Tessai Tsukabishi

A towering, powerfully built man with lightly tanned skin, Tessai wears his hair in cornrows and sports a broad handlebar mustache that merges into long sideburns, all framed by rectangular glasses. Around the shop his outfit stays plain: a white sleeveless shirt, ordinary trousers, and a blue apron. In his days leading the Kidō Corps he layered an elaborate dark blue mantle with a high upturned collar and the Corps' emblem over the standard Shinigami robes, carried a shakujō staff, kept a longer mustache, and twisted his cornrows into small horns.

Reserved, stern, and even-tempered, Tessai often plays the disciplinarian to the mischievous Jinta Hanakari, yet a softer streak runs beneath the calm. His devotion to Urahara is absolute, and he tends the shop so meticulously that praise for his work can move him to happy tears while a careless insult provokes instant fury. He has a weakness for medicines hawked on television, whatever their dubious effects, counts himself among the rare few who enjoy Orihime Inoue's odd cooking, and defers to Urahara even though the two once held equal rank.

Tessai was raised inside the Shihōin estate in the Seireitei alongside his friends Yoruichi and Urahara before rising to captain of the Kidō Corps, a post that kept him largely out of public view. Well past two centuries old, he recalls the age of the Quincy firsthand. Roughly a hundred and one years ago he and Hachigen Ushōda, his lieutenant, were called before Genryūsai Yamamoto's emergency council over the vanished Kensei Muguruma and his squad, and at Shunsui Kyōraku's suggestion Tessai gracefully ceded his place on the investigation team.

That same night he intercepted Urahara slipping out to look into the matter alone and chose to accompany him. The pair arrived in time to interrupt Aizen, then a lieutenant, and Tessai loosed the incantation-free Hadō number 88, Hiryū Gekizoku Shinten Raihō, only for Aizen to smother it with a defensive spell. Finding the Hollowfied victims beyond ordinary aid, he invoked the forbidden arts Jikanteishi and Kūkanten'i to still time and shift them to Urahara's laboratory. The rescue failed to reverse the transformation, and the next day both men were seized on Central 46's orders, plainly framed by Aizen and denied any defense. Sentenced to life imprisonment for wielding forbidden Kidō, Tessai was broken out by Yoruichi and, hidden in reiatsu-masking gigai, escaped with Urahara and the eight victims to the living world.

Settling into life as a shop hand, Tessai proved central to hardening Ichigo Kurosaki. He cut the boy's Chain of Fate and pinned him at the bottom of the Shattered Shaft, binding his arms with high-level Bakudō to force a swift awakening of his powers, then emerged himself unhurt but for cracked glasses. As Soul Society's former Grand Kidō Chief he ranks among its greatest Kidō masters, able to cast a level 99 binding spell without incantation, and he is a fierce hand-to-hand fighter whose open-palmed Tesshō can pulverize a Hollow's skull. His own Zanpakutō has never been shown.