The moment Kisuke came to this wide cavern and was face to face with Ichibei, he already had a lot of things in his mind. Most notably, Soul King's last words.
He was certain that the Soul King was referring to Ichibei when he said something about 'the being that shouldn't have been born', but Kisuke wasn't so certain as to why the Soul King was making the effort of 'destroying' his work.
With the Soul King's power, there should be no way to have anyone compel him to create the three worlds and start the cycle of life and death by sacrificing himself. In other words, it was the Soul King's idea to create the world as it is. However, why does Ichibei want to protect it? And after all these years, why did the Soul King want to disrupt the balance that he created in the first place?
Of course, from the very start, Kisuke was just speculating all of this because he's not really sure if that's what the Soul King was trying to achieve.
In an attempt to search for clues about it, Kisuke spent most of his time gathering data on Ichigo, Aizen, and Yhwach secretly. It's also one of the reasons why he chose to free the latter two and allow Yhwach to restore his power for a bit. But even if he put so much effort into this, to the point that Kisuke had no choice but to leave the rest of 'migration' in Mayuri's hand, he had almost nothing.
It was then that he finally decided to look at another perspective. The perspective of the 'being that shouldn't have been born'. And to get into that, his first target of investigation was Kazui, the child who accepted Hell.
After that, it didn't take long for Kisuke to piece together the clues that he had gathered when he figured out that Kazui's mission was not to provide safe travel to Hell for the lost souls, but an experiment to increase the Hell's population and further breakdown the boundaries between it and the three worlds.
'If Soul King was the soul of this dead body, then Ichibei is some sort of Spirit that was born from its lingering powers... No... He's probably just a simple maggot or fly that gained sentience after eating and collecting this dead body's flesh. Now it thinks that he's the real thing and trying to 'revive' himself.'
Kisuke intentionally talked in a cryptic way because he wanted the final confirmation from the man himself. Since Ichibei had no more reason to hide anything, he managed to give Kisuke a bit of a straight answer.
Because Kisuke was loudly narrating his thoughts inside his head, Tiamat and Benihime could also clearly hear him, [You mean to say that he's just one of these insects?] Benihime asked, [I thought that you were just joking.]
[Then let's say that he's one of these insects. What's the point of pretending to be the Shinigami and how does this affect our situation?] Tiamat asked this time.
'Before I answer that, this is the overview of what I think happened. Once upon a time, an unimaginably gigantic creature swam through the endless dimensions for a countless length of time. It witnessed countless worlds and probably destroyed some of them intentionally or accidentally. But at some point, something happened to it and soon met its end.'
'Its soul left its decaying body and noticed that there were numerous creatures that were living on its body and most of them were already like it, a wandering soul with no purpose. Whether it's from the worlds it destroyed or somewhere else, it didn't know where they came from.'
'But thanks to its long journey, it had learned a lot of things. Even though it was just a simple soul now, it still possessed a lot of power and started nourishing these aimless souls out of its own interest.'
[Are you saying that this soul was the Soul King?]
Kisuke, however, didn't answer Benihime's question and just continued on narrating inside his head, 'The way he was nourishing these poor souls was by giving them a tiny piece of itself. Thanks to this benevolent act, they soon started having minds of their own, making their own decisions, and creating their own culture.'
[That soul forgot something important, huh?] Tiamat immediately guessed the next part of the story. As someone who was once in the position of a Transcendent, she knew how important their whole being is, whether it's alive or dead.
'As expected of you.' Kisuke chuckled before continuing, 'Yes. It forgot something, two things in fact. It forgot that its body still exists, containing an enormous amount of power and it also forgot that there's something else living on it and not just souls which it was fond of.'
'The forgotten ones, these insects and probably a bunch of others, gnawed and competed for the essentially discarded body until only one of them remained. And among the victors, one came out special and inherited the memories of this body by simply consuming a lot of it and now it thinks that it was once this corpse.'
'The soul wasn't just late in noticing that something huge had changed on its back and it only acknowledged it because it suddenly appeared in front of it, forming relationships and interacting with the souls it has been taking care of for countless eons.'
'It was only at that moment that it was compelled to use its vast power to see what would unfold. But whatever it saw, it didn't hesitate to destroy and divide itself into countless pieces, leaving only behind 4 major parts which became the foundation of the 3 worlds and its lynchpin, the Soul King. Its power gave birth to countless things and shaped this dimension to the image it probably saw in its past, creating the cycle of life and death.'
'So why did it do this? I don't know. It knew that the 'fake' wanted it to complete itself, but for some reason, instead of fighting against it, the Soul King decided to spread himself out as much as possible and seal the way towards its dead body.'
'The fake was probably furious but it too can play the long game. It first opened the path to the body and started sending the scattered powers of the Soul King towards it. Slowly but surely, the fake was gathering everything into one place.'
[Hold on... Then the reason why Captain-level Shinigami and strong Arrancars are sent to Hell is...] The story made a few things click inside Benihime's head.
'They are those who manage to gather a little bit more of the Soul King's power and the fake threw them onto its plate.'
[Then the reason why you can't use your Shinigami and Hollow abilities is...]
'Because these abilities spawned from the Soul King's power and with its understanding of it, it's a trivial matter for it to seal them. It'd probably be the same if I had Quincy powers.'
Benihime and Tiamat finally understood why Kisuke said that Ichibei was trying to 'complete' himself. Since the three worlds are made out of the Soul King himself, he's now trying to devour everything.
[If you knew that, then why did you dive into this place!?]
At that moment, Kisuke smirked, 'It's because I knew exactly that, that I came to this place. This guy is setting up the same situation as Chaos did. You know what happens to people that just eat the food I prepared, right?'
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AN Aug 30, 2024: I apologize for being so late and sadly, I could only manage 4 chapters.
My sudden 'break' derailed a lot of things for me and that includes my momentum for this arc.
While I do have notes of what I want to happen, some of them look cryptic even though I'm the one who wrote them. I have a certain development in mind and just wrote down 'hints' for it for me to go back to in case I forget how it'll go.
But too much time has passed that those 'hints' can't get me back to what I was thinking a week prior. Thanks to that, it was hard to get back into it.
Oh well, enough of those excuses. Please enjoy and have a great day~!
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