3 New World III.

Ichigo woke up after a few days, he didn't know exactly how long he had slept but he knew that it was definitely more than 24 hours. He got up and looked at his body, it was in a much better state. He started to feel hungry again, he went outside the hole he created and started to hunt.

He lived this sort of life for a month before his pangs of hunger finally stopped and he started to eat normal amounts of food again. Ichigo was slightly disturbed at how his body was reacting, it felt a little foreign like he had entered a gigai not fully attuned to his soul. He knew that his body was very durable due to his quincy and hollow powers but this was still a bit too extreme.

'It seems that I haven't yet shook off all the side effects of staying in the void for so long.' Rather he didn't really know how much staying in the void effected him. In this month, his powers returned in large parts whenever he went to sleep, by the end of it, his reiryoku was a bit stronger than the time he fought with Ginjo, but his physique was even stronger than the time he was fighting Aizen, even stronger than after his dangai training.

Finally he had some time to sit and think about the world he was in. He sat high on a tree with barely anything left of his shinigami robe. 'This is clearly not earth, not only did I see the earth being destroyed but also the environment and the species living here are too different. It can be different dimension like Hueco Mundo, but it was stable due to human world and soul society, when both of them were destroyed, I doubt other dimensions like hueco mundo could survive by themselves or rather the bigger question is whether I'm in the same universe or a completely different one.'

Ichigo was sighing to himself thinking how Ishida sometimes talked about stuff like how there were trillions of planets in just the milky way and there were trillions of galaxies hence too many planets in the universe. 'Maybe I'm in one of those planets.'

He took a deep breath and started coughing,

Ichigo : "What the hell is that smell?"

He noticed that he was the one who was emitting that stink and looked at himself. He now had his muscles back but they were compressed to an insane level, making him look much slimmer. He sat in a lotus position and started to meditate. The past week, he realized that meditation helped his body recover much faster than sleeping.

He also noticed that he could extend his senses to a frightening level by using the spiritual energy present in the atmosphere. It was only possible if the area had dense spiritual energy in it and since most of this forest was filled with dense spritual energy, it was not that hard.

After a while, he heard the sound of running water. He pinpointed the location, stood up, gathered some of the thinner and softer hides he had collected over the month and went towards it. He used shunpo and arrived at a small river in a few seconds. He took off his tattered robe and went inside the river and started to clean his body and hair. He didn't have soap or anything so he couldn't clean his robe, so he cleaned the hides and started to create some makeshift clothes for himself. He used Matter Soul Manipulation to turn his chain into many different tools and finally made himself something to wear. After cleaning himself for an hour, he looked at his reflection in the river and cut his hair before burning it. Now he looked a lot like when he finished his training in dangai.

Ichigo already knew that this forest had inhabitants and they looked very much like humans. He noticed that they had very high reiryoku compared to the people of the earth, it was like his spiritual power before he became a shinigami. They were all living together in a large city made in an even larger clearing in the forest and from what he could gather by extending his senses, they had created a functioning society.

They were living according to the medieval times of the earth. There was a castle in the middle of their city, which probably housed the king and his family. The castle had the people with the highest spiritual power he could sense, but the strongest was still very weak compared to the current him. It was about the same power he had when he first entered the soul society. He had already seen the city from a height. The people livivg there were all humans, but their skintone was very light, it was similar to the skintone of those suffering from albinism on earth. Their hair color was also similar to albino people, light pink, light yellow or fully white.

Overall it was a clean city and was very beautiful. It was surrounded by nearly 100 meter high walls made of white stones making it look even more beautiful. They had hard pavement roads with houses made of white stone and wood. With the white stones and the extremely light skintone of the people, it looked strange and surreal. There was also a big river running through the city. The thing that intrigued him the most was that all the people livivg in this city had green reiryoku, he couldn't really forget green reiryoku since ulquiorra also had green spiritual energy.

But the atmosphere of the city was very tense and the people all looked very scared. On the walls, the west side was filled with soldiers with weapons like swords, spears and bows. It was a similar feeling, he had experienced it many times. It was when you had to fight an enemy way out of your league, like when he first fought Aizen before the dangai training, when he fought with Ulquiorra after he released his final form or like when he was fighting Yhwach for the first time, it was like even if you gave up your life, it would still be meaningless. It was a very bad feeling, not knowing when you or your loved ones will die. It was the biggest reason why he ignored nearly everything else and focused so hard on gaining strength.

Just seeing others having the same feeling of helplessness and despair made him restless. He started searching the forest on the west of the city, that's probably where the danger would come from. It didn't take him long to find a giant creature. It was a fucking ugly lizard and it was big and from what he could sense, it was strong, well stronger than the people of the city, not him.

The comparison would be like when he fought Kenpachi for the first time without using his hollow powers, suicidal. The lizard was about 20 meters long and about 11 meters high. The reason for its ugliness was its lose, wrinkly, leathery, brownish skin. It had no teeth and its eyes were protruding out of its skull. Rather than claws, it had webbed feet and lastly, its tongue shot out like a frog.

Ichigo wanted to kill this thing right now but decided to wait until it was closer to the city and the people there actually see him kill the damn thing. Of course he wouldn't kill the creature in one strike, he would try to prolong the fight needlessly to make it seem like he fought with his life on the line. Ichigo wanted to go through all this trouble because.

Firstly he didn't understand their language so he couldn't communicate with them properly. Second was because of the physical differences between them. Third was that doing this may let him be accepted in their city more readily. Fourth, he didn't have any sort of currency on him. Last and most importantly, he really wanted to take a proper bath with soap and hot water and wear actual clothes.