Gikon

Gikon, meaning artificial souls and rendered by Viz as substitute souls, are engineered spirits designed to push a Shinigami out of a Gigai or to force a stubborn soul from a corpse. Both the souls themselves and the means of taking them in were the invention of Kirio Hikifune, who first turned the once-unthinkable notion of a manufactured soul into reality.

The underlying idea is to feed foreign Reiatsu into a body so the recipient can claim that power as their own. In practice a user swallows a pill called a Gikongan, which ejects the resident soul and hands control to the artificial one, which then behaves along preset lines until it is removed. Because they answer to programming rather than a will of their own, these souls can be dropped into a vacant corpse or even an inanimate toy, and each is built with a distinct personality suited to its intended role.

After a complaint from the Shinigami Women's Association that the formal name lacked charm, the Gikongan came to be branded Soul Candy and dispensed from toy containers topped with cartoon mascots. The personality inside tends to mirror its mascot: the wildly popular Chappy chatters in a cutesy singsong, while other flavors range from a swaggering gangster to a timid coward and a diligent but dim-witted thinker.

Soul Candy is a staple across Soul Society, and many officers keep a favored brand. Rukia Kuchiki carries Chappy, Yumichika Ayasegawa the gangster Gringo, Renji Abarai the sly Ginnosuke, Ikkaku Madarame the jittery Blues, Rangiku Matsumoto the lecherous Momone, and Tōshirō Hitsugaya the earnest King. The whole line traces back to Kirio Hikifune, whose original design made the practice possible.