Chapter 252: Beyond Grudges and Debts (1)
If Aizen had ever made a promise to the Soul King, then at its core, it was only a single sentence.
From that moment on, this world would never again be bound by shackles.
That one line was enough to move the Soul King into action.
Whether it was Hell or the cycle of rebirth, both had been desperate choices made under stagnation. The Three Realms had long since been explored to the limit. There was no empty space left, no mysterious forbidden zone, no untouched virgin land waiting to be discovered. Everything within this world ran beneath the Soul King's cycle.
Yet it never meant the system was perfect.
It meant the system had run out of capacity.
It was already in motion, already strained, continuously spawning bugs and aberrations like a machine that no longer had the room to correct itself. A dying cycle, doomed to collapse, even as it watched an opposing system quietly accumulate strength.
When individuals above the rank of Captain died, they fell into Hell.
Eventually, Hell would overflow.
And when that day came, the fixed quantity produced by a rigid cycle would be crushed by Hell's infinite growth. Sooner or later, Hell would devour the entire world. This outcome was already set in stone.
To the Soul King, it was an ending even more despairing than the void devouring future he had once foreseen. At the very least, he had no solution of his own. All he could do was rely on that faint, uncertain clarity and confirm one thing.
After Kurosaki Ichigo, someone would be able to resolve it.
How it would be resolved, what method would be used, what the result would look like, what fate would demand in exchange, those were questions for another contest entirely. Another investigation. Another era.
But one thing was certain.
Resolving it would demand vast sacrifice, waste, and a measure of grudges and attrition.
Yet in the end, it was still only a problem inside the system.
The Three Realms and Hell, locked together as a dual world structure, formed a system fated to collapse, yet also a closed system, one without external variables. Those true voids beyond, the universes adrift in chaos, time, and space, those were possibilities the Soul King had never truly perceived.
After all, there were infinite universes and infinite parallel worlds. Possibility stretched from the infinitesimal to the infinite. If observation confirmed their absence in an instant, then they truly were absent. The Soul King had never seen a cosmos that could save them, nor any potential solution.
If he had glimpsed even a sliver, he would never have resorted to patchwork fixes.
It had been a last resort, chosen only because there was no alternative.
And now, a Visitor Star from beyond the cosmos had offered the Soul King a brand new choice, a brand new method.
Since this world was already doomed to ignite, doomed to explode, and since Chakra's sea lanes would inevitably find their way here following Aizen's arrival, then why not join forces and set the stage?
Why not present a united, flawless front to whatever came next?
Settle every grudge and hatred. Compress all pain and torment into this final hour. Shinigami, Quincy, humans, seen and unseen, would fight one last battle and reach a final outcome.
The Soul King's resurrection.
And the end of this world's lockdown.
After that, Hell would no longer be a calamity that could only be delayed. It would become an answer that could be faced, understood, and perhaps even perfected.
This was the promise Aizen gave the Soul King.
The Soul King was the incarnation of a world, so a promise to him was, in essence, a promise to the world itself.
Aizen bore no malice. Even if progress cast countless people from the carriage, to the world it was merely natural succession. So long as the other system did not destroy it, and so long as the root problem could be resolved forever, then it was the greatest possible good.
Whether one spoke of Chakra or spiritual power, both were ultimately energy systems. There was no hierarchy of nobility between them. The current disaster came from Shinigami and Quincy tearing at each other while clinging to the status quo as if it were sacred. To the Soul King, it could all be resolved with a flick of the finger.
And so the answer became obvious.
They could never triumph.
They could not even notice the real issue.
Because the true weavers of fate had already chosen the victor.
They were simply destined to settle hatred and debt with blood, on the battlefield of destiny.
If it did not happen this way, they would never truly understand each other's existence. They would never truly make peace. Only after force was used to its conclusion, only after they had acknowledged who stood above and below, only after they had accepted the objective reality of the world, could they finally recognize the other side as living beings.
In a sense, it was an inherent flaw of intelligent creatures.
Even the Soul King was no exception.
There had to be one real, all encompassing hatred that could throw them onto a genuine battlefield. They had to vent the resentment that had piled up over a thousand years. Only then could they join hands. Otherwise, hatred would keep spreading forever, multiplying like a sickness the world could not cure.
Every debt of gratitude and vengeance would be settled, counted, sorted out.
This was the mercy the Soul King granted them.
One of the best endings they could imagine.
The fact that Aizen Sōsuke's illusions landed one after another was not because his power had reached some impossible peak. It was because the world itself wanted everyone to believe him. Under fate's guidance, it naturally selected those who would truly believe, and those worthy of belief.
So called omniscience and omnipotence were feeble before true manipulation of fate.
And now, while everyone remained unaware, a silent tear opened inside the Soul King Palace.
Two figures stepped out.
Aizen Sōsuke and Kurosaki Ichigo, now dressed in their respective attire, stood within the Soul King Palace and looked down the sandō path.
Like statues, the figures of Quincy and Shinigami, including Ichibe Hyosube, were fixed in place along the route. Their expressions were lifelike, preserved in shock and disbelief. Their bodies and vitality had been sealed in an instant.
They had already settled their grudges.
Some had been defeated outright by Aizen Sōsuke, then forced to perform Auswählen to release themselves.
Others had charged into the Soul King Palace on their own, confronted the world's ultimate secret, lost all composure, and were frozen upon the sandō.
Ichibe Hyosube had believed the Soul King had abandoned his duty and tried to strike from behind, only to end up pinned in place as well.
For the oldest being in this world, it was undeniably shameful.
But shame meant little when one looked at who had held him fast in the end.
Deep within the Soul King Palace, inside a gigantic crystal of ice, a limbless figure gazed toward the two who had arrived through the rift.
Its eyes bore white, cross shaped gleams.
This dismembered body, naked and preserved within the crystal, was the Soul King. His continued existence maintained the balance of the Three Realms. It was because this unclothed man had sacrificed himself in the distant past that the realms had not been devoured by Hell, that total chaos had been delayed.
And now, a being long judged to have lost all self awareness showed an odd smile within the ice.
Hair raising.
The limbless form stared straight at Aizen Sōsuke, who had torn space to arrive here, and its grin was so horrifying that even Kurosaki Ichigo flinched, instinctively shrinking his neck.
Yet Aizen showed no surprise at all. He merely adjusted his glasses and looked upon the saint who had saved the world through sacrifice.
"Can you see farther into the future now, Your Majesty?"
'I have never been able to see the future, only a feeling.'
"Something just spoke inside my head!"
The voice echoed through Ichigo's mind so clearly that he jumped, his eyes darting around before locking onto the sealed body in the crystal. He could not accept that this man, frozen and dismembered, could still project his voice.
Aizen sighed, faint and almost patient, and shook his head.
"There is no need for such alarm. In truth, His Majesty sees everything. This world was transformed by his own sacrifice. Anything that occurs within the Three Realms rarely escapes the Soul King's gaze, so that reaction is pointless."
'Not so. There is still much I cannot see.'
Though he claimed there was much he could not see, he did not specify what.
Within the crystal, the limbless Soul King gave the slightest nod toward Aizen and Ichigo.
Then, like a trunk without limbs, he stared forward again, utterly still, as though the seal had swallowed every trace of motion.
If they had not just seen him nod and speak, Ichigo would never have believed the Soul King retained self will within that prison. He had heard the lessons, heard the stories of the sealing, but only now did he grasp how terrible it truly was.
Even standing nearby, he could sense the immense effort the ancestors of the Shinigami had poured into binding the Soul King.
At the very least, this was no trap ordinary Shinigami or Quincy could ever devise. The founders of the Four Great Clans had dismembered the Soul King and placed him here, wanting only a specimen.
And now that specimen had ideas of its own.
Outside the Soul King Palace, waves of reiatsu were already rolling in.
.....
[Check Out My Patreon For Advance Chapters On All My Fanfics!]
[[email protected]/FanficLord03]