“Isn’t she the cutest!” The red-haired, middle-aged man gushed childishly as he held his daughter, suspended in front of him by her armpits. The man—somewhere in his mid-forties—was pretty short, standing somewhere close to my own height. He wore a tracksuit set in a light red, a few shades brighter than his fiery coloured hair which—despite his age—showed no sign of losing its colour to the grey of age and wisdom.

For reasons clear to just about anyone.

In his hands hung his daughter, who he was absurdly proud of. Uyu’s face sported a mixture of deadpan boredom and embarrassment on her strangely melancholic features—an affectation of the way that her face naturally sat in an expression of anxiousness or worry. I could understand why Suzumi loved doting on the girl she professed as her little sister, much to Jinta’s own excitement. The young girl had slightly darker hair than her father, though still a deep red—just a quieter flame in contrast to her father’s burning red. Uyu’s darker red hair was pulled into two pigtails on each side of her head, exploding outwards from just behind her in a grand display of dichotomy between the excitement of her hair and her somewhat dour face.

“She definitely is.” I said, playing along with the father’s game. He pulled her back into his chest, twisting her away from me and assuming the face an overprotective mother gorilla.

“You can’t have her, she is property of–” He didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence as a un-gauntleted fist slammed into his face, launching the man into the air and to the far side of the Study Room—screaming all the while. Uyu tapped to the rocky floor below, letting out a slight huff of exasperation.

“Whose property!” I just laughed at the antics, having long since decided to go along with the charade. There is a genuine and affectionate relationship there—there was just a very strange dynamic that sat over top of the surprisingly normal and supportive relationship. “I-I’m sorry!” Uyu said after a moment of silence. Realising I hadn’t said hello to the girl I waved her anxious hand wringing away.

“That’s okay. How are you doing today?” I asked inanely and started listening to her answer.

Outside of being an incredibly powerful high-spec human, able to beat a relatively powerful Hollow into the ground in the span of a few minutes—Uyu was a normal schoolgirl. From how she looked and acted, I had expected she was significantly younger, but she had actually started high school this year. That made her somewhere around fourteen, which was only a little mind blowing. Though I guess it didn’t change much.

I happily listened to Uyu as she talked about the classes she was taking and friends she was making. It seems that Uyu—despite being a timid girl—is a bit of a friend magnet; people naturally surrounding the girl they think needs the most protection. Apparently, her hair is an excellent conversation starter and the challenge between the girls of her grade has been to try and tame her hair. None other then Uyu’s own mother has succeeded and—to Uyu’s endless frustration—she won’t tell her how she does it. Knowing her father, I’d say it is a conniving plan to get her daughter to talk to her if she wants her hair done nicely.

It was cathartic to hear about Uyu’s fairly normal life, outside of what she does with us and her general involvement with the spiritual world. It was a breath of fresh air, to hear about a life so disconnected from anything going on in the mess of the spiritual world, regardless of how interesting and fun it might be. Maybe it gave me a little hope as well—that some day this will all calm down and I could create that for myself, and instead of the spiritual stuff being my entire life, it can be something akin to a day job.

We started to warm up while we talked, ignoring Suzumi’s absence from training today. She may have been able to push away the effects of the alcohol with spiritual energy for the latter part of the night—or early morning if you were feeling pedantic—but it certainly doesn’t help with the hangover. Both Tessai and Kisuke had refused to help her recover from the hangover with medicines or a technique, stating simply, ‘She will need to figure that out for herself. Or she could just not get blind drunk.’ Or something to that effect, anyway.

While Suzumi was hungover, the symptoms weren’t all that bad, and we were able to have a quiet and thoughtful conversation in the morning—as we both enjoyed the slow nature of it. We talked a lot about the more detailed stuff I missed out on explaining last night; the other identity, if it was me or someone else, what the whole taking from other peoples reserves thing was about, etcetera.

The answer to all of those were sort of simple. I explained what the other personality was like; originally bland and one-note, not even really possessing identifying features or personality. I explained how, over the short conversation that we’d had in my bright waters, the identity had grown into his own—becoming Grayhom and somehow more me as well. After confusing her with that, I explained that it was like being adopted at birth and never knowing you had a twin. When you finally meet, you realise just how similar and different you are at the same time. That seemed to bring it together for her, though the situation was a little more complicated than that, the metaphor did its job.

After that I explained more about how—while the Grayom is his own identity—he’s just another identity of me. We are inextricably linked, one and the same at the most fundamental level. It was like we were one being with two heads; both able to talk and think independently but sharing the same body that builds their personality. Suzumi was relieved to accept that. She was worried that Grayom might want to take over, but I could only shrug. As little as I knew about Grayhom, I knew he was me, and that I wouldn’t do that—so he wouldn’t either. He also knows that because he would totally let me out to have a bit of a life, that I would as well. Mutual understanding on an extremely complicated but basic level. Though I guess I had to find a way to do that in the first place.

Then the most difficult question to answer. I don’t really understand exactly how it works—though I’m not without theories—but I do understand how the ‘blackhole’ trick is different from how I steal ribbons. Sort of, anyway.

Effectively when I become a ‘blackhole’ for spiritual energy, I am just calling all nearby spiritual energy to me. This means all nearby spiritual energy—meaning its not targeted, and I’m not even sure it could be targeted. All the mental model does is take from the most convenient sources nearby, which might just so happen to be the reserves of a Soul Reaper—after it exhausted the immediate vicinity of spiritual energy, of course.

Which means that the blackhole trick I do is vastly different from the ribbon snatch. For one, the blackhole trick requires me to ‘slowly’ sap energy from the surroundings. Someone could easily defend themselves against the relatively slow leeching, or even just run out of the radius of my reach—until I consume the other easy sources of spiritual energy to return to that particular being. In the sort of way that a single cell organism breathes, being small enough to rely on the principles of diffusion—with maybe slight supplementary ‘suction’—to allow the oxygen to pass through the barrier of their cell wall and assume the empty space where the cell had consumed the oxygen before.

My point is, there is severe diminishing returns. At some point, the ‘surface area’ of the blackhole I create will be too small in relation to the mass it requires to reach more spiritual energy—making it impossible to sustain itself, inevitably collapsing in on itself. So, I couldn’t just sit there and continue to widen the area of effect until it covered the entire world, just like a human can’t supply themselves with enough oxygen through their skin cells. Or something like that, anyway.

Now, the ribbon snatch works with the same basic mechanism—I would assume—but focused. Instead of widening the spiritual energy sources that my soul will accept to everything and anyone, it instead limits it to a simple soul, or ribbon. That way—as long as I can make contact with the ribbon of the being, or maybe even their body at some point in future—I can steal a portion to all of their reserved spiritual energy at once.

Now, this has its own limits—just like the blackhole method. Sure, I can take a large portion of a soul’s spiritual energy, but it can fairly easily be resisted. Especially if the target is aware of their own reserves—like any good Soul Reaper likely would be.

Take Urahara for example; it only took him a matter of seconds to figure out that the air around him was being leeched of spiritual energy, then even less to figure out that it was leeching his own reserves as well—then figuring out it was me.

However, even if I am able to steal spiritual energy from an opponent’s reserves, there is no guarantee that I am able to seal all of it—or even most of it. I think this is due to my soul being in the state its in. It was immediately noticeable after utilising the blackhole method that my soul is almost squishy—which is not at all normal. Souls are compact machines of pure spiritual excellence, they are packed tightly with integral components that are the literal building blocks for who and what you are—also giving you the potential to be more than that.

My own soul is nothing like that. The dark waters represent the equivalent to semi-functional hardware strung together in a daisy chain of Rube Goldberg machines that—while the components used are powerful—don’t accomplish anything. It would be like having a computer that is technically has the most processing power, but the software could never take advantage of the ludicrously inane way it’s been strung together—complete with chewing gum and sticky tape.

So, when I go to steal power from someone, the same bloated soul that says that I’m immensely powerful gets in the way of my own reserves. Making sure that even if I do try to steal more energy than my diminished reserves can hold, it’ll simply bounce right back off my soft and rubbery soul and into the atmosphere for that person to take right back into their own reserves.

Meaning that, while ribbon snatching allows me to temporarily use more spiritual energy than I can hold in my reserves for a few attacks or so, it eventually dissipates. Therefore, the best I could do against an incredibly strong opponent would be exactly what I did to Urahara the first time I stole a ribbon; hit them with a burst of their own spiritual energy when you still are holding most of it. Though Urahara also came out totally unscathed from that, so it clearly isn’t a winning strategy.

Another bummer about ribbon snatching versus the blackhole method; only the blackhole method can compress my soul, allowing Grayhom to work with the dark waters—adding the nigh infinite spare parts to a grand tapestry that I certainly don’t understand, but apparently I do somewhere deep inside.

Now, ribbon snatching is fast—I grab the ribbon of someone like Urahara and suddenly I have one-hundred times the spiritual energy I could possibly hold in my current reserves. This rush of spiritual energy floods inside my reserves and batters against my soul at odd angles in non-uniform patterns. This just makes all that excess spiritual energy bounce off uselessly.

The blackhole method is different. Its slower—at least comparably—for one. It slowly injects a fine mist of spiritual energy into my reserves, filling the reserves slowly to their maximum and then pushing just a little more. Now, since both the ‘walls’ of my reserve and my soul are nigh indestructible, this tiny bit of pressure is almost nothing. But little by little, more pressure is added—making the soul compress itself and bringing more of the dark waters close to the bright waters. There is only a consistent and dispersed stream of spiritual energy entering the reserves.

Uyu and I began to spar after finishing our long warmup process that we’ve completed what feels like hundreds of times—one that we honestly didn’t even need to do anymore, our physical ability far surpassing the need for a warmup. I shook myself of my contemplative stupor, trying to put my mind into gear for fighting.

As soon as we began the fight, I realised—once again—how difficult it was to adjust to actually having sight. Sight was great but worked to your great detriment when each attack threw up a flurry of dirt and stone—making my little monkey brain focus on the falling detritus. As soon as I’d gotten my limited sight back, my brain had decided to take everything I saw as gospel, even if what I was looking at was nonsense to my other senses.

For example, I could see Uyu’s ribbon and that could easily pinpoint exactly where she was in all the dust and rock—yet my brain made me search for the girl rapidly with my eyes, swinging my head to and fro. My still poor eyesight couldn’t even see far enough to correctly identify her anyways.

That earned me a gauntleted fist to the face, sending me flying backwards through the air without me preparing the spiritual rooting technique. As I flew through the dry, warm air of the Study Room I could only think one thing.

‘Well, this is going to be a learning curve.’