Thread:Silver-Haired Seireitou/@comment-31287098-20180202112744/@comment-2089817-20180204063314

I'm a bit under the weather, so I don't know if I'll be able to touch upon all the points I would want to in answering this, but I'll give it my best shot.

When you boil down the realms, they go like this: the use of existing ki (Kiai), the understanding and application of ki (Kiroku), and the changing and molding of ki (Kihaku). Hibiki's a bit... out there, so I'll leave that out for now.

In classic martial arts, people know of kiai as the yell Karate students do during drills and forms. And while this is an extreme oversimplification, it's not entirely inaccurate. Kiai is composed of the words "Ki" and "Ai", which is often translated interchangeably with the term Aiki, as "Joining Energy". So, for example, the yell karate students do, that's a yell meant to unite the spirit with one's mind and body through a fierce roar that brings forth all of one's might to the surface. That's what it's supposed to be, anyways.

Kiai, the realm itself, is about how one is able to bring together their mind, body, and spirit (reiryoku/reiatsu) together to produce results. But it goes beyond just self-unification. Unifying with the opponent during battle, learning to sync your mind, body, and spirit with theirs, and even learning to sync up your breath to nature and the world around you. That would be the most simple way to explain what Kiai is. It's all about how you bring together everything you are, while learning how to interact with the world and people around you.

So, yes, a great mastery over Kiai can produce tremendous increases in physical capabilities. It can even result in quickening reaction time too, because through Kiai training, the mind and body are reaching closer union, so messages traveling from sensations of the body to the mind (aka, reflexes and reactions) would be faster, so you end up with faster reaction speeds. That whole shabang.

Now, would they become a "monster", very possibly. Their strength would be remarkable, since a mastery of Kiai at the most basic level would suggest mastery of the center of gravity. Imagine being a guy weighing 200 pounds, and being able to completely channel all of that weight through an outlet as small as the knuckles via a punch. Now, imagine that for a setting like Bleach, where characters already have tremendous reiatsu pressure exerted around them, and being able to perfectly channel all of that tremendous force in a single strike. Greater levels of Kiai mastery could result in things like qing gong (weightlessness).

There really is no telling what the limits are in how to apply Kiai, so long as it fits with the definition I've provided before. That's the thing I tried to do with these realms, they each have infinite potential.