—————
The promotion arrived on a Tuesday, delivered in Captain Kuchiki's handwriting on paper so precisely folded that the creases could have been measured with instruments.
Seventh seat. Sixth Division.
Hatsu read the appointment notice at his desk, set it aside, and completed his morning katas before allowing himself to consider its implications. The bokken carved its familiar arcs through the dawn air — down, across, return — and the repetition gave his thoughts the structure they needed.
Seventh seat was not significant in itself. The Gotei 13 seated dozens of officers across its divisions, and a seventh-seat appointment in the Sixth was roughly equivalent to being told you were competent enough to deserve a slightly better room and marginally more interesting patrol assignments. Captain Kuchiki's evaluation had been characteristically austere: adequate progression, satisfactory combat assessment, recommended for seated duties effective immediately.
What the promotion gave him was access.
Seated officers attended quarterly gatherings — cross-divisional affairs held in the First Division's secondary hall, ostensibly for administrative coordination, practically for the kind of informal networking that the Seireitei's official channels couldn't accommodate. Officers from all thirteen divisions, ranks three through ten, occupying the same space for an evening. Drinking. Talking. Assessing each other with the professional curiosity of people who might one day fight beside or against one another.
A garden of possibilities, and Hatsu had just been given the gate key.
—————
The quarterly gathering occupied the secondary hall's eastern wing — a long, low-ceilinged space with cedar pillars and paper lanterns that cast warm, amber light across the assembled officers. The atmosphere was controlled informality: sake served in modest ceramic cups, conversations conducted at volumes that suggested camaraderie without sacrificing the ability to eavesdrop on adjacent discussions.
Hatsu moved through the room with deliberate patience. He spoke when addressed. He listened more than he spoke. The composite perception catalogued the room's occupants with the unhurried thoroughness of a cartographer mapping new terrain.
Most of the seated officers were exactly what their ranks suggested — competent, reliable, professionally adequate. Good soldiers. The backbone of the Gotei 13's operational capability. Not what he was looking for.
He found Hiyori at the sake table.
She was pouring with the aggressive efficiency of someone who considered the act of drinking a task to be completed rather than an experience to be savored. Small — shorter than Suì-Fēng, though built with a wiry density that suggested the height was the only small thing about her. Blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. A permanent scowl that appeared to be less an expression than a facial default, the resting state of features that had been arranged around displeasure for so long they'd forgotten any other configuration.
Vice-captain. Twelfth Division. Sarugaki Hiyori.
His awakened memories placed her with the precision of a pin on a map. Her future was tangled with Urahara's, with the Hollowfication, with the exile that would strip her of everything she knew and reshape her into something the Seireitei's architects had never intended. She was, in the timeline's brutal accounting, already walking toward a cliff she couldn't see.
But that was later. Now, she was a vice-captain with decades of combat experience, a released zanpakutō of considerable power, and the kind of instinctive tactical intelligence that formal training couldn't produce and couldn't replicate — the battle-sense of someone who had survived not through genius but through sheer, relentless refusal to go down.
And she was approachable. In her way. The scowl and the aggression were not barriers — they were the opposite. Hiyori's hostility was a form of honesty. She didn't hide behind courtesy or social performance. She said what she meant, struck what offended her, and expected the same transparency from everyone in her proximity.
For someone who needed to provoke a fight, this was ideal.
Hatsu took the cup of sake she'd just poured. Directly from her hand. Before she'd brought it to her own lips.
The scowl deepened into something tectonic.
"The hell do you think you're—"
"Sarugaki-fukutaichō." He drank. The sake was mediocre. "I'm Hatsu, Sixth Division. Seventh seat, as of this week."
"I don't care if you're the Spirit King's personal attendant, you just took my—"
"I've heard you're the strongest vice-captain in direct combat." Not true — or at least, not verifiable. But the claim was calibrated to land in the specific emotional register that Hiyori occupied: the intersection of pride and insecurity, the place where a compliment could function as a challenge. "I'd like to test that."
Hiyori's hand, which had been reaching for the cup he'd taken, stopped. Her eyes — sharp, amber, carrying the perpetual irritation of someone who found the world consistently beneath her standards — locked onto his with an intensity that the scowl had been concealing.
"You want to fight me."
"I want to spar."
"Same thing." She grabbed a new cup. Poured. Drank it in one motion. Slammed the ceramic down on the table with a sound that turned heads from three conversations away. "Fine. Tomorrow. Dawn. Twelfth Division training ground. And if you waste my time, I'll break something you need."
"Looking forward to it."
She stared at him for a moment longer — the assessment frank, undisguised, the vice-captain's experienced eye measuring the gap between his words and his capability with the practiced efficiency of someone who had seen a hundred promising officers crumble under actual pressure.
Whatever she saw, it was enough. She turned away without another word, the ponytail swinging behind her like a pendulum measuring out irritation in precise, metronomic arcs.
—————
The Twelfth Division training ground was clinical. Flat. Featureless. A rectangle of compressed stone bordered by walls that bore the scorch marks and impact craters of previous sessions with the indifferent tolerance of surfaces designed to absorb punishment. No wisteria. No ornamental gardens. No aesthetic concessions of any kind. The space existed for a single purpose, and that purpose did not include beauty.
Hiyori was already there. Arms crossed. Scowl in place. Her zanpakutō — a standard-length katana with a red-wrapped hilt — sat on her hip with the settled weight of a weapon that had been drawn often enough to consider its scabbard a temporary inconvenience.
"You're late," she said.
He wasn't. He was precisely on time. But arguing the point would have been both futile and counterproductive, so he drew his sealed blade and settled into his opening stance without comment.
Hiyori didn't draw.
She stood with her arms crossed for three full seconds, studying him. The amber eyes moved across his posture — feet, hips, shoulders, grip — with a speed and specificity that the composite perception recognized as experience. Not the trained assessment of an academy instructor. The visceral, combat-forged evaluation of someone who had been fighting long enough to read an opponent's capability from their resting stance the way a physician reads symptoms from a patient's complexion.
"Huh," she said. Then she drew.
The first exchange was educational for both of them.
Hiyori fought like a compressed explosion — everything tight, everything fast, everything delivered with a force-to-mass ratio that defied her small frame. Her swordsmanship was not elegant. It was not refined. It was effective in the way that a closed fist is effective — direct, economical, stripped of everything that didn't contribute to the immediate goal of putting her opponent on the ground.
Her hakuda integration was seamless — kicks and elbow strikes woven between sword combinations with the fluid naturalness of someone who considered the entire body a weapon system. Her reiatsu output was controlled but substantial, vice-captain-level pressure that sat on Hatsu's shoulders like a physical weight.
And her instincts were extraordinary.
The composite perception — five channels, full intensity — tracked her micro-telegraphs with the resolution that had become standard. Megumi's perception identified her structural tendencies. Matsumoto's dynamics mapped her movement patterns. Akiyama's analysis parsed her combination logic. Shiba's framework predicted her tactical decisions. Suì-Fēng's processing speed kept pace with her velocity.
Hiyori countered all of it.
Not by being unreadable — she was readable, her body broadcasting the same involuntary pre-motor signals that every fighter produced. But she was experienced enough that the signals were misleading. Not feints — something more sophisticated than feints. Hiyori's body had learned, through decades of combat, to commit to multiple potential actions simultaneously, holding the decision point open until the last possible instant before resolution. The composite perception could read her intentions, but her intentions were plural until the moment they weren't, and the moment they resolved into a single action was the moment the action was already arriving.
Decision-delay architecture. The analytical part of his mind catalogued the technique even as his body struggled to cope with its practical implications. She holds multiple attack paths open simultaneously and selects at the point of commitment rather than the point of initiation. The pre-motor signals are genuine — all of them. She's not feinting. She's maintaining multiple genuine intentions and collapsing the superposition at the last instant.
It was, in its way, brilliant. And it was entirely instinctive — Hiyori had never studied the neuromechanics of her own fighting style. She'd simply been fighting long enough that her body had evolved the technique through pure iterative refinement, the way water finds the fastest path downhill.
The fight ended in a draw.
Hatsu's blade at Hiyori's ribs. Hiyori's blade at his throat. The same mutual-kill geometry that had concluded his first bout with Suì-Fēng, though the path to it had been entirely different — not speed versus perception, but experience versus synthesis.
They held the position. Breathing hard. Hiyori's scowl had undergone a subtle transformation during the fight, the default irritation giving way to something more focused, more present. Not respect — Hiyori didn't distribute respect easily or quickly. But attention. The recognition that the seventh seat from the Sixth Division was not, in fact, wasting her time.
"You didn't release," she said. Observational. Clipped.
"Neither did you."
"Didn't need to."
"Neither did I."
The amber eyes held his. The scowl twitched — not softening, exactly, but adjusting, accommodating a new variable in its permanent calculation of the world's inadequacy.
"Next week," she said. Not a question. Not quite a command. Something between — the verbal equivalent of a hand extended without looking to see if it would be taken.
"Next week."
—————
The second spar was different.
Hatsu came prepared. The week between sessions had been spent processing the harvest from his existing channels and, more importantly, developing a specific counter to Hiyori's decision-delay architecture. The technique was theoretically straightforward — if she maintained multiple genuine intentions simultaneously, then the counter was to restrict her options rather than predict her choice. Reduce the number of viable attack paths through positioning and pressure, forcing her superposition to collapse into a smaller solution set.
In practice, it required operating at a level of tactical complexity that pushed the composite framework to its limits.
He released his shikai from the opening exchange. Shizuka no Hana bloomed, and his reiatsu surged, and Hiyori's amber eyes narrowed fractionally — the only acknowledgment she gave to the tripled spiritual pressure now pressing against her own vice-captain-level output.
The fight that followed was the most technically demanding Hatsu had experienced outside of his sessions with Shiba. Hiyori's decision-delay architecture meant that every exchange was a puzzle — a real-time combinatorial problem requiring him to simultaneously restrict her options, read her collapsing intentions, position his blade in the diminishing solution space, and maintain the reiatsu output necessary to keep Shizuka no Hana at full capability.
Three minutes in, he found the opening.
Hiyori committed to a combination that the composite perception identified as a three-path superposition — overhead cut, lateral kick, or shunpo retreat. Hatsu's positioning eliminated the retreat. His blade angle covered the overhead. Which left the kick.
He took it. Deliberately. Her heel connected with his forearm — the pain was sharp, immediate, a bright flare that ran from wrist to shoulder — and the impact created exactly the distance he needed. Shizuka no Hana traced a line across her left forearm as she recovered from the kick's follow-through, the iridescent edge parting fabric and skin in a single, precise incision.
Shallow. Clean. Sufficient.
The seed settled into unfamiliar soil. Hiyori's spiritual architecture was dense, complex, layered with decades of accumulated combat experience — the root system had to navigate carefully, finding channels that wouldn't trigger the sophisticated defensive instincts of a vice-captain's inner world.
Shizuka no Hana hummed. Warm. Patient. The roots found their path.
Hiyori looked at the cut on her forearm. The scowl deepened, but beneath it — transmitted through the seed's first tentative connection — Hatsu felt something unexpected.
Excitement.
Not the joyful, uncomplicated excitement of Megumi's brawling enthusiasm. Something sharper. More private. The excitement of a woman who had been fighting at a level where true challenges were rare, where most opponents folded before the real work began, who had just encountered someone capable of reaching past her defenses and drawing blood.
The spar continued for another four minutes. Hiyori won — her experience advantage still decisive when the fight extended past the window where Hatsu's tactical innovations gave him an edge. But the seed was planted, and the cut was real, and when they separated at the bout's end, the dynamic between them had shifted in the small but permanent way that first blood always shifts things.
"Your shikai's pretty," Hiyori said, sheathing her blade. The compliment was delivered with the same aggressive efficiency she applied to everything else — a fact stated, not a kindness offered. "Next week. Same time. And release from the start — I'm not here to watch you warm up."
—————
The feedback from Hiyori's seed began arriving on the fifth night.
Hatsu lay on his futon in the dark, Shizuka no Hana across his chest, and let the transmission wash through him.
It was vast.
Not in volume — Shiba's channel still produced more raw data per cycle. But in depth. Hiyori's decades of combat experience existed in her spiritual architecture as compressed strata — layers upon layers of kinesthetic memory, each one representing hundreds of fights, each fight contributing its own granular insights about timing, distance, pressure, fear, pain, victory, defeat. The roots had tapped into a geological record of violence, and the data that flowed upward was dense with the weight of time.
Her decision-delay architecture was the crown jewel. The seed transmitted not the technique itself — it was too instinctive, too deeply integrated into her neuromuscular patterns to be extracted as a discrete skill — but the underlying principle. The cognitive framework that made simultaneous intention maintenance possible. The ability to hold a decision point open, to resist the natural human urge to commit, to exist in a state of resolved irresolution until the environment demanded a specific answer.
Shizuka no Hana processed the transmission with care. The integration was slow, deliberate — the zanpakutō's spirit recognizing that this data required more careful translation than the relatively straightforward inputs from his younger sources. Hiyori's experience was not a grafted branch but a root system in itself, and merging it with the existing framework demanded architectural adjustments that the blade's spirit performed with the patient precision of a master carpenter fitting a new beam into an existing structure.
By the second week, the integration was complete enough to test. Hatsu's combat processing had acquired a new dimension — a temporal depth that the existing five channels hadn't provided. Where before his perception operated primarily in the present tense, reading current conditions and projecting short-term futures, Hiyori's contribution added a historical axis. Pattern recognition across extended timescales. The ability to identify not just what a fighter was doing or was about to do, but what they had always done — the deep structural habits that persisted across years and decades, invisible to short-term analysis but glaringly obvious when viewed through the lens of accumulated experience.
By the fifth week, Hiyori had to release her zanpakutō.
The moment came in the third minute of their bout — Hatsu's tactical pressure, augmented by the feedback from her own combat instincts reflected back at her through the composite framework, had closed enough of her option space that the decision-delay architecture was operating at diminished capacity. She was being forced to commit earlier, choose faster, resolve her superpositions before she was ready. The frustration built visibly — in the tightening of her jaw, the shortening of her breath, the incremental increase in force behind each strike.
Then she spoke.
The release command was sharp. Bitten off. Angry in the way that only Hiyori could be angry — not at him, not at herself, but at the fundamental injustice of a universe that required her to use her full power against a seventh seat.
Her zanpakutō transformed. The blade broadened, flattened, took on a serrated edge that glowed with contained spiritual energy. The guard reshaped into something aggressive and compact. Her reiatsu output doubled, the vice-captain-level pressure slamming into Hatsu's sensory field with a force that made his vision swim.
The fight after that lasted ninety seconds. Hiyori won decisively, her released zanpakutō's capabilities — enhanced cutting force, reiatsu-infused strikes, the serrated edge leaving wounds that resisted immediate healing — overwhelming Hatsu's defenses through sheer output differential.
But the seed harvested everything. Every technique she deployed, every instinct she revealed, every fragment of her released zanpakutō's combat data — it all traveled the roots back to the framework.
Hiyori stood over him as he lay on the training ground's stone floor, bleeding from three cuts that stung with residual spiritual energy. The scowl was intact, but her breathing was elevated, and the hand holding her released zanpakutō was not entirely steady.
"You made me release," she said. The words carried a weight that transcended their literal meaning. In the Gotei 13's informal hierarchy of combat assessment, forcing a vice-captain to release against a seventh seat was a statement. A declaration. The kind of data point that traveled through institutional channels with a velocity that no amount of shadow-cultivation could fully contain.
"Sorry," Hatsu said. From the ground.
"Don't be sorry. Be better." She sheathed the blade. The released form receded. "Next week. And bring more than that."
—————
The third seat of the Fourth Division was a different kind of acquisition entirely.
Yamada Itsuki was tall, thin, and possessed of a gentleness so thorough that it seemed less like a personality trait and more like a structural material — the substance from which his entire being was constructed. His hands were long-fingered and steady, the hands of someone who had spent decades learning to mend what others broke. His reiatsu carried the distinctive signature of a healer — warm, diffuse, calibrated for restoration rather than destruction.
But he was not only a healer.
His kidō was exceptional. Not the combat-focused hadō that the academy emphasized, but the full spectrum — hadō, bakudō, kaidō, and the obscure tertiary disciplines that most Shinigami never studied. His barriers were layered constructs of remarkable sophistication. His binding arts could hold opponents three ranks above him. And his healing kidō operated at a level that the Fourth Division's younger members spoke about with the particular reverence reserved for things they could observe but not replicate.
Hatsu approached him through professional channels — a formal request for cross-divisional kidō consultation, filed through the Sixth Division's administrative office with Captain Kuchiki's stamp. The request was genuine; Hatsu's kidō had reached the mid-sixties in both hadō and bakudō, and the next tier — the seventies, where the incantations grew longer and the reiatsu requirements grew steeper and the margin for error grew lethal — demanded guidance that his self-directed training couldn't provide.
Yamada agreed to the consultation with the quiet enthusiasm of a specialist being asked to discuss his specialty. Their first session was purely academic — theory, incantation structure, reiatsu flow mechanics for high-tier kidō. Yamada's teaching style was patient, methodical, and surprisingly rigorous beneath the gentle exterior.
The sparring came later. Naturally. Almost accidentally — a demonstration of barrier technique that escalated into a practical exercise that escalated into a controlled exchange that escalated into something that both of them recognized, by the end, as a fight.
Yamada's combat capability surprised people who judged him by his division's pacifistic reputation. His barriers were not merely defensive — they were tactical, deployed as environmental constraints that channeled opponents into predetermined engagement zones. His binding arts immobilized with a precision that the combat divisions' officers would have envied. And his healing kidō, in combat application, functioned as a form of intelligence — each diagnostic pulse mapping the opponent's reiatsu architecture, identifying structural weaknesses, feeding data back to the healer's analytical framework.
The seed was planted during their third session, through a cut that Yamada barely registered — his attention focused on the barrier construct that Hatsu had just circumvented through a technique combination that the healer's analytical mind was already deconstructing.
The harvest from Yamada's seed was unlike anything the other channels produced.
Not combat data. Not fighting instinct. Understanding. The deep, structural comprehension of spiritual anatomy that a master healer developed over decades of study — the way reiatsu flowed through a soul's architecture, the relationships between spiritual pressure and physical capability, the mechanisms by which a Shinigami's power grew and the constraints that limited that growth.
The reiatsu ceiling that Akiyama had called an excuse — Yamada's insights illuminated its actual nature. Not a fixed limit but a pattern — a habitual configuration of spiritual energy flow that constrained output by channeling it through established pathways rather than allowing it to find new ones. The ceiling was real, but it was architectural rather than fundamental. It could be restructured. Expanded. Rebuilt from the inside, the way a healer rebuilt damaged tissue — not by adding new material, but by reorganizing existing material into more efficient configurations.
Hatsu began the restructuring that same week.
The process was slow. Painstaking. The spiritual equivalent of renovating a building while continuing to live in it — each adjustment to his reiatsu architecture carried the risk of destabilizing the systems that depended on the existing configuration. He worked at night, during the deep communion with Shizuka no Hana, the zanpakutō's spirit guiding the restructuring with the patient precision that the blade applied to everything.
His reserves began to grow.
Not incrementally — structurally. Each reorganized pathway increased his capacity not by adding volume but by reducing waste, eliminating the inefficiencies that had consumed spiritual energy without contributing to output. The effect was cumulative. By the third week, his resting reiatsu had increased by fifteen percent. By the sixth, twenty-five. By the third month, he was approaching levels that matched Matsumoto's natural output — a threshold he had previously considered years away.
The composite framework absorbed the increased capacity and redistributed it across all processing channels. The five combat perception streams ran smoother, faster, with less cognitive strain. His shikai's duration extended. His kidō reached the low seventies — Hadō seventy-three, Sōren Sōkatsui, the twin-lotus blue fire, became achievable with full incantation, the muscle memory from Yamada's decades of practice providing the structural foundation that accelerated his own technical development.
The growth curve steepened.
—————
A year passed.
It passed in the rhythm of weeks — each one marked by its sessions, its harvests, its incremental additions to the framework's depth and breadth. The seasons turned. The wisteria bloomed and dropped its petals and bloomed again. Hatsu's morning katas continued, the bokken carving its arcs through air that felt different now, thinner, more responsive to the spiritual pressure that leaked from his hands without conscious effort.
The news about Kaien reached him through the usual channels — noise, disruption, property damage.
But this time, the damage was not a wall.
"Bankai."
Ōkubo said the word with the particular reverence that the Seireitei reserved for its rarest achievements. They were in the mess hall, morning shift, and the word fell into the ambient conversation like a stone into a still pond.
"Shiba Kaien. Confirmed yesterday. Thirteenth Division. Full bankai manifestation, witnessed by Captain Ukitake himself."
Hatsu set down his chopsticks.
The composite perception — seven channels now, each one pulsing with its distinct frequency — reached for the connection to Shiba's seed. The roots were deep, the oldest of his plantings after Megumi's, and the data they transmitted had been growing more complex for months. But the previous night's harvest had been different — denser, richer, carrying a resonance that he hadn't recognized at the time but that now, in the context of Ōkubo's announcement, resolved into clarity.
Bankai.
The culmination of a zanpakutō relationship. The final collapse of the barrier between wielder and blade. The moment when the silk between two palms dissolved entirely and the two spirits became, for the purposes of combat, a single entity.
Shiba had been approaching it for months. Hatsu had felt it in the transmissions — the deepening bond, the increasing fluidity of communication between Kaien and his zanpakutō, the growing ease with which released-state techniques manifested. The sparring pressure had been a catalyst, not a cause — Shiba's talent would have reached bankai eventually, with or without Hatsu's involvement. But eventually was a word that covered a range spanning years, and the focused, competitive intensity of their weekly bouts had compressed that range into months.
The timeline had shifted. Slightly. In a direction that favored survival.
Hatsu allowed himself a moment — brief, private, felt rather than expressed — of something that approximated satisfaction. Then he finished his breakfast and reported for morning duties.
—————
Shiba came to spar the following week. He looked the same — the easy grin, the casual posture, the feet-in-the-fountain informality that no amount of achievement seemed to modify. But his reiatsu was different. Deeper. The bankai had restructured his spiritual architecture the way Yamada's insights were restructuring Hatsu's — not by adding power but by reorganizing what was already there into something more coherent, more unified, more complete.
"Not going to show me?" Hatsu asked.
Shiba laughed. "Not today. Not here. I'd need a bigger courtyard." The grin softened into something more honest. "And more time. Bankai's… it's a lot, Hatsu. I need to learn what it is before I start swinging it around."
"How long?"
"Months. Maybe longer." He sat on the fountain ledge — the basin had been repaired twice since their sessions began, and the masonry work was starting to take on the resigned quality of craftsmanship performed in the full expectation of future destruction. "I'll come once a month. Keep the shikai sessions going. But the bankai work needs to happen with Ukitake-taichō. He's the only one who can—" A pause. The grin faded. "—survive it, if something goes wrong."
Once a month. The tightest, most productive feedback loop in Hatsu's network, reduced to monthly inputs. The loss was significant — Shiba's channel produced insights that no other source could match, the deep, complete perspective of a true synthesis fighter enriched now by the bankai's restructuring effect.
But the monthly sessions would carry something the weekly ones hadn't — the bankai's maturation data. Each visit would transmit Shiba's ongoing process of learning his ultimate technique, the slow integration of a power that most Shinigami never achieved. The insights would be rare but invaluable, compressed packets of information about the highest tier of zanpakutō mastery traveling the roots back to a man who was, quietly and systematically, building the foundation for his own ascent to that same tier.
"Once a month," Hatsu agreed. "And bring better rice balls."
Shiba's grin returned. Full force. The easy warmth of a man who had just achieved the pinnacle of his profession and who treated it with the same casual grace he treated everything else.
"Deal."
—————
That evening, Hatsu sat at his desk with the window open. The sunset painted the far wall in deep amber and violet. Shizuka no Hana lay across his knees, sealed, pulsing with the quiet rhythm of seven active channels.
His kidō had reached the seventies. His reiatsu reserves had doubled from their original baseline. His combat capability, assessed honestly and without ego, operated consistently at the level of a fourth or third seat — and in specific tactical scenarios, leveraging the full composite framework, at levels above that.
The growth curve was steepening. Each new channel enriched the existing framework, which improved his ability to cultivate new channels, which enriched the framework further. The feedback loops were compounding. The garden was becoming a forest, and the forest was generating its own weather — a self-sustaining ecosystem of mutual growth that required less direct intervention with each passing month.
He needed more.
Not greedily. Strategically. The timeline was moving. Urahara was in the Twelfth Division, working on things that would soon attract the wrong kind of attention. The Hollowfication was approaching — not imminent, but no longer distant. The window for preparation was finite, and the ceiling of what he could achieve within that window depended on the depth and diversity of his network.
Seated officers. He'd been eyeing them for weeks — the fourth seats and third seats and occasional second seats whose capabilities represented the next tier of insight. Officers whose decades of experience and specialized expertise would feed the framework with data that his current channels, for all their richness, couldn't provide.
The composite perception turned outward. Seven channels, seven perspectives, synthesized into an analytical instrument of remarkable sensitivity. It scanned the Seireitei's landscape — not physically, but conceptually, mapping the terrain of talent and opportunity with the patient thoroughness of a gardener planning his next season.
More, the blade whispered. The same word. Always the same word. But the whisper was deeper now, richer, carrying harmonics that hadn't existed a year ago.
Hatsu's fingers traced the sealed steel. The warmth beneath the surface was steady. Patient. Hungry.
More.
He closed his eyes. Let the seven channels sing their evening chord. And began to plan.