"Sounds pretty tempting."
Beckman narrowed his eyes, forcing himself out of his brief shock. Then he suddenly realized something and complained, "Hey, wait. Haven't I already surrendered? Isn't that why I'm here looking for an easy job? What are you trying to sell me here?"
"See? That's exactly why this old man is recommending it to you."
Borsalino laughed, casually raised a hand and lightly patted the shoulder of Beckman's soul.
Whoosh!
His half-transparent body instantly turned into a streak of faint light, dragged by an invisible force as he plunged headfirst back into his stiff physical body.
"Gasp!"
Beckman sucked in a sharp breath. The moment vision returned to his eyes, his whole body staggered.
The feeling of fullness and solidity as his soul returned to his body instantly covered his back with a layer of cold sweat.
"Come on. The work over at the Hall of Reincarnation in Hell is so easy you can sleep until you wake up naturally, and the pay is ridiculously high. There's no better retirement job than this."
Borsalino turned around without a care, leading the pale-faced Beckman and the dumbstruck Hongo through the pitch-black torii gate.
"Mm!"
The instant he crossed the gate, Beckman felt a stab of pain in his ears, as if he had dived into the deep sea.
When he adjusted and opened his eyes again, the world had changed.
"Where is this?"
Beckman frowned and forced the words out through his throat.
"What a barren, gloomy place."
Hueco Mundo, though now fully merged into this world, still retained its original desolate landscape.
The sky overhead was pale white.
The ground stretched endlessly with gray-white sand, while the air was filled with a rotten stillness.
In the distance stood several dead trees like crystal glass, lonely and silent, giving off a faint cold glow.
It wasn't that it couldn't be transformed. Quite the opposite, Hueco Mundo's current purpose was to preserve this bleak and chilling atmosphere.
Its laws were death and judgment.
Nor were the Arrancar imprisoned here. Every month they had fixed vacations to visit the normal world for leisure and shopping. They enjoyed plenty of freedom.
"Compared to the ground, shouldn't you really be looking at what's in the sky?"
Hongo swallowed and tremblingly pointed up at the pale heavens.
Beckman followed his finger.
His eyes, which had witnessed countless storms, widened completely once again.
Across the boundless pale sky, countless, countless specks of gentle white light were being born from the empty void in every direction like dandelion seeds, drifting together toward the center of this world.
It was an ocean of souls.
Beckman's eyesight far surpassed Hongo's.
He could clearly see that among the tens of thousands, even countless, streams of souls, some would suddenly vanish midway like candles burning out.
Others would be led away halfway by Shinigami dressed in black robes.
In the end, only about half of the souls successfully gathered at the center of this world.
There stood the former Las Noches, now remodeled by Rosse into the Hall of Reincarnation.
"These... are all souls that just died?"
Hongo's face turned pale. As a doctor, he understood the weight of death better than anyone.
"How... how can there be so many?"
"Oh, that."
Borsalino blinked and explained casually, "The world under His Majesty Rosse's rule now has several billion people. At the current birth rate, roughly four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand babies are born every day.
"So, around one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people die every day for various reasons."
"On average, two people die every second. So what you're seeing now is actually the slow season."
"N-No, that's not right."
Hongo stared at the endless stream of souls in the sky, his brows furrowed.
"Two people per second means just over a hundred per minute, and at most a few thousand per hour. But here, just the souls I can see already number well over ten thousand every minute."
"Heh! That's because a large portion of them aren't human souls at all."
Beckman spoke softly from beside him, exposing the truth in a single sentence.
"Look carefully. Their forms are all different. There are birds, fish, wild beasts, and plenty of creatures I've never even seen before."
He took a deep breath of the cold, lifeless air, his voice trembling slightly.
As a stronger S-rank, he saw much more clearly than Hongo.
And precisely because he saw so clearly, his heart was completely filled with a terror that transcended civilization.
The terrifying thing about this reincarnation system wasn't merely that it accepted every human soul.
It meant that in this world, whether humans, Sea Kings, beasts, birds, every living thing, the moment it died, its soul would be brought into this hellish cycle of reincarnation governed by the World Government.
In other words... Rosse and his World Government had truly and completely taken control of the life and death of every living creature in this world.
This wasn't even on the same level anymore.
This was merely a tiny branch of the World Government's system, yet Beckman already felt despair.
He didn't even dare imagine what kind of earth-shattering shock awaited him if one day he truly entered the real core of the World Government, the Holy Land, Mary Geoise.
He quietly glanced at Hongo beside him, whose face was equally pale.
The former ship's doctor was biting his lip, his forehead covered in cold sweat.
Beckman knew Hongo had chosen the wisest path.
As for the path he himself had chosen, that of an undercover agent, it was the stupidest gamble imaginable.
Right now, he wished he had never come.
The more he learned, the more hopeless and powerless he felt, until even the desire to resist was fading.
"Alright, alright, you two. Stop standing around in a daze."
Borsalino hooked an arm around each of their necks without the slightest politeness and dragged them forward with a grin.
"Let's keep going. I'll show you around and let you experience daily life working in Hell. If you still don't like the atmosphere after the tour, this old man can find you another job in the future."
"Since you're already here, I'll make sure you're taken care of."
Beckman didn't resist. He let Borsalino pull him along.
The cigar at the corner of his mouth, which had long since gone out, was unconsciously bitten so hard that a deep tooth mark appeared on it.
.
.
.
The tour through Hell actually didn't take very long.
But for Beckman, those few short hours were longer and more horrifying than everything he had experienced over decades drifting across the seas.
Under Borsalino's guidance, Beckman paid his respects to the ten supreme beings who governed the entirety of Hell's reincarnation.
The Ten Espada, Yama Kings.
According to Kizaru's joking explanation, these ten had once been the supreme fighting force of Las Noches in another world conquered by His Majesty Rosse, known as the Espada.
They had once been the sharpest blades in Rosse's hand.
Just how sharp those blades were, Beckman couldn't fully comprehend.
From several hundred meters away, he cautiously stole a glance at one of them using Observation Haki.
She appeared to be a gentle-looking woman without the slightest trace of killing intent.
Just that one glance.
Just that casual exchange of eyes.
Beckman felt as though an invisible giant hand had ripped his soul out of his body and slammed it onto the edge of a razor-sharp blade.
At the time, he hadn't even had time to scream before all strength left his body and he collapsed to his knees.
Too powerful.
That was no longer a lifeform on the same level.
Forget fighting back, even standing in front of her, Beckman couldn't summon the thought of resistance.
Like an ant facing an elephant that could crush it at any moment.
Even the thought of running away seemed utterly ridiculous.
And there were ten such beings.
Aside from the shock, Beckman gained plenty from the rest of the visit.
During the remainder of the tour, Borsalino gave him plenty of face and thoroughly explained the entire operating system of Hell's reincarnation.
The highest governing body of Hell consisted jointly of the ten Yama Kings and five Deputy Wardens of Hell.
Beckman didn't meet the latter personally, but judging from Kizaru's smug hints, those five Deputy Wardens were in no way inferior to the Yama Kings.
Fifteen of them.
At least fifteen SS-rank powerhouses.
And this was only Hell's reincarnation system, not even the World Government's core.
Beckman didn't dare imagine how many monsters the World Government truly possessed.
Over the past ten-odd years, they had stood still while the World Government had never stopped advancing.
Beneath those fifteen supreme rulers of Hell was a massive organization numbering in the tens of thousands, composed of Shinigami and Arrancar.
They all wore black robes, Zanpakuto hanging at their waists, spread across every corner of the world, specializing in guiding souls.
According to Borsalino, if Beckman was willing to stay in Hell, then with his S-rank strength and past experience, he could be made a squad captain.
The position wasn't especially high in Hell, but the hidden benefits were quite good.
If he and his friends or family died in the future, they could be guaranteed a good reincarnation.
Their memories would definitely be erased, since his family and friends were all rebels, but at least they could be reborn as humans and wouldn't disappear halfway through.
After asking around, Beckman also learned what it meant for souls to be led away or disappear halfway.
Hell operated according to its own set of laws, and those laws were built upon the World Government.
Anyone who had harmed the World Government during life, even if in their previous life they had merely been a mosquito that bit the arm of an ordinary World Government citizen once, after entering Hell, they would be erased by an invisible force halfway to the Hall of Reincarnation, their souls completely destroyed and erased from heaven and earth forever.
Meanwhile, World Government citizens truly remained superior even within Hell's reincarnation.
Every person's ID card was also linked to their soul imprint.
In other words, as a member of the World Government, your worst possible reincarnation was still as a human.
As for those outside the World Government, or ordinary living creatures, what they were reborn as depended entirely on luck.
And those souls who were taken away midway were people who had purchased special services.
Among them, the lowest tier allowed you to choose your family background in your next life, whether to be born as the child of a wealthy merchant or into a noble family.
The middle tier let you retain your memories through reincarnation.
The highest tier even allowed you to customize your next life.
Of course, the choice worked both ways.
A soul awakened during the third month of pregnancy. Only mothers who voluntarily applied at their local World Government office after becoming pregnant and willingly accepted a special reincarnated soul would be included in this system.
In reality, those who were truly rich and powerful enough to afford such privileges had usually arranged their next reincarnation while they were still alive.
After hearing the entire terrifying process, from life to death, then from death back to lif, Beckman stood for a long, long time beside the endless road outside the Hall of Reincarnation, a road formed from flowing souls.
He held a newly lit cigar between his lips but didn't take a single puff.
At last, he suddenly found it all incredibly absurd, to the point that he almost wanted to laugh.
This whole system the World Government had created was just a game, nothing more than one of Rosse's bad hobbies.
Whether low, middle, or high tier, they were all just ordinary beings struggling at the bottom.
Once they joined this endless cycle of reincarnation, they would only keep wanting to continue it.
As for those who retained memories from previous lives, Beckman guessed that even after a hundred lifetimes, Rosse still wouldn't accept them into the true upper ranks.
Because those people had already become fixed. They could never break free of that framework.
The World Government had no shortage of strength. If someone couldn't meet the standard in their first life, giving them hundreds or thousands more years would still be pointless.
Because the true upper echelon of the World Government didn't have to worry about lifespan in the first place.
In fact, they were immortal in the truest sense.
They couldn't even die, so where would reincarnation come into it?
He had also learned that if they died in another world, their souls wouldn't be drawn here.
Then what kind of power could possibly kill the World Government's upper ranks in this world?
At any rate, Beckman couldn't think of one.
Maybe if the Four Emperors and the NEO Marine gathered together and launched another surprise attack on the Holy Land Mary Geoise, they might be able to inflict some casualties?
But even if they died, it wouldn't matter. They had no means of harming souls.
The current World Government could restore someone even after death from the soul state, or simply let them continue existing as a spirit.
Even if they somehow succeeded in the surprise attack, the World Government's casualties would still be zero.
But if the World Government retaliated, they would probably be wiped out on the spot.
Besides, whether they could even carry out the surprise attack was still uncertain.
In Beckman's estimation, being intercepted before they got there was by far the most likely outcome.
How were they supposed to win this?
Even if Luffy truly became Nika and really possessed Rosse's level of strength, he still couldn't kill someone twice.