Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 27 - Soul Absorption and Negación

Time passed swiftly.

Several months had gone by since Wayne advanced to Gillian.

Unlike those mindless Gillians, Wayne had received the call of the Forest of Menos yet managed to remain in this forest.

He recalled that when Jekain had advanced, long ago, Jekain hadn't lost consciousness either, yet couldn't choose his own habitat. Maybe that was because Wayne was already within the Forest of Menos, sparing him from the forced summoning.

Or perhaps, as that mysterious voice-will had said, the unique nature of his existence meant there was no need to seek another place. Or perhaps by some stroke of fate, the very forest beneath his feet had been the one calling him all along.

Whatever the reason, it was good news for Wayne.

During Nel's hibernation, Wayne had fully absorbed the survival knowledge and laws gifted to him by the consciousness that called itself the will of the Forest of Menos.

Hueco Mundo, it turned out, was far broader than he'd imagined, far more filled with opportunity, and with the dangers that came alongside it. Even the hierarchy of strength ran deeper and higher than he'd known.

Vasto Lorde was not a Hollow's ceiling. Above that, king-class Hollows still held the possibility of further evolution. Only across countless millennia, no one — no, no Hollow — had ever actually reached that level.

Over this past month, fifteen-meter-tall Wayne had gradually grown accustomed to his enormous body. He'd worked out why Gillians moved so slowly: their sheer size was one reason, but the other was that after being poured into a new vessel, the Reishi within them thinned out all over again. That was precisely why so many high-level Hollows, the moment they advanced to Gillian, immediately used Soul Absorption.

Because they were starving.

Think of it this way: the Reiryoku a high-level Hollow could hold was roughly a bucket of water. Now pour that bucket into a swimming pool. It doesn't come close to filling it.

That emptiness was what made early-stage Gillians so sluggish.

But as time passed and their own Reiryoku grew, their speed would gradually return.

The mindless ones, though, over their long crawl toward advancement, they'd simply grown accustomed to that Reiryoku-conserving way of moving and never bothered to change. Most didn't even know how to change. Perhaps only when faced with absolute crisis would the idea of "run" surface from somewhere in their subconscious.

Wayne was different. From his days as a lower Hollow, he'd been relentlessly accumulating and compressing his Reiryoku. That discipline hadn't just made his advancement smoother, it meant that after advancing, the Reiryoku inside him was stable rather than hollow and unsteady.

And so, within a single month, Wayne was already moving freely. Shadow Step was gone — his new body couldn't use it yet — but that hardly mattered when it came to hunting. Inside the Forest of Menos, nothing was faster than him except the Adjuchas.

CRACK!

Under a great tree, Wayne slapped the head off an unlucky Gillian with one hand, picked up its Hollow Mask, and shoved it straight into his mouth. Then he walked away without a second glance, leaving the corpse still bleeding Reishi into the air.

His hunting method hadn't changed much, still ambush. His innate ability made sure of that.

The ability Wayne had received upon advancing wasn't an attack boost. It wasn't a speed enhancement. It was something else entirely.

It was called: Concealment.

Not just a surface trick, it ran deeper than that, woven into the very nature of his existence. For Wayne, Concealment was nothing short of a broken ability. Because what it granted him wasn't merely Reiatsu concealment. It was also physical form concealment, and... Cero concealment.

An ordinary Hollow's Cero was dark red. Nel's Cero Doble was pink. Wayne's Cero was colorless.

Completely transparent. The only thing visible when he fired it was the air itself, twisting and bursting apart at the point of ignition.

Wayne knew his control over it was still incomplete. Only when he advanced to Adjuchas, or to Vasto Lorde, would he achieve true full concealment, killing an enemy without leaking so much as a single trace of Reiatsu.

For now, the drawback was obvious. Concealment didn't add destructive force to his Cero. His only real edge was still the Reiryoku he'd spent so long building up. That meant a longer road to advancement than most. But Wayne could afford to wait. He still had time.

Until that person arrived.

"Burp..." Leaning against a tree trunk dozens of meters tall, Wayne let out a thoroughly undignified belch. Several months had passed since Nel entered hibernation. During that time he'd fully restored his Reiryoku, adapted to his Gillian body, and started compressing again. And somewhere in between, a question had begun to take up more and more space in his mind, whether this Forest of Menos truly had a master, as those two Adjuchas had once claimed.

"The Lord of the Northern Forest. Just what kind of existence is that?"

The title kept snagging at him. Lord of the Northern Forest, was it the master of the northern section of the Forest of Menos, or the master of the northern Forest of Menos as a whole? Those were two entirely different things.

The forest Wayne occupied was the Forest of Menos on the northern side of Hueco Mundo. Ruling a section of a forest and ruling the entire forest weren't even in the same tier.

If it was the former, the being's power would likely cap out at late-stage Adjuchas. But if it was the latter... even Vasto Lorde wasn't out of the question.

A being powerful enough to hold an entire forest under its grip was not something to take lightly. Until Wayne could protect himself, provoking something at that level was off the table.

"As a Gillian right now, hunting down other same-level Hollows with consciousness would just end in a bloodbath. Growth might be slower at the fringe, but it's safer than pushing into the core. And Nel is still asleep. Maybe when she wakes up..."

Wayne's massive silhouette paced slowly as he turned it over. He wasn't someone who took unnecessary risks. Especially not from a position of weakness. That patience, that restraint, he'd honed it from the very beginning, and he pressed it to its absolute limit here.

Near the clearing where Nel slept, he began building traps. As a Gillian, he was already more agile than the mindless ones, so even if the work was slow, he could still throw together basic pit traps and spike traps.

At this level, trees and boulders weren't going to hurt anyone seriously. That wasn't the point. What Wayne wanted was control, something to restrict an opponent's movement, or make enough noise to function as a warning.

Like a spider's web. No matter how wide it spread, the moment anything blundered into it, the spider would know.

When he'd finished laying warning traps across a full kilometer surrounding Nel, Wayne finally let himself relax. He found a massive pine, hollowed out a cavity in the trunk, and climbed inside to rest.

The Forest of Menos was bleak, a primordial wilderness thick with an aura of desolation, but its trees were immense. Enormous enough that a fifteen-meter Gillian fit inside them the way an ordinary person fit inside an ordinary room.

As for cultivating his Reiryoku? That was the least of his worries.

When he'd advanced to Gillian, the Forest of Menos had gifted Wayne more than just Cero. Two additional skills had come with it, Soul Absorption, and Negación.

Soul Absorption needed little explanation. It was the foundational skill of every Gillian, and the main way mindless Gillians grew within the Forest of Menos.

Reiryoku here was extraordinarily dense. Each use of Soul Absorption pulled enough Reishi from the surrounding air to match an entire lower-level high Hollow. A hundred draws was roughly equivalent to consuming one Gillian.

How many Gillians did it take to evolve into Adjuchas? A few hundred, maybe? Wayne didn't know, and didn't need to. He already understood that his own advancement would demand far more than a hundred Gillians' worth.

Negación, on the other hand, was something worth thinking carefully about.

In one sense, it was unbreakable. Once released, not even a captain-level Soul Reaper could shatter it. In another sense, it was completely impractical, it couldn't be cast on oneself, and whoever released it couldn't have Negación cast on them by another Hollow while it was active.

In other words, it had to be cast by an ally. Not just any ally, one with an extremely strong bond. Because once Negación was released, the user became everyone's target. It wouldn't disappear until they canceled it themselves, were struck down, or ran dry on Reiatsu.

For that reason, Negación was almost never seen in use between Hollows.

A skill with such extreme duality, whether its benefits could be made to outweigh its costs depended entirely on the Hollow wielding it.

Wayne settled into the tree hollow, opened his jaws, and began Soul Absorption. Reishi gathered from the air around him in faint, visible currents, flowing steadily inward. One draw, a brief rest, then another.

Hollows didn't feel fatigue. Especially not when Reiryoku was plentiful.

He closed his eyes and let the sensation wash over him, the quiet, pleasant pull of Reishi entering his body. The yield wasn't enormous, but it was steady, and it was safe.

Stillness, though, never lasts.

Some unmeasured stretch of time had passed, and Wayne was drifting toward the edge of sleep, when a roar split the air several kilometers away. It hit with a surge of Reiatsu so powerful that Wayne snapped fully awake in an instant.

"That's... an Adjuchas summoning call?"

The howl reverberated inside his skull like a direct command, move, go, now, and Wayne's body had almost obeyed before he caught himself. He grabbed the rim of the tree hollow with both hands, anchoring himself, and forced the howl out of his mind.

"What level of Adjuchas is this, to have a summoning force this strong? That just now must have covered roughly a quarter of the forest."

He muttered it quietly, still processing. The sound had come from deep inside, from the direction of the core.

"Could that be the Lord of the Northern Forest?"

He didn't know the exact tier of whatever had just called. He only knew that something capable of reaching into his own consciousness and pulling at it wasn't just strong.

It was on another level entirely.

"Should I go?"

Going meant a chance to gauge the actual strength of the forest's core. But whatever he came face to face with, it was going to be Adjuchas.

Not going meant safety. It also meant potentially missing something he couldn't afford to miss.

He hadn't reached a decision by the time the second summoning call came.

That one settled it.

Wayne stood, turned toward the sound, and began moving.

Not because the call had taken hold of him. But because he'd finally understood what it meant.

It meant war.

➤ Next: Battle of the Forest of Menos