"Swirling scents of tobacco in Edo."

Conclusion arc to ‘In All, But Blood’ series retelling the Bleach canon from the perspectives of Yamamoto, Unohana, Shunsui, and Ukitake — the Four Pillars of the Gotei Thirteen.

Ukitake investigates in the world of humans to uncover the final mysteries behind Aizen’s crimes as the Gotei Thirteen gears up for war against their former colleague and their political opponents. But what danger looms? Now that Aizen knows almost everything about them. And him.

Read now on AO3.

Summary of Chapter 1:

‘In All, But Blood’

Father, sensei, commander. Sons, disciples, captains. Brothers by soul, brothers in arms, brothers in hearts. Best friends, partners, lovers.

The three whose souls are inexplicably linked. Since the dawn of souls.

Find it now, on Archive of Our Own. 

Dear Kubo-sensei

I love the original premise of Bleach. I’m a Westerner, and the world of Bleach was really hard to understand at first. But I followed all your 686 chapters faithfully, and eventually I understood it (but also with a lot of self-research as well into the concepts of birth and rebirth!). Bleach premise is very Japanese Shinto, the concepts of shinigami, Soul Society, etc, are very hard for foreigners to understand. But I understood it eventually. As did many other foreigners. We struggled to understand it because your characters are so interesting, and we finally understood it after a lot of effort.

So why did you sanction “Can’t Fear Your Own World”? In this so-called sequel, you made out the whole Balance of souls to be one great lie, and all the past leaders of Gotei Thirteen to be blindly following orders to uphold the lie. So Yamamoto Soutaichou was also blindly following orders to uphold this lie? You created him as the founder of the Gotei, that means he must have known that the Balance was a lie?

Maybe it is okay in Japan to destroy your own creation like this.

Among foreigners, when we grow to love your heroes and your concepts, we don’t like to see the authors destroy their own creations. 

Therefore, all I have to say about “Can’t Fear Your Own World” is this: it is only an attempt to explain the Thousand Year Blood War. It cannot qualify as a proper sequel. 

“Two millennia ago, Yamamoto discovered and took under his wing two special young boys. The very reishi of Soul Society had rent and split with the force of their reiatsu when, one after the other, their reiryoku erupted for the very first time, separately, yet inexplicably entwined.” ~ reflections of Yamamoto Genryuusai Shigekuni in ‘Two Thousand Years Ago’, Chapter 2 of ‘Unforgivable, Regrettable’, Part 1 of the Ukitake-Kyouraku saga ‘In All, But Blood’.

Get the full ShunUki origin stories and saga on AO3. 

If you like either work, drop kudos on AO3 and reblog!

(Looking for the artist of above illustration. Please contact me!)

What’s in the story:

How it all really begun, as told by the memories of Yamamoto. Trace the origin stories of Ukitake and Kyouraku, from how they were discovered as boys, to Yamamoto's care and instruction of them, their trials and tribulations, how Yamamoto inadvertently orchestrated the relationship of his two wards, how they achieved shikai, how Ukitake attained bankai, all set in an early, chaotic feudalistic Soul Society ransacked by warring clans and the pre-canon Gotei Thirteen which was less organised and less civilised than the Gotei Thirteen we know today, when the Seireitei had not yet been built.

Shunsui from Yamamoto’s POV:

“Within a week, little Shunsui had explored every nook and cranny of the shiro and crawled at least once into every lap of Yamamoto’s twelve taichou and those of several other adjutants, inciting a small uproar of amusement, indulgence and consternation, for never before had a child been let loose with such impunity among the battle-scarred and war-toughened shinigami souls.”

Jyuushirou from Yamamoto’s POV:

“Raising and nurturing Jyuushirou had been an ordeal which tested Yamamoto in ways he never knew he could still be tested, and to his own astonishment, uncovered in his old battle-hardened soul a softness and humanity he had believed were long burned to cinders.” 

Story tidbits:

There are 3 phases of editing:

(1) Editing for grammar, punctuation, spelling and incorrect vocabulary;

(2) Editing for flow and alignment of plot and plot development, development of characters, emotions and relationships, and story organisation and pacing; and

(3) Editing for style.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule to say which should be done first.