Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 131 - Mayuri Kurotsuchi

Walking out of the examination hall, Wayne scratched his head as he looked at the stamp belonging to the 4th Division.

Was this Badge really that easy to get?

Wayne mulled it over to himself, then looked toward the area not far away, where he spotted Momo waiting near the examination grounds. She had apparently been informed that he had entered the exam hall, so she wasn't anxious, just quietly waiting.

"Big brother!" Seeing Wayne walking over, Momo hurried toward him. "Big brother, big brother, you were in there for so long."

"Ah, ran into an examiner who had a lot to say." Wayne shrugged.

"How did it go, how did it go — let me see big brother's results." Momo snatched the form out of Wayne's hands and looked it over. She found that Wayne had marked Pass in the Exam One column, the same as her. And not only that, an additional Badge stamp had been pressed onto Wayne's form, while hers had none.

"Wow! Big brother, big brother! You didn't just pass the first assessment — your form got another Badge stamp on it too!" Momo jumped up with delight.

"Oh? Is that so? I had no idea." Wayne smiled, feigning that he couldn't see it himself, letting Momo be the one to deliver the good news.

"As expected of big brother, you really are amazing! Just one exam, and you've already earned bonus marks from two Divisions." Momo was practically bursting with excitement.

"Alright, don't say that so loudly — someone will hear." Wayne reached out and patted his little sister on the head. "Let's go, Momo. On to the next location."

"Yeah!"

The two of them headed together to the second assessment location. The content of this assessment was Reiatsu measurement, using a special instrument to gauge a person's Reiryoku level and innate potential.

All the test-taker had to do was place their hand on a specially made sphere.

"A three-stage battle aura?" Wayne thought to himself sarcastically. Then Momo grabbed his arm and pulled him forward with her.

Sure enough, just as Wayne had mocked, the device in front of them was exactly what it looked like, something that measured Reiryoku and converted it into a numerical readout.

"Feed your Reiryoku into the Crystal Orb." That was the only thing the examiner said. Judging by the white lab coat he wore, this was someone from the 12th Division.

Momo went first. She placed her hand on the Crystal Orb, and the orb emitted a faint blue glow. Then, starting from the center, a white halo began to radiate outward, spreading across the entire surface of the orb, while the number displayed on it began to rise slowly.

Seeing the number climb, Momo began to push harder. A look of concentration settled over her face, and the rate at which the number rose gradually quickened.

Fifty, sixty, seventy...

The number slowed as it approached seventy-six, and came to a stop at eighty-two.

"Reiatsu level: upper-mid. Aptitude: superior." The examiner recorded as he spoke. Wayne watched from the side and pieced together what the instrument was measuring.

The number recorded the Reiatsu level score, while the color the Crystal Orb emitted corresponded to relative aptitude.

For those with poor aptitude, the orb would appear blue. The closer the color shifted toward white, the higher the aptitude.

"Next, number 918."

Hearing his number called, Wayne stepped forward, and Momo guided him over to the Crystal Orb.

"Go ahead." True to being from the 12th Division, the examiner showed no curiosity about Wayne's eyes. After all, in the 12th Division there were even modified humans, so what was one blind person?

"Mm." Wayne gave a small nod, then pressed his hand onto the Crystal Orb.

Hum!

The Crystal Orb lit up as Wayne fed his Reiryoku into it. A blue halo rose gently, but was swiftly overtaken by a dazzling white. The number on the orb shot upward, breaking past eighty in no time, and showed no sign of slowing.

"Amazing!" Momo's eyes lit up. She knew her big brother was strong, but she hadn't imagined he was this strong.

"Damn it..." Wayne frowned and pulled back his Reiatsu. He had no intention of making himself a target. As his Reiatsu input weakened, the number that had blown past eighty began to drift back down, eventually settling at ninety-six.

"..." The examiner frowned and glanced at Wayne, but said nothing more. There were always a few oddballs who wanted to hold back, it wasn't his place to interfere with someone else's judgment. He proceeded to write and read aloud at the same time. "Reiatsu level: superior. Aptitude: superior. Overall score..."

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Just as the 12th Division examiner was reading out Wayne's score, the number on the Crystal Orb instrument suddenly scrambled into garbled characters, and the entire orb's color shifted abruptly from its dazzling white to red.

"Not good!" Wayne's heart lurched wildly. Had the Reiatsu of the Hollow Beast inside him been detected? No, that couldn't be right, he had already smoothed out the Hollow Beast's chaotic Reiatsu, making it indistinguishable from his normal output. He hadn't deliberately let it flare, so why had this happened? It shouldn't have.

Wayne rapidly adjusted his Reiatsu. Quickly, the Crystal Orb returned to its original blue-white color.

"Hm? A malfunction?" The examiner caught the flash of red that flickered across the Crystal Orb and couldn't help but react with surprise. The orb had been testing students for years, this was the first time something like this had occurred.

But almost immediately, the Reiatsu across the entire examination ground erupted into turmoil. Wayne could feel it, a powerful surge of Reiatsu was bearing down toward the examination site.

"They're not coming to kill me, are they?" Wayne's heart hammered. The scale of that Reiatsu fluctuation had clearly alarmed someone at the Captain-class level. And the direction it was coming from was unmistakably aimed right at him.

Get out of here. Wayne thought, but it was already too late. The source of that Reiatsu wasn't far. In the moment he hesitated, it had closed to within a hundred meters.

Running was no longer an option.

Wayne let out a slow breath and braced himself for what was coming. The attack he had anticipated, however, never arrived, because when Wayne registered who it was, he too froze for a moment.

"C... Captain!" The examiner nearby broke into a cold sweat all over his body. He had never imagined that a glitch in the machine would bring his own Division's Captain here in person.

"The 12th Division's... Captain?" The other examinees looked on in shock, instinctively backing away. The Reiatsu that a Captain-class figure let out even without trying was not something people like them could bear.

"Ah, my apologies, I lost control of my Reiatsu for a moment." The one who spoke was none other than Mayuri Kurotsuchi, clad in his white laboratory coat and wearing his black-and-white mask. Those yellow pupils were fixed intently on Wayne. Only after hearing his subordinate call out to him did he rein in his Reiatsu.

"You — just now — did you make this Crystal Orb turn red?" Mayuri Kurotsuchi spoke in a sharp voice, enunciating every word. But before Wayne could respond, he pressed on. "You... have consumed a Hollow?"

"...Yes."

Uproar!

Every examinee in the hall erupted into commotion. Consumed a Hollow? How could that be?! Could that thing even be eaten?

"Tell me what happened." Mayuri Kurotsuchi's tone made it clear this was not the first time he had encountered something like this.

"On that occasion, I was hunting in a forest when I came across a Hollow Beast by chance." Wayne began his account. "That Hollow Beast had an extremely long neck, it coiled around me and lifted me off the ground. But as luck would have it, just as it was about to bite me, my blade drove straight into its skull. Its mask partially separated from its head. In order to defeat it, I bit into its mask. What I didn't expect was that a fragment of the mask hadn't been spat out in time, and slipped down into my stomach."

"..." Mayuri Kurotsuchi continued to stare at Wayne without a word. After a long silence, he turned and asked his subordinate. "What were his numbers?"

"Reiatsu level: superior. Aptitude: superior. Overall score: ninety-six."

"Impossible! Are you joking?" Mayuri Kurotsuchi's voice suddenly rose sharply, and it was unclear whether he was addressing Wayne or his own subordinate.

He immediately turned back to Wayne and continued to shout with unrestrained intensity. "When a Hollow Beast's Reiryoku enters a soul, it goes berserk, you should not be alive! To suppress it with your own Reiatsu, you would need to exceed that Reiryoku by several times over! How could you score this little? Boy, are you holding back?!"

Faced with Mayuri Kurotsuchi's interrogation, Wayne chose to say nothing.

"Test him again!" Mayuri Kurotsuchi turned and ordered his subordinate.

"Ah — yes! Captain!"

"You! Show me your full ability!" Mayuri Kurotsuchi's expression had turned frenzied, as if he had discovered a priceless treasure and was raving with excitement.

"Being able to consume a Hollow Beast's Reiatsu without triggering a Reiatsu rampage, and actually absorbing it as your own power, this is something I have never heard of! After all my experiments, I have finally seen a living case! Boy, no more holding back, squeeze every last drop of your limit out for me!"

With those words, Mayuri Kurotsuchi's Reiatsu began to surge wildly. All of it, of course, was directed solely at Wayne, none of it touched the others present in the hall.

"Damn it..." Wayne endured the mounting pressure, cursing under his breath. He wanted to leave but couldn't. All he could do was obediently return to the Crystal Orb for testing.

Hum!

The Crystal Orb rang out again. Then, in an instant, white light filled the entire orb completely. The white halo steadily swallowed all of the blue, and from the center bloomed a prismatic, radiant luminescence. The number on the orb blew past ninety in a single breath, and kept climbing.

"Yes, that's it, that's it! As I thought, this is not your limit! Keep going, keep pushing for me!" The light of madness shone in Mayuri Kurotsuchi's eyes. As he watched the color and the numbers on the Crystal Orb, even his black-and-white mask was barely containing the frenzied grin spreading across his face.

"Damn it all!" Wayne cursed again, then continued to push his Reiatsu higher.

"Boy, if you hold back again I'll cut you down where you stand!" Mayuri Kurotsuchi roared without stopping. "Unleash the Hollow Beast Reiryoku inside you!"

BOOM!

Knowing he could no longer hide what he had, Wayne steeled himself inwardly. Fine, if you want to see it, then see it clearly. Wayne released every last drop of his current Reiryoku in a full burst. The radiant Crystal Orb was instantly tinted with a dark crimson, then the crimson receded, and a far more powerful radiance erupted from the orb, blanketing the entire training grounds in a layer of brilliant white light. The examinees near the Crystal Orb had their eyes blinded by the glare. The number on the orb broke through one hundred in that same instant, rocketing toward two hundred, then past two hundred, climbing to three hundred, four hundred!

"Yes, just like that! Don't stop, keep going!" Mayuri Kurotsuchi's voice had nearly torn itself to shreds in a scream. The madness in his eyes was completely undisguised. He looked ready to slice Wayne open for dissection right there in front of everyone.

Finally, after surging past the five hundred mark, Wayne's Reiatsu reading began to gradually fall back. It came to rest at five hundred and twenty-six.

The Crystal Orb's light dimmed slowly, and all the examinees in the hall recovered their vision. The sudden burst of Reiatsu had been shielded by Mayuri Kurotsuchi's own, so it hadn't caused any wider disruption.

"Satisfactory." After witnessing Wayne's performance, Mayuri Kurotsuchi reined in his frenzied expression and addressed Wayne with complete composure. "Having seen your actual power, I now believe what you said about consuming a Hollow Beast's mask. With Reiatsu like yours, it is indeed possible to firmly suppress the Reiatsu rampage triggered by the mask of a Lower Hollow."

"Wh... what do you mean satisfactory," the examiner beside him whispered, drenched in cold sweat. "A reading of over five hundred, that's already within the top five Seated Officers across all the Soul Reaper Divisions, isn't it? He's just an ordinary soul. Not even a student yet, let alone a Soul Reaper."

"Calm down, Aki." Mayuri Kurotsuchi said to his subordinate. "It's not as though Seireitei has never produced prodigies. Every so often, a monster student appears, that's perfectly normal. But what I find strange is this: even at the Captain-class level, consuming a Hollow Beast's mask makes it impossible to bring that power under one's control. The only option is to expel it from the body using one's own Reiryoku. Yet you have clearly absorbed and controlled that Reiatsu, and strengthened yourself with it. I am very curious, how did you do it?"

"I don't know either. I just tried to digest that rampaging Reiatsu, and somehow I actually managed it." Wayne fabricated a response on the spot. Since Mayuri Kurotsuchi was curious about it, he naturally wouldn't know that Wayne had once been a Hollow Beast himself and understood every nuance of a Hollow's Reiatsu.

"Omoshiroi." The smile on Mayuri Kurotsuchi's face took on a playful quality. "Aki, stamp this one."

"Th... understood..." The examiner addressed as Aki quietly let out a breath. "Cap... Captain... then this assessment result..."

"Write it according to the actual standard." Mayuri Kurotsuchi gave a small nod, then stepped forward a few paces, bringing his face close to Wayne's. "You're still blind?"

"Yes." Wayne let out a deep breath. The discomfort from the Reiryoku he had consumed during the burst was only now beginning to subside.

"Any interest in joining my Division? I can restore your eyesight. And I am also very interested in you. How about cooperating with my work?"

"You mean you're interested in dissecting me," Wayne thought privately. "It is a great honor to have caught your eye. If I am fortunate enough to pass the examination, I will give it serious consideration."

"Hmph, arrogant creature." Mayuri Kurotsuchi was plainly unsatisfied with that answer. "No matter, you have the standing to be arrogant. A pity that I cannot lay a hand on Academy students. Otherwise... heheh." Mayuri Kurotsuchi's muttered words sent a cold sweat running down Wayne's back. Sure enough, this man was planning to cut him open.

"The examination continues!" Before leaving the hall, Mayuri Kurotsuchi said one final thing. "Boy, give me your name."

"Tsukishiro Hinamori."

"Tsukishiro Hinamori, is it? Very good." Mayuri Kurotsuchi wore a smile full of layered meaning as he walked away from the examination grounds at a leisurely pace.

"N... number 918, Reiatsu level: exceptional. Aptitude: exceptional. Overall score: 526!" After Mayuri Kurotsuchi had departed, the examiner called out Wayne's Reiatsu test results at full volume.

"It's over." Wayne cursed silently. "Now there's nothing left to hide."

➤ Next: Combat and Kidō