Bleach: Reborn — Chapter 162 - Zanpakuto — Inner Fire

A year swept past. Wayne's academy life moved forward steadily, since the Ranking Tournament, there had been no more large-scale events. Every day was packed with classes.

None of it was particularly difficult for Wayne.

He'd gotten word from Mizusue about the Awakening Trial. After completing one full academic year, the academy would issue Zanpakuto and give the students most likely to achieve awakening a chance to enter the Cave of Trials.

Twenty slots, generally. Selected by the academy instructors and the Seated Officers of the Gotei 13.

Instructors based their picks on academic performance, overall excellence, and, after Zanpakuto were issued, the student's affinity with their blade and how far their sword spirit had developed.

The squads had a simpler method. Whichever squad wanted a student simply signed that student up.

Squad 4 had set its sights on Wayne this year.

Mizusue admitted there was an element of gambling in that decision. Wayne was completely cut off from Kidō, which made him oddly similar to Squad 11's Captain Kenpachi Zaraki. Kenpachi knew nothing of Kidō, his Zanpakuto had never awakened, and yet armed with nothing but an Asauchi, he had carved his way all the way to Captain-class.

Wayne's results so far weren't identical, but they were absolutely trending in the same direction.

The saving grace was that while Wayne was shut out of Kidō, he had genuine talent for Kaido. Self-healing, at least, wasn't something Mizusue had to worry about. Even if his Zanpakuto failed to awaken, Wayne could still enter Squad 4 through her connections.

But every squad had a fixed number of promotion slots each year. Leave them empty and they went to waste.

So Wayne set out on a path of hard training in preparation for the Awakening Trial.

Not that it was much of a detour. He had always known what road he needed to walk, and he had never let up.

Half a month after the Ranking Tournament, Wayne moved into his new residence. Momo, Granny, and Shiro-chan moved in with him. The four of them began their life together again.

The moment Shiro-chan arrived in the Seireitei, he felt the dense, thriving Reishi in the air. It was like a dripping tap suddenly wrenched wide open, flooding his tiny reservoir as fast as it could fill. But the distance between the wings meant that no matter how much Reiatsu Shiro-chan leaked, it no longer reached Granny. The overflow was absorbed by the watermelons in the courtyard and the spirit plants growing alongside the melon patch. There was one pleasant side effect: Shiro-chan's watermelons had an almost ice-chilled texture, crisp and sweet and cold on the tongue. The customers loved them.

Wayne started teaching Shiro-chan Reiatsu compression because of it. Full control was out of reach for now, the Reiatsu wasn't Shiro-chan's own power, but Hyorinmaru's influence bleeding through him. The only way to master it completely was to obtain a Zanpakuto and draw Hyorinmaru inside. Only then could Shiro-chan truly take the reins. But compression could at least purify his own spiritual power and reduce how much leaked out, which was worth doing.

During that same year, Wayne undertook a much larger project. In the corner of his bedroom, he dug a hole, more than a hundred meters straight down.

He didn't have Kisuke Urahara's trick for carving open sky beneath the earth, but drilling a hole was well within his abilities.

A hundred meters down, the shaft opened into a space of nearly a hundred thousand square meters. It took him half a year to finish. He couldn't have managed it alone. He called in a personal favor from the Kidō Corps members of the Yagami family, asking them to use Kidō to assist with the excavation and to inscribe a semi-permanent formation inside the cavern that would keep the air cycling. The circulated air vented through four separate openings, each of which Wayne capped with a disguised pedestal that looked like a candle stand from above.

The cavern interior was lit by luminous crystals. Spirit plants that released Reishi filled the space. Of the three types he had, he left the medicinal variety where it was and transplanted the other two down here. Those two types naturally formed a self-sustaining cycle, drawing in all the spiritual energy stored in the deep soil around them. Combined with their faint bioluminescent glow, the result was an underground space that was slightly dim but breathtaking, a sea of softly glowing flowers stretching in every direction.

The spirit plants had come from the Spirit Gear Set exchange. That was also why he'd asked Mizusue to bulk-purchase them for him. Without that stockpile, a flower sea covering tens of thousands of square meters would have taken years to complete.

Yagami China had accepted the commission without hesitation. Beyond the basic construction costs, she didn't charge Wayne a single extra coin. The personal favor, however, came with conditions: he would have to step in and help her once if she ever ran into serious trouble, and he had to agree that she could come down to the underground base whenever she wanted.

For the sake of his training, he accepted.

Not that China's real interest was in absorbing Reishi here. It was the glowing sea of flowers she liked, and Wayne himself. Without Wayne's Soul Absorption skill, even living underground full-time would only give her one or two times the absorption rate she'd have outside, nothing like the dozens-of-times amplification Wayne enjoyed.

Once the base was finished, Wayne essentially stopped attending classes. Of the four core subjects, he had no equal left at the academy in Zanjutsu or hand-to-hand combat, unless the old man was personally teaching swordsmanship or unarmed combat, those classes offered him nothing. He had started the year as the second-ranked sixth-year student. The second strongest at the academy, by any honest measure.

If he'd gone all-out against Kitagawa in a real fight, Kitagawa's bones would have been cold for a year by now.

With the spirit plants around him, Wayne absorbed Reishi in the underground base every day, compressing and converting it, uninterrupted. His absorption rate was rapid. His spiritual power changed day by day. Every time Mizusue or Ikkaku saw him, the Soul Reapers would shake their heads and marvel that this freak had somehow gotten stronger again. And he still hadn't even received his Zanpakuto.

Day after day, training, Soul Absorption, compression, conversion. In just half a year, Wayne's Reiatsu capacity reached Lieutenant-level. The pace of it was genuinely frightening. And once he unleashed that high-quality Reiatsu, he could hold his own against a fighter of Ikkaku's caliber. Against someone like Yumichika Ayasegawa, though, it got complicated. Yumichika could absorb your Reiatsu, which meant the only real answer was to hit him at maximum power and end it before he could respond. Otherwise you'd hand him the advantage, and Wayne was honest enough with himself to admit his current spiritual power wasn't enough to one-shot Yumichika. Don't let the gentle, almost feminine act fool you, when Yumichika cut loose, he was more frightening than any woman alive.

Kira and Momo also had a good year. Alongside their regular coursework, Wayne gave them extra tutoring from time to time. One was his disciple, the other his little sister, and the occasional pointer made a real difference. He would have included Shiro-chan, but Shiro-chan still couldn't properly control his Reiatsu or direct it at will. So Wayne taught him the sword and hand-to-hand combat instead. The rest would have to wait for his Zanpakuto.

The year closed, and the day arrived when Zanpakuto would be issued. First-year students who scored "Excellent" on their assessments received one outright. Those below "Excellent" had to retake the exam or wait until their second year, when they could request a reassessment at any time. One step behind, and you stayed behind.

Wayne's was issued directly. Second-ranked student in the academy, anything else would have been an insult to reason. His Zanjutsu and hand-to-hand combat were already enough to give the instructors trouble, and his Shunpo had developed into high-order two-step and three-step variations that no one else could match. Apart from Kidō, there was nothing Wayne wasn't exceptional at.

Well. Historical and cultural studies were another matter.

But Wayne clearly wasn't headed for a desk job, so the instructors looked the other way.

"Here."

On the evening after exams ended, Mizusue visited Wayne's residence and delivered the Zanpakuto herself.

"Why did Lady Mizusue come all this way in person?" Wayne was surprised. Wasn't this supposed to be the instructors' job?

"To see whether you can awaken it on the spot." Mizusue dropped into a chair without ceremony, picked up a slice of watermelon from the table, and bit into it. "Has to be your family's watermelon," she said while still chewing. "Ice-cold, crisp, and sweet."

Well, of course. Watermelons raised on the output of the strongest ice-type Zanpakuto in existence, how could they not be cold? Wayne kept that thought to himself.

"Direct awakening — I'd say the odds aren't good." He took the Zanpakuto from her, ran his hand along the blade, and pushed his Reiatsu into it.

Nothing happened.

Mizusue clicked her tongue. No direct awakening, then. She shook her head. Hopefully the trial would give him something to work with.

"Trial starts next week. Bring your little crew." She stood, still faintly disappointed, and left.

The "little crew" was Kira and Momo. The two of them excelled in different areas, but both were at the top of the class. Kira had been nominated for a trial slot by the instructors. Momo's slot had come from Squad 13's Kaien Shiba.

The reason was simple: she was Wayne's little sister, and she wore the Shiba family crest. That slot had originally been arranged by Isshin Shiba for Rangiku. But the main family wanted to do Momo a favor, which also served as a gesture toward Wayne. He had personally delivered the entire Kira family into their service as a vassal house, after all.

Renji Abarai was also among the trial participants. Wayne hadn't crossed paths with him much over the past year, he spent most of his time in the underground base and rarely showed up at school, and even when he did, he wasn't the type to talk. He and Renji were never particularly close. Momo and Kira, as classmates who actually attended, had gotten to know Renji quickly. Kira regularly sought him out to spar, and Momo spent a good amount of time tutoring him in Kidō. The three of them became friends through it.

Wayne's one real interaction with Renji came the day he happened to be at school and Renji came running up to challenge him. Wayne put him on the ground in three moves. Renji immediately wanted to become his disciple, the same way Kira had. Wayne turned him down — he needed his time for his own training — and pointed him toward Ikkaku Madarame instead. Ikkaku, fellow battle maniac that he was, happily took the referral and accepted Renji on the spot. The two of them sparred constantly, though it was mostly Ikkaku giving Renji corrections.

So it was Ikkaku of Squad 11 who put Renji's name down for a slot. No complicated reason, he just wanted a worthy sparring partner down the road.

After Mizusue left, Wayne sat down and took a proper look at his Zanpakuto for the first time. Black hilt cord. Round tsuba. A blade with a gentle curve. The moment it was in his hand, he could feel it, the sharpness and durability were in a different category from any ordinary katana.

The old stories said a Zanpakuto's form and power were shaped by the user's own soul. Through years of nurturing, you earned the right to communicate with the sword spirit, learned its name, and gained its strength.

Wayne didn't know yet what his Zanpakuto would be. But he kept returning to that dream, the desolate desert, the figure half-hidden in the amber haze. He wondered if that was his sword. It didn't matter much. For now, the priority was raising his spiritual power. Even without a Zanpakuto, his intention was the same as Kenpachi Zaraki's: cut his way to Captain-class on raw ability alone.

That night, Wayne fell asleep with his Zanpakuto in his grip, pouring Reiatsu into it steadily until sleep took him completely.

In his dreams, he arrived at the desert again. Pitch-black sky. Absolute desolation.

He was clearer-headed this time. And he understood now why the Zanpakuto world his soul had built looked the way it did.

He came from Hueco Mundo. Decades spent in that place, his soul wasn't going to conjure a city from a life before this one, the way Ichigo's had. That world didn't belong here. Even if it was still the softest thing inside him.

In the dim stillness, the mass of haze drifted toward him again, the unseen figure wrapped inside it.

"As I thought," Wayne said, watching the mist settle in front of him. He smiled faintly. "You're my Zanpakuto. But I still can't make out your face — which means I can't learn your name yet. That's right, isn't it."

No answer came from within the haze. Instead, a hand extended through the mist — bone-white, claw-like, reaching toward him. Wayne raised his own hand and reached back.

They almost touched.

An invisible force cut between them. No matter how hard Wayne pushed, he could not close the distance by a single inch.

"Still not enough." He lowered his hand and shook his head. "That's fine. We'll meet again in the Cave of Trials. Next time, at least, I'd like to see your face."

He wasn't surprised. He hadn't expected Touch-Awakening to work in the first place.

One step at a time.

He sighed, and woke up.

Daylight already filled the room.

Seven days until the Cave of Trials.

➤ Next: Cave of Trials