The Scarlet Creation

A full month after Aizen fled Soul Society, Yamamoto uses the monitor link inside Orihime's apartment to brief her, Hitsugaya, and Rangiku on what the Gotei 13 has managed to piece together. When Orihime tries to excuse herself, the Captain-Commander insists she stay, because the danger reaches into the Human world as well. Ukitake's search of the restricted Daireishokairo turned up not only tampering with records on the Hogyoku but access, two days before the betrayal, to writings about the Oken. Rangiku sketches the hidden monarchy for her: a royal house that lets Central 46 govern in its place, screened away in a separate dimension behind the Royal Guard, the gate to which only the Oken can open.

Yamamoto sets aside an assassination of the Soul King as the pressing danger and corrects Hitsugaya's guess that Aizen learned the key's whereabouts, since that secret lives only in the spoken lore handed down between Captain-Commanders. What Aizen actually studied was how the Oken is forged. The recipe demands a hundred thousand souls and a spiritually saturated site, a Jureichi spanning two ri. Because such a place wanders and pulls souls toward it, the one in Aizen's sights is Karakura Town, whose people and streets would be scoured out of existence to make the key. Yamamoto vows the Gotei 13 will find a countermeasure and, citing the four-month dormancy of the Hogyoku, sets the reckoning for winter.

Yamamoto charges Orihime with carrying the warning to Ichigo and asks her and her friends to help defend a battlefield too vast for the Shinigami alone, and she agrees. Rangiku leaves to brief Ikkaku's group while Yamamoto holds Hitsugaya back to meet a visitor waiting behind him. Beneath the Urahara Shop, Chad refuses to fold against Renji's released Zabimaru and calls his Brazo Derecha de Gigante back up as Urahara looks on. This chapter was adapted into episode 125.