Bleach: Awakened — Chapter 78 - The Flooding Blanks
Zzzt!
Space kept distorting, twisting further and further, no. To be precise, space itself was being erased, the same way the Valley of Screams had been. But the two were entirely different concepts.
The Valley of Screams, formed from Blanks, had substance. This was pure, formless space. By any logic, without abilities specifically rooted in spatial manipulation, it should have been completely impossible to affect formless space through spiritual pressure alone.
And yet that enormous crescent moon shattered all common sense. Space itself seemed to wail in anguish, formless, invisible space, visibly being erased by a force that exceeded all imagination.
"Not enough..."
The terrifying crescent moon kept devouring the void. The range the Valley of Screams had encompassed was vast, and every inch the crescent passed through was flattened to nothing, but as time wore on, the crescent itself was being worn away. Little by little, it was on the verge of vanishing.
"Tch..."
Fine cracks split across his body. His spiritual pressure kept surging with no sign of stopping. Under Trinity in Bankai, Ichigo's spiritual pressure seemed to have no ceiling, but the body carrying that pressure was on the very edge of collapse.
"I can only do it one more time..."
Black spiritual pressure gathered at the horn on his forehead. A darkness deeper than night eroded the space around him. This time he hadn't let the Quincy or human powers take part. In his current state, even this much was all he could barely manage.
"Royal Hollow's..."
The spiritual pressure converged into a sphere. Ichigo's body sank, and the space around him looked as though it had been crushed inward.
"Flash!"
A terrifying burst of light erupted. His body spun with it. The black Cero swept across everything, and it was even faster than the crescent moon.
ZZZT ZZZT ZZZT ZZZT,
A distant sound rose in his ears. Every trace of space around Ichigo was reduced to nothingness, and the terrible spiritual pressure circulating inside his body was all that protected him.
Any Soul Reaper or Hollow caught in this void would not last even a single second. Even someone who had pushed just barely past their limits—but had never truly set foot in the Transcendent realm—would have no chance of surviving here.
"Done it..."
Tensa Zangetsu returned to its twin-blade form in his hands. But Ichigo had no strength left to hold them. The twin blades slipped from his grip, neither hovering in the air nor falling, they dissolved into flecks of spirit particles and scattered away.
"Tch... I'm really at my limit now..."
His Shihakusho was dissolving just like the blades. Countless hairline cracks spread across his spirit body. His spiritual form had hit its absolute limit, and his spiritual pressure dropped like a cliff had swallowed it.
"That's bad, that's bad... this is a problem..."
He murmured softly. He couldn't move at all. His body reverted from spirit form back to physical flesh, and the instincts buried deep in his soul told him what they'd never told him before: this was a genuinely fatal crisis. The first one in his entire existence.
"I'm not really going to die... am I... surely... not..."
The words drifted out without any conscious thought. Ichigo lay on the void. Dark veins of black traced endlessly through his bloodstream, the power of his blood keeping his vital signs alive by sheer force.
"Can't... Sosuke Aizen is still waiting for me to cut him down... and then there's Yhwach..."
His gaze went unfocused. And then Ichigo's body began to move, not by his own will. The void itself had started moving.
With the Valley of Screams' influence gone, the chaotic space collapsed, and the two celestial bodies returned to their proper courses, drifting apart from each other once more.
The laws governing space registered the vast emptiness where space had been erased. Acting on the most fundamental logic, the stable space far away began expanding outward, steadily filling the void back in. The nothingness was being compressed from all sides. Before long, this place would become stable space again.
"No... I can't die... I have to go back alive! I promised them... I have to protect them!"
Beneath the force of that overwhelming will to survive, the spiritual pressure that had been guttering out ignited once more. Blue light flickered across Ichigo's body, not the black of Hollow and Soul Reaper, not the gold of the Quincy. The color that represented something more primordial than either.
WHOOSH WHOOSH,
White Blanks appeared. They emerged one after another, without end, and in moments, everything the eye could see was a vast expanse of white. An untold number of Blanks, gathered silently around him.
Those who call themselves guardians of the Three Realms' order, one of the Soul Reapers' most defining traits is that the souls their Zanpakuto cut down don't simply cease to exist. They enter the cycle of reincarnation. It wasn't a pure form of that power, but the Soul Reaper ran deep in Ichigo.
The Valley of Screams that had just been destroyed hadn't truly vanished. It had dissolved into flecks of spirit particles that melded into the surrounding space, waiting for time to carry them into reincarnation.
But Ichigo had blown apart even that space. The Blanks that had already broken down into spirit particles were forced, under the pressure of what he'd unleashed, to coalesce back into form.
One Blank hovered near him and lingered. Mindless, without thought, and yet it sensed something familiar from Ichigo's body. The scent of memory.
WHOOSH,
That single Blank merged into Ichigo's body. The blue light pulsed once, then quickly dimmed.
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH,
With that first one leading the way, a second followed. A third. A fourth. Then countless Blanks poured into him all at once, the blue light flashing over and over without stopping.
As they flooded inward, the cracks across Ichigo's body were steadily being repaired. The Blanks were acting like a catalyst, as his physical body was restored, it kept growing stronger at the same time.
HISS HISS,
The countless cracks gradually closed. Ichigo's physical body broke free of time's shackles and reached what was, theoretically, the absolute peak state of that body.
But the Blanks still numbered beyond counting. The Valley of Screams had been large enough, but the one Ichigo had destroyed was the largest that had ever existed, accumulated over tens of millions of years. The Blanks had continuously cycled through reincarnation, and still a staggering number of them remained.
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH.
After a brief pause, the Blanks continued pouring in. His body was no longer growing, but the blue light blazing from Ichigo's surface kept intensifying. Within him, the power that had always served as the foundation, the one that had been negligible compared to his other forces, was now evolving at a breathtaking speed.
WHOOSH,
Finally, the last of the Blanks entered. Blue light blazed across the entire void.
Gold and black—the colors representing his other powers, surfaced on his body at the same moment, shining alongside the blue. Three colors of radiance enveloped Ichigo. The perilous situation that had been teetering on the edge of destruction was transformed in an instant.
Zzzt,
The expanding space had already filled the void completely, reshaping it back into the cracks between dimensions, flowing once more between the three realms: Soul Society, Hueco Mundo, and the World of the Living.
WHOOSH,
His body drifted, beyond his control. Ichigo kept his eyes tightly shut and let the current of space carry him. The three-colored spiritual pressure held around him, shielding him from the spatial damage.
Whooo,
Like a gust of wind sweeping through, Ichigo's body shot rapidly toward the distance.
Toward where, unknown.
When he would wake, unknown.
➤ Next: Before Us, No Enemies Shall Stand