Disclaimer: The ideas and concepts used in BLEACH belong to Tite Kubo, as well as any regular characters. Most of the characters in this story belong to me. Thank you.


"What is his status?" Rei asked. A medic wearing a bandanna sporting a red cross in the middle draped over his eyes turned with a mouth agape with shock and quivered out an answer.

"I-A...Apologizes, Lady Unohana" the young man stuttered fearfully. "I can't really tell if he's better or not. Frankly, I'm too terrified to look directly at him...his pressure is still up, though, if that counts for anything."

"Thank you" Rei said. "Please look after Hoji Araijin. He's still training in the garden."

"Still?" the young medic asked.

"Yes" Rei replied. "He refuses to stop. It seems to help him cope." The young medic bowed on his way out and hurried to the garden. Hoji was indeed still training, a solid week of swinging his sword and punching the wall with his bare hands until he made a rather large hole. His body was in shambles and his mind and pressure wavered constantly, but something kept him sprinting forward. Rei walked carefully over to Shin's body to examine him with a quick sweeping of her hand, but she noticed something odd in the corner.

"Not again" she lamented. Upon a sword healing stone surrounded by retreating streams of incense smoke Shin's Shikei sat just peeking barely out of its sheathe. "I don't know what that sword is doing to Kenpachi's body but it won't help. Shin must recover slowly. If his pressure would come back to him all at once..." Rei didn't vocalize the results of a massive implosion of spiritual energy, as the result would be obvious and deadly. She went on her way, seeing nothing she could do, and left Shin to his silence...


Inside Shin's mind, constant swirling clouds of red and blue dashed across a blank sky of gray and a sun of ethereal, shining black. He sat at the base of the mountain of ruins that had built up since the last time he had seen the world. Now twisted visions of metal protruding from the stone structured walls of a myriad broken homes were clearly visible forming a spiked peak of jagged metal.

"Is this it?" Shin asked himself, eying down a sword with a partially shattered hand guard. All the swords, the whole armory's worth sticking from the ground like shafts of short bamboo. He looked at the blade and its shaft, at the curve and the edge and the overall length and the torn thread of the tassel before making the decision and tossing it swiftly into the ground. "How many swords are here?"

"More than enough" mused the prophetic voice far above. Bursting into view in a blast of char-black flames was Shikei, Shin's spirit, standing on unseen bony feet at the highest spire of twisted metal framing. "Take a good, fine look, Shin Kenpachi. These are the lives you have taken, those you carry with you no matter where you go. Each sword is one whose spirit and breath you have forever broken."

"Really?" Shin asked. He slumped down, arms propped on his knees, and gazed ahead lethargically. "What a drag. I thought there'd be a lot more...What's with the sky though?"

"The sky?" Shikei repeated. "Why would you want to know about that? You can't get to it."

"Of course I can" Shin said. "I decided a long time ago that I would go beyond the sky as soon as I could. Even if I have to rip the wings off a Hollow and use them myself to push past the blue border of my world, I'd do it..."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Shikei asked.

"Heh" Shin laughed with a smirk, "I don't even know. I thought pushing my limits would ultimately reward me, but now look. I'm basically dead. I'm not even sure why I'm bothering to sift through all these swords. Mine isn't among them..."

"Then why try?" Shikei asked, now behind Shin. "If you know that something isn't there, or can't be done, or is otherwise impossible, why attempt? You'll only be disappointed or die as you try."

"Heh heh" Shin laughed, now twice with a happy smile and glare. "Somebody's gotta try. Why don't you try to wake me up if I'm not dead?" Shin hopped down from his outcrop on the mountain and started walking leisurely among the swords. He touched every one of them while Shikei watched from up high, smiling with its skull-head at his host's perseverance.

"Hope is fragile, isn't it?" Shikei asked, Shin hearing in his own mind. "All it takes is a single push for someone to be flung far over the edge."

"I haven't given up hope" Shin said. "It'll take more than just dying a little bit to abolish my hope."

"But what about the others?" Shikei asked. Shin had to stop and think for a moment how his friends, his fellow warriors, would respond to his death. "It is a ripple in the pond that has broken those two rocks of men, although I would argue Suichi is more of a very dense branch than a rock like Hoji is."

"Hoji can't break" Shin argued. "He's...uh...unbreakable? I don't know, but something like this wouldn't shake him. He'd just brush it off and go train so he can tell me what a slouch I was in the time I was comatose."

"Are you positive about that?" Shikei asked. "He's just as human as you are."

"That's a low blow" Shin said, taking a sturdy saber from the ground and holding it on his shoulder. "I haven't considered myself human since I died the first time and came to this world. I'm a phantom, a ghost. A shinigami, god of death. That's the literal translation, you know, and gods aren't human."

"What mythology from your world had inhuman gods?" Shikei asked. "I can't think of any who showed no error or lapse in judgment, and I'm you. What does that say about you position?" It was that Shin had no position. "So much depth, they have perceived in this muddy puddle of blood you spilled. So much that they are afraid to look into it anymore. Why? You're battle was just as unimportant as both of theirs and somewhere they know it."

"What are you getting at?" Shin asked, glaring daggers at his phantom self. Shikei started to dissolve into the air as a cloud of black fire with a nefarious laugh.

"You think to highly of yourself, is all" Shikei said. "Your death would have been pointless. There is nothing for you to find here...no mysteries or secrets. All that you see is all that can be seen. Shin Kenpachi, there is nothing here for you at all!" And that was that. No matter how hard afterwards, Shin could not manifest his spirit to walk and talk among him, and over his head the sky froze with evil clouds of black that taunted Shin below.


A week passed since then. Still, Shikei did not come forth. In his absence Shin had found a way to train himself to pass the seemingly infinite time. Within the confines of his secured sub-conscience, he was training using an uncorrupted piece of long metal as a shaft and a sword as a blade. With those two items he pierced the sword near through the metal pole near the tip and made a scythe. With that he trained himself to find a style that would suit his new weapon if it ever decided to show itself again.

"I can't give up" Shin declared. His voice echoed loudly through the air in his dream world. He took his impromptu scythe from its draped position and spun it around with the palm of his hand. The dust on the ground kicked up as he increased the speed. "I have determined the main principle of this style. It is...rotation!" Shin started flourishing with his pole-scythe, spinning and twirling it around with simple motions of his hands and arms. He caught and continued the motion of the spinning scythe to rip apart the very air with the bladed end.

Still spinning it like a deadly baton, he passed it from hand to hand and walked forward in a jumpy gait. He nearly skipped his way over to a sword sticking from the ground, and bounced his scythe to and from its sides. Using to force with the deflection he encountered, Shin made tens of notches in the corroded metal blade with what looked like only one motion. Then he let the pole hook and spin around his neck several times before grabbing it loosely and spinning it overhead. He picked out a target across the field and set his scythe down, both hands gripped and scythe no longer in motion.

"But is this really it?" he asked himself. He took his scythe in one hand and pointed the blade behind him, gripping the end of the rod with his left hand over shoulder. "Is this why I died? To train? I could train in the sun or under the stars or in any damn storm just the same...this can't be all there was to death..." In his solemn prose the ground expanded away from him, the swords and ruin mountain now far away in the distance.

"You see too many fish" Shikei said "in this puddle of blood." The phantom hovered unseen in the sky, blocking the already black orb of light that cloaked the world in grainy darkness.

"I see too much meaning in my death?" Shin shouted upwards. "How is that possible? Of course I see meaning in my death, I died!"

"You're alive!" Shikei shouted back.

"I still died" Shin argued.

"You're ALIVE!" Shikei roared. Shin backed up away from the billowing phantom's shadow and readied his scythe in front, just in case. To his surprise, it was indeed his own scythe, and not his cheap mental imitation he spent so long mastering. "If you want to take something away from this dream let it be that: a symbol of your absolute power. The dark clouds overhead are those that follow you everywhere, the overseers of death and doom."

"So that's it?" Shin asked. "My death, this whole month of recuperation, was just incidental for me. I wasn't set to learn anything or harvest any skills. All I was to do was sit around and wait for my body to move again."

"Yes" Shikei droned.

"You're too blunt" Shin said. "Anyway, I can't believe you. There was something behind my death I was supposed to find. How am I supposed to know that this wasn't it?" As he referenced the field of death in his soul the ground suddenly came back around him, neat and evenly spaced about. "Was I supposed to learn a lesson by these graves, these dead warriors?"

"Nope" Shikei plainly answered.

"What about that?" Shin asked, nodding his head behind him. "The destruction and dread I've caused on my path?"

"That's just a pile of broken crap, Shin" Shikei pointed out. Shin felt himself swelling with rage from his own reflective apathy and uncaring for the aparent suffering of all those he killed and the views he had of them. Shikei was pushing further to an unseen edge, and then when Shin saw it he realized just what purpose he was to learn: Codependance.

"There is nothing here for me" Shin reiterated. "Is that true?"

"That's right" Shikei said, descending quickly to the ground.

"No hidden secrets on m bankai or any other form of power you can take" Shin added. "All that's here is what I see."

"That's right" Shikei responded.

"So then..." Shin said, baring a snarling smile on his face, "I guess I learned nothing from my death. I'll just have to go right back to training once I can walk, right?"

"Yeah" Shikei sighed with pride. He started hovering into Shin and disappeared. The scythe he draped over his shoulders again became his sword, shaking and pulsing with his deadly, black energy, and he began slowly sheathing it with a smile.

"My sword is my soul" Shin mantra'd "and my soul rests with my sword. They are one in the same, and I am within my sword at all times. My reflection always shows through the darkness and casts shade in the light. Shin and Shikei are the same being..." and with a clang he sheathed his sword, formulating a final thought as the clouds covered the sky in his world. "Maybe that's why we can't get along..."


The room was vacant, full of stagnant air, and looked curiously red upon his first glance. Shin finally awoke, his chest repaired and the curious mist around him retreating out the unknown door. His body was not only wrapped in warm blankets but bound down to the bed he was on which was weighted down to the floor. He looked up and saw his sword, sheathed, on his chest.

"You're annoying" Shin chided. "If you can move, cut me loose. I need to take a walk..." Just then, the door opened and the mist blasted out. A terrified man with a cover on his mouth gazed inside. "Oh, hey. Can you help me here buddy?" The young medic just stuttered in fear, as only through his adept medical eyes could he see the swirling black fog that had stuck to Shin Kenpachi's bedside like kelp to the banks of a river. The medic felt so strong a sense of vertigo from staring into a puddle the depth of an ocean that he fainted on the spot, away from Shin.

Shin blinked. "...Oi...unbind me here...hello...?"