Bleach Pilot Chapter

The story opens with Ichigo cutting down a pleading Hollow, then handing a grateful old soul a ticket bound for Soul Society, after which Rukia of the Third Division explains the difference between harmless Pluses and predatory Hollows. A flashback to the previous week shows Ichigo walking home with Mizuiro, trailed by wandering spirits he can see thanks to his family's mortuary trade, when Rukia bursts in to tackle a Hollow. Ichigo, startled that she can be seen at all, scolds her for swinging a sword in a kimono before the Hollow, lured by the Pluses around him, lunges again and loses an arm to her blade.

When Ichigo comes to, Rukia has shrunk to the size of a cigarette pack, having spent nearly all her power shielding the bystanders, and she foists her Shinigami duties onto him. After a squabble that ends with her restoring him to his body and knocking his soul back out with the Gokon Tekko, Ichigo reluctantly takes up her work. A dispatch soon reveals that his classmate Orihime Inoue has died at the foot of a shrine staircase. Ichigo severs her Chain of Fate to send her onward, and her father appears in a suit to escort her, only for Rukia to recognize him as a Hollow.

As Orihime rises skyward, her father tears up her ticket, refuses her passage, and reveals his monstrous form, intent on keeping her with him forever. Ichigo intervenes and learns the only way to free a Hollow is to slay it. The father confesses that he pushed Orihime down the stairs, embittered that she had stopped praying for him and drifted away. When he seizes her, Orihime grasps Ichigo's blade and drives it through her own chest, destroying her father, and assures him with her dying breath that she never forgot him. Restored to full size, Rukia prepares to guide Orihime on, and quietly asks Ichigo whether they might talk more often, to which he agrees.

Ichigo, able to see spirits, meets Rukia Kuchiki when she battles a Hollow and loses most of her power protecting bystanders, shrinking in the process. Rukia transfers her Shinigami duties to Ichigo. A job leads Ichigo to the deceased Orihime Inoue, whose Hollowfied father tries to trap her rather than let her pass on. Orihime sacrifices herself on Ichigo's blade to destroy her father, and Rukia stays behind after losing her right to return home.

This one-shot, also labeled Chapter 00, was the proposal Tite Kubo submitted to Weekly Shonen Jump after concluding his earlier series ZombiePowder, and it was later reprinted in Bleach: Official Character Book SOULs. Numerous elements differ from the eventual manga: Ichigo's hair is black on the cover, Rukia belongs to the Third Division and shrinks after lending her powers, souls receive tickets rather than undergoing konso, Hollows lack masks, and the Kurosaki family runs a mortuary instead of a clinic. Orihime dies here and is taken to Soul Society, and the grieving father figure was later reworked into her brother, Sora Inoue. Kubo's early plans left out Soul Society's hierarchy but already carried the seed of Ichigo's Shinigami heritage.