Interlude

Hikone Ubuginu did not remember the moment that their sense of self germinated.

That didn’t quite mean that they had no memories of their time as an infant, in the way that an ordinary Soul Reaper and human would not. The konpaku called Hikone was a warped form created by layering and interleaving the splinters of many different beings. Inside their konpaku were Hollows from millennia ago, freshy dead Quincies, and even miscarriages collected from the world of the living. The konpaku was a compilation of every possible kind of soul with the Fragments of the Reio at its center. Normally, a being such as Hikone would promptly fall apart and lose form. However, because they contained the Fragments of the Reio that the Tsunayashiro family had gathered, Hikone was miraculously able to continue life as a konpaku with a single sense of individuality.

Though Hikone clearly remembered the moment when they had been given the name Hikone and their consciousness had awakened, they were seized by the fantasy that they had a sense of self that reached much further into the past than that.

Or perhaps that was not a fantasy.

After all, the building blocks used to create Hikone were konpaku prior to their decomposition into reishi. It was quite possible that what could be called the dregs of those prior beings influenced Hikone to some extent.

It was the sensation of dozens, hundreds of different selves intermingling within them.

Because they were such an aggregation, there was nothing but chaos that approached nihility.

An accumulation of emotions floated up and disappeared within them.

A certain fragment of soul would forgive slaughter, while another would reject it as absolutely impermissible.

A certain fragment of soul would claim that evil itself was the essence of humanity, while another would extol virtue as the true embodiment of humankind.

Though their individual rationales and memories had vanished, the differences in the ways of life etched into those konpaku entangled and, at times, threatened to tear Hikone’s soul apart in their rejection of each other.

Because of that, the individual called Hikone found peace in the instruction that the individual called Tokinada granted them. Tokinada would point out what was definitively “righteous” for the ever lost and perplexed Hikone, which would herd the dregs of konpaku rampaging within the child’s head in a single direction.

Hikone’s one and only desire, that they themself had come up with, was to become a “good king.” For Tokinada’s sake—because the Soul Reaper said he would make them king—they would strive to become a leader beloved by the people.

Tokinada had taught Hikone that in order to become king, occasional violence or slaughter was a necessity. And though Hikone had accepted that, a “Hikone-ness” had begun to steadily germinate within them from other pieces of themself.

What it would become would divide Hikone’s fate…

However, to Hikone, currently a follower of Tokinada, that was still irrelevant.

And at this moment it still was not.