Year 118 in exile.
N.B.
Here's my caveat: I will not be sharing much sciency details in the recording of this journal, not because it's top secret, which it is, but because I'll have to use more of these NBs more frequently to explain my meanings, and they're getting annoying already. This is just me emptying my thoughts onto a page, willing and happy to accept my worded regurgitation and keep me sane. The onus is on me to keep my mental health in top form, and $10 for a thick leather-bound legal-size 500-page book is a bargain, in my opinion, if you compare it to the small fortune it takes to buy a book in the Soul Society. Letting my fingers do the work as I pour out my thoughts on paper is the most effective way I've found to keep me standing on the precipice of the abyss in my mind.
Signed K.U.
A note from the owner of these writings
To make magic out of the mundane requires that I first make it mine. Ownership! Ownership is what's needed to take on a life of its own within me, not as a burden but as a prideful responsibility when I create, even if it's a grain of sand. Because a grain of sand is a moment of creation, and everyone knows that to create anything requires time, and patience, and love. Knowledge is but a byproduct derived out of my loyalty to excellence, and excellence, as I can testify, is a matter of trial and error. Most of the time, there are a mountain's worth of errors before success is realized. I create for my passion and for love, and love is older than humanity. Love requires no explanation, just as the universe that formed the nucleus of my soul one moment in time eons ago requires no explanation for why it did that.
When I create, it's a declaration, essentially me telling the universe, "Hey! I am not a raindrop in a thunderstorm; I am the storm. I am that which brings change with the flash of my lightning. I wash away and leave what is valuable in my wake—what can endure my visitation and the intensity of my presence. Here, using the opportunity of the now, in this space is where I reach out and pull my dreams, my ideas from thought, into my orbit, into my sphere of creative energies— into existence. It is the seemingly insignificant act of my mind moving in reality, yet it is monumental in its simplicity. When I create something new, when I invent from my thought environment, manifesting into reality the possible from what was previously impossible, intangible, and unseen! It stands as my declaration of war to this world, nay, to all of existence, that I will not settle for the ground floor when the sky is the limit, even in exile surrounded by the finitude of humanity as I am.
A scientist is an artist, and an artist is a warrior. It takes courage to embrace the unknown and extract from its frontier the impossible in the face of constant failure. Because within our courage lives the infinite. Reality is a choice, and you get what you focus on. Always!
Signed K.U.
Exilee Extraordinaire
Before I immerse my consciousness into the energy of another problem I feel coming on like the mother of all migraines—if I got those—I'm visiting my graveyard of dreams again through the lens of my mind's eye. Miles of tombstones of the things stretching out over acres and acres of thought that I painted in a greenfield at sunset just so it agrees with the current state of my wandering imagination a little more. Ah! The sweet nectar of accomplishment waters my pride as I'm recording on a high from my latest successful experiment, wherein I created a brand new environment, a brand new world, by exercising my right to creation on a grand scale as a citizen of this galaxy. But even after doing this, there is still so much to be done, and my mind will not rest easy.
Coming here, looking over this graveyard from the seat of my consciousness has kept me from blowing up this world in my sometimes seemingly mad pursuit of duty to excellence. That's not me being funny because I can and have, on several different occasions—ones I will not name in this journal recording for the sake of preserving my dignity—almost done just that. Toeing the lines of balance just this side of too far. There was an exception for this last time; however, I am proud to say that when I created a brand new reality inside the Grain Of Pause—a pocket realm, to use the proper terminology—a domain of time and space existing separate and apart from the Earth's reality, I did not come close to blowing up the World of the Living as we know it. Yay me!
Knowing the powers that you hold in your possession in the fullness of their carnality is only the first interlude of the horror movie, which is why I'm consistently working on my control—finetuning, if you will—the nuances of my gifts/curses. Only the soul of the universe alone knows how I am still a good egg with all that I know and all that I can do with all that I know.
A smirk formed on his lips as he wrote the next sentence.
It could be the fact that my better half would kick my ass six ways to Sunday if I were to seriously consider being evil incarnate of the mad scientist archetype. Yes. Behind every thriving man, there is a strong, beautiful woman saying, "Mess up and see what happens. I dare you."
Walking through my graveyard is a routine of mine to temper my creative passions: a double take, an in-depth look at the things I gave up on that I could have accomplished both here in the World of the Living and in my home world in the Seireitei; their names etched in elaborate script carvings on the front of every tombstone just so I can torture myself for accuracy's sake. It's my version of taking a walk to clear my head, but instead of going outside, I'm walking inside my head. Not from an imaginative perceptive but from a spiritual consciousness no human could begin to understand until they are at the end of their lives or at the beginning of their existence before their birth, when their psyche, soul, and true selves have yet to connect to their physical bodies.
The names vary from the experiments that I was too afraid to be responsible for or attempt to ideas that I allowed to die after dismissing them as too risky to be born just before I became distracted in the mundanities of this 'life?' if that's what this existence is for an exiled soul reaper like myself. I gave up understanding on what to call 'this' a long time ago as I continue to pretend to need to breathe in and out out of habit in this artificial body, one that I recently reconstructed. Not that its predecessor wasn't firing on all cylinders, but I had to add a few more wrinkles to this one because no matter how good your skincare routine is, your sunblock game, and no matter how much of a gym enthusiast you are, no human is ageless, and I must act accordingly to dwell among the mortals ignorant of my existence. Which is a good thing for me. It's convenient considering the traffic I get in my shop on a monthly basis because Seireitei time zones suck eggs in the World of the Living. If the soul reapers who exiled me are dogged in their pursuit of my talents—audacious of them, I'm aware—that's soul reapers for you. (Gods are remorseless bastards, present company excluded, most of the time.) Imagine the lengths humans would go to for what they think is everlasting life. IMMORTALITY. Ha! If they only knew the truth.
Can you imagine it? I, of a long-lived species with ageless knowledge and intellect and keys to the mysteries of this life and the one after it. A being of my caliber subjected to the indignity of a test subject for humans—a species that knows nothing about the world that they live in? Never mind their own potential? That will never be born. My pride would not be able to handle such acute humiliation.
I've often convinced myself that this is a good thing—living, as it were, in the World of the Living. It's a good thing that I have to stifle the fullness of what I am, have always known my being to be, to blend in with the collective chaos of confusion that is the human race who has forgotten their purpose and what they were sent on this earth to do when they were born; the connection to their souls hidden from their consciousness and buried deep in their subconsciousness that they visit every night when their bodies need rest only to wake up on the morrow and remember nothing of the world within that they visited; a shame really.
That's why children are such precious treasures to the earth, and their conception should always be conceived in love and happiness, not force, cruelty, or bitter despair. When a child is born, before its environment has beaten its belief system into its psyche, that child is still connected to the soul of the world from which it came. At that time in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible, and they know exactly what their dreams and purposes are until the propaganda of society and their messed-up belief systems hammer them into submissions of politeness and civility and 'the way things must be for the greater good'. This is one of the most criminal and acts of viciousness that happens in this world on an hourly basis. Many people are alive, but not many are living. #Dreamkillers #Lifesuckingvampiresociety. Only now, some are wising up and living their best lives based on their limited perspective of what the freedom of living is. But even with that said, (written?) most are unaware of what their true purposes are. Unable to hear the cries of their souls.
Because I am a soul and a soul understands what it's meant to do before its given form and flesh, as a spirit fully conscious of what it is while having a human experience, nothing in the entire collective breath of time and existence has ever been worse. I can't advertise my talents, lest I attract unwanted attention from the humans and other equally unpleasant forces. I could send the balance of all things off kilter if I let my spiritual reiatsu get out of my control for even a moment. I live in misery and I hide, unable to fully be what I am lest I upset the 'way things must be. After all, a death god is not meant to live among living creatures. A cruel punishment indeed, made more humiliating when said soul reapers come knocking at my door demanding my help. 13 Hells! How am I still a good egg?
Not that I can just die. An inglorious suicide doesn't suit my style anyway. Pulse, shinigamis are one of the hardest beings ever created in the soul of the universe to kill. Wound, yes, and it hurts like nine kinds of hell on the recuperation side of things for the soul reaper to recover the reishi content that escaped through their cuts and slashes. But unless it's by some interminable illness that prevents them from maturing by metamorphosis, and it's rare for a soul to die by a disease, something that literally eats at their lifespan and hampers the collection of reiatsu, or by an intense force that overwhelms and destroys their essence (the heart of their soul nucleus), the very thing that allows them to imprint on the cosmos, like the Firebird King more popularly known as the Sōkyoku, a halberd of true death does with rapacity, then killing a soul reaper is almost impossible.
N.B.
A soul matures through metamorphosis. Some call this spiritual growth, but that is not entirely explained. Metamorphosis happens at the point at which reishi, like cells in a human body, starts to build and repopulate within the soul, harvested through various actions taken throughout the soul's journey (lifespan). It goes without saying that, unlike humans, soul reapers cannot grow physically because, of course, they don't have physical bodies. They must undergo changes through the stages of their existence. Time plus meditation, training plus rest, plus study, and strong adverse circumstances such as battles will achieve that; getting stronger and adding more Reishi content, like breaking bones and healing them properly, makes healthy, stronger soul reaper babies. Building reishi in a spirit is a sure way to level up on the metamorphic scale. There are other methods too, but I won't go into those right here. The soul reaper can feel their energy levels leveling up, similar to giving off a presence. This is why the captains of the Goeti are so revered. They have presence! And depending on their mood, that presence can loose the bowels of an enemy or provide reassurance to an ally on the battlefield, thankful that reinforcements have arrived. Without saying a word, hundreds fall at their feet if it be their will.
Everyone has his or her own graveyard of dreams, and normally, it's not a place one wonders about voluntarily. Only the brave come here of their own accord if they're strong enough to look upon the innocent things they allowed to die so horrendously. The missed opportunities, the almost great moments in their lives disguised as failure or embarrassment. That one last push, or that one step away from completion, that last turn around the bend, and it would have been worth all the other failures leading up to that critical point before they gave up.
Most humans who do get here are sent on a quick pilgrimage if they have a too-close brush with death because the average human mind can't handle death even in the smallest details. Whether that's the death of a loved one, a pet, the ending of a career, or a marriage, even in a fictional work, they just don't cope with it well. They'll say that their life flashed before their eyes, and whenever I happen to overhear that, I secretly smile to myself. It's not their life that's flashing, as they call it; it's the dreams that they've allowed to die that are coming back like a haunting; it's the regrets from the roads they didn't travel out of fear or uncertainty that are bitching better than a 'Karen' can throw a fit for the manager. They ring continuously in our minds, silently screaming at us to act upon them while we have the currency of opportunity in our grasp. The dreams that are 'flashing before their eyes' are the untold stories replaying to their owners what they could have done differently—what could have been. Nothing can make someone feel like excrement like a regret that refuses to shut up. Humans are lucky in that regard because they don't get to hear their dreams and ideas constantly screaming at the top of their metaphorical lungs until they're close to death's door. A soul has no choice.
The fountain pen scratched the paper on that last sentence as Kisuke Urahara paused in mid-thought, pen-to-paper action. This is one of the few things that can hold his attention for long periods outside of his need to create in a near frenzy sometimes. Every day since he got the boot from the Soul Society, he's kept up a steady stream of logs of his ideas and experiments, but most times just to empty his thoughts on paper. Journaling keeps him from talking to himself like a raving madman. An intelligent, well-educated, and avid reader of a madman, but a madman nonetheless. Perhaps because this is also a form of creation in itself, that's why it works.
The problem with curiosity, especially for a soul (he continued to write, his well-honed penmanship flowing over the white page in a graceful dance of inked words and grammatically correct sentences), is that there's no cure for it. Believe me, I've searched extensively for decades. "Why would you want to cure curiosity?" I can already imagine someone asking. Well, it's not a passing fancy in my case. I, being me, can never actually relax. For me, my soul cries out constantly to my purpose from the moment I became aware that I had a purpose; curiosity is my ally and my nemesis rolled into one, intruding on my existence at inopportune moments. I don't get to make excuses like 'I'm having a creative block right now' like humans can boast about.
Even now, inactivity bites at my soul, on the heels of the latest of my completed works, "A Grain of Pause," a dimensional space, a separate reality different from any of the ones known to man, and my fellow gods back in the Soul Society. If they only knew what I am up to in my exile, their conservative minds would warp.
Without being in danger of tooting my own horn too badly, I could go so far as saying that the twin continents in the pocket domain (unimaginatively named the Twin Continents) of the Grain of Pause are completed to my satisfaction until I decide to shift the tectonic plates and reshape that world.
One would think that after pouring 160 years of my precious time into that masterwork, creating a separate time law, a separate space law, and all the nuances and details that go into the moments of creation, from a single grain of sand to mountains, rivers, and animal life. Not to mention side projects on city-size magnitudes, my stint as a mentor to Isshin's boy, and my constant updates from the Soul Society. Not to mention also my other long-term experiments, pulse the shop, that I would want a breather (not that I have any need for breath in the World of the Living seeing that I am Death God).
Still, an itch is alive just under the surface of my artificial skin, scratching at my impatience to see more, do more, create more, invent carefully, invent recklessly, theorize extensively, act on my theories, uncover, discover, and on and on without limitations, laws, or rules, and this happens constantly. And yes. I have tried sex. Mind-scattering sex at that, and it only fuels my need to create as the interludes to trists only invigorate my energy. But it does, admittedly, quiet the urge temporarily as long as I'm in the bed, in the closet, in the lab, outside, in the Study Chambers under this house, on the roof of a building, in the middle of the sky at night or early morning, etc, I believe the rest is self-explanatory.
The last time I followed my passion to create assiduously and damn the consequences, I created something I couldn't destroy—the Hōgyoku. Floating up from the depths of my imagination, maybe even from the dark side of me that I've always tried to keep in check because, hey, we all have a dark side. I am no saint. No soul reaper wants to be damned seven ways to the 'Pearly Gates'. That's almost as bad as being sent to the World of the Living to, quote, "live out the rest of your life".
Coming to my graveyard of dead dreams and ideas is a soother for me. Here I can watch the worms, a.k.a. the minutiae of everyday mundane life I pretend to in order to fit in, eat their fill of my once opportunities; it's my version of Netflix and chilling as I watch the ghosts of my dreams and ideas replay their last moments of thought over their designated tombstones, ending just at the same time I remember giving up on them. The plots are the same every time I visit. The one time repeated information isn't mind-numbingly boring to me is watching my dreams die—figures, I'm a death god, of course. Trips like these keep me from creating or following the seductive voices of my curiosity down destructive rabbit holes guaranteed to dirty my fluffy white tail like the one that almost gave the Sōkyoku its next meal in Rukia Kuchiki, Yoruichi's newest and most unwilling student victim. Speaking of which...
A digression.
I can't say I blame Rukia for not wanting any part of this scheme-pie Ginrei has his wrinkled fingers wriggling around in. Unless you're a masochist with a penchant for political drama and playing dodgeball with assassination attempts, who would voluntarily want to be married to Byakuya Kuchiki? Surely not the right, sensible young woman who was struggling to get free like a cat in a bag in Yoruichi's grip after failing to escape from her master. Yoruichi literally threw the girl unceremoniously past the threshold of the Grain of Pause last night. I could have told Rukia that she wasn't going to escape once Yoruichi got a grip on any part of her. I've been in that grip, and there is no escaping it until Yoruichi lets go. Regretiblity, the moment didn't come up.
To the best of my knowledge, Byakuya doesn't want anything to do with marriage again. It doesn't take rocket science to figure that out, and, honestly, I can't blame the guy. I've long suspected that his late wife, Rukia's sister (messed up that given recent developments), and the only love of his life was actually assassinated and didn't just die because of her ailment. When you're a soul reaper, the words 'life and love' take on a whole new meaning. It's not that fleeting, diluted chemical reaction that humans are allowed to feel that wars have been started over in centuries past. Oh no! What we soul reapers feel is orders of magnitude more potent. For souls, love is oneness—it is connection. Words cannot describe what we feel when we're in love with another soul. I have no idea what the old goat's plan is for the part where his grandson and adopted granddaughter get to do the sideways shuffle; all I ask is that he doesn't get me any more involved than I already am. If I know Byakuya as well as I do, there will be no peaceful resolution to this. Even if he's cornered into a marriage with his adopted sister, there is no way he'll willingly bed her, either for duty or tradition. The nobility be damned.
A knock sounded on the door of his lab, pausing his fingers on the full stop.
"Come in," Kisuke called in response, closing his journal after capping the pen.
It was Ururu, of course. He felt her spirit coming down the stairs. The door slid open, and the shy girl came in, carrying in her hand a steaming tray of delicious-smelling food that reminded the hunger mechanisms in his gut that he hadn't eaten. Carefully evading the obstacle course of random things scattered on the floor of his laboratory, the young girl successfully placed the tray flat onto his desk among the paper stacks that seemed to be nailed down into the mahogany. They've been there so long.
"Kisuke-san," Ururu's soft-spoken voice said, "you haven't eaten in three days."
"Has it been that long?"
She inclined her head.
Kisuke smiled sheepishly and affectionately patted the pig-tailed head of his adopted, artificial daughter. He didn't think of Ururu and Ginta as lowly mod souls. After all, who was he to judge a soul reaper perpetually damned to live in a Gigai for the rest of his exile sentence. "Thank you for thinking of me, Ururu," he told her, and she blushed a delicate pink under her already rosy cheeks.
Now that her duty was over, the girl was turning to leave when Kisuke called out to her back. "Ururu,"
"Yes, Kisuke-san," she said, turning on her heel to face him.
With his hat off and long bangs in the center of his forehead, Kisuke's patient gaze was unimpeded as he looked at his young charge. "You do not have to do what Lady Yoruichi asked you to do last night if you don't want to. You know that, don't you, Ururu?"
The girl shook her head as if to brush his words of dissuasion away. "No, I want to do it. I want to help Lady Yoruichi." Ururu told her master with firm-ish conviction.
"Okay." Kisuke nodded understandingly, respecting her decision. "Thank you for the meal; it smells wonderful."
"I hope you like it," Ururu said shyly, picking her way over and around objects laying on the floor.
Kisuke quickly partook of his meal, satisfying his hunger that just came online after giving way to his spiritual brainwalking by the gravesides for three days. It also does that when he's in the grips of a creative frenzy. Hunger is one of the simplest ways to differentiate a potential shinigami from the rest of the denizens of the Soul Society because hunger is correlated to reishi content.
"Change must happen in order for progress to match forward." Kisuke said to his untidy lab, or, as he likes to call it, 'organized chaos'. He knew where everything was in this place. He gave the leather cover of his journal an impatient look. Now that he's gone and broken his writing stride, his mind is already wandering elsewhere. Sinking into the energy of that problem he felt earlier. Already ideas were forming in the corners of his thoughts; theories and plans were taking their first shapes in his head. Next steps.
With a resigned determination, Kisuke picked up his fountain pen and reopened his journal. He always does this, no matter how tired he gets. He knows he can't skip this last part. The conversation in ink he can't afford to miss. It would be insignificant if anyone ever sat down and read one of his journals and actually made sense of the collision of thought they find paster on these pages. But to him, it's as critical as Reishi.
Notes to myself.
Any Final thoughts?
He paused the penpoint a millimeter from the page as he searched his mind before he continued.
Nope. I have no final thoughts. There are always new thoughts piling up, bubbling in my head as long as I'm aware. Even now, as I scribble this line, I'm in a hurry. Why? Because there is a torrent of ideas starting their own little conference in my brain right now, and I'm the guest speaker of honor. This is my journey, a soul on its purposed path.
A small chuckle escaped him. Whether out of bitter humor or in earnest, Kisuke didn't think to analyze it.
Any advice?
He didn't have to pause this time.
Just one, in fact. The obstacle is the way. Proceed in that direction, always. Fear is hesitation. Hesitation is stagnation, inside of which lays a pit where worms grow fat from dying dreams and dying ideas with the potential to shift paradigms.
Personally, I hate worms.