The desolation and loneliness that had spanned hundreds of millions of years slowly receded from the depths of Yoriichi's consciousness like an ebbing tide.
The gray currents of the chaotic world, the heaven-shaking, earth-moving might of the Creator Gods, and that utterly tragic act of self-sacrifice-all of it became imprints of memory, settling in the deepest reaches of his soul.
The instant his consciousness returned to reality, the first thing Yoriichi felt was a bone-chilling cold.
He instinctively looked down and found his right hand resting lightly on a huge, transparent crystal that gave off a faint glow.
Through the crystal, he could clearly see the mutilated figure within, stripped of its limbs, with only a head and torso remaining.
The Soul King.
The symbol revered as supreme throughout Soul Society's history, yet so mysterious that he had seemed almost nonexistent.
So this was his true face.
A lonely prisoner who had filled the cracks in the world with his own body, turning himself into an eternal pillar.
The sweeping epic of creation he had just witnessed stood in stark, bitterly ironic contrast to the wretched remains sealed in crystal before him.
Yoriichi slowly withdrew his hand, the lingering chill in his fingertips seeming to remind him still of the weight of that history.
He stood quietly in that pure white space, so vast and empty that it seemed boundless, and said nothing for a long time.
In his mind, White's flawless face, Black's mountainlike figure, and the final, settled arrangement of the Three Realms flashed past in turn.
So the origins of Hell, Hueco Mundo, Soul Society, the World of the Living... all of it were this cruel.
This had not been the gods creating as they pleased, but the only path to "survival," forcibly selected from countless endings