[Volume One: Hueco Mundo Chronicles] “Ugh…
Mmm…
What’s wrong with me?” Slowly opening his eyes, Wayne felt wave after wave of dizziness and weakness.
A chill wind swept across him, and he shivered involuntarily.
His vision cleared.
What lay before him was a dusky yellow sky without a single cloud, only a chaotic, murky haze that stirred dread deep in the chest.
“Where is this…” Gazing at the unfamiliar surroundings, Wayne fell silent for a moment, then began sorting through his memories to make sense of his situation.
“I must have died.
Is this the world after death?” Wayne rose to his feet and looked around at the strange environment.
In his memory, he should have been in a hospital bed, fighting his final battle against illness, and losing.
“A chaotic world, a dusky yellow sky, air damp and thick with a fishy stench.
A bone-chilling wind and a desolate desert, and this strange, oppressive aura…” ROAR!
Before he could figure out his circumstances, a bizarre howl erupted nearby, snapping every nerve in Wayne’s body taut in an instant.
He turned his head.
What he saw was a creature whose size defied comprehension, mammoth-like in scale, walking on all fours, its tail even longer than its entire body.
On its head, a massive grayish-white mask was clamped over a face that was hard to place as either bovine or feline.
Where the eyes should have been on the mask were black, empty voids, within which only faint, flickering points of red light gleamed.
Strangest of all, a gigantic hole pierced straight through the creature’s torso, leaving the space before it completely hollow.
The bizarre creature, however, seemed to have no interest in Wayne whatsoever.
It roared once, pawed at the ground, and ran off into the distance, leaving a baffled Wayne behind.
“That shape…
why does it look familiar?” Wayne drew in a sharp breath.
“It kind of looks like…
a Hollow?
The Hollows from the anime Bleach?” Something clicked in his memory.
“Did I…
transmigrate?” After a long pause, Wayne arrived at that conclusion.
The word “transmigration” was not unfamiliar to a young person of the 21st century.
What was unfamiliar was that a concept belonging only to films, television, and literature had actually happened to him.
“Did I transmigrate, or does this world of Soul Reapers truly exist after death?
Is this Hueco Mundo?” Turning over everything he knew about that anime, Wayne gradually recalled the name of this dim, murky realm.
Hueco Mundo.
“Why am I in Hueco Mundo?
Could it be…” Muttering to himself, Wayne reached out and felt along his own body.
Sure enough, right at the center of his chest, a pitch-black, empty hole had appeared there.
At this, Wayne’s heart filled with nothing but resignation.
He really might have transmigrated, and transmigrated as a Hollow, no less.
“Incredible.
There really is a Hollow Hole.” Feeling the void in his chest, Wayne could only accept the fact.
Whether this was a world that truly existed after death, or he had crossed into the world of Bleach, one thing was clear: he was still alive.
“Forget it.
At least I’m alive again, and I can still move.
That’s already pretty good.” Accepting reality, Wayne began taking stock of his situation.
But right now he had no idea what he even looked like.
If he had ended up as an animal-shaped Hollow, or some mutated form, that would be a problem.
He stood up and began examining his body.
Conveniently, there was a withered little tree beside him.
Assuming it was no different in size from a normal tree, then Wayne’s current height — level with the trunk — was probably about the same as in his previous life.
Around 1.7 or 1.8 meters.
Looking himself over, he was still a bipedal, humanoid form.
That alone made Wayne breathe easier.
As long as he was still human-shaped, controlling his own body would be simple.
For people of the modern era, taking martial arts classes was already commonplace, and many had even begun dabbling in cold weapons.
That meant Wayne’s brain had retained its most basic motor coordination and reaction capability.
As long as he was still human-shaped, he could put those advantages to use.
He looked down at his lower body.
Anything resembling clothing had long since vanished.
All that remained was a layer of white, keratinous skin wrapping around him from the waist down.
At the waistline, the white keratinous layer had formed something resembling a battle skirt, while his upper body was covered in a layer of white, armor-like hide.
As Wayne’s physical abilities grew, this hide would likely become the Hierro that only high-level Hollows possessed.
Examining his hands, Wayne saw that his left hand still held the shape of a human hand, except for a thick layer of keratin at the joints and forearm, like a bracer, and a raised ridge of bony protection at his shoulder.
His right hand, however, had transformed into a claw.
The original five fingers had become five razor-sharp bone blades.
A layer of hard plating extended from his forearm upward.
In the very center of his chest sat a small, pitch-black hole, the location of his Hollow Hole.
Staring at it, Wayne thought for a moment.
He remembered a scene from the anime: after a Hollow evolved to a higher level, the position of its Hollow Hole would shift as its body changed.
He wondered if that would hold true for him as well.
Having roughly surveyed himself, Wayne was fairly satisfied with his humanoid Hollow form.
Whatever else was uncertain, he could still move normally.
That was enough.
“Right — I remember that Hollows all wear masks.
Why don’t I feel anything?” Wayne suddenly tensed.
He recalled that a Hollow’s mask formed to fill the void left by its heart.
More than that, the mask was the core of a Hollow’s spiritual power.
Once it was shattered, that power would scatter and dissipate.
Of course, there were Hollows with special abilities whose spiritual power actually surged upon the mask’s breaking.
After their power stabilized, their abilities would gradually recede and the mask would restore itself, but that was true of only a rare few.
As the thought crossed his mind, Wayne reached up to touch his face.
Because the mask had already become a part of his body, it didn’t feel jarring at all.
He quickly traced its shape.
Calling it a mask, though, wasn’t quite right.
It was more accurate to say Wayne was wearing a helmet.
A white helmet encased the upper half of his face and his entire back of the head.
Light, pale-golden strands of hair fell from the back of the helmet.
Directly in front of his eyes was an even thicker, inverted-triangle layer of bone, with horn-like bony protrusions rising above it.
Strangely, none of this obstructed his vision in the slightest, which surprised him.
With his physical assessment complete, Wayne turned to testing his strength.
In Hueco Mundo, a world where the strong consumed the weak, power was everything.
With enough power, you could walk through Hueco Mundo however you pleased.
Without it, you were destined to end up as a meal in some high-level Hollow’s belly, or simply become another part of the desert.
He clenched his left fist and drove it into the withered tree beside him.
One blow, and the tree snapped and toppled.
Without pausing, he raised his right claw and slashed at the fallen trunk.
The claw split it cleanly into five smooth segments.
“Hmm.
Not bad.” Wayne allowed himself a small smile.
“I still don’t know my current Reiatsu level or what my abilities actually are — but I should be able to figure that out by poking around, right?” he muttered to himself.
“Alright.
I’ll start by carefully looking for some Hollows nearby that seem relatively weak and see how I do against them.” With that settled, Wayne prepared to move.
He hadn’t taken a single step when an invisible pressure crashed in from all directions at once, nearly driving him to his knees.
“Ugh — this crushing feeling…
is this Reiatsu?” Following the pressure to its source, Wayne forced his head up.
A kilometer away across the desert, a gigantic shark hurled itself out of the sand with tremendous force and let out a soul-shaking roar.
In that instant, every dead tree in the vicinity was pulverized by the shockwave.
Even at a full kilometer’s distance, Wayne was hurled backward by the impact and lay there for a long time, unable to rise.
It took several minutes before he finally struggled back to his feet.
When he looked toward where the shark had been, there was nothing left, no creature, no sign of movement.
Everything had returned to its usual desolate calm.
Get away from here.
That was Wayne’s first and only thought.
Whatever else was true, that shark-shaped Hollow had just made one thing perfectly clear: it was the undisputed ruler of this stretch of desert.
If he stayed, Wayne had no idea when that terrifying roar might simply tear him apart.
Perhaps the shark hadn’t bothered to attack because he wasn’t worth the effort, an ant too insignificant to kill.
He didn’t linger.
Wayne immediately ran in the opposite direction from where the shark had appeared, not daring to stop for a single second.
Since becoming a Hollow, his stamina seemed to have improved considerably.
He didn’t know how long he had been running before he finally stopped, sinking down beside a boulder and breathing hard.
“I should be far enough from that area by now,” Wayne muttered between gasps.
A long while passed before his breathing evened out, and even then he broke into a cold sweat.
The image of that moment refused to leave him.
He couldn’t help but laugh at himself.
He had thought punching a small tree down made him impressive.
Facing that gigantic shark-shaped Hollow had shown him exactly how weak he really was.
“No.
I have to find out what I’m actually capable of, right now.” If that shark had been an Adjuchas-class Menos, then Wayne’s current strength placed him somewhere in the upper range of ordinary low-rank Hollows.
But if it had merely been a large, common beast-type Hollow, then without any question, Wayne was among the weakest creatures in all of Hueco Mundo.
His mind made up, Wayne began moving stealthily through the endless sea of sand.
Wandering aimlessly was often the most dangerous thing you could do, you never knew which high-level Hollow’s territory you might stumble into in the next step.
But staying in one place would mean never growing, and Wayne knew it.
Better to take the initiative: move carefully, stay alert, and trust his instincts to steer him around threats.
Drawing on his memories of Bleach, Wayne mentally mapped out the regions of Hueco Mundo as he walked.
The territory was divided into an inner circle and an outer circle.
The inner circle was home to the top-tier kings.
The outer circle was the roaming ground of weaker Hollows.
The outer circle was further divided into the surface, the sand layer, and the underground.
The surface was the domain of the Menos.
The underground was where Wayne likely was now.
Within the underground layer, the most dangerous landmark was undoubtedly the Forest of Menos.
With his current strength, going anywhere near it would be suicide.
Even so, Hueco Mundo was vast.
Beyond the several Forests of Menos, there were smaller valleys, dead-tree groves, and similar territories, occupied by high-grade ordinary Hollows that had not yet evolved into Gillians.
What Wayne needed to do now was work his way toward one of those smaller territories and find something he could actually test himself against.
There were no timekeeping tools in Hueco Mundo.
Even the air and the light were disordered, offering no frame of reference.
Wayne could only estimate how far he had traveled by how tired he felt and how long he had rested.
After roughly three days, Wayne climbed a low sand dune.
On the other side, he could vaguely make out what looked like a stretch of forest.
Such as it was.
The trees there were nothing but black and white dead wood.
The other so-called resting places for Hollows, rocky cliffs, fault-block formations, were simply areas that were marginally easier to survive in.
That was all.
But for Wayne, this small stretch of forest was enough.
He wasn’t here to push deep into the wasteland.
His goal was to work along the outer edge of the forest and find the weakest enemies he could.
➤ Next: Treading Carefully