Chapter 180: What the hell are you talking about?!
Aizen's voice remained gentle, almost courteous, but the content of his words had no such mercy.
He did not circle the truth. He did not wrap it in metaphors or soften it with half answers. He delivered everything to Ichigo in the simplest, most direct way, as if he were presenting a report.
The Hogyoku.
His experiments.
The bodies.
The souls.
The manipulations within Seireitei.
The calculations, the compromises, the hatred he buried, the loneliness he fed.
And finally, the truth of the Soul King.
Aizen had chosen this approach deliberately. He believed sincerity was the sharpest weapon. This Aizen was not the same as before, at least not in the way he moved through conversations. He did not need to disguise his intentions with a pleasant mask, because he no longer needed to gain time or position.
He needed Ichigo Kurosaki.
And Ichigo, fortunate or unfortunate, was still Ichigo. The same blazing heart. The same reckless courage. The same willingness to bleed for friends, for strangers, for the word "right," even when the world refused to define it clearly.
Aizen still considered raising Ichigo and forcing his power to bloom the best decision he had ever made. Even after falling into darkness, that belief had never wavered.
Now, with chakra offering a path that could truly crack the Soul King's system, Aizen's gaze settled on Ichigo with renewed certainty.
Not as a tool.
Not as an experiment.
But as a piece of hope he could not replace.
"I hope you will not repeat this conversation to anyone," Aizen said softly.
Ichigo sat frozen, eyes unfocused, his thoughts grinding as if his mind had been forced past its limit. His expression looked less like anger and more like a machine that had been given too many commands at once.
Aizen watched him, then continued, voice low and sincere.
"In the conventional sense, I am a villain. In the common understanding, I am a villain. I killed residents of Rukongai. I killed Shinigami. I used souls for experiments. I framed superiors and comrades."
What followed was a history of crime measured in centuries.
Aizen spoke of Seireitei as if it were a laboratory. He spoke of his own sins as if he were reading entries from a notebook. He even spoke of his interference in Ichigo's parents, the choices he forced, the circumstances he shaped.
And yet, after hearing it all, Ichigo did not explode.
He did not lunge across the table.
He did not draw a blade, because he had none, and because the blade he wanted was not in his hand, but in his chest.
He was not calm because he forgave.
He was calm because the situation was too twisted to name in one emotion.
Because Aizen had not been the one who swung the final blow.
Because some part of Aizen's intention, stripped of blood and methods, was painfully understandable.
Overthrow a rotten system.
Rebuild it.
Make the world less disgusting.
Refuse to live with someone's boot on your head.
Ichigo could not pretend those desires were alien. He could feel, with an instinct that had never failed him in battle, that the man across from him was not lying.
Even in the long hatred between Shinigami and Quincy, Aizen's choice not to kill Masaki immediately had been lenient, in its own cold way.
Ichigo understood his own blood now. He knew what he was.
A child born from Shinigami and Quincy.
A Hollow coiled within him.
A contradiction walking in human skin.
So Aizen's words, no matter how grotesque, were not fundamentally false. Ichigo had been watched. His regrets had been orchestrated. His pain had been cultivated, watered like a plant, pruned like a weapon.
He had every right to hate Aizen.
If not for him, Masaki would not have been in that place on that day.
If not for him, Isshin would not have been investigating disappearances in Karakura Town.
If not for him, his parents might never have met, never abandoned power for each other, never stepped into that chain of causes that ended in death and silence.
But the most painful fact was also the strangest.
The true cause of his mother's death had nothing to do with Aizen's direct intention.
Masaki, as a pure blood Quincy, had possessed both Blut Vene and Blut Arterie. A normal Hollow should have been incapable of killing her.
Yet on that day, someone targeted the Quincy directly and stripped them of the protection they should have had.
That someone was Yhwach.
The leader of the invisible empire.
A monster whose existence could grind the world into dust within a year and a half.
And the irony was unbearable.
The Hollow that killed Masaki was a special Hollow created and modified by Aizen. Aizen's purpose had been to fuse the power of Hueco Mundo with Shinigami, to transcend boundaries, to reach the level of the Soul King, and then destroy and reshape this rigid world into something new.
Aizen's experiment lit the fuse.
Yhwach's action detonated it.
Even worse, the fragment of Yhwach within Ichigo was Zangetsu, the presence Ichigo had trusted as his own. Zangetsu genuinely wanted Ichigo to survive, yet he had sealed away Ichigo's power, burying it for safety, for control, for fear of what would happen if it emerged at the wrong time.
When Aizen laid it all out, the web of relationships became a noose around Ichigo's mind.
Hatred existed.
But it did not know where to land.
Aizen's actions were monstrous, yet in Seireitei, captains and vice captains killing a handful of Shinigami or wandering spirits would not even be treated as a true crime. It was disgusting, but it was normal, which somehow made it worse.
Attacking his superior and comrades, yes, that was unforgivable.
Yet Aizen claimed, with that same steady tone, that if he had not struck first, he would have been exposed and eliminated before he could even move.
If Ichigo had discovered all this through whispers, through broken clues, through other people throwing his parents' past at him like a weapon, he would have been furious.
But Aizen gave it to him openly. Every ugly detail. Every rotten truth. Every piece of Ichigo's history that should have belonged to his own family.
That honesty did not cleanse the blood.
But it poisoned Ichigo's certainty.
And without certainty, anger had nowhere to stand.
By the time Aizen finished, Ichigo felt as if his brain had been stuffed with stones. Before dinner, he had been relaxed, almost happy, about to enjoy a free meal.
Now the steak looked like something he could not swallow.
So how was he supposed to count this?
If the enemy was simple, Ichigo could fight. He could strike. He could end it.
But Aizen was neither purely his mother's killer, nor purely her avenger.
He was both cause and coincidence, both hand and distance.
And the most brutal part was this.
Without Aizen coming here to speak, Ichigo suspected he might have remained ignorant for years.
For a son to learn his parents' truth from strangers was a cruelty of its own.
All his effort, killing Hollows, protecting Karakura Town, bearing responsibility like a chain around his neck, it had always been for family and friends.
Now his father had been something else entirely.
Now Ishida's bloodline carried horrors he had never imagined.
Now Soul Society, the place he had been told was peace and happiness, sounded like a prison painted gold.
Kaname Tosen's story.
The hidden hierarchy.
The way Rukia transformed the instant she saw authority.
All of it collided inside Ichigo's modern mind like waves smashing stone.
He felt swept into a whirlpool, unable to find the surface.
At last, exhausted and empty, Ichigo tried to cling to something simpler.
If he could not decide whether to hate Aizen for his mother, then he would find another reason.
A moral reason.
A reason that did not require a map of centuries and conspiracies.
He lifted his head, eyes heavy, jaw tight.
"I don't understand the Spirit King," Ichigo said. "I don't understand that truth you keep talking about. It's too far from me."
He stared at Aizen, forcing the killing intent down into his stomach like bile.
"But answer me this. Why did you choose to become a villain? If you were that strong, you could have done it differently. Why kill so many souls? Why kill so many Shinigami?"
Aizen's eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger, but in thought.
"Do you want the normal explanation," he asked, "or do you want the truth?"
"Both."
Aizen nodded once.
"From a normal perspective," he said, "a captain can handle subordinates and wandering spirits however he wishes. That includes killing them, experimenting on them, testing them, imprisoning them, isolating them, even releasing Hollows to hunt them like game. All of those things have happened."
Ichigo's breath caught.
Aizen continued, calm as ever.
"But my actions would have required approval from the Central Forty Six, then examination by the Technology Development Bureau. The process is slow. And I suspected Kisuke would never rebel against the Soul King. So I acted on my own. That is the normal reason."
Ichigo clenched his fists beneath the table.
Soul Society, a leisurely place, Rukia's earlier words echoed in his head like an insult.
Aizen paused, then spoke again.
"The real reason is simple," he said.
Ichigo waited, tense.
Aizen's eyes were steady, his voice frank, stripped of performance.
"Because I had no friends."
Ichigo blinked. "What?"
"I had no one who could help me analyze or understand. No one who could share the loneliness in my chest. Kisuke has his childhood friend, and his companions. I did not."
Aizen leaned back slightly, as if the truth weighed more than his crimes.
"I am not a noble," he said. "I am a Shinigami from Rukongai who entered the Academy through talent and effort. I climbed and climbed, thinking that eventually I would find someone to speak to. But the higher I went, the more I realized I knew nothing. I understood nothing. I only saw the ugliness of the world, and I tried to fix it with my own methods. From the beginning until now, it has always been like this."
Ichigo's mouth opened, then closed again.
"But even so," he said, voice rough, "you can't use human lives."
Aizen did not flinch.
"When it comes to killing," he replied, "you are also part of this cycle. You, who kill Hollows, are not different from us."
Ichigo's chair scraped as he stood, fury finally finding a spark.
"You're saying we were killing people for fun?"
"Yes," Aizen answered, expression calm.
Ichigo froze, stunned by the certainty.
Aizen adjusted his glasses.
"From a macro perspective," he said, "you, Ishida, and your friends were killing people in an enjoyable way. You even held a contest, didn't you? To you, Hollows are monsters. But you know what lies behind their masks. People. You were dealing with people in another state."
Ichigo's throat tightened.
"Hollows, Shinigami, humans," Aizen continued, "these are the fundamental elements of this world's structure. My actions caused a chain that contributed to your mother's death. Your actions, hunting Hollows to protect humans, also cause villagers in Rukongai to disappear forever to maintain balance."
His voice remained even, merciless in logic.
"This is the Soul King's balance. If you believe that dissipation, the loss of form, the inability to reincarnate, is death, then yes. You are killing people."
Ichigo's lips trembled, but no words came.
Aizen's gaze sharpened.
"Do you understand now? Shinigami, wandering spirits, Hollows, humans, they are different states. A human dies and becomes a wandering spirit. That spirit becomes a Hollow, or is sent to Soul Society, or becomes a Shinigami. These are variations of the same existence."
He let the words sink in like poison.
"If my creation of the Hogyoku is sin, then Ichigo Kurosaki, you are approaching me quickly. What I sought was to break this cannibalistic world."
Ichigo's breath came out unevenly.
"But I just…"
All I wanted was to protect my family.
All I wanted was peace.
What was wrong with that?
Aizen did not press him with anger. He pressed him with inevitability.
"Whether it is a Hollow, a Shinigami, or a wandering spirit," he said, "to the world, the difference is small. The only true exception is the Quincy. Hollows destroyed by Quincy simply vanish."
Ichigo's eyes widened.
Aizen's tone remained clinical.
"And after the Thousand Year Blood War, the Shinigami grew tired of allocation and regulation. They chose to eliminate the Quincy entirely. The balance stabilized."
His eyes met Ichigo's.
"Now do you understand why I say this world is built on evil?"
Ichigo sank back into his chair.
The last scraps of resistance in his expression faded, not because he accepted Aizen, but because his mind had no clean ground left to stand on.
Everything he believed in still felt right, yet the structure beneath it looked rotten to its core.
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