Cursed Parakeet

At a Karakura construction site, Harutoki Ide warns Yasutora Sado and Gitano Shigeo that the parakeet he carries has doomed each of its past owners. Gitano wants nothing to do with it, but Sado's soft spot for cute things wins out just as the bird shrieks a warning and a falling I-beam plummets toward them. Sado shoulders the beam to shield his friends, and the parakeet thanks him, introducing himself as Yūichi Shibata. In Hueco Mundo, the Hollows Grand Fisher and Shrieker fixate on souls, the latter locking onto the caged boy.

On the school roof the next morning, Ichigo marvels that Rukia healed his battle wounds overnight with her Kidō skill. The banter continues with classmates Mizuiro and Keigo before Sado arrives, bandaged from an I-beam and a motorcycle, still carrying Yūichi. Sensing the gentle Plus inside the bird, Rukia resolves to perform Konsō that night. Ichigo recalls first meeting Sado years earlier, when the towering, gentle boy took beatings to protect him and never fought back.

That evening a car accident floods the Kurosaki Clinic with patients, and Sado is brought in with a large, claw-shaped wound reeking of Hollow. He slips away before dawn, and Karin falls ill after glimpsing the boy's memories, chief among them watching his mother murdered.

Unable to detect a Hollow that hides between worlds, Ichigo tries a new approach. Concentrating his perception, he manifests Reiraku, the visible ribbons of spirit energy only high-level Shinigami can see, and follows Yūichi's thread. Rukia is stunned by how far he has advanced. Sado, meanwhile, holes up in an abandoned factory and refuses to abandon Yūichi even to spare himself the curse. When Shrieker attacks Rukia, her weakened Sōkatsui barely scratches him, and he boasts of having already eaten two Shinigami who tried to free the boy. As Karin tearfully begs Ichigo to reunite Yūichi with his mother, the rescue closes in.

The fourth episode adapts chapters 7 through 9 and stages the opening of the Rukia and Sado fight against Shrieker. It marks Ichigo's first use of Reiraku and expands the manga with a fuller flashback of his and Sado's first meeting. Numerous small anime changes and cuts are noted, and the English dub mistakenly labels Rukia's Hadō 33 as a Bakudō. The comedic next-episode preview has Urahara advertising his shop a week early, to Ichigo's annoyance.