Chapter 008: Reiatsu Level
Exactly what he'd been hoping for.
But it turned out Matsushita Yusuke had still been underestimating Aizen Sosuke.
All five Zanpakuto categories plus one. What the heck. This wasn't just a resource deposit anymore. Aizen was basically a walking lottery jackpot.
Every time Matsushita Yusuke felt like his progress had hit a wall, the man would show up and knock it down without even trying.
What did it mean to grind hard?
Apparently you could slack off and still get stronger. All five categories up by one, across the board.
The quest notification pulled his attention sideways and he couldn't stop grinning, sitting there absolutely delighted with himself.
Aizen Sosuke watched the reaction and didn't find it particularly strange.
If anything, that intense eagerness to learn was, in its own way, a little infectious.
Perhaps Matsushita Yusuke reminded him of a younger version of himself in some small way. Another unusual soul, the kind that didn't quite fit anywhere, standing somewhere lonely and apart.
The thought brought a quiet feeling with it. Aizen wanted to say more, but held back. Better to leave it here.
"That's enough on Jinzen for now. There's certainly more to cover on the subject of Zanpakuto, but there's no point biting off more than you can chew. For where you are right now, just work on digesting what I've told you."
Simpler than expected.
Matsushita Yusuke genuinely hadn't anticipated the whole thing amounting to a single explanation. But hearing it, the relief on his face came naturally.
Actually, that made sense.
He was a complete beginner when it came to Zanpakuto. Getting everything dumped on him at once would have meant absorbing nothing.
And besides, he had quests.
Whether he fully understood the content or not was beside the point. Collect the reward first, figure the rest out later.
With that settled, Matsushita Yusuke's smile went a little stupidly wide, the kind that was hard to hide.
"Got it. I'll go give it a try and report back when I've made some progress, Aizen-sensei!"
He turned and headed out at a brisk pace. Aizen watched him go, briefly considered saying "you don't have to report back specifically to me," then paused, and let it go without saying anything.
Let him do things his own way.
Because in this quiet, dull stretch of Soul Society, outside of the research that actually held his interest...
Perhaps this was the one person who could bring Aizen a certain kind of genuine surprise.
He probably wouldn't admit it. Might even call it an overstatement. But the truth was that right now, Aizen Sosuke was looking forward to something.
One week from now, when they met again.
What new thing would this one show him?
Worth finding out.
On the other side of that door, Matsushita Yusuke jogged away from the faculty office, scrolling through his quest log and stat panel with a grin he couldn't have suppressed if he'd tried.
He was just happy. Genuinely happy.
[Quest complete... Rewards acquired]
After the notification finished rolling through, he stopped in the corridor and took a proper look at his panel.
[Matsushita Yusuke]
[Reiatsu Level: 3] (Current cap: 15)
[Zanjutsu: 14 / Hakuda: 11 / Hoho: 7 / Kido: 19] (Total: 100)
These were his base stats.
Compared to before, his Reiatsu Level had gone from 4 down to 3. On the surface that looked like the wrong direction, but it wasn't.
When the level counter hit its cap it reset back to the bottom, and through that process the overall ceiling got raised to the next tier. The number going down was actually a sign of going up.
It was a slightly unintuitive display system, he'd give it that. From a pure game design perspective, resetting a number downward to represent progress was the kind of choice that made players squint at the screen.
But thinking about it from a Bleach standpoint, the logic clicked into place.
The Shinigami power ranking system had a clearly defined structure. The measurement scale, called Spirit Class, applied to the vast majority of Shinigami and ran from rank twenty all the way up to rank one, with lower numbers representing greater strength. That many distinct tiers existing said something on its own about how seriously Soul Society took internal power hierarchies.
Generally speaking, Vice-Captains sat somewhere around Spirit Class four or five. Class three and above was effectively captain territory.
So by that standard, class three or higher was where a Shinigami started being considered genuinely powerful.
That said, even among the powerful there were gaps.
As the original story demonstrated clearly enough: two captains at comparable levels, one of whom had already achieved Bankai, got erased on the spot by Aizen's Kurohitsugi. Once the gap in Spirit Class opened up far enough, the two combatants simply weren't on the same plane anymore.
As for what came after class one and how you ranked things from there?
That got into genuinely contested territory, and you'd also have to factor in individual circumstances, mental state, and peak condition.
Throw in concepts like deaf Ichigo or genocide-mode Yamamoto and the whole conversation lost its usefulness immediately.
On top of that, Matsushita Yusuke figured the Spirit Class system was essentially retired content by the time the story reached its later arcs anyway. Once the narrative expanded to cover Hueco Mundo and the Wandenreich, measuring anyone against a Shinigami yardstick stopped making much sense.
The more practical approach was to pick a calibration point instead. A reference unit.
Someone like Toshiro Hitsugaya, or pre-Royal Guard Ichigo. Two young Shinigami with limited track records but genuine credentials and respectable power levels. Sitting right at the dividing line between cannon fodder and the real deal.
Anyone who could beat them belonged in a serious fight. Anyone who couldn't wasn't worth putting on the stage.
Anyway.
Back to the actual panel.
Matsushita Yusuke's stat display didn't map cleanly onto the traditional Shinigami ranking framework. In his read, the System had simply skipped that layer entirely and gone straight to something all three realms could recognize: raw reiatsu ceiling as the measuring stick. Direct and efficient.
As for the four disciplines, they'd all gone up somewhat, but everything except Kido was moving at a crawl.
Basically what he'd already described. Resources inside Shin'o Academy were limited. Regular classes weren't dropping anything worth having.
And Aizen's contributions were coming in at a fixed rate.
So Kido just kept climbing while everything else inched forward.
Nothing to be done about it.