Torn Journal Page
Y'know, I wasn't a religious person. When I died, and ended up in Soul Society, it was a bit of a shock. I'd also never ruled out the possibility that there might be an afterlife, but it was still surprising. I've never read any texts like the Bible for any religions (except Dante's Inferno for school, but that's fiction, so it doesn't really count), but aren't all the afterlifes supposed to be paradise? I wake up in what they call District 42 of the East Rukon, and we are under the rule of some kind of tyrannical empire!?
I wasn't exactly old when I died, in my mid-twenties, but apparently it's customary to join a sort of found family when you arrive, and the people I ended up with was a nice older woman, and a young boy. She explained the gist of what had happened over the previous year, and it had my head spinning. I mean really, an evil empire of magic humans attacking some governmental body of death gods. I wouldn't have believed it if it weren't for something I saw for myself.
When I was alive, I had a normal life, a completely average person living a bland life, working as a salaryman at a boring company. Sure, I'd died but it had been quick and painless. A car crash. But I'd never truly seen death, not like this.
It wasn't too long after arriving there that I had my first encounter with the soldiers in white. This was the first time I saw what this empire was truly like. I had gone to a bar for a drink when a group of them walked through the front door. They simply demanded drinks, and were clearly weren't going to pay. The bartender tried to protest, and one of them conjured a sword out of nothing! I'd never seen anything like it. The bartender relented, there wasn't much he could do.
This was what life was like in District 42. Patrols of soldiers crossed through occasionally, taking what they wanted and making sure we knew our place. But it was a few months later that I truly saw what they were capable of.
Rumors were spreading around that a family in our district was secretly harboring a shinigami fugitive. I'd been told about the shinigami. People in the district had mixed opinions on them. Some liked them more than others, but it was pretty much unanimous that they were better than the current occupiers. I'd heard plenty of stories; how they wore all black and used amazing transforming swords to fight. Sure, I'd seen the soldiers in white do some pretty magical stuff, but the stories about the shinigami were so outlandish. One story said there was one that was over 2,000 years old and wielded the power of the sun!
After they had been driven from Soul Society, the Wandenreich had begun a purge to wipe out any remnants existing in the districts. It was considered high treason to interact with a shinigami.
Anyway, when the rumors reached the ears of the Wandenreich, soldiers moved through the district searching every home. It wasn't long before they discovered the fugitive shinigami.
I still shiver when I think of what happened next. The shinigami was young, she looked like she was barely a teenager. Apparently when the Purge began she had been a student in the shinigami's academy. The soldiers made everyone in the district gather in a large clearing in the center of the district. The soldiers said that the girl, and the man and woman that had been harboring her were to be made an example of, so everyone in the district was forced to be there.
And… gods… When we got there, there were three upright logs atop piles of wood. I knew my history, knew what that meant. To think, they'd be so barbaric. As the three were marched to the stakes, they held stoic expressions, but once the flames, bright blue in color, began to consume her, the facade broke. The terror, the screams, the pain, it won't leave my mind. I don't think it ever will.
I learned afterwards, from an elderly man, that it was even worse than I had imagined. The flames were made of something called reishi, extremely condensed. Because of that, not only did the fire simply kill them, it destroyed their souls completely, removing them from the cycle of reincarnation.
I can hardly take it anymore. A monstrous empire, willing to execute people on a whim, what the fuck kind of afterlife is this! Apparently the shinigami weren't truly destroyed though. Their army retreated, and they are still waging war out there somewhere, so that is the smallest scrap of hope we cling on to.
The only updates we get about what's happening outside the district comes from what we gain from the loose lips of drunk soldiers at the bar. There is a faction of insurgents that rebelled from their army fighting against them outside the districts, as well as the occasional guerilla attack by rogue shinigami still working underground in the districts.
As if all this wasn't enough, recently a soldier came to the bar complaining that they were dealing with a new situation. A fucking outbreak of zombies of all things! They had already overrun multiple districts, and the more people they kill, the stronger they get. I would say "what's next, a meteor crashing into the planet?" but apparently that already happened during the initial invasion. I want to go back to the world of the living.
Whatever the case may be, the Wandenreich's intention with that execution was clearly to sow fear, make it clear what happens to any traitors, but for a lot of us it had the opposite effect. Personally, I've had enough of this. Over the last few months, people throughout the Rukon have established a network of locations, known simply as the Path, in order to try and get ~~~~~gami refugees out of the Rukon Districts, and try to find one of the smaller factions in the ~~~~~~~~~er out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ink of doing for that nameless girl whose cries won't leave my mind.
Author's Notes:
I'm back! And with a very dark chapter. I might bump the rating on this story up to M because of this chapter.
(I used ~~~ to illustrate the page being torn here on FFnet, just to clarify)
I've been sitting on this idea for a while. I'm a big Star Wars fan, and the parallels that can be made between the Empire and the Wandenreich are very obvious, as are the similarities between the Jedi and the Shinigami.
In both the manga and anime, when Haschwalth first appears in the Seireitei he says something along the lines of "Tremble in fear Shinigami, the Sternritters are going to purge you all". To me that implies that a Wandenreich that successfully occupied the Seireitei would start a purge similar to what the Empire did to the Jedi. Or the real world example it's based on.
The next chapter will have a much lighter tone to balance it out, I promise. And regular weekday updates are back for the time being so look forward to it!
Thanks for reading!
