In that fleeting moment, Tsunayashiro Shōgo finally grasped the chasm between "pinnacle" and "real pinnacle."
The terrifying reiatsu that seemed to strain his spiritual body to the brink of bursting, beyond his precise control, flowed through Yamamoto's hands as naturally as an extension of himself forged and condensed to perfection.
The instant he was struck, the heightened senses granted by the Soul King's bone allowed him to feel every inch of his body disintegrating under the crushing force, a tremor that tore him apart.
Just one punch.
The horrifying disparity was now crystal clear.
The gap in their strength was indeed as vast as an ocean.
Yet...
Shōgo still struggled to rise from the ground.
The surface of his decayed frame bore web-like cracks, like shattered ice. Under the ceaseless infusion of the Soul King's bone's boundless reishi, those fractures mended, piecing his fragile form back together bit by bit until it was whole again.
No... more than that, it grew younger, fuller.
Crack! Crack!
Large patches of dead, ceramic-like skin sloughed off Shōgo's body, revealing the pale, fresh flesh beneath.
The Soul King's bone, once merely embedded within him, now shimmered with faint radiance.
The patterns around that crystalline bone pulsed expanding and contracting as if drawing power from it, feeding his broken body and propping him up to stand once more.
"Oh?"
"You can still stand, huh?"
Yamamoto looked down at him.
"Or perhaps, thanks to that Soul King's bone, you've become the sort who won't die so long as even a shred of your body remains?"
He spoke as he stepped slowly toward Shōgo.
His voice carried no trace of fluctuation.
"Yamamoto."
Shōgo's voice turned hoarse and heavy.
"I acknowledge you."
Yamamoto let out a cold scoff, his tone grim, "The acknowledgment of the weak means nothing to the strong."
Shōgo offered no further reply.
Standing in place, he raised his chilling blade, pointing it at Yamamoto, and intoned softly:
"Sip from the four seas, the heavenly shores entwine. Equally duplicate ten thousands, and sharpen."
"Enrakyōten!"
As his words fell, nothing around them changed only the shape of his blade shifted subtly.
Shōgo lifted his head.
With the passage of time, his once-wrinkled face had reverted to that of a middle-aged man, nearly identical to Tsunayashiro Ogata, exuding a stern, resolute air.
"Originally…"
"If circumstances had allowed, I'd have preferred not to use this Zanpakuto."
"Did you know, Yamamoto?"
"Those who guard the Soul King's Palace if they can endure the solitude will never die."
"Five thousand years, ten thousand, a hundred thousand!"
"So long as they wish to live, they can persist indefinitely."
Shōgo spoke as he stepped forward.
With his first stride, more dead skin peeled away, the shriveled husk of his former body splitting open to reveal a younger, more robust form beneath.
The Soul King's bone continued to glimmer faintly.
His voice grew ever calmer, "Those beings, upon ascending to the Soul King Palace, have their bones reforged by the Soul King's power. Their lives meld with the Reimyaku surrounding the palace, rendering them immortal." [1]
"But… if they stray too long from the Soul King Palace of ultra-dense Reishi, they weaken from the lack of spiritual particles. Their time to linger and fight in the three worlds is, in truth, quite brief."
"Within those two sentences I just spoke lies the secret that allows each of them to surpass the 'limit' of a Shinigami…"
"Namely using the Soul King's power as a medium to link their bodies with the world's Reimyaku."
"To that end, the Tsunayashiro researched for countless years, exhausting every method to replicate this technique. In the end, we achieved only a half-finished product."
"Using the Soul King's bone as a conduit, it briefly connects an individual to the Valley of Screams, harnessing all the souls, beings, and Reishi within it for their own use."
"…Yamamoto."
Yamamoto narrowed his eyes, sensing a faint whiff of danger, and instinctively halted his steps.
Having honed himself at the apex of shinigami existence for countless years, he naturally had some understanding of methods to transcend Shinigami even brushing against the thick bottleneck barring that path.
Thus, he instantly recognized the sudden peril Tsunayashiro Shogo now posed.
The next second...
He thrust out a hand, beckoning backward.
Ryūjin Jakka as if pulled by an unseen force spun rapidly through the air and landed in Yamamoto's grip.
Shōgo looked up at him, his voice deliberate and measured.
"This… is my true trump card."
The moment his words fell, his tone surged sharply, a roar tearing forth.
"Fuhahara!"
"Hm?!"
Behind him, Kinroku's eyes widened in shock the instant he heard that name.
Shogo's blade slashed downward, its edge cloaked in a faint, blurred ripple of spatial distortion, sweeping toward Yamamoto and slicing the earth apart.
Yamamoto, having just caught the hilt, swung the scabbard like a club, striking toward the incoming spatial blade with a whistling tear through the air.
Yet the moment he met that spatial slash, Yamamoto seemed to sense something. His form darted swiftly to the side, barking an order behind him.
"Scatter!"
As the others retreated, only Kinroku stepped forward, brandishing his blade to intercept.
"Fuhahara - Void Slash!"
He traced a horizontal arc through the air. Amid the already-warped space, a pitch-black gate materialized abruptly, like a shield before Kinroku.
The spatial blade from Shogo's strike clashed with the dark void, unleashing waves of staggering force from an unseen point as if a small patch of the world before them twisted into distortion.
Kinroku, too, sensed the anomaly and swiftly withdrew from behind the black gate.
Barely half a second after his retreat, the air before him bloomed, jagged cracks of distortion splitting the sky, swallowing grass and soil whole.
Kinroku looked up at Shogo.
A trace of disbelief flickered in his eyes.
This spatial blade was somehow more potent than when he wielded it himself.
[O MAI GO TO!]
[Kinroku's blade is way better in someone else's hands.]
[Isn't this kinda like NTR?]
The broken blade sat in the spectator seats safely munching on snacks.
By now, the Wanderer soldier had been nearly wiped out, with only a few stragglers yet to be finished off.
But neither Makoto nor the remaining captains had any intention of joining the clash ahead.
The gap was simply too vast.
Makoto watched the scene unfold, his fist tightening in silence.
In truth, it wasn't just him.
Even the captains now had no role left but to watch.
Everyone could feel it clearly, Shōgo's reiatsu had surged to a terrifying extreme.
"All things in the Universe, turn to ashes!"
Yamamoto drew his Zanpakuto, a fierce shout erupting from him as his reiatsu roared skyward like a cascading waterfall in reverse.
"Ryūjin Jakka!"
No matter how much he scorned this method of forcibly boosting strength through external means, Yamamoto knew it was time to get serious.
As for immortality?
Could something reduced to ash still persist?
Ridiculous!
The ancient unadorned blade flared to life, flames igniting like a torch. Yamamoto stamped the ground, his form blurring into a shadow that transcended spatial limits, appearing abruptly before Shōgo.
The fiery edge slashed downward.
"Void Slash!"
Shogo's blade swept forward, conjuring a pitch-black spatial curve in front of him.
The instant roaring flames flooded that warped spacetime, his figure darted aside, unleashing a relentless barrage of slashes toward Yamamoto. Countless spatial blades sliced through the air, weaving a dense, razor-sharp net.
In a flash, Yamamoto's form was engulfed by a storm of blade-light, carved into ribbons.
Shōgo's eyes flickered, as if realizing something, and he instinctively turned his head.
Then, he saw Yamamoto's sturdy frame emerge unscathed.
What the blades had shredded in the distance was merely his discarded clothing.
Shunpo - Utsusemi [2]
Shōgo's eyes widened in fury, his hand twitching to raise his blade again, summoning another spatial curve for defense.
But before his wrist could fully lift...
Yamamoto had already assumed a drawing stance.
"Taimatsu."
The moment his words fell, a spark of fire blazed into Shōgo's vision, the world aligning as if in a single line, banishing the shadows.
The Zanpakutō descended from above cleaving into his shoulder.
Flames erupted like blooming petals, gushing from his wound and orifices, threatening to reduce him to a charred husk in an instant.
Yet even then, Yamamoto's blade-light didn't relent.
In the blink of an eye, it tore the smoldering ash before him into seven or eight fragments.
Blazing flames surged skyward, the ground billowing with scorching black smoke.
"D-Did he… get him?"
Makoto's voice slipped out unconsciously.
But no sooner had he spoken than his gremlin's sharp retort cut in.
[He might've had him a second ago, but with the flag you said, he's definitely not dead now!]
[Besides, this is the 'smoke without injury' rule, ya know!]
Sure enough...
His zanpakuto's words had barely landed when a Wanderer corpse lying not far from Makoto began to convulse violently.
A chain of causality stretched from the void, abruptly linking to its chest.
The corpse jolted as if alive, thrashing wildly.
"Ah… Aaaah!"
The next moment, its corpse writhed and transformed into a blazing, fragmented torch.
Makoto's eyes widened in shock.
"What's happening now?"
But before he could process it, a low chuckle rose from within the flames.
"Hm… Heheheheheh... hahaha!"
Shōgo's silhouette emerged slowly from the fire's core, gripping Enrakyōten once more. He stepped forward, heedless of the surrounding blaze, which parted obediently before him like the Red Sea before Moses.
Yamamoto stared in astonishment toward the flames' heart.
"Still don't understand, Yamamoto?"
Shōgo strode forth, his voice growing more exhilarated.
"This is what true immortality means."
"Even reduced to ash, nothing can stop it."
"With the Soul King's bone sustaining me, my power becomes boundless, while you'll only exhaust yourself, declining further and further."
"And because this body and soul are endlessly remade by the Soul King's bone, each time I die, I grow stronger."
He spoke loudly, running a hand through his mottled black-and-white hair, revealing a wild face of perhaps thirty or forty years gone were the deep wrinkles of before.
Shōgo brandished his blade, and the raging flames on the grassland vanished under an unseen force.
The Soul King's bone embedded in his chest glowed ever brighter, wave after wave of even mightier reiatsu bursting forth.
He fixed his gaze ahead, his voice low and resonant, like a divine judgment.
"This is despair, Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto!"
---
[1] Reimyaku is the spiritual pulse, spiritual veins, or leyline that explains the origin of spiritual energy or reishi.
This information was first introduced by Tite Kubo in his novel titled Can't Fear Your Own World.
[2] Utsusemi is a highly advanced Shunpo technique.
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Bonus Chapter:
100 Power Stones = 1 BC
300 Power Stones = 2 BC
500 Power Stones = 3 BC
700 Power Stones = 4 BC
1000 Power Stones = 5 BC
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