Spring brought warmth and blossoms; autumn passed, and winter came.
The old cherry tree in the courtyard budded, then shed all its leaves. Snow snapped a thin, rotten timber at the corner of the eaves.
Time was the one thing Soul Society never lacked.
To those lofty figures at the top, a year meant only a few more stacks of yellowing handover documents on their desks, a few routine deliberations of no real consequence in Central 46's underground hall.
But in the Eleventh Division, this year felt longer than any decade before it.
First Division.
The window stood half open. The chilly early-spring breeze carried in moisture from melting patches of snow, brushing against the thick sheets of rice paper spread across the desk.
A document lay on the desk.
[Eleventh Division Captain Appointment Certificate]
Genryūsai Shigekuni Yamamoto studied the year-long military discipline performance evaluation attached to the end of the document.
It was densely covered in detailed regulations marked in vermilion:
[Those who cause injury in private fights shall be demoted one seat and forfeit half a year's pay]; [Those who report for duty improperly dressed shall receive twenty lashes]; [Those who disobey formation orders during drills shall be confined in the division's jail pending investigation].
For an entire year, the Eleventh Division had not seen a single vicious private brawl that left severely wounded men dumped in Rukongai. No squad member had drunkenly drawn his sword and smashed up a tavern in the streets. Even the emergency casualty lists sent to the Fourth Division were a full two-thirds thinner than in previous years.
The man who had seized the captain's position with an invisible blade had not taught them how to cut people down.
He had taught them how to kneel and