Chương 106: A Heart Stab.

Kirinji did not stop there. He quietly, without so much as a flinch in the expression on his face, twisted the polearm's blade and carved out a piece of flesh from his body. Blood poured out of his chest in hordes, like a river that was just released from a dam. His heart which was removed on the blade of his pole arm still beat powerfully but Kirinji simply discarded it like it meant nothing to him, standing there without a heart in his body like it was just another day.

Unohana didn't flinch as well, observing everything that Kirinji was doing with a hawk's gaze. Kirinji stabbed his polearm into the ground after that and brought his free hands above the hole above where his heart used to be.

"Zessho!" Kirinji shouted out loud, forgoing the chant for the healing kido partially and causing a green blue glow to appear above his hands. Kirinji then brought his hand close to the wound and it gradually closed on itself, the blood flow stopped first, the heart formed next and the muscles and the ribcage formed after, the skin formed last leaving the wounded area without any apparent injuries. But Kirinji didn't stop there. The greenish blue glow intensified and his shihakusho repaired itself too!

"Our Reiryoku, the internal energy, makes up our clothes too, which is why it can also be repaired by Kaido. All it depends on is your understanding of what you want to fix using Kaido, or healing kido." Kirinji explained softly and Unohana nodded. Unohana nodded softly before looking at Kirinji and asking him a question on the spot, it was regarding something that had bothered her all this time, "How does the soul relate to all this?

Aren't we all just souls at the end of the day, why do we need to know how the physical body functions to heal it?" Kirinji smiled, "Unless you're someone like the Soul King, a being who can simply create a form from imagination, you have to depend on the natural properties of the soul to heal it. And to heal the soul you have two ways. One is to heal it by accelerating its healing factor, another is to heal it by reconstructing it using the source of the soul.

The former is very limited and the latter is too broad a tool to use well. My kaido is a mix of the two. A balance that requires precision and skill." Unohana frowned, while it didn't answer her question completely, she suspected that Kirinji was doing this to make her think of the answers by thinking in depth. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. So Unohana closed her eyes for a minute to ponder upon what she had just heard.

Haruto, who was absorbing the memory as he watched it, obtained access to Unohana's mind as she thought things through, allowing him to essentially hear her thoughts as if she were speaking it out loud.

'Why would there be two ways to heal the body?'

'Kirinji said that one of the ways is to reconstruct it from its source… so does the human soul have a core?'

'If it does… where is this core located? Is it different for each person it belongs to or is it the same for everyone?'

'The zanpakuto has different forms based on each individual person… and the zanpakuto is a reflection of one's deepest core… so does that mean that the human soul's core is different for each person?'

'Does it contain the blueprint to their entire being?'

'What would manipulating it bring?'

'Would manipulating the core of a shinigami change them into a hollow or a quincy depending on how it is molded and manipulated?' As if hearing her thoughts, Kirinji spoke up immediately, "Your thoughts are written plainly on your face Unohana… but yes, the secret to what a soul becomes once it dies to some extent lies inside its soul core.

While that is true, the soul core itself can be manipulated by sheer will, so when an extreme situation occurs, like death, a person might end up manipulating their soul core to become something other than a free soul, for example becoming a hollow."

"So does healing someone constitute rewriting their soul core to remove the bad parts and make them good again?" Kirinji nodded firmly, "Precisely. A broad stroke brush is used in the form of your will to overwrite the target's soul core, once that is done you can use the first method of healing someone, to accelerate the natural healing capacity of the body to reabsorb whatever you've overwritten the soul core with.

For example, in the case of healing my heart, I recreated my heart in my body before activating my natural healing factor to reabsorb it into my body as a part of myself."

"I see… so how do I get started by sensing the soul core in a human being?" Kirinji smiled slyly at that and spoke in a bland tone, "It'll take you ten to twenty years to feel the soul core with your talent…"

"Ten to twenty years?" Unohana asked with slight surprise, but then she calmed down since for a person who'd already lived over a thousand years, ten to twenty years was not a big amount. But Kirinji softly shook his head while clicking his tongue, "Tsk. Tsk. Tsk… I expected you to be more impatient. Can you guess how I can speed up that process for you?" Unohana frowned, "Speed up the process?", that was when a bizarre idea struck Unohana's mind, "Don't tell me…

you'll modify my soul core so that I'm able to feel all soul cores henceforth!?"

"Exactly!" Kirinji nodded and stretched his arm, letting it land on Unohana's shoulder as a green glow enveloped it.

"Brace for the pain." Kirinji said softly before his hand blurred and stabbed right into Unohana's chest. Unohana coughed up a mouth full of blood but otherwise remained perfectly normal, she pulled out a handkerchief from her Shihakusho and dabbed the edges of her lips to wipe away any blood before she closed her eyes softly and readied herself for the pain that was to come.

Kirinji narrowed his eyes in focus and made a grasping motion inside Unohana's chest as if he were reaching out to something before his fingers curled around something almost physical. He then dragged his hands back out and revealed a shining orb gripped by his long fingers.

Unohana's eyes instantly glazed over and her eyelids shut with force as she felt a soul rending pain wash over her body, it radiated in waves out from her chest and touched every single part of her body making her feel a smoldering pain across her entire being. Kirinji let the orb hover in front of his face by leaving it in the air, before bringing both his hands together around it. A greenish hue covered both his hands before thin needle-like solid threads extended out of his fingers and punctured the glowing orb.

Kirinji's fingers moved extremely fast, at a speed at which the human eye would fail to even notice the afterimages they left behind, causing his entire hands to blur into a mass of flesh lit purely by the emitted glow of the orb. Unohana did her best to not keep track of the time but every short second seemed like a long year, but soon she heard Kirinji's voice-"And… done."