Yoji stopped moving, turned his head, and watched Urahara with cold patience, waiting.
Urahara wrung his hands and forced himself to continue.
"The device works in conjunction with a supplementary reishi circuit I installed beneath the floor of this room. If you move it to the Ninth Division without that circuit, it's just a rusty barrel. It won't do anything."
Yoji understood immediately.
Ah. So that's the game.
The machine worked. It just happened to require infrastructure that only existed here, which meant that using it — in his own room, where it would actually matter — meant hiring Urahara to come and build the same infrastructure from scratch. And the price of that would be...
"Skip to the point," he said. "What does it cost to install the same circuit setup in my room at the Ninth?"
Urahara's eyes lit up. He straightened, rubbed his hands together at an accelerated rate, and produced a smile of remarkable sincerity.
"Hehe, I knew you'd understand how it works, Senpai! The price is very reasonable, actually — full installation, complete circuit, everything included — just three hundred thousand kan!"
"What."
The distinguished young nobleman persona evaporated on the spot.
Yoji pointed at him.
"The machine itself cost forty thousand! And you want three hundred thousand for the supporting parts?! Have you lost your mind?!"
Three hundred thousand. That was the kind of number you quoted to the top tier of Seireitei's hereditary aristocracy. Yoji had been writing fiction and collecting royalties for years — his total accumulated earnings, every kan he'd ever made, came to just over a hundred thousand. And he still owed the tavern fifty thousand of that.
Urahara pressed closer, dropping his voice as though the walls had ears, which in the Second Division they probably did.
"Senpai, listen — the circuit in this room runs off a connection I set up to the Second Division's underground reishi junction point. Tapping into that was not easy or cheap. If I'm setting up a fresh system at the Ninth, I'd need to design a completely new circuit and solve the power supply problem from scratch. Three hundred thousand isn't profit — it's barely cost."
He gave Yoji the look of a man sharing a painful truth.
Yoji narrowed his eyes.
Reishi pools were liquid spiritual energy, allocated to each division for daily cultivation and general use. And this person had quietly been siphoning from the Second Division's supply.
Aizen. Hirako. And now this one. Why does everyone around me turn out to be a problem?
But the logic held. Without a stable, high-density reishi source driving it, the device was decoration.
"I don't have three hundred thousand," Yoji said flatly.
Urahara deflated like something with the air taken out of it.
"But," Yoji continued, pointing at the machine, "turn it on. Right now."
Urahara blinked. "Turn it on for — what?"
Yoji said it through his teeth.
"To write. To earn money. Where else is three hundred thousand kan going to come from?"
The word money hit Urahara like a stimulant. He was across the room in two steps and had the activation button pressed before Yoji finished speaking.
Hmmmmm.
A low vibration moved through the floor. The rust patterns across the machine's surface — which had looked random — began to faintly glow, reishi tracing through them in slow, irregular currents. An invisible barrier unfolded around the room, sealing it from the outside world.
Urahara then extracted, from some corner of the disaster he inhabited, a rickety wooden table and a chair in marginally acceptable condition, and positioned them carefully within the barrier's range.
"Senpai — watch the time." He kept his voice low, gesturing at the ceiling. "In about three hours, the division draws on the reishi pool for the evening meal. The energy levels will shift and things might get irregular. You'll want to be done and out before that."
He did not need the secret collaborative creative project of a Fifth Seat from another division to be responsible for the entire Second Division eating undercooked rice tonight.
"I'll leave you to it. Take your time, Senpai, take all the time you need!"
He backed to the door wearing the expression of someone who understood everything and would say nothing about any of it, pulled it shut, and through the wood Yoji could hear the faint sounds of Urahara settling cross-legged against the outside of the door.
Apparently he'd appointed himself informal guard.
Yoji took note of it. The man was greedy and disorganized and his workspace looked like a crime scene, but he was perceptive in ways that counted. He'd almost certainly already worked out that what Yoji needed was a sealed environment for writing that couldn't be observed or detected — and he'd chosen, without being asked, to stand watch.
Not a bad ally, all things considered.
Yoji cleared his mind.
Now came the actual decision.
The story had to resonate broadly — wide enough to pull in sufficient volume of emotional resonance from the largest possible number of readers. But volume alone wasn't the point. What he needed, urgently, was depth — the kind of profound response that only came from genuinely powerful souls being genuinely moved. That quality of resonance was what could crystallize into something capable of actually breaking through a reiatsu ceiling.
He needed to write about someone whose story, at its core, could reach captain-level shinigami and shake something loose in them.
Names and faces moved through his mind and were set aside, one after another.
Then one remained.
Her history was legend. Her nature — the deepest truth of what she had been and what she had chosen — could disturb anyone strong enough to recognize it for what it was. And she was here, in the Seireitei, alive, close enough to touch.
Her.
Yoji's hand moved to his hilt.
"Take up the brush—"
The words came out quiet, unhurried, absorbed immediately by the sealed air of the room.
"Tsuizoku Banshō."
The Zanpakutō dissolved — not into ice and snow this time, not into the disguise — but into a cascade of luminous reishi that gathered and settled in his palm and became something else entirely.
Not a folding fan.
A brush. The handle was smooth and old-feeling, like worn jade. The tip flickered with reishi that shifted and changed like light caught in moving water, like something that couldn't quite decide what it was.
This was its real form. The instrument that wrote into the fabric of narrative itself.
The moment it took shape in his hand, something shifted in Yoji. The usual languor fell away. His eyes sharpened into something that hadn't been visible before, something focused and precise and completely awake.
He spread a sheet of blank paper on the table, gathered his reiatsu like ink, steadied his mind like a held breath, and brought the brush down.
The characters appeared, black and deep, carrying in them something that smelled of blood and iron and old killing:
The Killer of the Rukon District
Part One — Crimson Bloom
At the end of a river paved with bones
I heard
the sound of the first blossom opening
It was the quiet crack of a throat giving way
— Sparse Flowers.
When the last stroke was finished, the characters on the page seemed, briefly, to breathe. A faint crimson light moved through them and was gone.
The sealed room filled with something — a quality of intent that was simultaneously perfectly pure and perfectly violent, pressed into just those few opening lines.
Yoji set the brush down and held still for a moment, taking stock of the reiatsu cost — lighter than he'd expected for something this true — and through Tsuizoku Banshō there came the faintest echo of something reaching back from a very long time ago. Something that had soaked a great deal of ground.
Across the Seireitei, in the Fourth Division's captain's quarters, Unohana Retsu sat arranging flowers with the particular unhurried precision she brought to everything.
The shears paused.
She looked up, her eyes — gentle on the surface, and below the surface, without any bottom that had ever been found — turned slowly toward a direction she couldn't quite name.
In the space of one breath, something had moved.
Distant. Familiar in a way she couldn't account for. A thread pulled by something she hadn't thought about in a very long time.
As if a flower grown in blood and left for dead in a place no one had looked in years had, in the dark, without anyone knowing, trembled once.