Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 120 - Soul Reaper and Hollow

One night of searching and hunting had yielded a generous haul. Pheasants, wild rabbits, and squirrels all fell within Wayne's range, and he had even speared two fish from a stream not far outside the forest on his way home. It was, by any measure, a great harvest.

Wild game, of course, only amounted to a meal or two. More significant was what Wayne had confirmed: the soil from the forest, rich with Reiatsu, could actually support cultivation.

After sitting out for a full night, the rate at which that soil shed its Reiatsu was not dramatic at all. It was perfectly viable for storage and planting. But to overturn the entire courtyard, Wayne would need to make multiple trips back and forth. And whether the soil could sustain growth over a long period was still unknown. If it turned out to be a depleting resource, he would have no choice but to keep digging from the forest indefinitely. In that case, he might as well plant directly in the forest.

So Wayne loaded up a full cart of soil and decided to start small, dig out a modest plot in the courtyard first, try planting there, and if the results looked good, he would convert the whole yard into something like Shiro-chan's family's melon patch.

As for what to plant, watermelons, naturally. The seeds could be had straight from Shiro-chan's house at no cost.

He pushed the cart home. The sky had not yet fully brightened. Wayne did not rest. Instead, he started breaking ground with a hoe. It was only when the sun rose that he finally had a square pit dug out in the sunniest corner of the courtyard. He lined the edges with stones, then tipped the forest soil in to fill it.

"Good morning, Big Brother. Ahh~~" Just as Wayne finished filling the pit and began turning the soil, Momo stirred awake, slid the door open, and caught a glimpse of Wayne's busy figure.

"Momo? You're up." Wayne did not turn around, only tilted his head slightly to speak. "Good morning."

"Big Brother, what are you doing — wait, wait?!" Momo stood there, bewildered, still trying to figure out what her brother was up to, and only understood when she stepped closer. Lined up neatly beside him was an entire row of game. Two pheasants, three squirrels, two wild rabbits. Two carp. Beyond that, a handful of wild berries. And then there was the cartload of soil.

"Big Brother, all this game..." Momo looked puzzled.

"I went into the forest last night. These are the spoils." Wayne did not stop working as he continued. "After yesterday's fight and that big dinner, I felt my sensitivity to spiritual energy sharpen quite a bit. When I extended my perception at night, I could sense far more than before. So I decided to test it in the forest, and sure enough, I could pick up every animal in the area without trouble. That's why the haul came out this well."

"But, but..." Momo was stunned. Hadn't they agreed not to go back to the forest? And he had caught so much, on a good day, she and Shiro-chan together might manage a few fish. Granted, a few had gotten away because of the Hollow beast, but two fish had already been enough for a full dinner. And Big Brother today...

"Momo, could you help me prep the game?" Wayne stopped working and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"Once they die, my sense of them fades. It gets a bit difficult to track them down properly."

"Ah — yes, of course." Momo answered quickly, then reached for the game beside her with barely concealed delight. When Big Brother made his move, the returns were always like this. At least she would not have to worry about building up her Reiatsu for a good while.

"Remember to set some aside and bring it over to Shiro-chan and Granny." Wayne reminded her. "And afterward, grab a few watermelon seeds from Shiro-chan's place. I want to try planting them in this soil and see if it takes. It's all Reishi-rich earth — hopefully we can get the yard to supply itself."

"Got it!" Momo nodded with enthusiasm. "But, Big Brother..." It was only then that it hit her, for him to have managed all of this, there was a good chance he had been awake the entire night.

"Once I finish up out here, I'll go rest for a bit." Wayne rolled his shoulders. The fatigue from a whole night's work was not what really weighed on him. What wore him down was the injury he had taken in the night while trying to channel his spiritual techniques, the flow had clashed with the Hollow beast's Reiatsu pattern, and the feedback had caught him. Of course, with his trousers covering it, all Momo could see right now was a very dirty Wayne.

Fortunately, as a soul, a minor graze like this needed very little time to heal on its own. Otherwise explaining it would have been genuinely awkward. The moment Momo spotted an injury, he would probably be banned from the forest entirely.

"Alright, Big Brother, I'll take care of the rest. You go and rest." Momo looked at him with worried eyes and took the hoe from his hands. She steered him over to the water barrel and urged him to wash up and change, while she set about dealing with his filthy clothes.

After a quick wash, Wayne changed out of his tattered outfit in the bedroom. But instead of handing the clothes to Momo, he told her that once she finished with the food, she should take one of the squirrels to the market and exchange it for two sets of clothing, one for him to wear day-to-day, and one for her.

When Momo heard that, her eyes lit up. She had been quietly longing for a kimono for quite some time, but life had always been too tight, and she could never bring herself to spend on it. Now that her brother was willing to let her use his earnings to bring one home, that meant this was a gift from Big Brother himself.

"Thank you, Big Brother!" Momo did not refuse. She bounced off happily to deal with the game. Watching her go with that light in her step, Wayne smiled softly at her retreating figure, then turned and headed inside.

Lying in his bedroll, Wayne took a long, slow breath. His gaze drifted to the corner of the room, where a Hollow Mask, still not fully dissolved, sat where he had left it when changing earlier.

Perhaps it was the particular way he had killed the Hollow beast, or perhaps it was that the concentration of Reishi in Soul Society was higher, either way, the mask was dissolving far more slowly than anything he had seen in Hueco Mundo. After nearly ten or more hours overnight, a substantial portion still remained.

Looking at that half-mask, Wayne thought it over, then snapped off a small piece and placed it in his mouth. He immediately wrapped it with his own Reiatsu.

BOOM!

A tremendous shockwave erupted inside him. But this time Wayne had come prepared, and the advantage was clearly his. He pressed the Reiatsu surge from that small fragment down quickly.

When the upheaval subsided, Wayne steadied his Reiatsu and set his spiritual energy cycling again. Then he began carefully examining each unit of Reishi within himself.

After a thorough search, Wayne located the trace of foreign energy inside him, the Hollow beast's spiritual power, now fused with his own.

"As expected. Hollow beasts can devour Soul Reapers because a Soul Reaper's Reiatsu runs in clean, regular patterns, while a Hollow beast's Reiatsu is chaotic and volatile. So when a Hollow devours a Soul Reaper, it can instantly disrupt their orderly spiritual energy and absorb it. The reverse is also true — a Soul Reaper can absorb a Hollow beast's energy, but smoothing out the chaotic Reiatsu requires far stronger suppression. The Hōgyoku's ability to break the boundary between Soul Reapers and Hollows might operate on exactly this principle. That's likely why, when Aizen planted Hollow beast seeds in those captains and vice-captains, even someone at the level of Shinji Hirako could get caught off guard."

Wayne felt the energies moving inside him as he worked through the analysis on his own. Looking at that thin thread of Hollow beast power, the corner of his mouth curved slightly.

If he could accumulate Hollow beast Reiatsu from the very beginning and turn it to his own use, might his spiritual energy not advance faster than others?

"I probably won't be detected, right?" Wayne ran a finger across his face, the question directed at that faint trace of Hollow beast Reiatsu now residing within him.

His internal Reiatsu had already been smoothed out and folded into his regular circulation. Unless Wayne deliberately forced it to flare, that Hollow beast Reiatsu should not be detectable from the outside. But nothing was absolute. He would need to verify this with the Gotei 13 first before drawing any firm conclusions, the 12th Division in particular.

With that settled in his mind, Wayne resolved to keep the Hollow beast Reiatsu inside him from ever exceeding thirty percent of his total Reiatsu. Even if it was discovered later, he could claim he had accidentally ingested fragments of a Hollow Mask during combat. And if it really came to it, he could always force the energy back out of his body.

Using the same method, Wayne broke the remaining fragment into pieces and absorbed them completely. Then he let out a long breath, pulled his blanket over himself, and prepared to let his body recover from a full night's labor.

By the time Wayne woke again, it was late afternoon, bordering on evening. It was not that he was a heavy sleeper, rather, when it came to restoring stamina and Reiatsu, Wayne's constitution, with its compressed spiritual energy, simply demanded more recovery time than most.

At dusk, Wayne opened his eyes, stretched out a long, lazy yawn, and felt clear-headed and refreshed. The exhaustion from the night before had fully lifted. Tonight he could slip off to the forest and have a productive run again.

"Hm? Where's Momo?" He stepped out of the bedroom and saw no sign of her. The game from the night before had all been dealt with, though.

"Did she go over to Shiro-chan's?" He took a quick look around, changed into fresh clothes, and headed out the door. He made his way to Shiro-chan's house and found Shiro-chan and Granny busy with dinner.

"Shiro-chan, Granny. I'm here."

"It's Toshiro..." Shiro-chan rolled his eyes, though his tone was perfectly polite. "Thank you for the gift, Brother Tsukishiro. I didn't expect you to go outside the settlement all on your own last night."

"Now that I have some spiritual energy, I need to put it to the test. My Reiatsu perception seems to be able to substitute for sight at this point, so I need to keep training it." Wayne gave a brief explanation for his night outing. "By the way, where's Momo?"

"Hm? Momo headed back ages ago."

"Oh?" Wayne raised an eyebrow, then remembered he had asked Momo to go to the market to buy clothes earlier that day. "In that case, I'll go find her. Granny, can we come over and eat with you tonight? I'll bring some flatbread on my way back."

"Of course you can, little Tsukishiro. This pheasant and rabbit are far too much for just me and Shiro-chan to finish." Granny laughed warmly.

"Then I'll come back with Momo shortly." With that, Wayne waved goodbye to Granny and Shiro-chan and broke into a jog toward the market. He moved along the street, scanning for Momo.

He found her quickly. At the far end of the street, a crowd of residents had gathered in a tight ring. From inside it came the sound of a heated argument, and one of the voices was unmistakably Momo's.

"How can you do this!" Momo's voice was thick with tears. "I gave you a whole squirrel jerky as trade for two sets of clothes. How can you only give me one?"

"Little girl, that's the going rate at this market right now. If you want to trade, you get one set. And when did you ever give me a whole squirrel's worth of jerky? It was half a squirrel." A man's voice answered, dripping with mockery and cunning. As he spoke, he held up the jerky in his hand for the crowd to see. The portion was clearly less than a full squirrel's worth.

"You — you ate half of it while I was trying on the clothes, and now you're going to deny it!"

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Little girl, mind what you're accusing people of." The man had a shifty face, lean and hollow-cheeked, with a streak of cold viciousness to it. "Half is half. That only covers one set of clothes. All these people are standing right here watching — do you think I'd try to fool the whole crowd? You, though, little girl, at your age you're already making false accusations and running schemes. Watch yourself, or I'll haul you in front of the Gotei 13 for a complaint."

"You—!" Momo Hinamori shook with fury, eyes brimming with tears. But she had no recourse. She could not walk away with only one set of clothes, and she absolutely refused to accept that. This was not something she could let go of.

Because jerky like this was genuinely rare on the market. Even squirrel was not a common catch. The value of what she had brought was more than enough to cover two good-quality sets of clothing, and this swindler had seen that a young girl stood before him and decided to take advantage. While she was in the shop picking out clothes, he had quietly eaten half the jerky.

The neighbors standing around did nothing to intervene, watching with blank expressions as the swindler held court. He was one of the street's known crooked merchants. He had some spiritual energy and had made a habit of bullying souls with no Reiatsu. Most people on this street avoided his shop, though sometimes he would force trades on them. Only when Soul Reapers came to his shop did he refrain from pressing them, he would simply overcharge them instead.

The man had been fortunate enough to be born into the household of a minor noble's concubine, and that connection was what gave him the right to sell clothing in the Rukongai.

Now, faced with a large piece of jerky that could actually boost his Reiatsu, he had no intention of being fair to Momo.

"Little girl, I'll tell you what, take the one set and go home. It's getting late. Stay any longer and it'll be dark."

"You, give me back the other half of my jerky!" Momo was shaking with helpless anger, eyes red and wet, and lunged forward to snatch back the other half. This was what Big Brother had worked so hard for. If she went home without getting the fair exchange, she would never forgive herself.

"You little girl, you have no idea when to quit!" The man's voice sharpened, and he released his Reiatsu. Drawing on the thin, surface-level knowledge of spiritual energy release he had picked up from his aunt, a minor noble's concubine, he brought that pressure down on Momo.

Momo did have Reiatsu of her own, but at this stage she had no control over it whatsoever. Otherwise she would not have ended up in this position.

The moment the Reiatsu dropped, the onlookers felt their chests seize, an airless, suffocating weight rushing up through their nerves all at once. Momo, bearing the full brunt of it directly, stumbled backward a full step. Her footing became unsteady, and both her physical strength and spiritual energy were draining fast.

"Hmph, little brat, get out of my shop!" Seeing that Momo was faltering under the pressure, the swindler's mouth split into a grin. He drew back his foot and swung a kick aimed squarely at Momo, looking to send her flying out the door.

Clang!

Just as that filthy foot was about to connect with Momo's body, a sudden streak of black light cut across and intercepted it. The crack of shattering bone followed immediately.

"AUGH!" The swindler crumpled to the ground, clutching his leg. His shin had snapped and twisted at a grotesque angle.

The shock was instantaneous. Momo had no time to react. She only saw a tall, lean figure plant itself in front of her, and in that same moment the crushing discomfort the Reiatsu had forced on her vanished entirely.

"Big... Big Brother?" Momo's vision was blurred with tears. She could barely make out the person standing before her.

"Mm." Wayne answered quietly. Then he turned his gaze down to the swindler lying on the ground.

"Whether you run a crooked business or not is none of my concern. But you took my jerky and refused to hand over what was owed in exchange. Don't blame me for not holding back."

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➤ Next: Hit and Run