Races

The living races share the world of the breathing, and most humans move through it blind to spirits entirely, only a rare medium sensing the dead at all. A small subset called Fullbringers are born spiritually aware, able to draw out the souls that dwell inside physical matter through the power that names them. The Quincy round out the living, attuned humans who forge weapons from spirit energy and erase Hollows completely, a method that endangers the balance of souls and drove the Shinigami to hunt them nearly to extinction.

Among the spirits, a Plus is the gentle ghost of a dead human, tethered by a Chain of Fate that, once corroded, warps them into a Hollow. Shinigami are empowered souls of the Soul Society who wield Zanpakutō and Kidō to bury Pluses and battle Hollows, while Visored are Shinigami who seized Hollow powers along with the masks that come with them. Hollows themselves are ravenous spirits out of Hueco Mundo, marked by white masks and a hole where the heart once beat, and those that shatter their masks and reclaim reason become Arrancar. Rounding out this order are Zanpakutō Spirits, the living embodiments of a Shinigami's blade, and the manufactured souls, both the pill-form Gikon and the experimental Modified Souls built to hunt Hollows.

A few beings climb past every ordinary limit. These Transcendent Beings take in the Soul King, Yhwach after devouring the Soul King's power, Aizen by way of the Hōgyoku, and lastly Ichigo Kurosaki as a hybrid of every race. Other kinds surface mainly outside the core manga. The Bount are humans of high spiritual energy who feed on souls and fight through familiars called Dolls, and the Tōjū are Zanpakutō Spirits left masterless and adrift. Blanks are memory-starved souls of the Valley of Screams, the Togabito are the chained inmates of Hell, and the Kushanāda are that realm's towering wardens.