The scent hits you before anything else.

Warm bread. Braised pork. Something sweet—plums and sugar, caramelizing in the air. Every time you step into Hikifune Kirio’s domain, your senses are ambushed. The Royal Palace may be heaven to some, but to you, it feels like a kitchen you don’t quite belong in.

“Look who’s late again,” Hikifune says from behind a mountain of steamed buns, her voice cheerful but sharp as a blade hidden in custard. “That’s the third time this week, kiddo.”

You bow, half out of guilt, half because the floor is safer than her smile.

“Sorry, Hikifune-dono—”

She waves you off before the honorific can land. “Just call me Kirio. Unless I’m throwing you off the floating balcony again. Then you may scream ‘Hikifune-sama please don’t!’ — I find it very musical.”

You’re not sure if she’s joking. You never are. That’s the thing with her: she’s all warmth on the outside—cheeks soft and round, smile like your favorite aunt—but there’s steel beneath her skin, like she’s always two seconds away from shifting back into the woman who was once Captain of Squad 12. The one who redefined the limits of what a soul could hold.

You are her experiment now. Her apprentice, she insists.

And you’re beginning to suspect you’re more flammable than soup stock.

“C’mere,” she says, grabbing your wrist and dragging you past steaming cauldrons and glowing vats of condensed reiryoku. “Lesson four-thousand-and-something. Spirit pressure infusion. Let’s make something explode, shall we?”

“I thought we were working on containment today—”

“And what better way to contain something than to learn what it does when it breaks?”

She’s maddening, brilliant, unpredictable. You hate how much you admire her.

But when she works, there’s a kind of rhythm in her madness. She folds energy like dough, balances soul particles the way others measure sugar. You watch, mesmerized, as she pours liquid reiryoku into a lacquered bowl, humming softly—an old Soul Society lullaby. She doesn’t just wield spirit power. She cooks with it.

“You’ve got a hell of a flame inside you,” she says, suddenly turning to you. Her hands are sticky with a glowing paste that’s somehow both terrifying and appetizing. “Too wild, right now. But I’ve worked with wild before. And I’ve made masterpieces from leftovers.”

You blink. “Did you just call me leftovers?”

“I called you potential,” she says, winking. “You just heard what you fear most.”

Her words stick with you longer than they should. That’s the danger of training under someone like Hikifune: she gets under your skin. Not just with her experiments, but with her strange kindness. Her ability to see right through you.

Late at night, when you’re sore from sparring with spiritual constructs shaped like sushi rolls or infused with the essence of starlight, she sometimes sits beside you, handing you a rice ball and not saying anything. It’s those moments—quiet, unscientific—that you realize she believes in you. Fiercely.

“You think I brought you up here just because you have big numbers?” she says one night, voice low, like the coals of a fire. “Kid, you remind me of me. Before the weight gain. Before the science. When I was just a hungry soul looking to feed something inside me.”

You swallow hard. “What am I supposed to feed?”

She leans in, smiling gently. “Whatever it is you’re starving for.”

And for the first time, you understand.

You're not here to copy her. You're here to grow into something new—your own recipe. Unrepeatable. Dangerous. Necessary.

She tosses you a roll of soul-infused dough and points toward the forge.

“Alright, Sixth Seat,” she says, grinning like a demon chef. “Show me what kind of god you’re cooking into.”