It took me all of a few hours to realise that I was, indeed, an idiot.

Souls are way more complex than I had even conceived of. They were a concept that was so easy to break down into simple terms, not too dissimilar to a computer. There was a motherboard and all the different component technologies worked off of that motherboard, adding additional functionality to the greater system. In a way, the mind was the software, the operating system that gave the user access to the cold metal of the hardware, the soul.

It was why someone could probably go their entire life without realising that they are extremely spiritually sensitive, that is until their software is forced to comply with the reality of their hardware.

All this is so easy to say and theorise about, but as soon as I actually set hands on the building blocks of it, I realised that it was so much more complex than that. As I tinkered with the grand Lego set of my own soul, I came to understand just why Kisuke was how he was about soul editing and creating new souls like the Mayuri guy was doing.

I had no doubt in my mind that the soul itself was one of the most complex systems in the known universe, and the fact that someone could be so arrogant as to believe that they were smarter than whatever process had created the soul was astounding to me now.

Though who else but those arrogant enough would even try.

It seems that creating ways to interface with a soul has become pretty standardised. Soul Reapers had their Zanpakutō, Quincies had gotten all weird after their Progenitor was killed, but they still had their ways, and there were a few others around the place that seemed similar—though I couldn’t be bothered to try and drag it out of Kisuke.

Trying to put together even one piece of my soul was mind bogglingly difficult, trying to imagine creating an entirely new soul from scratch the way that Mayuri had, one that was a legitimate being by every right, was just astounding.

It didn’t take long for Grayhom to take the reins on the soul stuff again, and for me to take the reins on the blackhole technique. Turns out Grayhom is just as shit at spiritual energy manipulation as I was with soul manipulation.

We had a long time to theorise why that was within my soul, being that there was effectively no measure of time in here. The consensus we came to was pretty simple, in terms of the prior computer analogy. We were both identities, and a soul is only really meant to have one of them, those that have two are either Hollows or added after the fact. But we are one and the same but separate identities, nonetheless.

So essentially, we’re both relegated to our own areas of the soul, one of us maintaining the grip over ‘software’ management, and the other over ‘hardware’ management.

If you think about it long enough, it starts to sound extremely powerful. It’s the reason that Soul Reapers are more powerful than a regular human with tonnes of spiritual energy. The Zanpakutō’s spirit manages the hardware of their soul, though nowhere near the scale that Grayhom and I are capable of. At least not normally.

None of this changed the fact that working with something as delicate and complex as a soul was mind numbingly difficult and tedious. While the early stages were almost easy, we quickly realised that we were picking the low hanging fruit. It was the difference between the no-brainer building blocks of a house and the fiddly accoutrements of each individual room, one being obvious and the other almost a form of abstract self-expression.

As such, the process began to slowly grind to a halt, where no matter how much spiritual energy I sucked in from the outside world, Grayhom wasn’t capable of doing the ridiculously complicated math fast enough.

To be fair to the man, we’d managed to increase our spiritual reserves once again by a massive margin. It hadn’t doubled, but it’d gotten close. It was getting to the point now that I was going to be genuinely annoying to procure so much spiritual energy to fill my reserves with between massive expenditures like a fight.

The sheer accumulation of spiritual energy I’d need would take hours to refill my reserve, but I knew that this was just another disparity between what I am and the Soul Reapers. By all accounts, I was still a normal human with the label of high-spec slapped on. But with spiritual energy reserves being almost entirely too massive for just any regular human to have—without decades of intense training no less—I was only differentiating myself further.

“What now?”

I forget who it was that asked, between me or Grayhom. In here we were more than separate identities, we were more closely intertwined than we’d ever been.

“We continue.” The answer was. And so we did, irrespective of time. The passage of it was almost never pulled into question, tasks more important at hand than counting the seconds within this space.

The answer for our difficulties became obvious in that time. The rigid nature of our thought processes was withholding us more than we’d thought—so clearly sectioning off our responsibilities was cutting down our potential enormously. Such was the difficulties of teamwork, and the major downside of our multiple identities.

So instead of simply launching ourselves at this wall with impunity, we decided to both teach and learn. We ignored the temptation of the stars that surrounded us, glittering and begging to be put to use in truth—to function along with the rest of our soul in harmony—yet that wasn’t the right use of our time.

We sat across from each other and just talked at first. Despite knowing so much between ourselves, we lived in inverted worlds to each other and that made for a lot of things we didn’t understand about each other’s reality.

The upside was that we are both entirely native to our own world, with my understanding of the mind and the physical, of the software that allows us to experience more, and with Grayhom’s understanding of the soul, of the energy within and the machinery that makes up what we are.

It was a synchronisation point, being left to only interact with one another, my only company being myself and Grayhom. It separated me from the idea of power, of the fighting. It separated him from the idea of fixing a broken soul, of repairing what we hadn’t had in the first place. Here it was all about understanding.

The world galvanised around us as our understanding of each other, and ourselves, grew rapidly. Two waif thin ribbons meandered out of our incorporeal bodies, slowly seeking each other blindly, neither of us bothered to comment on them. The conversation devolved, not even speaking any longer. It wasn’t telepathy that we used to communicate, because it was deeper than that. Regardless of the brain being the vessel of thought, each word and action reflected on the soul, and so we just communicated through the ones and zeroes of our mutual hardware.

The tiny ribbons finally found each other and, within moments, had found themselves tied in a knot connected as solidly as they could be for now. The next actions were simple and didn’t need comment to accomplish.

The blackhole technique was enacted once again in full force, Grayhom was no longer left behind without understanding it either. He could see my mind, how I organised the world around me into boxes, and then watched as I labelled them as mine.

In concert, he organised his own identity to understand the inside world as ours as well, pulling our actions into consistency. The change was immediate and noticeable, with the spiritual energy happy to be herded like cattle, and the motes of light that represented the parts of our soul taking much a similar stance.

There was no single piece of the soul that commanded ultimate control, only modules and pieces. Each piece held as little reasoning or intelligence as any other, and none of which had the capability of truly restraining itself from wanting to be part of the greater soul, even if doing so would be destructive.

So as Grayhom’s mind began to whirr, mapping out the countless pieces left to rot in the dark waters, my own mind worked in concert with his. Instead of manually testing each and every piece of the puzzle, brute forcing our way through the colossal task, I lent my own grasp over the mind to Grayhom.

Software and hardware, integrating in a complexity I couldn’t possibly begin to express. The conversation between us had accelerated to a speed that would be incomprehensible otherwise, using the abstract thinking of the mind together with the raw computational power of the soul.

Things clicked into place with a veracity that we only continued to refine, the pieces of the soul were commanded in place, and they moved to our whim. The spiritual energy pushed as hard or as softly as we pleased, everything was under our control.

The dark waters shrank, being subsumed by the golden soul that we had cultivated. As we did so, Grayhom grew beside me, assuming a true humanoid form and as we continued his form only became more defined.

Yet, even though we had every inclination that we’d be able to complete our soul, something stopped us.

It wasn’t our lack of spiritual energy, or the lack of understanding. We both knew where the next piece should be placed, we had the pressure to do so, by every metric it was possible. But regardless, the piece didn’t budge, even if it so desperately tried to swim forward into the place we’d created for it in our soul.

Something was holding it back, like a fishhook in the mouth of a fish desperate to get away. Again and again, we tried, but there was no making it budge. In time, we had no choice but to go and investigate ourselves.

The downsides of creating an actualised space within a soul is that you also capture the reality of just how large a soul really is. Though it might not actually be that large, if scaled to legitimate standards of physical measurement, the true surface area of the soul would decimate the earth’s own surface area by a wide margin, nonetheless.

We raced across the golden surface, the bright waters having now been solidified into golden stone and crystal, the dark waters still plentiful enough to fill the crevasses and valleys of our golden soul. The trip felt like both days and minutes long at the same time, the strange dilation of time fluctuating with each step we both took forwards.

But the strange fluctuations were wiped from our thoughts as we arrived where that stubborn piece was located, though even that was unimportant.

It was there that we found a ribbon. Our ribbon. I don’t know what I had expected when I saw my own ribbon, but the gargantuan pillar of bright silver was not it. I’m not sure that I actually expected to see it at all.

However, now that we had encountered the ribbon, it shrunk from the massive pillar into a small line of silver floating in the air above a tall mountain of gold crystal. We journeyed towards it with hesitation, but as we reached the foot of that mountain, we realised that there was no way we could possibly climb it, even within our own soul where our power was strongest.

We tried to slot the piece in once again, but we were denied, the top of the mountain flashing with a power that coursed over the gold crystal and smacked us with pure force, sending both of us flying away from the foot of the mountain.

I tried to push against the power, which was strangely also my power, but only succeeded in plipping end over end with Grayhom trying to do the same. The wave of power didn’t stop pushing, however, sending me hurtling further than Grayhom, into the darkness of the now waterless cavity surrounding my mostly formed soul.

My vision blurred as I spun faster and faster through the air before slamming into a wall of some sorts and opening my already open eyes. The act of which broke my brain a little for a moment, but when I finally took in my surroundings, I realised that the blast had been a little more than just localised within my own soul.

The machine that Kisuke had built was now rubble, mixed with a fair amount of the shattered rock and detritus from the Study Room’s terrain. I looked around wildly, to see Kisuke sitting on the ground with a magazine held on one of its edges, obscuring his face.

“Uh, Kisuke?” I called hesitantly, and the man peaked from behind the magazine. I was getting ready to apologise, but the magazine was rolled up and summarily thrown at me, smacking me on the head with enough force to make me reel back for a second.

“Yeah, yeah, no need for the boot licking. The thing was meant to be destroyed, the entire buildings that do the same thing routinely explode, so to expect anything different would be foolish.” He got up from his spot on the ground and brushed off his inverted Captain’s cloak and walked over to me, picking the magazine up from the ground.

“What I really want to know, is what you’ve been doing that requires multiple refills of both Tessai and I’s spiritual energy reserves.”