1: Moriyasu Tokoyo Verse of the Eyes Deep behind eyelids carved away, they know the world as nothing more than a tangle of threads.
These eyes that dwell in Tokoyo’s darkness, having seen through too much of what is real, have forgotten how to lie.
* * * Soul Society, the outskirts of Koifushi Mountain, North Rukongai District 3.
Warm morning light spilled across the quiet grassland.
In the gentle breeze, small creatures dozed contentedly, eyes narrowed, sprawled out here and there to soak up the sun.
Crack.
Crack.
An abrupt sound rang out from somewhere above the grass.
The small animals pricked up their ears, searching for the source.
They stared up at the blue sky and white clouds, puzzled, not quite understanding why the sound was coming from up there.
Crack!
A sound like shattering glass, but sharper, striking straight at the soul.
A fissure abruptly tore open in what had been an unbroken stretch of blue sky and white clouds.
Pitter-patter!
Squawk!
Flap!
A chaos of footsteps and wingbeats as the small animals scattered and fled.
The fissure in the sky grew more frantic with the noise, until, past some threshold, every sound abruptly vanished.
The fissure suddenly split wide open, and a pair of pale hands reached out from within.
The hands gripped the edges of the rift with force, and with a sudden heave, launched out of it like a high jumper clearing a bar, landing on the grass below.
In the next instant, the rift sealed shut and vanished without a trace.
“Ah, that felt good.
Finally out of that dark place.” Moriyasu threw both arms overhead and stretched with a satisfied groan, nostrils flaring as he breathed in the smell of fresh air and grass like a man starved for it.
He moved his body a little and found it heavier than expected, as if some invisible mountain were pressing down on him.
Even lifting his arm took real effort.
“Middle of nowhere.
Not a bad spot.” He closed his eyes, and after about three breaths, snapped them open.
A thread of silver had appeared at the center of his once-black pupils.
The entire world transformed before his eyes.
The grass beneath his feet, the soil, the trees around him, the insects and small animals living among them.
Through Moriyasu’s eyes, all of it dissolved into threads of white, shapes woven from Reishi.
He looked off into the distance, and there, roughly two kilometers away, several red threads of Reishi floated in the air.
“The pathways are red?” He started walking toward the red pathways.
The moment his right foot touched grass and earth, the inch of soil and grass beneath his sole dissolved into Reishi and surged up through the bottom of his foot, leaving a small crater behind.
He walked on, step by step, toward the red pathways, and every step left another crater in the ground.
Everything he stepped on turned to Reishi and flowed into his body, and gradually he felt lighter.
After roughly a hundred paces, he stopped and took stock of the power now in him.
It wasn’t much.
If Moriyasu had gone all out absorbing it, he could easily have ended up with a thousand times what he now had.
But that wasn’t his plan.
“This should be about enough.
Call it a finished reconstruction.” He held his hands up in front of him, opening and closing his fists a few times, then bounced on the balls of his feet.
His body felt completely different now, much lighter than before.
Moriyasu closed his eyes again, and when he opened them, the thread of silver in his pupils had faded away.
He kept walking in the direction where he’d seen the red pathways.
Before long, he heard a bright, bell-like voice ring out somewhere ahead.
“Everyone line up for your registration scrolls!
Only thirty more years until reincarnation!” Moriyasu followed the voice.
What came into view was a lively young woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, a scarf tied around her neck, dressed in black, a long sword at her hip.
People with red pathways were a special kind of soul unique to Soul Society: Shinigami.
She was busy calling out to the people around her, all dressed in coarse hemp robes.
They came and stood before her, holding out their arms.
She would run a finger across each arm, and a string of numbers would surface on the skin.
This was the registration scroll, meant to give these people a place in line for the reincarnation ceremony held once every sixty years.
The people in hemp robes were humans who had died in the living world.
When a person died in the living world, their soul would leave the body and wander.
One of a Shinigami’s duties was to find these wandering souls in the living world and perform Konso on them.
Through a Shinigami’s Konso, the soul would be broken down, then pass through space to arrive in Soul Society.
Because humans in the living world are made of physical matter, once they underwent Konso and arrived here, their bodies would be reconstructed out of Reishi.
And in the process, they would lose all their memories, becoming souls of the Rukongai.
Moriyasu himself wasn’t sure why, but after staying up late binge-watching anime, the moment he closed his eyes and opened them again, he’d somehow ended up in a pitch-black space, where he met an old man who called himself Tokoyo.
The old man had insisted on handing over his surname and his power, all of it, to Moriyasu.
But after leaving that space, he’d actually ended up in Soul Society, so none of that mattered anymore.
Because this was the world of Bleach, the show he’d watched in his past life, which meant he could get his hands on the abilities he’d been dreaming of forever.
And the moment he saw the beautiful blonde woman up ahead, Moriyasu was finally sure of it: that guy named Tokoyo hadn’t lied to him.
“The five great clans, huh?” Moriyasu murmured under his breath.
From what he knew, Soul Society had five great noble clans.
But the fifth one, the one sealed away in that dark space, he’d never once heard of.
“Well, since I’ve taken your power, and I really have been given a second life, guess my name’s Moriyasu Tokoyo from now on.” Head of the Tokoyo clan, one of Soul Society’s five great noble houses.
Sounded pretty impressive.
But Moriyasu had watched Bleach countless times in his past life, and there had never been any such clan.
Which meant there was clearly a lot going on here that he didn’t know about.
The thought made him smile.
He walked toward the blonde Shinigami girl, Rangiku Matsumoto.
“Hi, could you tell me how to get to Shin’o Academy?
I want to become a Shinigami.” Moriyasu stopped three steps in front of Rangiku, cutting in before she could hand the next soul their registration scroll.
Rangiku turned her head and looked him over from head to toe without a hint of self-consciousness.
Short black hair, features cut sharp as a blade, a pair of bright, sharp eyes, and a smile as warm as a spring breeze that put people instantly at ease.
Even in hemp robes, he stood tall and straight.
Three steps of distance, not too close, not too far.
Perfectly measured.
This was someone with manners, someone who knew propriety.
As she kept looking him over, she noticed the armguard on his right arm, an unusual design, decorated with patterns like threads of gold.
On the arm in particular there was a strange emblem that looked like the crest of some noble clan.
Rangiku frowned slightly.
They’d covered how to identify noble crests back in school.
She hadn’t really paid attention at the time, but if this particular crest had ever come up in class, she was sure she’d have remembered it.
The emblem was an eye, with symmetrical lines above and below, all enclosed within a circle.
For some reason, staring at it gave her the feeling that everything about her was being seen straight through, and it left her strangely uneasy.
She shifted her gaze back to Moriyasu’s face, and at the sight of his clean, handsome features, the unease faded.
She smiled and said: “Shin’o Academy is in West District 1 Junrinan.
You’re in North District 3, Koifushi Mountain, right now.
Head to North District 1 Junrinan first, then follow the wall of the Seireitei west, and you’ll see it.” “Thanks.” Moriyasu thanked her, turned, and headed toward North District 1 Junrinan.
Rangiku watched him go, extending her spiritual sense for a moment before pulling it back, shaking her head slightly.
“That spiritual power rating’s a bit shaky.” She put him out of her mind and went back to handing out registration scrolls for the day.
Moriyasu strolled along, taking in the sights of the Rukongai as he walked.
Soul Society was vast, but the Seireitei and Rukongai under Shinigami administration were relatively concentrated.
The area under Shinigami control could be thought of as one enormous circle.
At the center of that circle was the Seireitei, where the Shinigami and the noble clans lived.
The Rukongai was built around the Seireitei at its center, districts set aside specifically to house souls.
The whole of Rukongai wrapped around the Seireitei like layers of an onion, divided outward district by district.
The ring closest to the Seireitei was called Junrinan.
Based on the Seireitei’s four gates, east, west, south, and north, it was split into East, West, South, and North District 1 Junrinan.
After the better part of a day, he finally arrived outside the west gate of the Seireitei.
West District 1 Junrinan.
The Shin’o Academy’s enrollment site.
The enrollment stand was simple, just two instructors seated at a table, with two round beads set on top: spirit-measuring beads.
Anyone who wanted to apply had to pass the bead’s test first, to see if they had enough spiritual power.
What separated a Shinigami from an ordinary soul of the Rukongai came down to the concentration of Reishi.
An ordinary soul with low Reishi concentration could go on existing in Soul Society indefinitely just by breathing.
A soul with too high a concentration, on the other hand, would grow hungry and need to eat food infused with Reishi to sustain its body.
The spiritual power rank was the standard used to measure how concentrated that Reishi was.
Only souls ranked twenty or above qualified to apply to the academy.
Moriyasu got in line without fuss, and his turn came quickly.
Smiling, brimming with confidence, he set his hand on the spirit-measuring bead.
A moment later, the characters for “nineteen” surfaced on the bead.
The two instructors exchanged a look, as if having a silent conversation, before turning back to Moriyasu.
“Register your name first.
Report to Shin’o Academy in three days.” Moriyasu picked up the pen and wrote his name across the registration form with a flourish: Moriyasu Tokoyo.
The instructor jotted a note beside it, right in front of him: Spiritual Power Rank Nineteen.
Moriyasu smiled.
“Thank you.” He thanked them, turned, and walked off, his bearing straight and tall.