Hello, guys!
Because of the holiday season, I want to celebrate with you in two ways.
The first is that, starting today, Monday the 22nd until Sunday, January 4th, I will publish daily chapters so you have plenty to read during these holidays.
After that date, I will return to my usual schedule.
The second surprise is that, starting December 24th, I will activate a 50% discount on all tiers of my Patreon.
The promotion will be active for 2 weeks, ending on January 6th.
If you wanted to read the advanced chapters, this is your chance.
Merry Christmas!
Mike.
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Chapter 28: Special Delivery
It was late. The hour when the mortal world surrendered to its dreams and nightmares, letting the night breathe. The Kyoto shop was closed. The sliding door was secured, the linen noren taken in, and the only light on the facade facing the Gion alley was the soft, solitary glow of a red paper lantern hanging above the entrance, casting long, dancing shadows on the wet stones.
Inside, the shop was silent, but not empty.
Urahara emerged from the backroom, not from his laboratory, but from the private quarters he had built in the folds of his personal dimension. He had spent the last four hours immersed in his main research: the "Heart of Silence". The data the Tengu had provided was... disturbing.
The idea of a silenced civilization, and an artifact of that silence buried beneath a Tibetan monastery, was a story that itched at the back of his mind, a thorn of curiosity he couldn't ignore. But even two-thousand-year-old scholars needed rest.
He was making his nightly rounds. It was a new ritual, one he had adopted almost without realizing it in the last few weeks. His pocket dimension, formerly a purely functional space for storage, research, and solitude, now had... guest rooms.
Well, a guest room. And it was no longer for "guests".
He walked down the dark wooden hallway, his footsteps in wooden sandals the only sound. The air here smelled of tatami wood and the jasmine tea he had brewed earlier. He stopped in front of a shoji door that was slightly ajar.
A soft strip of moonlight—or the dimensional equivalent he had programmed, which was much more picturesque—filtered from inside, illuminating the hallway.
He peeked in.
The room wasn't large, but it was no longer the sterile space he had created. It was full of life. It was full of Kara.
She was there, fast asleep.
She wasn't tucked neatly under the covers. She was sprawled on the futon, face down, as if she had fallen from a great height.
She was still wearing the clothes she must have arrived in hours ago: a threadbare Metropolis University gray t-shirt and gym shorts.
One combat boot was thrown in a corner, as if she had kicked it off; the other was still lazily on her left foot, dangling off the edge of the bed.
She was snoring. Softly, but with a determination Urahara found vaguely impressive.
Krypto was curled up in a ball on a rug at the foot of the bed. The dog let out a small pitiful sigh in his sleep, his paws twitching, undoubtedly chasing some intergalactic villain.
The room was a map of her new life. In one corner, a stack of journalism textbooks. On a light wooden desk, a state-of-the-art Daily Planet laptop was open and in sleep mode.
But next to it, a Justice League communicator charged silently. And on the dresser, next to a half-empty glass of water, was a framed photo. It wasn't of Krypton. It was of her, smiling awkwardly, with her arm around Clark Kent's shoulder, on the porch of the farm in Kansas.
Urahara watched the scene for a moment, an unusual silence in his mind.
'What a noisy creature,' he thought, and for the first time in a long while, the smile on his face wasn't ironic, nor calculating, nor mischievous. It was... genuine. Almost paternal. 'Even when she sleeps, it looks like she's in the middle of a battle. She must have had another day chasing electricity.'
He realized that his pocket dimension, his sanctuary of solitude for two millennia, now had a heartbeat. It had the sound of an exhausted Kryptonian's deep breathing and the sighs of a dreaming dog. It was a variable he had never planned for, a side story that had invited itself into his library. And he discovered, to his perpetual surprise, that he didn't mind at all.
With a delicacy that belied the power he contained, he reached out. He didn't touch the door. He simply guided a small current of air. The shoji door slid silently on its track, closing with a soft click, leaving just a small crack for air to enter.
He turned and turned off the hall light. The house was calm.
He descended the wooden stairs to the main shop. The darkness here was different. It was the darkness of a closed business, not that of a home. The Kyoto moonlight filtered through the rice paper windows, casting shadows of the candy jars onto the wooden floor.
He was heading to the counter, perhaps to have a last cup of sake before retiring, when the air changed.
It didn't turn cold, like with the demons of Xar'thos. It didn't turn oppressive, like with Destiny's magic.
It turned... fast.
Urahara stopped, hand halfway to his hat.
A low hum filled the shop. It was a sound right on the edge of human hearing, like the beating of a million hummingbird wings in unison, or a high-voltage capacitor about to explode. The hairs on his arms stood up with a sudden charge of static electricity.
The smell of tea and cherry wood was instantly drowned out by a new one: ozone. Sharp and clean. The unmistakable scent of lightning striking a meter away.
Vvvvvvvvvvmmm.
The glass jars on the shelves didn't fall. They started to vibrate. They vibrated at a frequency so high and pure they seemed about to disintegrate on the spot.
Urahara turned slowly toward the center of the shop. 'Well, this is new,' he thought, his professional curiosity awakening at once. 'It's not Chaos. It's not Order. It's not Hell. And it certainly isn't Kara snoring. It is... fast.'
In the center of the shop, the moonlight filtering through the window seemed to concentrate. The beams of light curved, stopped being straight, and began to spin, forming a small vortex of golden light and dust. The hum intensified until it became the roar of a jet engine.
The vortex spun faster and faster and then, with a dull pop that shook the building, it solidified.
In the place where the dancing dust had been, a figure now floated.
It wasn't an old man with a white beard. It was a being that looked like the very embodiment of kinetic energy. He was young, with the arrogant and perfect beauty of a Greek statue. His golden hair was curly and messy, as if he had just run a thousand kilometers against the wind. He wore a short Greek chlamys, shining white, over what looked like modern golden running gear.
But it was the accessories that told the story.
On his head, a petasos, a wide-brimmed hat with two small golden wings beating so fast they were a blur. In his hand, he held the Kerykeion, the caduceus, a golden staff entwined with two living snakes that hissed nervously. And on his feet, the talaria: sandals of pure gold, each with a golden wing beating at an impossible speed, keeping him hovering an inch off the tatami floor, the wind of his movement causing the wall scrolls to flutter.
It was Hermes, the Messenger of the Gods of Olympus.
And he was panicking.
His face, usually the image of divine confidence, was pale. Drops of what appeared to be golden sweat beaded on his forehead. His eyes, fast and bright, darted around the shop with a desperation that didn't fit a god.
"Urahara Kisuke," said the god. His voice was not one. It was a chorus of a dozen echoes of himself, all speaking at breakneck speed, tripping over each other. "The Information Broker. The Solver. The shopkeeper at the crossroads of worlds. My sources... my contacts... my oracles tell me... that you are the one who fixes the impossible!"
Urahara, who had watched this dramatic and noisy entrance with an expression of slight annoyance (mainly for the dust he was kicking up), simply gave a slight bow.
"Hermes-san," he said, his voice a balm of absolute calm in the god's storm of panic. "What an unexpected honor. A god of Olympus in my humble shop. You arrive a bit late, I'm afraid. We're already closed."
He pointed to the teapot still warm on the counter. "Tea? Or perhaps... something with more caffeine? You seem... rushed."
The contrast between Hermes' divine panic and the shopkeeper's absolute calm filled the room. Hermes blinked, his supersonic vibration stopping for a second, his divine mind struggling to process the man's total lack of awe.
"NO!" shouted Hermes, his voice breaking into echoes. "There is no time! No time for tea! It is a disaster! A complete disaster! If Father finds out, I'm finished!"
"There is no time!" repeated Hermes, his voice a chorus of echoes that seemed to bounce off the candy jars. "Father is going to... is going to...!" The god of speed was vibrating in place, the wings on his sandals beating so fast the tatami floor beneath him was beginning to scorch from sheer friction. "I'm finished! This time I'm really finished!"
Urahara raised a hand, not in alarm, but with an almost insulting calm. "Hermes-san."
The god didn't hear him, his panic was a miniature sun. "Years! I'll spend years in Tartarus! He'll tie me to a rock and have an eagle..."
"Hermes-san," repeated Urahara, his voice a bit firmer. The god kept ranting.
Kisuke sighed. The noise was excessive. And, more importantly, it was annoying.
"Shut up," said Urahara.
The word wasn't a shout. It was a low, quiet whisper, but charged with an authority so absolute, so ancient, that it cut through the god's panic like a cold knife.
Hermes froze. His vibration stopped. The echoes of his voice died out. He stood jaw-dropped, his divine panic colliding head-on with a will that was, somehow, faster than his.
Urahara brought a finger to his lips, his gray eyes shining with lazy amusement under his hat. "Shhh," he whispered. Then, he pointed his thumb toward the ceiling, in the direction of the room upstairs. "My partner is sleeping. She had a very long day chasing a woman made of electricity. And, believe me, she gets in a very, very bad mood if she is woken up before she has had her full twelve hours. And her bad mood tends to involve throwing things into orbit."
He leaned over the counter, his voice now a conspiratorial whisper. "So, why don't you breathe for a second—a very therapeutic act, I'm told—and explain to me, quietly, what kind of cosmic mess you've caused this time?"
Hermes, the herald of Olympus, the one who spoke to kings and gods, suddenly felt like a scolded child. The sheer mundanity of the request—being scolded by a shopkeeper for making too much noise—threw him completely off balance.
He nodded, his movements now nervous and jerky.
"It's... it's Father," he whispered, his voice now a single thread of panic. "Zeus! The King! The..."
"Yes, I know his work. The lightning guy, right? Go on," said Urahara, pouring himself a cup of tea he had kept warm.
"He entrusted me with a package!" whispered Hermes frantically. "A gift! A gesture of peace, you know! Between pantheons! Something very delicate! I can't say more! Olympian top secret! If they find out I lost it, it could start a divine war!"
Urahara took a sip of tea. "And you lost it?"
Hermes' face contorted in agony. "I was taking a shortcut! Time is money, and I am the god of time and money, sort of! So... I slipped through the Bleed!"
Urahara's hand, halfway to his mouth, stopped.
His lazy smile vanished, replaced by a stillness of sudden and intense interest. His gray eyes sharpened.
'Ah. My. The Bleed,' he thought, his mind buzzing with a new wave of curiosity. 'The attic of the universe. The space between the pages of reality. The place where failed stories rot. What... what a reckless choice. And how... fascinating.'
"I know, I know, bad idea!" said Hermes, as if reading Urahara's expression. "I've done it hundreds of times! Saves me aeons! But this time... it was different! There was a storm! A conceptual storm! Dimensional turbulence! I felt... I felt the echo of that Doctor Destiny business from last week, everything is churned up in there! And a horrible thing... a thing from a dead universe, all teeth and broken logic... hit me! And... and I dropped it."
"I dropped the package," he moaned, face in his hands. "Right into the heart of the Bleed!"
Urahara remained silent for a moment, processing this. "If it fell, go get it. You are fast."
"I CAN'T!" shouted Hermes in a whisper, on the verge of tears. Golden sweat ran down his temples. "That is the problem! You don't understand what I am! I am Hermes! I am the god of paths! Of borders, of connections, of commerce, of messages that go from Point A to Point B! My very existence is a definition of rules!"
He pointed at the empty air of the shop. "The Bleed... is the place without rules! It is the space between Point A and Point B! It is disconnection! It is poison to me! It is an ocean of nothing, and I am a being made of something! If I stay there for more than a minute, my own story, my own definition, unravels. I dissolve!"
To demonstrate, Hermes held out his divine hand. Urahara watched with clinical interest as the edges of the god's fingers seemed to fray, like a bad television signal, dissolving into golden static before solidifying again with a visible effort of will.
"I'm already coming undone just from the time I was there!" he moaned.
"And the package?" asked Urahara.
"That is the other problem! It cannot be destroyed! It is protected by Father's lightning! It is indestructible! So it won't dissolve. It will simply... float there. Intact. Lost. Forever. An eternal mockery of my failure, waiting for some horrible creature of the void to find it and start a war! I'm finished! Father will tie me to Tartarus with my own intestines! I swear I'm not joking, he's done it before! He's not a good boss!"
Urahara set down his tea cup. His gaze was no longer that of a shopkeeper, nor a scholar. It was that of the consultant.
"I understand," he said, his voice now purely professional. "A delicate delivery problem. An indestructible cargo in an environment of conceptual nullification, inaccessible to the client."
Hermes stared at him, his panic pausing for a moment at the cold assessment. "Yes. Exactly. Can you... can you help me?"
"I can retrieve it," said Urahara with a calm that seemed divine to Hermes. "The Bleed and I... have a gentleman's agreement. It doesn't bother me if I don't bother it. It is a quiet workplace."
The relief that flooded Hermes' face was so bright the shop lit up for a moment with golden light. "YES! YES! I KNEW YOU COULD! Anything! What do you want? Name it! Gold of Olympus? I'll build you a house of solid gold! The wine of Dionysus, which drives mortals mad? A barrel of ambrosia? Do you want immortality? Done! Oh, wait, the stories say you already..."
Urahara raised a hand, stopping the torrent of offers. "None of that, please," he said with a grimace of slight distaste. "Gold is heavy. Wine gives me a headache. And ambrosia is so... sticky. Not to mention the indigestion."
Urahara's smile returned, but this time, it was the smile of the shopkeeper who knows he has exactly what the customer needs. "No, my price is much simpler. But much more expensive."
Hermes swallowed hard, golden static flickering around him. "What?"
"If I retrieve this package, here and now, and save you from your father's wrath..." said Urahara, his voice a soft whisper. "You will owe me a favor."
A shiver ran through the god. Gold was cheap. Immortality was a trick. But a favor. A favor to a being like this, a being who lived in the gaps of the world and spoke with demons and walked through the Dreaming... a favor was a terrifying price. It was a blank check.
But then, he thought of the rock. And the eagle. And his own intestines.
"Done," said Hermes, his voice a croak. "Done! A favor! Whatever, whenever! I swear it by the River Styx!"
The oath resonated in the shop, shaking the candy jars. The contract was sealed with a power older than Zeus himself.
"Excellent," said Urahara, his smile widening. "Always a pleasure doing business with a professional."
"And to seal the deal," he continued, his voice turning casual again. "As... a small down payment. A token of good faith."
Hermes nodded, willing to do anything. "My caduceus? My hat?"
"Oh, no. Nothing so flashy," said Urahara. His gaze drifted down, toward the god's feet, where the winged sandals still beat lazily in the air. "I like that feather."
Kisuke pointed, not at the staff of power, not at the divine artifact, but at one of the dozens of small, shiny golden feathers adorning the wing of Hermes' left sandal.
The god of speed was completely bewildered.
A feather? A useless feather from his shoe? Not an artifact? Not a secret?
But he was too relieved to argue. It was the strangest request he had ever received, which only confirmed that this shopkeeper was as crazy as the stories said.
"Sure! Take two! Take them all!" he said. He bent down and, with a quick tug that didn't hurt, plucked one of the golden feathers.
The feather didn't fall. It floated in the air between them, beating lazily on its own, emitting a golden light and the same sensation of speed as the god himself.
Urahara plucked it from the air. The power it contained was subtle, but beautiful. 'A feather from a being who walks between worlds,' he thought, a smile of genuine satisfaction on his face. 'A being of speed and connection. A being who can find any path... How... useful.'
He tucked the feather into his sleeve. The down payment was paid.
"A deal is struck, Hermes-san," said Urahara, becoming professional. "Now... how do you say you got there?"
"Now?" stammered Hermes. "You're going now? Just like that? Don't you need a ritual? A sacrifice? A star map?"
Urahara gave him a lazy smile. "Time is money, Hermes-san. Isn't that your line? Besides, sacrifices are so... messy. And they stain the wood."
He set down his tea. "Now, I need the... 'coordinates', so to speak. But a map will do me no good. The Bleed isn't a place, it's a state. So, if you would be so kind..."
Kisuke approached the god. "Close your eyes. Think of the exact moment you lost it. Not the location. The feeling. The sensation of the air, the sound of the storm, the panic. Paint me a picture with your memory."
Hermes, though a god, suddenly felt like the student. He obeyed. He squeezed his eyes shut, his divine face contorting in panic as he relived the memory.
The instant he did, the shop reacted.
The Kyoto lantern lights flickered. An unnatural wind swept through the room, making the candy jars vibrate violently. The air was suddenly filled with the roar of a million realities tearing apart and the sharp smell of ozone Hermes remembered.
"I see it!" shouted the god, eyes still closed. "The storm! The darkness! The... the thing...!"
"I got it," said Urahara quietly. The wind stopped. The shop returned to calm. The shopkeeper had "tasted" the conceptual echo in the air. "A simple dimensional tear. How messy."
Hermes opened his eyes, gasping. Urahara was already turning his back on him, walking toward the center of the shop.
"Wait for me here," said Urahara, his voice casual. "And please, don't touch the candy. The chocolate ones are particularly temperamental tonight. And above all, don't go upstairs. My partner is sleeping, and she gets very angry if woken up."
Hermes could only nod, mute.
Urahara stopped in the empty space between the counter and the shelves. There were no incantations. There were no circles of power. He simply unsheathed Benihime.
The crimson blade shone in the darkness of the shop, the only true source of light. Hermes felt the power of the sword, a power that was not of this universe, prickle his divine skin.
Urahara raised the sword. And with a movement as fluid and precise as a calligrapher finishing a stroke, he cut.
He didn't attack anything. He cut the air in front of him.
And the air split.
It wasn't an explosion or a portal of fire. It was a "seam." As if the fabric of reality were a dark cloth, Urahara had just cut the threads. A vertical line of... nothing... appeared. A milky white, silent void that seemed to pull the light and sound of the shop, absorbing them.
Urahara Kisuke sheathed his sword and, with the calm of a man going out to get the newspaper, stepped into the cut in the world and disappeared.
The seam closed behind him with an almost imperceptible sound, like a page turning.
Hermes, the God of Speed, the Messenger of Olympus, was left alone in a Japanese candy shop, mouth open, shivering in the silence.
For beings like Hermes, or indeed, for almost any being in the omniverse, the Bleed was hell. It was the non-functional space between universes. The library's attic. The cosmic recycling bin where failed realities, aborted timelines, and broken ideas were thrown. It was an ocean of chaos, pure energy, and contradictory narratives, a place where a being's "story" could be undone in seconds.
But for Urahara Kisuke, it was fascinating.
He wasn't falling. He wasn't flying. He was walking.
Beneath his wooden sandals, his own spiritual pressure, his reiatsu, created a platform of solid golden light with every step he took, a personal path through nothingness. The "air" around him was a milky white void, but it was full of... things.
To his right floated the corpse of a universe. He saw a dead Earth, wrapped in black vines, the silent echo of a reality where magic had died completely and logic had consumed itself. He saw the ghostly hull of a starship that should never have existed, the U.S.S. Enterprise of a story a writer had discarded.
To his left, he saw a colossal iceberg made not of ice, but of frozen sound: millions of screams and phrases from a forgotten war, frozen at the moment of their universe's death.
'What a wonderful mess,' thought Kisuke, his internal monologue filled with purely academic delight. 'It's where all the failed drafts and torn pages are kept. What a wonderfully dirty place. I wonder if I'll find any of the earlier editions of the Xylonian story around here...'
There was no fear in him. How could he be afraid? Fear came from the threat of your story ending. But he wasn't a story. He was the reader. This wasn't hell. It was the "rare and discarded books" section of the library.
He felt Zeus's power signature before he saw it.
In this sea of chaos, of broken stories and failed logic, it was a beacon. A constant pulse of Order. Of Rules. Of Symmetry.
'Annoying,' he thought. 'And loud. Over there.'
He moved, no longer walking, but flowing through the void with a Shunpo (Flash Step), a blur of movement so fast the broken reality didn't even realize he was moving.
He saw the package. And he saw the problem.
The "conceptual storm" Hermes had mentioned. The Bleed, like a body, was trying to attack the "infection" of pure Order that was Zeus's package. A storm of contradictory realities swirled around the box, a hurricane of failed possibilities trying to erase it.
The moment Urahara approached, the storm turned toward him, sensing his own unique form of order.
His mind flooded with visions.
He saw one: him, Urahara Kisuke, sitting on the empty throne of the Soul King, his eyes cold and humorless, ruling a silent and perfect Soul Society. A story of absolute power.
He saw another: him, a simple mortal, growing old on the Kent farm, with a gray-haired Kara by his side, their children playing in the cornfields. A story of domestic peace.
He saw a third: a world where he had never been born, where Aizen had won, where the universe had collapsed into madness.
The storm offered him futures, pasts, fears, and desires, trying to find a narrative to "anchor" to and tear him apart.
Urahara Kisuke fanned himself.
The breeze from his fan, a gesture of pure disinterest, dispelled the visions.
'What a lack of originality,' he thought, deeply disappointed. 'A future of power? A future of peace? I've already read those stories. They are clichés. And quite boring.'
His own simple truth—that of a curious shopkeeper who enjoyed tea and good conversation, and who was helping a god because he found the story funny—was his shield. An identity so humble and so strange that the Bleed had no story to counter it with.
He walked through the conceptual storm as if walking through a bead curtain. The golden platform beneath his feet did not waver.
There it was. A simple olive wood box, the size of a shoebox. It floated in the center of the chaos, glowing with the power of Zeus's lightning, unharmed.
Urahara grabbed it. It was cold to the touch, and vibrated with divine arrogance.
He turned, tucking the box under his arm, and began his leisurely stroll back.
In the Kyoto shop, exactly sixty-seven seconds had passed.
Hermes was levitating three feet off the ground, wings beating with panicked speed, and was about to scream, convinced the shopkeeper had failed, been destroyed, and now he would have to face Zeus.
The seam in reality reappeared.
Urahara Kisuke stepped out of the white void, the dust of a thousand dead universes on his shoulders, which he brushed off indifferently. He held the olive wood box in one hand.
The cut closed behind him, leaving the shop in silence once more.
He held the box out to Hermes.
"That... that's it?" stammered the god of speed, his divine mind struggling to process the time scale. "You... just... you've been gone... sixty-seven seconds! I felt... I felt your presence cross the Void! That should have taken aeons! It should have... broken you! How!?"
Urahara patted the god on the shoulder, a gesture that made Hermes flinch.
"It was a nice walk," replied Urahara, his shopkeeper smile returning. "A bit damp, as I said. But refreshing."
Hermes took the box as if it were a venomous snake, his eyes wide and fixed on Urahara. The god's arrogance had vanished completely, replaced by the same naked dread Zatanna and Constantine had felt.
This being wasn't a mortal. Wasn't a mage. Wasn't a god. He was... something else. A being who could stroll through the Bleed.
"The debt..." said Hermes, his voice now a formal and trembling whisper. "Is recorded. The Styx has heard my oath. Olympus... Olympus will not forget this, Urahara Kisuke."
With a burst of golden light and a thunderclap that shook the dust off the candy jars (and almost woke Kara, who let out a growl from upstairs), the messenger god vanished.
Urahara was left alone in his shop, now silent. The air smelled of tea and the storm that was gone.
He opened his hand. In his palm rested the small golden feather, beating lazily in the air.
'Hmm,' he thought, a slow smile of pure satisfaction forming on his face. 'A feather from a being who walks between worlds. A being of speed and connection. A being who can find any path.'
He tucked the feather into his sleeve. His gaze drifted to the backroom, to his laboratory, to the map of Tibet and his research on the Heart of Silence.
'A monastery hidden in the highest mountains. A place no one can find. This... this will be incredibly useful for my next trip.'
He turned off the shop light and went up the stairs, the house returning to domestic calm.