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Chapter 59: City Of The Eldritch
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Without a word, Gin vanished into the dark horizon, spiritual pressure flickering away like a candle snuffed by wind.
Akashi exhaled slowly, lowering his blade. His body ached, muscles screaming in protest. Nothing he wasn't used to by now.
He laid a palm on his chest and let his healing Kidō surge once more. The warmth spread through him, closing wounds, straightening bones.
He glanced toward the distant forest.
It was time.
The shadows beneath his feet deepened unnaturally as he approached. The trees, now clearer in view, were made not of wood but of some strange silvery quartz.
They stretched impossibly high into the sky, thick and rigid, forming a jagged skyline above and below.
What Akashi had first seen were only their tips; massive extensions piercing the surface of Hueco Mundo's sands like thorns.
Now, he descended.
Beneath the dunes was an abyss, a realm cast in eternal gloom, where these strange crystalline trees formed an endless forest.
The Forest of Menos.
It smelled of dust and death, the faint tang of reiryoku seeping through the air like mist.
Every step he took echoed faintly. Every tree glowed faintly from within, casting ghostly silver light across the shadows.
Akashi walked onward into the deeper dark.
Beneath the ashen skies of Hueco Mundo, where the sand drank no warmth and light was a forgotten concept, Akashi wandered deeper into the Forest of Menos.
The silver-quartz trees loomed above him like petrified titans, their jagged limbs arching far into the void, piercing even the desert's upper crust.
The air was stagnant here, thick with residual spiritual pressure that suffocated the senses, as though the very realm was reluctant to allow anything living to thrive.
He moved carefully, avoiding the patrolling Gillians and the creeping Adjuchas that lurked in the deeper groves.
His purpose was not conquest, not yet. First came establishment. Foundation. Order.
And so, after several hours of weaving between pale colossi and silent predators, Akashi stopped at a clearing.
It was dark; no different from the rest of the forest; but here the terrain was level, secluded, and ideal.
Kurayami pulsed in his hand. A whisper, a song of coiled madness, moved along his thoughts.
"Let us begin," He murmured.
He plunged Kurayami's tip into the ground. At once, the spiritual air warped, and the very earth quivered.
From the contact point emerged a black sun; void in hue, impossible in nature.
Its heatless glow expanded rapidly, crawling over the forest like a plague, and from it poured spirals of writhing darkness, whispering foul incantations in tongues that didn't exist.
This was the birth of the Eldritch Realm.
The clearing convulsed. The ground split and twisted, mutating into onyx plates.
The trees nearest to the black sun shriveled and melted, replaced by towering spires of alien stone that spiraled upward like screaming souls caught in eternal agony.
Tentacles burst from the sand, rearing and twitching, some plunging back down, others hardening into barricades or twisted architecture.
The City of the Eldritch had begun to form.
And then came the workers.
From the shadow of Akashi's feet, they emerged in a chittering swarm. Bone-thin horrors with too many arms, eyeless faces poured out like a tide of famine.
These were his worker horrors, servants bound to a Hive Mind powered by the Hive Queen.
Despite being born to the Hive Queen instead of Kurayami directly, they still functioned like true horrors of his Zanpakuto, under his absolute control.
He raised a hand.
The swarm spread.
Some began erecting walls; hulking ramparts lined with chitinous spikes and churning tendrils that shifted as though alive.
Others carved paths in the quartzified ground, laying cables made from the nerves of the forest itself.
The Hive Mind worked in perfect synchronization, building laboratories, watchtowers, and even gardens of bone and sinew where cursed plants would later grow.
They built it all in no more than a few hours, miraculous, not them but the Eldritch Realm.
That's why they were quick. It's through it that they constructed the City Of The Eldritch, designed a while ago, but only put into practice now.
From the belly of Gluttony, Akashi released the next phase.
He willed the massive black ribcage-mouth to open wide, and from the shadowy portal within poured equipment; glass chambers, tools, books, scrolls, and other devices that shall be needed.
All had been stored within Gluttony's endless void-stomach for this very day.
The workers caught and sorted them with surgical precision, placing each tool in its designated spot.
Then came the horrors.
First, the Hat Man, a thin humanoid cloaked in shadows, his face obscured by a wide-brimmed black hat and a veil of darkness.
He couldn't speak, but he knew what to do, simply stepping into one shadow and disappearing into another, phasing through the forest to scout the far reaches of Akashi's territory.
He was weak; physically fragile; but his ability to jump between shadows made him effectively immortal in the right terrain.
Next came the colossal Zenaserisu, a black, skeletal wyvern with wings of torn night and eyes that held no light, only the memory of it.
His claws dug into the boundary of the city as Akashi leaped onto his back, rising above the newborn kingdom.
From up high, Akashi surveyed the city's borders while Kurayami, now transformed into an obsidian longbow, settled in his hands.
His arrows whistled through the air, silent and merciless.
Hollow after hollow fell from afar, skewered and disintegrated before their corpses could hit the ground.
Far beyond the outer edge, the behemoth known as Cthulhu slithered and crushed through the trees.
His form, now matured even further, dwarfed the Gillians beneath him; his bulk a writhing mass of appendages and viscous darkness.
Tentacles coiled around the gigantic hollows, dragging them toward a central maw that pulsed with incomprehensible hunger.
He was on a rampage, a walking calamity.
Meanwhile, Gluttony had left Akashi's shadow, his ribcage open and mouth stretched grotesquely wide, even by his own standards.
He consumed indiscriminately; hollow corpses, dead trees, shimmering sand, even chunks of the silver-quartz trees.
Everything devoured was reprocessed and redirected to the workers for study.
And above them all, perched on the city's highest wall, the Dullahan stood watch.
Mounted on a monstrous nightmare steed, his body was clad in blackened armor, his detached head resting on his hip.
His gaze swept the dark expanse with undead precision. Every time his mount exhaled, it released clouds of soul-crushing despair.
Then came the Nuckelavee, standing on the opposite side.
When all was set, Akashi finally descended.
He walked through the twisted avenues, beneath black arches made from hollow spines, past lanterns made from severed eyeballs that glowed with inner darkness.
The city pulsed with life; his life.
He entered the central spire, the Heart of the Eldritch City, and found himself in a chamber where warm water steamed faintly.
The Eldritch Realm gave him this too; a place to refresh, to rejuvenate. He shed his robes and stood under the cascading black shower, the oily substance rinsing away the blood and sweat of the day.
Steam rose, veiling his pale skin in shadow. For the first time in what felt like days, he let his muscles relax. He closed his eyes.
He never felt so relaxed in Soul Society. That place was weird. It was Tokinada's home, so he never felt truly safe.
"But what's with the worker horrors' sense of beauty?" Akashi muttered with twitching lips. The City now feels like a horror home.
There were eyeballs everywhere, spines, and skulls, "I should definitely make it more artistic. The horror should stick to the City walls, but within should be comfy... That should help with the demons in my mind."
Later, he emerged dressed in fresh robes of woven horror silk, regal and strong.
His steps echoed as he entered the throne room; a vast black cathedral of howling spires and echoing voids, where his throne of jagged obsidian and dark blades nailed upon it.
He sat.
Before him stood the fruits of his labors. His horrors, his inventions, his kingdom.
The Eldritch City.
And above them all, the black sun continued to pulse, a heart for the world he had created.
He exhaled deeply, content.
"Kurayami," He said aloud, smiling faintly, "I truly love you."
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