An announcement before we begin:

I have set up a blog, "In Cold Blood," which is now my homepage on my profile; the address is as follows: icedblood1986 (dot) blogspot (dot) com. Here I will be posting updates to any project I've written—or any other project, period—as they're posted. This includes updates to a pair of websites I've recently joined known as "Wikinut" and "Triond." These sites are pay-to-post, and I will earn a percentage of ad revenue generated by each page I post for them.

In order to earn some money with this passion of mine, I will be posting all new fanfiction projects through Triond (Wikinut does not allow fanfiction, but other nonfiction projects or original fiction will be posted there). I apologize for this inconvenience, but I hope you understand that I am trying to make more out of this than a hobby. I hope to help my family and myself with my writing. I'm transferring to a university to pursue a teaching degree, and I need all the help I can get. So keep an eye out on my new blog, if such is your inclination. I promise that things won't be too infuriating. It would help me out a lot if you guys could look at what I have posted already, and of course leave feedback if you wish. Any and every response to my work is greatly appreciated and encouraged.

Don't worry about any projects that are currently up on here. They won't be moving. This announcement is only in reference to new projects.

Thank you for understanding, and if you decide to take a look at "In Cold Blood," feel free to drop me a line. I always love to hear from you.

Now that that's said, on to the chapter. I've opted to try something new with this update; new, old, whichever you prefer. This will be the beginning of a new story arc, and will be an ongoing thing. But instead of waiting until I have 1,000+ words, I will be posting each section (scene) I write as a separate chapter. Hopefully this will mean shorter, but more frequent updates.

Let me know what you think of this approach. And, of course, if you like the storyline.

Let us begin.

Zaraki was first.

That was the scary part of it all, if it could be encapsulated into a single sentence. Logically speaking, it couldn't. Too much had happened in too little time for it to be explained in a single sentence. Nonetheless, that was what Hitsugaya Toushirou thought about, when people talked about it, when people talked about it in the hushed, superstitious tones of people so scared that the fear had become a great, hulking beast that they were trying to hide from.

Zaraki was first.

Kurotsuchi called it Pathogen #173-SS-H-9, and Yamamoto called it, "this problem," but most of them, Hitsugaya included, thought of it by another name:

The decay.

They all knew how it worked now, why Zaraki Kenpachi was the first to succumb and why most of Soul Society—those you would have expected to be victims of an infection like this—hadn't even been touched by it. They had an idea of how it spread and how it grew (Hitsugaya suspected that Kurotsuchi knew far more about it than he let on; like his predecessor he rarely felt the need to explain what he knew and never explained it fully), but that first day they'd known nothing.

The only thing they'd known was that the Gotei 13's most rabid attack dog—a man with such raw power that he could have had the run of Soul Society if he'd had the patience, forethought, and desire to take it—was sick.

Except…sick didn't encompass it.

Ukitake was sick.

This wasn't anything like that. It was more. Worse. More devastating.

Zaraki wasn't sick. He was decaying.

One day he was the wild, insane, chronically bored captain of the 11th division; the next he was flat on his back in the 4th Division's headquarters, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling and barely able to speak. And the only thing that had come even close to making him more coherent had been removing his eye patch, which at least gave them half an iota of insight as to what the holy hell was wrong.

Hitsugaya hadn't given it a second though at first; the 11th Division was in and out of the infirmary so often that it was a cliché. Zaraki was there less often than his subordinates—if only because it took something with the spiritual power of a god to even wound that whirling, grinning devil—but the idea of Zaraki being in the infirmary wasn't the faintest bit foreign.

Hitsugaya took some amount of notice when Madarame and Hisagi joined him.

And when Komamura and Kuchiki joined them, he was fully on alert.

It was then that he discovered that none of the upper-ranked tenants of Unohana's house had entered it as a result of battle. None of them had a single mark on them (in the cases of Madarame and Zaraki, new mark). Ukitake Jyuushirou was the only member of the entire Gotei 13 to have continuous run-ins with illness. Such things were not even close to common.

In short, for five shinigami to fall ill in sequence like this, four of them captains and one an acting captain, was the exact opposite of a coincidence. It was, for lack of a better term, a cataclysm.