Sōken Ishida

Sōken was an old man whose gray hair, matching mustache, and small chin beard framed deep gray eyes behind a pair of glasses. Age had lined his skin and drawn out his cheekbones. He dressed in the white garments of a Quincy worn beneath a brown tunic.

Uryū admired his grandfather as a kind soul who preached an unusual Quincy philosophy built on cooperation with the Shinigami rather than rivalry. A traditionalist at heart, Sōken clung to the older Letzt Stil and rejected the newer forms of Quincy power. He could not stomach the way Yhwach drained the power and lives of Quincy branded impure to restore himself, and held that those dwelling in the human realm bore a duty to halt the emperor's genocidal designs.

Cast out of the Wandenreich for holding to the old ways, Sōken fled the Quincy's hidden realm through a Gate of the Sun, carrying off a device that operated it. In the human world he trained both his son Ryūken and his grandson Uryū, becoming the boy's devoted mentor and passing him the Sanrei Glove. He repeatedly urged the Shinigami to accept a shared arrangement in which Quincy would act as first responders against Hollows until the reapers arrived, but the proposal was rejected every time. He also kept a journal, written in a Germanic tongue, recording the truth of the Wandenreich, Yhwach, and the death of Uryū's mother.

As a Quincy, Sōken could sense Hollows from great distances and drew ambient spirit particles together to form a bow, the Heilig Bogen, firing condensed arrows with the precision of a master archer; being an Echt Quincy, he was born able to use the defensive Blut. His life ended when a swarm of giant Hollows overwhelmed him and the Shinigami meant to guard him arrived too late. Only later did Uryū learn that Mayuri Kurotsuchi had deliberately delayed those reapers in order to harvest Sōken's soul for research, leaving almost nothing of his body behind.