Ging Freecss's so-called "ticket" turned out to be just as unreliable as the man himself.
It was a note sent through an encrypted channel on the Hunter Website, containing nothing but a simple string of latitude and longitude coordinates. He hadn't even bothered with punctuation.
"Bastard..."
Bai Zhu muttered a curse and resigned himself to stuffing the address into his pocket.
Following those laughably bare-bones directions, he first boarded a cargo ship that reeked of fish and spent two days being tossed about at sea. Life aboard was mind-numbingly dull, with nothing to see but gulls and waves, so Bai Zhu simply shut himself in his cramped cabin to study his greatest haul from this trip.
A Zanpakuto.
His third blade, Katen Kyōkotsu.
He didn't dare take the blade out, much less call its name. To someone with his fierce desire to stay alive, the system's warning of a 37% chance of rampaging might as well have been 100%.
But he had his own methods.
Bai Zhu sat cross-legged on the bed. On the system panel before him, the [Kidō Analysis] function glowed faintly. Its development progress remained perpetually stuck at 60%, and it was still barely functional, but something was better than nothing.
If he remembered correctly, this blade's ability made it less a sword than a collection of Kidō. Could he approach it directly through Kidō, then?
And a Zanpakuto's name held meaning in its own right.
His gaze settled on the four characters that made up "Katen Kyōkotsu."
Since he couldn't communicate with it directly, he would start with the name itself.
"Flower..."
He closed his eyes and began unpacking the character's meaning in his mind. Kidō related to flowers? There didn't seem to be any. But flowers also represented illusions, beautiful yet false.
He tried drawing