In Bleach with Creation Sword
創造の刀 · The Sword That Builds the World
A Bleach Fan Fiction
INTRODUCTION
White Feather
A man accounts for himself
I am going to tell you exactly where I went wrong.
Not because I owe anyone an account.
Not because confession does anything useful for a dying man. I am going to tell you because if there is one thing a hundred years of existence has taught me, it is that the truth does not disappear simply because no one is listening to it.
It persists and waits.
So do I.
My name is Raiken Shirohane.
I was born in the 74th district of the North Rukongai, in the kind of poverty that teaches you to read people before they read you.
I learned this early and I learned it well, and I thought for a long time that it was enough.
That if you could see clearly, you could not be deceived.
I was wrong about that. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I had spiritual power.
More than the district knew what to do with.
Not the raw overwhelming quantity that turns heads in the Seireitei — mine was quieter than that, denser, a light that came from somewhere unusual inside me and didn't behave the way power was supposed to behave.
It was noticed, and I was recruited into the Fifth Division.
I believed this was earned. I was told it was earned. It was not earned, and I was lied to.
Devastatingly, I was collected.
___
His name was Aizen Sōsuke. And he was the most careful liar I have ever encountered.
He never told me I was part of an experiment.
He told me I showed exceptional promise. He told me the special training was an opportunity given to very few. He spoke in a voice that made everything sound like you were already exactly where you deserved to be — like the world had arranged itself around your particular worth, and all you had to do was not waste it.
I did not waste it. I gave him everything he asked for.
What he asked for, as it turned out, was my soul.
Not metaphorically. He had a device
Small, unassuming, less refined than it would later become — and he placed it against my spiritual architecture and told it to work.
The Prototype Hōgyoku.
That is what I later came to understand it as.
At the time, I understood nothing except that something was changing inside me, and Aizen was watching the change with the focused attention of a man who has been waiting a long time to see if his hypothesis was correct.
…
His hypothesis was wrong.
The device did not do what he intended.
It did something else.
Something that belonged to me, not to him, something that recognized the structure of my soul and began, quietly, to fulfill it.
He saw only the failure.
The feedback, destabilization, a body beginning to shut down. He made a note in a record I never got to read.
He fabricated charges against my name and submitted them to the Central 46, who signed without looking.
Then he disposed of me, telling me a recount of his ploy with a sly grin.
.
That is the correct word.
Disposed.
The way you discard a failed result. The way you clear the bench for the next experiment.
I died on a table in the Fifth Division's restricted sublevel.
I did not die quietly. I want that on record.
Even if the record is only this — even if the only witness is whatever remains of me at the end of this. I fought the shutdown with everything I had. My Zanpakutō spirit, whom I did not yet have a True name for, pressed against the darkness with me.
We fought together and we lost together and then we were gone.
Uneventful.
And then I woke up in Hell.