Chapter 234: Flying Star
"…So they will definitely go to the Zero Division, right?"
"Is that so. Desperate?"
"Yes."
Seated on the sofa in the Kurosaki house, Aizen lifted his teacup and blew gently across the surface, as if the heat itself had offended him. His gaze stayed on the screen, calm and attentive, his smile still mild and warm, like a respected elder watching a group of juniors struggle through a lesson they refused to admit they needed.
His camera placement had been meticulous.
Through the Chakra worker bee cameras, the meeting inside the dojo looked tense and solemn. The atmosphere was dim, the air heavy, and every furrowed brow seemed to deepen the gloom. It felt like dark clouds pressing down on a city that was about to collapse.
For Soul Society, that image was not exaggeration. It was simply honest.
They had reached the end of their rope.
There was no more outside leverage to spend. No more hidden guests to invite. No more mysterious factions to pretend could be called in at the last second.
Every power in this world, the obvious, the hidden, the dormant, even the ones people thought had vanished, had been forced into the open by chaos. The foundation of Soul Society, the foundation of the Quincy, the hidden cards in everyone's hands, all of it was laid bare. Aside from the suppressed Hell, everything was already on the board, clashing, swallowing, countering, and devouring.
They might not have fully realized it yet, but the ones at the top were already suffocating.
An invisible web was spreading, knotting itself through every faction, every belief, every fear. A web that brute force could not tear.
"In the past," Aizen said softly, "I enjoyed using illusions and genjutsu to bring people suffering and cognitive errors."
He took a sip of tea, eyes never leaving the screen where Kisuke Urahara frowned and argued, pushing again and again toward entry into the Soul King Palace.
"But I have learned something. When you control information itself, that is the greatest illusion."
His voice stayed gentle, but the meaning was cold.
Once, he had been naive. He believed that through deception, through experiments, through power, he could create someone who truly understood him.
In reality, he both succeeded and failed.
Ichigo understood him, yet never claimed he could accept it.
Urahara understood him too, and chose to pretend he did not.
That feeling had been difficult to name. As if his own understanding, the thing he trusted most, had been rendered meaningless. Later, when Shunsui Kyōraku released him from Muken and he watched Ichigo struggle with everything he had, Aizen finally felt that life still held meaning.
So he trained himself, deliberately, in the Hokage world.
Planning did not always require direct confrontation. Many times, the most effective plan was silent, like mist on a rainy night, seeping in naturally until it filled every crack in the walls.
Just like this.
Could anyone claim Soul Society reacted too slowly?
Could anyone claim the Quincy failed to grasp what was happening?
They all had choices.
Yet in the face of more information, they could only choose the one Aizen allowed them to see as viable.
This was the real trap.
Everyone had their own stance. Their own beliefs. Their own interests.
And those things narrowed every possibility into one inevitable road.
Soul Society seemed to have countless options, but their interests forced them toward the one that looked, from the outside, like the most foolish. The Quincy also had options, but Yhwach's presence dragged them toward the most selfish. Everyone looked free, yet no one truly had a choice.
They would all become the flaw. The stubborn, seemingly invincible enemy, yet utterly powerless against the web tightening around their throats.
If you wanted to defeat Aizen, you would first have to defeat your own people, people who had done nothing wrong except desire a better life. And you would have to cooperate with enemies stained by blood feuds.
Soul Society already knew the correct path.
They simply could not choose it.
They were not allowed to choose it.
On the surface, it looked like they had been forced into choosing the Soul King Palace after a chain of mistaken decisions.
In truth, it was what all three parties wanted.
Yhwach wanted the Oken to enter the Soul King Palace and destroy it completely.
Yamamoto wanted legitimacy, a final judgment, and the authority to move without tearing Soul Society apart from within.
Seireitei wanted a single voice to silence the split.
And Aizen wanted to meet the Soul King face to face.
Everyone had their own goal, yet the situation had rotted so thoroughly that every ambition converged on the same point.
Everything was proceeding according to his script, exactly as he had told Ichigo.
No excess. No surprises. Only the path they were cornered into walking.
"Then why are they in such a hurry?" Ichigo asked, earnest enough that it almost sounded like he still believed urgency was a choice. "If they dragged it out longer, they might suppress it. Things could even change internally."
"They are running out of time."
Aizen shook his head, speaking with the patience of someone explaining a simple rule to a student who refused to see the board.
"I planted many clones of the God Tree in Hueco Mundo. Those things have no conversion function. Their purpose is simple. Harden themselves, absorb the spreading reishi desert, then transmit signals into the universe through the Chakra network."
He took another sip, as if the words were nothing more than casual conversation.
"Everyone knows what I did. Because of the God Tree's natural hardness, only elite fighters can cut them down. And because those God Trees absorb surrounding reishi and convert it into broadcast signals, they can feel it."
"They can feel that a fleet has sensed the signal," he continued, "and that something mysterious is coming."
Ichigo blinked, then frowned.
"But without the Chakra signal, they would be safe?"
"Huh? Why?" Ichigo leaned forward, confusion written plainly across his face. Despite six months of being force fed information, he was still painfully ignorant of the imaginary sea and Aizen's travels.
"Usually, once you have coordinates, you can arrive directly, right? If you send a signal, you can get there directly, and Chakra is good at pinpointing locations. So if the coordinates are cut off, why can they not just come later anyway?"
Aizen answered without hesitation, tea steaming faintly between them.
"Because outside, in the imaginary sea, there are what you could call infinite parallel universes. Without signal coordinates, without key data and records, you cannot randomly locate one specific world for research and development."
He set the cup down softly.
"So long as they kill me and destroy the God Tree, they free themselves from the unknown. This does not require teaching. Once you truly come into contact with that cosmic aura, you understand it instinctively."
He looked at the screen again, at the tense faces inside the dojo.
"They know what I am. They know what they are facing."
The imaginary space was too vast. There was no up, down, left, or right. Even when the Hokage universe explored it, they relied on Aizen's coordinate trajectory and judged by his Chakra aura as the axis.
If the Chakra coordinates were shut down, and the aura erased, even the void fleet could search for ten thousand years and still fail to find the closed Shinigami world.
That was why both sides were getting nervous.
If this continued, the fleet pursuing Aizen's aura would arrive.
And then it would no longer be a matter of clever sacrifices or shifting pieces. It would become a matter of everyone's life and death resting on Aizen's whim.
To proud people, to those who lived by dignity, that was intolerable.
So before that future became reality, they had to determine the stance of the Soul King Palace and the Royal Guard. They had to unify Seireitei, establish legitimacy, and then expel Aizen and every other enemy, no matter the cost.
Of course, that was only the rational thinking of the Seireitei faction.
The Shinigami world also had its descent faction, madmen who wanted the entire world to explode. The Quincy ideology was even more extreme, craving a collapse into Chaos where the world itself ceased to matter, the madness almost elegant in how absolute it was.
Only under the Royal Guard's authority could Seireitei, the strongest force, truly unify.
Otherwise, this seemingly unshakable power was nothing more than Kyoka Suigetsu, magnificent to look at, and hollow when asked to act.
And this was something Yhwach, Yamamoto, and even the people in the Shiba dojo understood, even if none of them wanted to say it aloud.
"Next," Aizen said, voice smooth, "we watch carefully and see how Kisuke will twist black and white to do work for us."
"The clog hat helping us?" Ichigo asked, baffled. "Why?"
"He has his own ideas and concerns," Aizen replied. "He believes he is walking the correct path. But in essence, what he does next will help us greatly."
After all, Kisuke was not a simple loyalist. Even if he stood close to the nobles, he still carried his own convictions.
Aizen's eyes narrowed slightly, not with malice, but with the calm curiosity of a man watching a door finally begin to open.
Ichibe Hyosube might control the Zero Division.
But the Soul King was not dead yet.
.....
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