The voice had changed to a low sultry hum, more appropriate in the back-room of a bar then in this blank space. "I can make you a new body, but we cannot put you back in your world. Your soul is dead, but you did and will do me a great service in more than one time, Mu-ge-tsu." It drew out the name, caressing it in a manner that made Ichigo blush to the tips of his ears. "Rules say that a favour must be repaid with an equal value, therefore I took your soul into this place which exist in between worlds. I will and have repaid my debt."

The scowling boy began to put together the information he had just learnt, rules that must be kept, and debts that must be paid - that was the law of the kami.

"You-you're a kami?" Ichigo stammered.

"By some definition," There was a pause from the being, before it continued on in a friendly tone. "The Shinigami call me 'king'; though I am no king of theirs, merely a medium through which nature spirits - kami - and souls came together and became zanpakuto and wielder. Beyond that," he continued, " I am only unique from many of your friends by virtue of the magnitude of kami that I am. Many humans, and most shinigami, and all hollows are linked to the greater spirits, youkai or kami whether due to longstanding contracts, bloodline relationships, or circumstances beyond all control but the fates. Your mentor could transform into a cat could she not? That was no kido, but a throwback to the days in which nekomata had walked beside her clan, intermarrying and sponsoring until the line between human-born and spirit-born was as the wall of a soup bubble." Then he fell silent, as if he had not dropped a massive bomb on the substitute shinigami.

But the teenager wasn't concerned with tales of youkai or minor kami - he had never disbelieved in such (it was hard to do so when he could see souls since he was a young child, had seen the gates of hell, and viewed the effects of some more benign curses (cackling oni that tripped and tugged on the hair of a chosen victim sprung to mind immediately), and looking at the unusual looks of some shinigami - particularly Komamura-taichou, it was hardly shocking).

No, Ichigo paled for another reason; the relationship between a shinigami and his sword had been around for thousands of years, with students being taught from a master of the art much like how Urahara had taught him. This had allowed for a small amount of elite experts, who formed the backbone of the courts and pseudo-samurai class of Soul Society. Although Yamamoto Shigekuni Genruysai had formed the Shinigami Academy over two thousand years ago, increasingly significant the number of those who received training and forming the Gotei 13, this kami had moulded the relationship between zanpakuto and human soul tens of thousands of years before that. After the high school delinquent thought back to what he knew of kami - in summary: beings with absolute power over what was under their domain, often something so small as a spring, but with rules that severely limited how they could use that power - he paired it up with what he knew of the being. With a domain as big as the Kami was implying... it was no wonder that the Seretei and Rukongai called him king.


AN: So this is a bit longer than the previous one, and typed in a short time. If there are any grammatical mistakes please point them out, I have been rushing this. I should have another chapter or two out tomorrow (also - I may not keep that schedule up permanently).
AN2: So I did an edit, (see chap 1 AN2 for more info). I do not think there is anything major changed in here. Mostly a bit more description and some grammar fixes. Enjoy!
AN3: This is a combo of a few other chapters (see chap 1 AN3), but it is over all the same. It is a bit smoother and a few other details were changed so... reread? (I promise I won't be doing this combo thing again)

AN4: I have got to stop going back and editing, but I got a brainwave in regards to how youkai and the like would have been involved in Soul Society (the existence of a broader spirit world beyond humans and ex-humans is one of the main bases of my fic), so had to go back and insert the build up for it.
Kaen