Bleach: My Life as a shinigami starts from Heuco Mundo

Tsubaki slept soundly.

How he hadn't been eaten during his sleep was anybody's guess

In the bliss full world of sleep, he no longer felt cold. It seemed that there was a beautiful figure accompanying him. His head lying comfortably on the figures lap, his face was the definition of content.

But the beautiful dream did not last long. Suddenly, there was a shaking and the whole world was shattered in an instant.

Tsubaki opened his eyes sleepily, and what he saw was a round face.

It was quite a startle, and he suddenly moved back a little, trying to open his eyes wide before rubbing the sleep off of them, finally seeing everything in front of him clearly.

In front of him, there were several figures standing at this moment. They were all wearing black clothes and had Katanas strapped to their waists.

They looked exactly like the man who had died at the hands of the monster before.

More importantly, they all seemed familiar to him, the people wearing black, as well as the monster from earlier, he was sure had seen them somewhere…but the question was where…

The main reason was, he was always busy with illness in the last days of his life, and he didn't even have any energy left to watch anything, so he had forgotten many things.

"&#￥@#@#…"

After seeing Tsubaki wake up, the round-faced man who had woken Tsubaki up earlier started speaking, but tsubaki couldn't understand a single word. He was talking, right? But the problem was that Tsubaki couldn't understand what he was talking about. It was the same as the words spoken by the monster before.

Tsubaki really didn't know what the other party was talking about.

The thing was, despite being Japanese, he had been born and brought up in America.

He didn't understand Japanese!! It had always been a sore subject for him, his parents had been one of the few People that had realised the horrors they had inflicted on others during the world war, thus they had tried to distance themselves from their heritage as much as possible, this included making sure their son knew english as his mother tongue and not Japanese. They would've had his name be american too, but sadly their families wouldn't have that.

Tsubaki looked at the man with a blank face.

The man continued.

Tsubaki continued to look at the person.

Staaaarrreeee…

After seeing Tsubaki's gaze, the man finally tilted his head in equal confusion, did he not understand him?

This was verified after Tsubaki also spoke and took the initiative to ask the man.

Just as Tsubaki couldn't understand what the man had said, Tsubaki asked "Can you speak English?"

The man made a blank face.

He couldn't understand either.

This was embarrassing.

The two sides didn't speak the same language, which was a big problem.

So, they had to give up the conversation temporarily.

"Captain, he looks like a person who just fell into the Hueco Mundo. Before he falls to a Hollow, shouldn't we perform a soul burial on him"

A red-haired man came up to the flat-faced man and asked.

"It's too late." said the round-faced man.

"Hmm?" The man who spoke earlier frowned slightly, his hands already clenching his sword, ready to purify Tsubaki before he completely turned into a hollow.

Realizing that his subordinate was…a little slow to say the least, the round-faced man explained, "Before waking him up, I carefully checked the battlefield here and found that although the ordinary Hollow was killed by Jiro, the Menos was not killed by him"

"What?!"

Hearing this, the red-haired man was a little surprised.

The round-faced man said in a deep voice, "Jiro must have been killed by the Cero during the battle with the Hollow. Then, his Zanpakuto was picked up by this soul. It seems that he is a special talent seeing as he awakened the Zanpakuto that had been dormant due to Jiro's death and turned back into an Asauchi, which burst out with power and killed the Menos"

The man had a thoughtful look to his face as he spoke "Which means…he's no longer a whole, he's a shinigami now"

"Him, a Shinigami?" The red-haired man looked at Tsubaki in disbelief. Was it really that easy?

"Without being taught by the Shin'ō Academy of Spiritual Arts, and without knowing any of the four techniques, can you still be called a Shinigami?"

The round-faced man sighed, turning toward the red-haired man, "It's not that only those who pass the graduation exam of the Shinō academy can become a Shinigami. In fact, before the Shinō Academy was established, the definition of a Shinigami was much broader than it is now."

"At that time, unlike now, there was no systematic teaching for souls with the qualifications of a Shinigami. In the beginning, as long as they could use spiritual power and wield a Zanpakutō, they would be called a Shinigami." The man continued to explain "The current definition of a Shinigami was only established after the establishment of the Gotei 13 and the Shinō Academy of Spiritual Arts."

"But even so, every few years, there are still some souls in Rukongai who accidentally pick up the Asauchi left by dead Shinigami, and then activate their Zanpakutō, defeat the guardians of the gate of Seireitei, and directly become Shinigami."

"Not to mention, there are many nobles in the Soul Society who have learned various Shinigami abilities through family private schools. They have not gone to the Shinō Academy to study, but they can still be called Shinigami" he hadn't expected having to explain all this to a subordinate…it was worrying. After all nobility having their own schools was a well known fact across the seireitei

His gaze fell on Tsubaki again. "Although he has not received any systematic teaching, he was able to reawaken the Asauchi. There is no doubt that he has the qualifications to be a Shinigami…No."

His gaze shifted and landed on the Menos' corpse. "It could be said, he'll be a very strong Shinigami"

The red-haired man followed the captain's gaze and looked at the massive corpse, it was a pretty awe inspiring sight.

"Then Captain, what should we do with him?" The red-haired man asked after a small while.

The round-faced man pondered for a moment.

Finally he stepped forward and made a clumsy gesture towards Tsubaki.

If language cannot communicate, gestures and the like should suffice.

After seeing the other party's gesture, Tsubaki was stunned for a moment, and then he also made a gesture, a simple nod.

After some friendly "communication", Tsubaki joined the two men's team.

For a period of time afterwards, he followed the round-faced man and slowly learned how to speak from him.

After all, this is the opponent's home court, and Tsubaki can only accommodate them.

At first, Tsubaki thought this was a different world, but when the man wrote words on the desert, Tsubaki was stunned after looking at them. He did not recognize some of the words, but some of them were exactly the same as Chinese.

Thing was, while Tsubaki never learned Japanese, due to his work he had learned to at least read Mandarin, and the characters that had been drawn were very similar to some Mandarin characters.

Combined with the way these people dresses

Now he understood.

The language being spoken was japanese.

It was no wonder that he could not understand what they said before, but honestly as an anime fan…it felt like a knife had been twisted in his heart, how had he failed to recognise not only his own traditional language but also the language of Anime!!

Never mind the almost two years gap he couldn't watch anime or the delirium he was in thanks to recent events, that shit still hurt his ego.

Moving on….

The island nation's writing system had originated from China and was modified based on Chinese and so some characters had remained unchanged, so Tsubaki was able to recognize some of it.

It will be much easier to learn a language if you know at least some of the characters.

Time passed slowly, he was gradually able to have simple communications with the other party, he finally figured out the situation in this world. Some memories that were about to be forgotten in his mind were also recalled slowly.

This was indeed the world after death.

But it is the afterlife in an anime.

(End of this chapter)

(T/L note: as the story is from China, the author made it so that the main character, Xia Mu, didn't speak Japanese and only spoke chinese, I wasn't aware of this before starting the translations so I just changed the name to japanese without thinking, so I had to think of another reason he didn't speak Japanese, and so, voila, I made him be from America with a family that was ashamed of their heritage, and having Tsubaki being someone that had learned Mandarin)