Soul Society prior to the start of the story was a lawless, insane, hot mess of a society. The humans reborn here didn't retain their memories of their past life and consequently, it was like humanity had to start over here.
Except they aged more slowly and were roughly introduced to using reiatsu, as they call it in this world.
And for some insane reason, they were much more aggressive as shinigami than as humans. Likely due to something about this world that the Soul King created. I couldn't discount the possibility that because it was the Soul King who created it instead of the Great Nobles that could be a potential side effect.
Coming into this world with memories, I could easily compare how this world felt against other worlds and there was definitely... something off about it.
It wasn't inherently bad, per se, but it was perturbing. It was hard to put it into words, but—like—
Like going out to stay at a hotel that at first glance looks pretty nice. It's got a soft bed, a TV, a strong AC, and one heck of a nice view. But then when you lift the blankets up you see red stains. Now, those stains aren't inherently blood—they could have been spilled soap that didn't get washed out, or whatever, but it wasn't exactly good, you know?
It didn't mean it was an evil room, or that something bad had happened there. Just... something was off about it, yeah?
I don't know. Maybe that's a bad example.
But that's how I felt while living in the new "Soul Society."
I had pulled back the covers of a nice hotel bed and found a red stain.
Blood, soap, or maybe something else entirely?
Either way, cleaning was necessary.
Where did I want to start, though?
It took Genryūsai two thousand years to advance Soul Society to where it stood at the start of the story. To change the ending, did I want to speed this process up, or keep it at the same pace?
'Hmm, hmm, hmm...'
Well! Regardless, I had to start with training Genryūsai up as soon as possible, so he could help establish order. Chaos was fun, but I really wanted paved streets and plumbing.
(◕▾◕✿)
85 B.C. (A couple centuries after the world was split by the Soul King)
Those deemed strong enough in the Soul Society were granted zanpakutōs. I wasn't familiar with how the process was started, but those were the general whispers on the street. People who were strong could find the swordmaster, and he would forge for them a powerful weapon that would eventually be known as the zanpakutō. The forgemaster, Ōetsu Nimaiya, currently resided as one of the two Royal Guards for the Soul King but he visited Soul Society once a week to test out potential warriors. If they were strong enough to earn the sword, they might one day be strong enough to join the Royal Guard.
Genryūsai would inevitably obtain his infamous zanpakutō sword soon enough, but since he was still a child that wouldn't be a for a while.
A feisty child that hated baths, but a child nonetheless.
Speaking of the devil...
Genryūsai was watching me behind the trees of our farmhouse while I prepared the potato patch. He thought he was being clever in repressing his spiritual energy—reiatsu—but he wasn't experienced enough at it to hide it from me.
Plus his butt was sticking out from behind the tree as he leaned around it to peer at me suspiciously.
'Wonder what he's up to,' I thought, half-amused. He hadn't objected when I brought him food and offered him a place to sleep off the rough streets of the Soul Society. But the longer he stayed with me, the more suspicious he started to become of me.
Now a week into living under the same roof, he was hiding and spying on me.
I dropped the hoe, letting gravity carry the weight to dig it into the soil before I pulled it back up and started again.
The Soul Society was a lot like the world of the living except overflowing with spiritual energy, and an odd overlaying tone of something hanky. On the bright side because of all the excess spiritual energy certain plants grew like weeds here—potatoes being one of them. Once I got a proper farm set up we wouldn't have to worry about food.
Meanwhile, I could just slip over to the world of the living during any time period and steal—er—forage for food as need be. It was super easy to get a house built up here that way.
After another ten minutes of digging up a field for the potatoes, I finally looked over at Genryūsai and hollered, "You wanna help, or nah?"
He let out a yip like a puppy, so startled that he fell back on his bum on the soft green grass. His dark eyes widened considerably, and his cheeks reddened as I giggled at his reaction. I dropped my hoe in the ground, brushing off the dirt from my blue work pants.
"Well?" I asked him, now approaching him.
Genryūsai's face was redder than the strawberries I was going to plant later. "N-No."
"No?" I repeated back, moving closer and placing my hands on my hips. "Wanna go back to hiding, then?"
"H-How did you know I was there?" he asked, scrambling back to his feet.
"Hmm? Hmm? I wonder?" I mockingly rubbed my chin in thought.
"What do you want me with me?" he blurted out, then comically gasped at himself as his hands flew back up to cover his mouth. If there wasn't a touch of genuine fear in his gaze, I might have started howling at how over the top his reaction was.
The tint of uncertainty and anxiety in his eyes kept me restrained. I offered him a kinder smile, one not laced with mockery. "I told you. I'm going to be your teacher."
"Why?" he asked, slowly lowering his hands to once again regard me with suspicion.
I gave him a big grin. "Because you're my diamond in the rough."
(◕▾◕✿)
It still took about a month of spying on me—and fleeing every time I spotted him—before Genryūsai even thought about relaxing around me. He still devoured the food I made him, would put away the clothes I gave him after I washed them, and still slept in his room, but heaven forbid he was seen in the same room as me or—dare I say it—talk to me.
I was a patient soul, however, and we had thousands of years ahead of us before we even reached the main story. Souls that filtered into this world were tougher than most, and gaining that strength usually resulted in a certain level of suspicion, and cynicism. The "Soul Society" as it was was a hazardous, horrible, and cruel place where the weak were abruptly killed off. This kind of environment forced a get-strong-or-die mentality.
Showing kindness was viewed as a way to deceive and manipulate. Undoubtedly Genryūsai had already been tricked and betrayed before I came along.
How else would a child be left alone to starve on the streets?
Originally this resulted in Genryūsai growing into a monster at his prime, and only tempering down with age. His "kindness" still resulted in the death of his enemies, though, and his "compassion" for anything other than people of his military force was nonexistent.
Perhaps my intervention would change that.
Or perhaps it would drive him to commit further acts of cruelness.
It was hard to say for certain what my presence would bring—Wyrd could be tricky at times. I had plenty of instances of showing kindness to a villain, and it only spurned them into committing more heinous acts later on.
50-50 chance, I'd say.
Regardless, it would give a different ending, and the journey would be fascinating to watch.
"Oi, lady!" Genryūsai growled out. It came across as more adorable since I could clearly see how nervous he was by the way his knees shook just a teeny tiny bit and his cheeks were flushed. Super cute that he was trying to act all tough, though!
"Yes, Gen?" I asked him, pausing in my clay sculpting—I was making an outdoor clay oven in the shape of Totoro.
"Y-You said you were going to train me!" he blustered.
"Yep. Are you ready to start now?" I asked him, glancing over at him and grinning once more. "You have a lot more meat and fat on you now, so it should be safe to do so."
"M-Meat?" Genryūsai stammered, paling as he lost all his courage. "Y-You're going to eat me?!"
I couldn't resist snorting at that, trying hard not to burst out into laughter at his reaction. I wasn't entirely successful this time around since a few giggles escaped me.
"S-Stop laughing," Genryūsai snapped back, warm color roaring back into his cheeks as a wave of embarrassment washed over him. "J-Just train me already, okay? I need to get stronger."
"Okay, okay," I wheezed. "Let me finish this last part here and I'll wash up. Be warned, though, I'm brutally efficient."
Genryūsai puffed up his chest and held his chin high. "I'm tough! I can take it."
He didn't even last the first hour.
(◕▾◕✿)
84 b.c.
Genryūsai was tenacious.
It had been a year since we started training and the boy had reluctantly not missed a single lesson. Since he was all skin and bones when we first met we had work on getting his muscle mass back up to a healthy weight before we could do anything intensive.
Now, normally, you don't train children.
Human children were especially big no-nos, but children born in the Soul Society were an exception to this world.
Namely because of their proportion of spiritual energy—reiatsu, sorry—and physical energy. Their spiritual energy was greater than their physical energy, which spurred on their bodies to adapt at faster rates when young, and made them much sturdier than a regular human. It could also be used to slow down the rate of their physical energy—vitality—degenerating which was how some of them could live for thousands of years.
Their physical energy tethered them to this world and gave them life. It was their blood, their heart, their bodies. Even hollows, who were not alive in a traditional sense, had a body that bled.
Genryūsai had a large reserve of reiatsu—bigger than most born here—and consequently was much sturdier.
If I were to train an average soul, they would be advancing two times slower than Genryūsai.
I had to give it to the little fella.
Boy was tenacious.
(◕▾◕✿)
80 b.c.
With Genryūsai gone for the day doing who knows what, and the farm chores taken care of, I decided to get started on my Super Plan™ that was obviously way cooler than what Sōsuke Aizen could ever come up with. Hence why it was called a Super Plan™.
I first let go of my tie the world later known as the Soul Society. I was a purely spiritual being, so flickering between worlds so closely tied together was as easy as breathing. Hueco Mundo, like the Soul Society, was a place more There than Here. That is to say, it was a place more closely tied with the spiritual realm than that of the physical.
The only difference it really held from the Soul Society was the sheer volume of spiritual energy overpowered its physical energy, so little to no life could grow. After all, physical energy was life, vitality.
In between one breath and the next I found myself floating lazily in the vast dark skies of Hueco Mundo.
And off I went in search of another lost little soul.
(◕▾◕✿)
70 b.c.
When settling into a routine time drifts by with ease.
In the mornings, Genryūsai would assist me on the farm before he began his daily exercise. It took several years of eating proper nutrients and healthy exercise before he had gained a strong enough body to last through a single day of one-on-one training.
But gain it, he did.
He worked hard with a fervor I hadn't seen in a mortal soul for many, many years. He practiced his katas, and swordsmanship with such rigid discipline there were times where I had to forcibly put him to bed. He pushed himself to exhaustion over, and over, uncaring about his own pain.
His hands were hard and calloused by the time I gave him his zanpakutō—courtesy of the Royal Guard—and his eyes burned with unwavering determination.
I could see how such a child would grow up into the feared leader of the Gotei 13.
Yet I did not see a whisper of the supposed monstrous rage he would unleash in his youth.
Indeed, Genryūsai was quite kind to me once he accepted that I meant him no harm.
I wondered if perhaps some event I didn't know about would transform him into the supposed rage-aholic, or did I change enough about him by simply raising and teaching him for a little over a decade?
Only time would tell, I supposed.
"Rirī?" Genryūsai inquired, stepping up onto the back porch of our home.
The sun had already set, and I had taken a seat on the porch to watch the moon and stars that night.
No matter what world I went to, or what life I experienced, the night skies were a consistent factor.
That, and that I could easily troll people at the bat of an eye.
"Yes, Gen-Ge-en?" I asked him, smiling sweetly at when he cringed at his childish name. He had insisted I stopped calling him chan when his voice started to crack. I politely told him absolutely not, and started to sing the chan part when I wanted to annoy him.
Genryūsai sat down beside me, folding his hands together in his lap as he furrowed his brow.
He had aged up to pubescent, but it was hard to tell how long he would stay like that. Due to the high amount of reiatsu inside him, his vitality would fluctuate. One year he might age like a normal human. Another year he'd be stagnant.
Souls in the Soul Society did age faster as children, but once they hit that puberty mark it could drastically slow down.
He was, technically, twenty-two years of age, but he looked no older than thirteen.
Genryūsai took a seat beside me on the porch, an oddly perplexed expression on his youthful face.
"You know a lot of stuff, Teacher," Genryūsai slowly said, shifting his weight.
"Mm-hmm."
"Who trained you?" he asked me.
"A lot of people," I answered.
"Will I get to meet them?"
"Someday," I said with a smile.
(◕▾◕✿)
I know technically the manga claimed Soul Society is like millions of years old but... what? The first human town found on record was around 7100 b.c. Not even a hundred thousand years. But the Soul Society is millions of years older than our current civilization, but sure as heck doesn't look like it?
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Learning about Bleach lore and trying to pick out what canonically happened at the start of the Soul Society is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle of random facts, contradicting timeline and rules, and how the fuck did that happen?
So here's my solution: Let's change that digit to something a bit more believable, k thnx.
I just can't wrap my head around the idea of a militaristic society not advancing for millions of years after they just introduced the cycle of death / need to survive. Sorry for that little deviation from canon, but I cannot see any logical way to explain how over millions of years there weren't some lazy tech-savvy fellas forcefully advancing the society. Soul Society should have floating cities and instant teleportation wrist watches or something by the time Ichigo comes around if it were m i l l i o n s of years old. We went to the moon in less than 100k where the fuck is the Soul Society moon base?!
Answer: Hitsugaya, I think. Tsunderes are fun.
Question: Who would be the best student in the Bleach-verse for you?
Reviews are love!