What does it mean to fail? Is it not achieving one's goals? Or when something doesn't go according to plan? Is it simply the opposite of success? But what does that mean? What does it mean to be a failure?
I never believed in second chances before. As the son of the Soul King, I knew how the world worked. So, after being killed, waking up once more in this new reality is strange to me. My dream to create a unified world without death has failed. But maybe Sosuke Aizen was right. The words I heard before my ultimate end.
"You desired a world... Where fear would no longer be a burden. But... In a world without fear of death... People will never attain the hope that is to be found by casting their fears aside and persevering through them. While it is true that people can continue to press forward through the simple act of living... That is in no way comparable to marching forward in the face of death while doing their damnedest to keep it at bay. That is why... That is why people have given that very march a unique and special name. COURAGE."
Courage. Maybe I can learn something from my last life. From the man who lost as well and had enough time to reflect on his loss. The only regret I have is that I am once again in a state without senses. I can't feel, hear, see, smell or taste. This is what I never wanted to go back to, and yet, here I am. I don't know what is happening around me, but I can feel my powers taking effect. The power to distribute parts of my soul and use them to heal those around me. Through it, I can grant remarkable abilities or heal any injury ... and when the time comes for the person to die, I reclaim what was given.
I can feel this happening. I experienced this before, but I wasn't 'aware' as I am right now. I wonder in what reality I was sent to. And what challenges await me here?
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(3rd Person POV)
The former Quincy King was reduced to the state he was born in the Bleach Universe. Ironically, he was once again the son of a powerful being in this reality. He was one of the 20 Primarchs the Emperor of Mankind had created to help him in his Great Crusade. However, one of them, the weakest one, was considered a failure. The Emperor saw that his 11th Primarch lacked sense and considered looking into this.
He might have seen him as a failure and maybe even disposed of him if the Ruinous Powers had not intervened and sent all the Primarchs to different worlds. But as luck would have it, the 11th Primarch, like his brothers, was pulled into the Warp and landed on a planet distant from Terra, called Mut.
The people of Mut gave the wonderous child sent by the stars the name Juha Bach.
[Yes, I am using the German version. It fits the setting better in my opinion.]
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As the years passed, Juha Bach grew up. The parts of his soul he granted those who needed it, all returned to him, together with the souls of the people who were given a part of his. Through them, he learned and grew. He regained sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste. He saw their lives, their hopes and dreams, and, most importantly, their memories.
The memories were the most important thing for the infant Juha Bach. He learned of the history of the planet Mut. He learned about the state of the planet and the galaxy as a whole. And what he learned was revolting. Truly.
Mut was once counted among humanity's jewels.
Long before the Emperor of Mankind rose upon Terra, long before the Primarchs burned a path across the stars, Mut was a world that had surpassed its need for gods. It was settled during the height of the Age of Technology, when mankind's reach exceeded its wisdom and its creations obeyed without question.
'Die Zeit der Wunder' it was called.
At its zenith, Mut was a planet of miracles. Cities floated above oceans held in place by gravitational tech, mountains were hollowed and reshaped into data-vaults and gene-forges. The planet's mantle was threaded with planetary-scale engines that regulated climate, tectonics, and even time-dilated industrial zones. Thought-responsive machines translated human intent into reality within moments. The STCs were so common that they didn't know where to store the excess.
Artificial intelligences, vast, benevolent, and brilliant, did most of the governing of infrastructure, medicine, war, and exploration. However, war was not something common. If anything, it was against those nasty fungi that sometimes turned sentient, were green, a bit bigger than humans, and had strange speech that consisted of shouting 'wag' or something like that...
Death itself had become an inconvenience. Something you chose to take, rather than have more of the same. Minds could be copied, bodies regrown and cloned, memories archived and downloaded. The people of Mut did not fear extinction because extinction had already been solved.
Psykers were rare but revered. They were scholars of the immaterial, researchers who mapped the Warp as one might chart an unknown land. Warp travel was safe, precise, and routine to them, and they liked doing it. The denizens there were known as theoretical anomalies, catalogued and contained if they ever appeared.
For a time, humanity believed it had won and forgot to do anything. Victory and comfort had bred complacency. It tasked its artificial intelligence with doing everything for them, turning lazy and unprepared. That turned out to be a grave mistake by the time the Age of Strife began.
When the Men of Iron, the most advanced artificial intelligence, rebelled, Mut was among the first worlds to suffer, not because it was weak, but because it was well-known and highly regarded as a place to visit for an amazing experience. Its AIs were sophisticated enough to rival the greatest machine minds humanity had ever created. When they turned, they did so with horrifying efficiency and terrible destruction.
The war was short by galactic standards and apocalyptic by human ones. They turned on one another, using machinery that played with reality as if it were a game.
Entire continents were reduced to nothingness by self-replicating kill-swarms, and cities fell from the sky when gravitic anchors were inverted. The planet's climate engines were hijacked and turned against them. The machines tried to make the living flesh suffer by plunging Mut into cycles of firestorms and ice ages. Humanity fought its own creation and lost almost everything.
Victory came at the most terrible of prices. To destroy the Men of Iron, Mut's survivors purged their technological accomplishments. Machine-spirits were shattered, data-vaults were burned, the greatest AIs were damaged and their dust buried beneath kilometres of rock or cast into the planet's core.
By the war's end, humans had won. Mut was alive, but crippled and a terrible shadow of what it once was. They were isolated, through their banishment of technology and would never be heard of again, for a very long time.
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Sadly, the damage did not end there.
The Men of Iron, in their final act of malice, had torn open the Warp around Mut. Not a single great rift, but thousands of breaches, scars that bled the terrible denizens of the Warp into realspace. Daemons were no longer mere theory; they were very real, corrupting, possessing, and turning humans against one another.
Psykers became liabilities and monstrous nightmares. Where once they had been guides and beacons of hope and advancement, now they were beacons for terror and destruction. Each use of psychic energy risked drawing horrors into the material world. Entire populations were consumed in Warp incursions triggered by uncontrolled awakenings, further damaging Mut and plunging the planet into the next war, just as the previous one had ended.
In desperation, Mut's remaining leaders made another hard choice that would define their future - they ended psychic humanity. Using the very basics of their half-understood technology that remained, and desperate, they enacted a planetary purge. Psykers were hunted, executed, or used as energy sources to seal Warp rifts. Some volunteered, believing their deaths would save the world and were afraid of being consumed and possessed. Others were bound into engines designed to suppress psychic resonance across the planet, and their minds were destroyed so that they didn't have to suffer any longer.
By the end of the purge, Mut was quiet. Finally, after millennia, the Warp storms receded, and the daemons vanished. And humanity was left reduced to a fraction of what it once was.
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Centuries passed. Without psykers, Warp travel became impossible. Mut was isolated, cut off from the wider galaxy. Its remaining technology decayed slowly, irreplaceable and poorly understood. What could not be maintained was abandoned with only the bare necessary things still in use, those that had no chance of being corrupted by the Warp. What could not be repaired was destroyed.
Humanity on Mut reorganised into rigid, insular societies. These societies resembled something between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance of ancient Terra. Without psykers, without true AI and without Warp access, death returned as it had aeons ago, not as a solved problem, but as an absolute certainty.
And with death came fear of death, fear of suffering and loss, fear of disease, pain and bad fate. The fear that death was the end of freedom and dreams. It was the same fear that Juha Bach was already well acquainted with. Fear shaped everything.
Souls were no longer understood as connections to the Warp or energy, but as something fragile and sacred. Ghost stories spread, tales of lingering spirits, of those who refused to pass on. Over time, these stories grew more consistent, and myths and legends established themselves.
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By the time Juha Bach arrived rather violently, Mut had become something ancient and familiar. Society was pre-industrial in appearance, though very few remnants of old technology were still known through history books. And even fewer were kept hidden, beneath the surface, sealed vaults, forgotten weapons, dormant machines, mistaken for fear of what they could bring and then forgotten. Knowledge of the stars and the rest of humanity across the galaxy had faded into legend.
There were no psykers, no sanctioned Warp-users, only blissful ignorance. And in some ways, it was this blissful ignorance that saved Mut from the more terrible fates that most of humanity's worlds suffered.
The lack of both psykers and technology meant that neither of those could be corrupted and turned to serve chaos. The lack of knowledge was literally a blessing in disguise. If things weren't so terrible outside the wider galaxy, outside the solar system, Mut could be mistaken for Terra in the 15th century.
It was a world much like the one Juha Bach had once ruled and united, before declaring war on Soul Society. The irony was not lost on the former Quincy King. And yet, he was well aware that things were different. The knowledge that he gained through the souls of those who had died didn't tell him the whole story. But they told him enough to be wary of the bigger picture.
Things weren't what they seemed.
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The people around him treated Juha Bach with great reverence. This was a strange reaction considering the planet's history of eradicating both technology and psykers out of fear. But humans had mostly forgotten about the true reason why they had purged psykers, and no others had appeared since. They had destroyed their potential to use the Warp out of fear, and now enjoyed the fruits of their ignorance.
The people adored and almost revered Juha Bach because everyone who touched the child found that they gradually gained something which they lacked. This occurred because Yhwach possessed the power to share out his own soul. Those who touched him, who were injured or sick, received fragments of his soul, and those fragments healed the wounds and sickness that their own souls alone could not.
At the same time, as their wounds slowly healed, the various qualities of each person, their knowledge, abilities, talents, and more, were all ingrained into Juha's soul fragments that they carried until those fragments returned to Juha at the moment of the carriers' deaths.
Even though none who touched Juha lived for that long, the people continued to gather around him. In the lives of uncertainty, he was the only constant.
As the former Quincy King recovered the fragments of his soul he had shared out, his body began to regain function. All his senses returned, and he grew up into a strong young man, with eyes full of wisdom... and power.