The Zero Division of the Gotei Thirteen: the Royal Guard of the Soul King, as well as a collection of the military organization's most innovative thinkers. Each of them is a creator, inventor, or discoverer of something which changed or advanced the Gotei Thirteen and, indeed, Soul Society itself. The ostensible head of their cadre, the Soul King, is no exception to this. He, too, was once possessed of a boldly exploratory intellect, before exemplary intelligence was traded for homeostatic omniscience. The sharp edge of a singularly ingenious mind was melted down to be spread out across the entirety of space and time, and so was lost to the memory of all but the King of Hell and one other who still remained from the time before his ascension. Had it not been altered by lies and eroded by time, history may have read that the man who became known as the Soul King had been the greatest thinker in all the spirit-populated worlds.
Each member of the Zero Division possesses, as part of the structure of their very bones, something known as the Oken, or King's Key, which grants access to the Soul King Palace. But, before it became something purely conceptual that could be simply willed into a person, before it was a result of godlike physical reconstruction of one's biology, the key to Heaven had been something physical, the single most important invention of the same man who would one day recreate it in the bones of his subordinates. Though he may not have been the first to conceive of the notion of a plane beyond the boundaries of life and death, he was undoubtedly the first one to act upon the thought and create a method to travel there.
Was he surprised, when he finally arrived in Heaven, to find himself alone? Had he expected a pantheon of gods in place of the large crystal he found instead? And when he approached it—at first apprehensive due to an inexplicable awe he felt at the sight of it—was making contact with its glassy surface the first instance of him studying it, or it studying him?
These questions may have answers never to be known, but what is known, by vanishingly few now, is that the man was able only to ascertain the barest surface-level understanding of the mysterious crystal's function, even with his superlative intelligence. He concluded that it was something that could draw souls out of the reincarnation cycle to store within itself, creating within it an amalgamated conglomeration of souls; that the spiritual mass of this fusion of souls could be measured, and that sometimes, at random, the mass would suddenly decrease before being replenished by newly attracted souls.
The further details of the crystal could only have been learned in full by the man once he entered and became a part of it, some time later, but will be lain out here: Whether it is something natural formed over the ages in the spiritual world as the material world likewise gives rise to mountains, or it is something that could be called a god, the true nature of the crystal is to pull into itself certain souls which are saturated with positive karma. Souls weighed down with negative karma naturally descend to hell, while a select few of their counterparts are attracted so strongly to the crystal that they can break free of the cycle of reincarnation which is the lifeblood of the twin worlds of Soul Society and the Living World. These souls it contains within itself, under such pressure that they are fused together until it eventually expels an entirely new soul created from pieces of the countless ones it has absorbed. Most interestingly, the products of this process, which are reintegrated into the cycle of life and death, have a tendency to become important figures, mostly in the history of Soul Society, though sometimes, rarely, in the Living World. In either case, they are always exceptionally powerful. The Commander of the Zero Division, Ichibei Hyosube, The Monk Who Calls The True Name, is an example of this, unbeknownst even to himself. The man who would become the Soul King was, in fact, another.
But, long before he would come to know the workings of the crystal to this extent, the man who would become the Soul King was someone who desired more than anything to create a world where life and death were one and the same. It was in pursuit of that goal that he, through tireless effort and many trips back and forth between the realm of the crystal and Soul Society, constructed in secret a device that could mimic, in a far inferior manner, the behaviour of the crystal. He'd begun to notice that the dense spiritual atmosphere, or Reimyaku, of the crystal's realm was such that it increased his reiryoku more the longer he stayed there. When he'd made his first successful transportation there from Soul Society, he had been someone who would not have been ranked as anything more than an unseated officer in the Gotei Thirteen, had it not still been thousands of years from being formed. By the time his device had been completed, his reiryoku was on the level of a Shinigami Captain.
Normally, such an infusion of power, however gradual, would eventually prove disastrous to the soul subjected to it, but the excess spiritual pressure was helpfully absorbed by the crystal rather than causing the catastrophic breakdown of the soul. The man had observed this too, and so, had created his device to do the same on a smaller scale. Eventually, merely being near the device as he continued his studies of the heavenly plane resulted in a crystalline buildup being captured in a spherical chamber he'd built into it in anticipation of that outcome. He'd noticed shards and larger chunks of a similar substance suspended within the crystal that he'd theorized were byproducts of its energy cycle. Then, one day, a positively karmic soul was unexpectedly pulled to the nearby device just before it could enter the crystal that had been its destination, destroying it. Shocked and flabbergasted, the man had looked among the smoking scraps of his wrecked invention to see the pristine white sphere that was the first-ever Hogyoku. The discovery of this, it could be said, was truly the start of everything which came after.
Back in the Living World, Uryu Ishida opened his window to the cool night air so that Tier Harribel could enter. She did without a word, looking around his room with an unreadable expression. Her eyes found the ginto bottles on the desk and stayed there.
"You're endangering yourself," she commented neutrally.
"I know what I'm doing," replied Uryu shortly as he stepped between her and the desk to block her view of it. "Did you bring it?"
"I did." She jabbed the air beside her with a finger as if poking it, and it ripped itself open at her touch, the very space of Ury's bedroom peeling itself back at a centralized point, revealing a black abyss within. Harribel, never taking her eyes from Uryu, plunged a hand into the darkness she'd so casually opened in reality and pulled something from it. A second later, it was as if nothing had happened, except that Harribel held in one hand a katana with black hilt wrapping and a rectangular tsuba. "A Shinigami zanpakuto," she observed, turning it in her hand as if to inspect it.
Uryu shook his head. "It's called an Asauchi," he corrected. Zanpakuto was what the specially forged blades were called when they had names, and before that, in their nameless state prior to being imprinted on by a Shinigami and taking on an aspect of their soul, the blank swords were known as Asauchi, given to Shinigami in training. At times, Shinigami would be sent into Hueco Mundo to perform extermination missions, and the survival rate among these brave soldiers was far less than one hundred percent. A Shinigami who died in Hueco Mundo couldn't always have their zanpakuto retrieved, and if they fell with it drawn, and the blade stuck into the sand and stayed there a while, the thirsty grains would draw the imprinted fragment of the owner's soul out of the blade itself, leaving it once again a mere Asauchi.
The sand which made up the vast white desert of the realm of the Hollows, like the sand of the Living World, was a natural desiccant, except instead of pulling water out of objects, the sand of Hueco Mundo drew out reishi. Its role in the ecosystem of Hueco Mundo was to absorb reishi from fallen Hollows and other beings so that lesser Hollows too weak to hunt could subsist on mouthfuls of sand during lean times when other sources of food were scarce. Occasionally, this draining sand would leave behind swords emptied of the reishi of the Shinigami who had been their wielders. Uryu knew Harribel had taken one such sword for herself since Yhwach's defeat, and now, as they'd agreed, she'd brought one for him.
He took it and held it in his hands. It was heavier than he'd anticipated. "Thank you," he said, basically on reflex, as he knew that Tier Harribel didn't care to be thanked.
"You freed me from the Wandenreich's dungeon," said the Arrancar simply, letting Uryu infer the rest. She seemingly ignored the fact that, without her already having repaid him previously, Uryu would have surely been reduced to bones by the light of Herschwalth's final vengeance, ones that perhaps Orihime wouldn't have been able to revive.
"Then I guess we're even," he said. "Did you talk to Inoue?"
Uryu wasn't sure why he'd asked. He could have just left it. Certainly, neither he nor Tier Harribel were the type of people that had a conversational quota.
"Yes," she answered to Uryu's surprise after turning back to his window. Then, with an electrical whooshing, she was gone. Propping the Asauchi gently against his desk, Uryu crossed over to the window, and slammed it shut.
"Captain Shiba," Rukia said with a bow that brought her forehead to the floor of the Captain's quarters of the Thirteenth Division barracks. "I apologize if I—"
"Don't start up with that crap," came Isshin's rough tone, tensing Rukia's shoulders. "Don't make the same mistake with me that you did with Kaien when he was around." Isshin sat on the floor, eyeing Rukia from across a low table between them. "That's not why I wanted to talk to you. And besides, it's Captain Kurosaki."
"O-oh..."
"I left the Shiba name behind when I met Masaki, so I have no claim to it anymore," he said, making very little of a subject which Rukia thought was of incredible importance, as if the issue of his family name was neither here nor there.
"Yes sir, Captain Kurosaki," said Rukia with forced obedience, swallowing her retort in defence of the man's voluntarily shed honour. The phrase felt strange in her mouth, what with her new commander sharing a name with her close friend. She found that using it caused her to think about him, and as soon as she'd shaken from her mind the invasive image of him lying unconscious in his bed—his freshly mopped brow glistening—she found herself wishing the man before her wasn't so averse to his rightful name.
Isshin leaned back, a look of contemplation on his clean-shaven face. Rukia was still stunned by how young he looked, as if he hadn't aged a day since he'd left for the Living World all those years ago. He looked like he could be his own son's older brother. He was handsome in a way that it bothered Rukia to admit to herself, for she feared the handsomeness lied mainly in the resemblance shared by the two young men.
Rukia's shoulders tensed again when Isshin suddenly clapped his hands together. Having this man as her new Captain seemed to have put her very on edge, something she hoped wouldn't be a permanent condition.
"Alright, let's get down to business," he said as he shifted his position on the floor, straightening up to peer across the table like a perched hawk watching the ground below for its moment to strike. Her position under his strangely captivating gaze made Rukia feel disquietingly like the field mouse skittering far below. "Do you know why Kyoraku-ojiisan named me as the new Captain of the Thirteenth?"
Rukia's stunned mind took a moment to register that the old man to whom Isshin was so flippantly referring was the Captain-Commander. "Because you used to be the Captain of the Tenth," Rukia guessed, surmising that his credentials were a valid enough reason to slot him back into the broken organizational hierarchy, as had been done previously with the returned Visored Captains after Aizen's defeat. Rukia only vaguely remembered him from back during his first tenure, having seen him in passing a few times at most.
"It's because we didn't want you to think you were replacing Shiro-jii," Isshin corrected, sounding mildly frustrated. "The old man knows you'd make a good Captain, but we both agreed that having you immediately take the place of someone like Captain Ukitake would be a mistake. That's why I'm here."
Rukia blinked. Too much information had been thrown at her at once for her to process it all. Luckily, Isshin went on unprompted.
"I don't care what anybody in Soul Society thinks of me, I have my own life in the Living World, and I don't plan on leaving it," he said nonchalantly. "I'm just here to make your transition from Vice-Captain to Captain easier," he nodded. "I know what you're like, so I'm betting you don't have the confidence yet to take Shiro-jii's place. So I'm going to play Captain for a while since the Gotei Thirteen is really hard up for people right now, and when I'm done, you'll be replacing me instead of replacing Ukitake, got it?"
Rukia nodded slowly, still surprised.
"Urahara's making me a gigai right now that'll look just like my old body so that I can still run my clinic, but I'll probably be in here about..." he took a moment to gaze at the ceiling, "...once a week."
Rukia's head came very close to whacking the table.
"Oi! Once a week?! What am I supposed to do in the meantime?" Rukia almost couldn't believe that she was yelling at her Captain, but he reminded her so strongly of Ichigo that she only got a hold of herself again after she'd clapped her hands over her mouth in embarrassment. Married name or not, the man before her was still a Shiba.
Isshin burst out laughing. "That's good!" he declared. "You're gonna need that kind of spunk to lead this Division when I'm not around."
Rukia's face was so hot and red that it was like the onset of a sudden fever. She wanted to cry. "I'm s—"
"Hey!" Isshin cut her off. Meeting his eyes, she saw that he was once again serious. "Don't apologize. That's Captain rule number one," he said, holding up his first finger. "Anyway," he said, pushing back from the table and relaxing his posture once again, "I'm gonna need you to report to me at my house a couple of times a week." This last part he'd said in no particular direction, his eyes drifting around the room as if looking at Rukia had become boring.
"Eh? At your house?"
"Yeah. I run a clinic, so I'm still gonna need to be there a lot, so just come by whenever you have free time and keep me up to date, okay?"
Rukia's heart was thumping for myriad reasons that had popped into her head all at once, though her mind's gaze had avoided landing on each one for longer than an instant, as if each was a flash from a wall of paparazzi cameras that she shyly blinked away from.
She gulped. "Okay, Captain," she said over the pounding in her ears.
"Good," nodded Isshin, grinning. "Now, I've gotta go talk to that brother of yours about helping me pull some strings with the Central 46. He owes me one." Just as he rose from the table, the paper door of the room clapped open and Rangiku's strawberry blonde head popped in.
"Rangiku—glark!"
Isshin's words had been kicked right back into his mouth by Rangiku as she came leaping into the room with her leg extended. Her flying kick left the ambushed Captain rolling on the ground.
"I heard you were back, asshole!" shouted Rangiku as she thumped a couple of hard stomps into the body for good measure. "I can't believe you came back after all this time and you didn't even tell me!"
"Ow! Didn't—ow! Stop!—Didn't Urahara give you my message?!" Isshin managed to say in between being kicked relentlessly.
Eventually, Rangiku ceased her barrage, but Rukia thought this was only so she could get breath enough in her to keep berating her victim. "Yeah, one lousy goodbye and then you leave for twenty years!"
Suddenly, Isshin was back on his feet, but Rukia hadn't seen him get there. "Hey, I'll have you know that I just so happened to meet the love of my life!" the man argued, reaching into the fold of his shihakusho and pulling out a photograph to shove in Rangiku's face, presumably of his late wife, Ichigo's mother, Masaki. "So of course I'd stay! It was like Romeo and Juliet!"
"But you didn't even visit us! And what's with you carrying that photo around with you? Talk about obsessive!"
"It's a symbol of my love, you hag!" roared Isshin, though Rukia got the strangest feeling that, somehow, the vitriol flying between the Captain and his former subordinate was a language of endearment hidden beneath a layer of bluster. "Look how beautiful she was! As if I could leave somebody like that! Look at the size of her boobs!"
"I've got bigger boobs than that!" Rangiku snapped back. Rukia didn't see how that, whether or not it was true, was at all pertinent. It seemed to her like Rangiku had somewhat lost the plot.
"As if!" retorted Isshin. "And look at her beautiful strawberry blonde hair!"
"You're just describing me!"
"Matsumoto, that's enough, you're making a scene," came the voice of Rangiku's Captain and holder of Isshin's former position, Toshiro Hitsugaya of the Tenth, in his unbroken boyish voice like the minor chords of a flute. The white-haired boy stood in the doorway with his arms folded, looking unimpressed with the display before him. He afforded Rukia a glance of respectful acknowledgement with his piercing green eyes.
Rangiku rounded on her Captain with teary eyes and a pleading expression. "But Captain!" she whined, intoning for sympathy but receiving only a tired eye roll.
Now Isshin was between Rangiku and Hitsugaya, though, once again, Rukia had missed seeing him move. "Toshiro!" sang the man cheerfully, seeming to forget Rangiku entirely. "Look how big you are! And I see you went sleeveless with your haori, just like your former mentor," noted Isshin proudly, closing his eyes and stroking his chin with a smug smile staining his face. He sounded like he was talking to one of his own children.
"I'm a Captain now, Kurosaki-san, so please don't talk to me like a kid," said Toshiro, Rukia thought, almost pleadingly. His words were stern, but she noticed he was blushing.
Isshin looked as though he'd been punched in the gut. "Kurosaki-san?! Don't say that, Toshiro!" He looked like he was on the verge of tears. Rangiku burned a glare into his back, Rukia imagining it to be due to Isshin stealing her Captain's cool attention away from her.
Toshiro reddened even further. Rukia knew how he felt. "Very well," he said quietly, without making eye contact with Isshin, "...Isshin-san."
"That's my boy!" yelled Isshin ecstatically. Rukia was beginning to notice a similarity between him and Rangiku, that they both switched emotions on a dime. He thrust his hand out to Hitsugaya. "Here, it's a sign of respect in the Living World," he said.
"I know what a handshake is," Hitsugaya said in frustration, staring at the open hand. He looked over Isshin's shoulder at Rangiku, who shrugged.
"I never got to congratulate you on becoming a Captain, Toshiro, so here." Isshin jabbed his hand out a little as if to remind Hitsugaya about it. His tone was even, all the manic excitement having left him, and pride shone from his eyes.
As Hitsugaya slowly reached out his hand to accept the gesture, Rukia noted the tension all over his body. He was cautiously reciprocating as, all the while, his ultra-sharp Captain's senses were on high alert, his tirelessly-trained muscles ready to spring into action at the slightest unexpected twitch of the man before him. When they wanted to, as Isshin had shown multiple times in the last few minutes alone, Captains could move at such speed as to be invisible even to the eyes of Vice-Captains, and Toshiro Hitsugaya trained more seriously than most, except perhaps Byakuya.
In the end, none of this meant anything.
In a movement so imperceptible that Rukia couldn't have hoped to keep up with it, Isshin had pulled on Hitsugaya's arm the very instant their hands came together. Before Rukia or Rangiku could register anything amiss, Captain Hitsugaya was up in the air above Isshin's head, held aloft by the man holding him under the arms.
"Takai! Takai!" shouted Isshin, as if Toshiro was a small child who'd asked for an airplane ride from his father. "That's my little Captain Toshiro! I'm so proud of you!" He kept pumping his arms to send the mortified little Captain up and down, up and down. "You should come visit me with Rukia-san sometime. I can introduce you to my girls! Hahaha!"
The bloody smile that was still plastered on the man's face when he'd crashed into the wall a moment later thanks to Hitsugaya's powerful kick told Rukia that, despite his pain, the man believed his affectionate stunt to have been well worth it.
Sosuke Aizen, the man in whom the lineage of the perfect first Hogyoku lived on, thanks to his own machinations, grinned as he heard the footsteps approaching his prison cell deep beneath the Seireitei. Though his excessively lengthy sentence could not or would not be reduced by the Central 46, they had reluctantly granted him something in return for him having taken action against Yhwach during what had quickly come to be called the Thousand Year Blood War with the Quincy Wandenreich. It wasn't to be discounted, either, that he had initially refused the Quincy king's offer to join him. Dangerous and psychotic as they thought he was, he had not resisted when it had been time to return to Muken, and so, in spite of themselves, the Central 46 had thought it acceptable to grant Aizen some small request in return for his service.
That request had been one conversation, alone, with Ichigo Kurosaki, the hero of the war. The boy had been comatose for two weeks following the defeat of Yhwach, but having finally awoken days before and fully regained his Shinigami powers just the previous day, the Central 46 had sent a messenger to him so that Aizen's request could be granted most expediently. That is to say, so that it could be gotten over with and Aizen forgotten for the next millennium.
The orange-haired boy pleasantly surprised Aizen by wearing the unimpressed, slightly annoyed expression that was his face's usual mode, looking not the least bit intimidated by the dangerous man bound to the high-backed chair on the other side of the bars in front of which he stopped. Aizen supposed that anyone who had defeated the almighty King of the Quincy had earned the right to such confidence. Besides, his not being afraid of Aizen would make the conversation that much easier.
Ever since his defeat at the hands of Ichigo and Kisuke Urahara, the Hogyoku within Aizen had begun to share with him visions of a life he'd lived and lost, of a past he'd forgotten, and of a name he'd had stolen from him. They had started as something dreamlike, such that he wasn't sure in the beginning whether or not they were hallucinations brought on by the sensory deprivation he was subjected to when alone in Muken. But what he'd taken for the fanciful excursions from reality of a profoundly under-stimulated mind soon became intriguing enough in their underlying logic that, when offered a chance at temporary freedom if he worked against Yhwach, Aizen had taken it purely to fulfill a singular goal: to see the Soul King, for He, Aizen was sure, had been the one whispering in his mind.
Aizen had to admit that even he was disheartened, slightly, when Ichigo Kurosaki unwittingly ended the life of the Soul King. He'd barely paid any attention as he was once again bound and returned to his solitary confinement, for his powerful mind had been reeling with the revelation that the questions the Hogyoku had instilled in him might never be answered as it frantically searched down the few blind alleyways of his mind for everything it did not know. In the end, he'd come to the disappointing conclusion that he had been left with too few pieces of the puzzle that was his forgotten past for even one such as himself to assemble.
Then the answers had come rushing into his mind more strongly than ever before, as if the floodgates had been opened. He knew, because he was made to know, that someone other than the Soul King had taken up the task of gifting him with what little knowledge he had not already possessed and that it was someone deeply connected to him. Him, and Ichigo Kurosaki.
"Hello, Ichigo," Aizen's cordial tone echoed along the sekkiseki walls of Muken.
"What do you want?" replied the boy without hesitation or decorum.
"I know your father came to Soul Society today as well, I had hoped that you'd bring him with you."
"He's busy. And why would I do something like that? This isn't a family visit."
Baritone laughter leaked from Aizen's grin uncontrollably as his mind travelled back to a place it had previously been unable to reach. He was aware, too, even as he stood among the smoking rubble and looked out through the eyes of his past, that to go any further back than this would still be impossible for him.
Looking down, he saw blood on small hands. Somebody had died, with him as the likely cause, though he still could not remember what had led to the state he was in. Then the ringing pierced his ears so that he was forced to crouch and slap his bloody hands over them in a vain attempt to block it out. After a second it quieted, and just before it faded away completely, he was sure that its tone warbled in a manner that mimicked the spoken word Conceal to his aching ears.
He looked around then to see that, though the rubble around him remained, everything beyond it in every direction had been replaced by a featureless white void, so that he seemed to be standing on an island of demolished masonry floating in a sea of utter nothingness. Then he looked up, and standing before him were two of the largest men he'd ever seen, one broad of figure with a bald head and a bushy black beard and wearing a necklace of oversized prayer beads, the other even taller, slender, with no hair on his face but an excess of it on his head styled into a ludicrously extensive pompadour. Standing side by side, their wildly contrasting forms made them look like human representations of the number "10", thought Aizen—or rather, thought the boy that Aizen had been. Both were Shinigami Captains, as evidenced by their haori.
"Hmm...what do you think, Tenjiro?" That was the bearded monk.
The Captain with the pompadour seemed to be focused more on cleaning out his ear with his pinky finger than on the boy the monk had been referencing. "From what we felt, I didn't think it was just a kid. Should we just kill him?" he asked, sounding bored. "They'll say he went up in the explosion too."
The monk slapped one of his meaty hands on the back of the other Captain's head hard enough to send the man sprawling forward so that he nearly tripped over the kid he'd so casually suggested that they murder. "We can't do that, I'm afraid," said the monk as he folded his arms authoritatively. "He's being watched."
"By who?" the lanky Captain asked irritably, rubbing the back of his head and stepping slowly back as if the boy were a venomous snake, never taking his eyes off of him.
"Who do you think? You know he's part of that family."
"Ah," said the would-be murderer, looking ticked off at the kid now as he stomped the ground twice like he was trying to quiet a noisy downstairs neighbour in an apartment. "I guess this is all you, then. I'm heading back." As he said this, the tall man was already turning around, and he vanished into thin air a second later after taking only a few steps from the monk. It was as if he'd walked off the edge of the rubble island and melted into the blankness surrounding them.
The boy only took notice of the gigantic calligraphy brush the monk had been wearing on his back when he reached behind him to pull it off, holding it in both hands. He looked down at the frozen boy questioningly before dropping to a crouch so that their faces were more even with one another, though even so, his remained higher than the boy's.
"I wonder if you'll be able to stay awake for this part," he said. His tone sounded like one that you would use when talking to something that wouldn't comprehend what you were saying, like an animal. Keeping his eyes fixed on the boy, he said, "Blacken, Ichimonji," and the command seemed to echo inside of the boy and vibrate his bones. When his eyes were once again able to focus, the bristle tip of the giant brush had been replaced by a blade which, though stunted, was undoubtedly that of a zanpakuto.
The boy tasted copper as blood trickled from his nose onto his lips, but he found himself unable to wipe it away.
"I'm not surprised," he said, his expression scary. The boy's breath caught as the edge of the zanpakuto's blade suddenly touched his neck, resting gently on his collarbone. "Just the release of my zanpakuto would be enough to knock out most Captains in the Gotei Thirteen, you know..." Then he took the blade away from the boy's neck, more slowly than he'd placed it there, so that this time the boy saw it move. The monk sighed. "I apologize for my First Officer," he said, "he doesn't always think things through. Don't worry, it would be dangerous if you were to die..." he raised his zanpakuto as if for a cleaving strike, "...The piece you have inside of you...our lives would become difficult, if it returned to Him..." The zanpakuto came whistling down.
Blackness.
"That was how my name was taken from me," Aizen finished, the smile still lingering on his face.
"You met Hyosube-san back then," said Ichigo, eyeing the storyteller suspiciously. Aizen couldn't begrudge him his skepticism.
"Yes, the Leader of the Zero Division," Aizen nodded, "and he used that power on me."
"So what?" asked Ichigo impatiently. "What does that have to do with me?"
Aizen's smile widened. "Because the Hogyoku inside of me has been resonating with another Hogyoku that resides in Hell," Aizen revealed gleefully, "and it's because of that, that I've been able to learn the name that Ichibei Hyosube cut away from me that day..."
"What is it, then?" asked Ichigo, pushing past his momentary surprise at the existence of yet another Hogyoku.
"It was...Shiba."
Hope everyone who's reading likes Isshin as much as I do, 'cause I can't seem to leave him alone. My second chapter ended up being dedicated entirely to him, which wasn't the original idea :P Happy reading