The transmutation succeeded. Ichirō's face broke into a bright smile as he picked up the finished product and examined it with satisfaction.
"What's that?" Urahara asked curiously, peering closer.
"A gun," Ichirō replied, spinning it deftly around his finger before aiming it at a piece of wood jutting from the ground. "An advanced weapon—and the one I was best at using when I was alive."
"Gun? So this is a gun? How does it work?"
"Like this…"
Bang!
A sharp crack split the air. Urahara and Yoruichi's pupils constricted as they saw the hole appear in the wooden block several meters away.
Too fast—so fast that even their eyes couldn't catch the bullet's motion.
"So that's… a weapon from the future?" Urahara murmured, astonished. "What incredible speed."
Yoruichi folded her arms beneath her chest, tilting her head thoughtfully. "It's impressive, but it's also easy to dodge. If your opponent reacts faster than the shooter, a Shunpo would easily avoid it."
Ichirō chuckled. "True. It's not perfect yet, but it can be improved." He holstered the revolver and began laying out more materials on the ground.
He wasn't satisfied with crafting just one weapon. The revolver was merely his most familiar creation, not the most powerful.
---
After reincarnating into the Fullmetal Alchemist world, Ichirō had long pondered his path forward. That world was dangerous, and though alchemy was extraordinary, it was still, at its core, a form of science.
He hadn't been confident that he could master alchemy to its ultimate level, so he sought something with immense combat power that didn't rely too heavily on complex transmutation theory.
Naturally, coming from a modern society, the first thing that caught his attention was the gun. Firearms were not rare in that world, but strangely, few alchemists specialized in them. Ichirō never understood why—because to him, they were the perfect fit.
He couldn't guarantee exceptional talent in pure alchemy, so he chose a safer, more pragmatic path.
And the results proved him right. In that lifetime, his alchemical skill had grown strong enough that he nearly qualified as a State Alchemist, and his combat prowess—enhanced by his mastery of firearms and close-quarters combat—made him a true "Gun Alchemist."
The revolver was the first firearm he ever transmuted. In his original life, he had been an ordinary man, not even a gun enthusiast, barely able to name models, much less understand their mechanisms.
The revolver was simply the gun he understood best, so after countless experiments using alchemy, he successfully reproduced one—and had continued to refine its design ever since.
Now, his next goal was to craft a far more famous weapon—The Desert Eagle.
Though impractical in real combat, the Desert Eagle's tremendous power and iconic design made it a legendary weapon. As a Gun Alchemist, Ichirō could hardly resist recreating it.
While the weapon was notoriously heavy and difficult to handle, alchemy could easily overcome those weaknesses.
For example:
Weight could be ignored by carrying only its essential parts and transmuting the rest when needed.
Recoil could be mitigated by reinforcing his body through self-transmutation. Unless the recoil literally blew half his torso away, it was manageable.
Precision and maintenance? Perfectly solved through instant re-transmutation.
And, most importantly—it just looked cool.
The only drawback was ammunition. His improvised gunpowder lacked the explosive power required for Desert Eagle rounds.
Even so, Ichirō was overjoyed as he carefully stored both the revolver and the Desert Eagle. The trip had far exceeded his expectations. All that remained was convincing their instructor to allow him to spiritually convert the two guns for use back in the Soul Society—then this soul burial field trip would be a complete success.
---
In contrast, the other team's soul burial wasn't going so smoothly.
Thanks to Ichirō's Kidō assistance, they'd earned the young boy's trust—but the real problem came afterward.
The boy's lingering regret stemmed from a broken wooden sculpture. He desperately wanted to fix it—that simple wish was the obsession keeping him tethered to this world.
The problem? The sculpture was just a random trinket he'd found by the roadside. It held no real meaning beyond his childlike stubbornness.
That, Ichirō thought with a sigh, was why he disliked dealing with children. You never knew why they fixated on things so meaningless.
The students were stumped. Even among the first thirty Kidō spells Ichirō had learned, there wasn't one suited for repairing physical objects. Perhaps higher-level spells existed for that, but those were well beyond their reach.
After all, the higher the Kidō number, the exponentially greater the power—and the difficulty.
Some Bakudō were so strong they could even function as lethal attacks.
For instance, one of the most notorious forbidden Kidō involved stopping time itself.
If a master could control it precisely enough to halt time for only a single organ, it would become a terrifying weapon.
And #99-level Kidō could outright destroy targets rather than restrain them.
But that power came with unimaginable complexity. Most Shinigami in the Soul Society only managed spells between #30 and #40; anything higher was usually limited to seated officers.
So fixing the sculpture was clearly out of the question.
Ichirō could have repaired it easily through alchemy—but that would defeat the entire purpose of their Soul Burial Training. Their task wasn't to fulfill lingering wishes. A Shinigami's duty was to guide souls to the afterlife, not grant them closure in the human sense.
That distinction mattered.
Whether the students could realize that on their own… that was the real test.
Ichirō suspected they'd struggle to break free from their current mindset. It was hard to see the bigger picture when trapped in the moment. And even if they did, they'd need a humane way to resolve the issue—unlike the previous incident where they had resorted to illusionary Kidō to deceive a soul into peace.
That was too dangerous. Each illusion cast left behind a trace of instability in the spiritual balance—a potential threat that could one day resurface.
As the students kept arguing in circles about how to fix the sculpture, Ichirō sighed.
He walked a few steps away, drew the Desert Eagle, and began dismantling it piece by piece—then reassembling it, then disassembling it again, faster and faster.
This kind of simple repetition trained his transmutation speed. And now that he understood Kidō, every reconstruction inspired subtle improvements in design.
He didn't believe firearms had no place in the Shinigami world.
Traditional bullets might one day fail to even scratch spiritual bodies—but what if they were combined with Kidō?
He thought of examples—like the Primera Espada's Resurrección, which manifested as twin guns: one fired rapid, weaker Ceros, while the other released slower, devastating blasts.
That was one potential path. Another was Soi Fon's Bankai—pure amplification of firepower through concentrated spiritual energy.
There were countless possibilities.
And so, Ichirō had no intention of giving up.
After all—this was something he had spent decades perfecting.