The winds shifted over the rocky ridge where Fang Yuan stood.
It was early morning, and the mist curled through the mountain pass like a living thing. Below him, the Earth Kingdom stretched endlessly, a canvas of green and gold. His camp was modest—a cracked ceramic pot for tea, a few borrowed tools from an abandoned traveler's shrine, and a rolled-up map smudged with dirt and sweat.
Today marked his second month since waking in this strange world. Two months of trial. Two months of solitude.
Two months of silence.
And he still didn't understand why he was here.
At first, he'd believed it was some cosmic mistake. But no mistake grants you the power to bend the elements. No accident makes the water swirl around your fingers, or the stones hum when you walk. And yet—he knew this world. Its people. Its stories. As if they'd been burned into his memory from books and screens, not born from experience.
And now… they felt realer than anything he remembered of his old life.
Fang Yuan closed his eyes, drawing a slow breath.
The air was thin. Cold. Crisp.
His hands pressed together, focusing on the flow of energy in his chest.
Earth was the easiest. It answered him like a loyal dog—solid, unmoving, ever-present. He could move boulders now, split rocks, even sense vibrations through his soles if he stood still long enough.
Water came next. He had practiced near a glacial stream three valleys away, learning to guide the flow around his limbs. But it was slippery. Fickle. It resisted if he tried to control it. He had to ask, not demand. That alone had taken weeks to grasp.
Fire… he was still afraid of fire.
He'd summoned it only once since that night. It had burned too hot, too fast. Like it wanted out of him more than he wanted it released. He hadn't tried again since.
And air…
Nothing.
No matter how much he meditated, jumped, twisted, begged, nothing came. The wind remained wind. Untouched. Aloof. Watching.
It gnawed at him.
In the forests below the ridge, a hunter knelt by a disturbed patch of moss.
It was too clean. No blood. No signs of prey. But the earth beneath was… shaped. Not naturally. Not weathered. Formed.
A perfectly circular pit.
"Someone passed through here," the hunter murmured to his wolf-badger companion. "But this wasn't normal. It looks like…"
He didn't finish.
Instead, he stood and turned toward the nearest outpost. The Earth Kingdom army had been asking about "unusual phenomena." Spirit disruptions. Strange elemental activity.
He hadn't planned to get involved.
But this…
This felt different.
Fang Yuan found the cavern just before noon.
A jagged tear in the rock face, hidden beneath moss and twisted bramble. From the outside, it looked like nothing. But something pulled him toward it.
A feeling. A low hum. Like a heartbeat.
Inside, the air turned cool, damp, old. Echoes danced against the walls. Light from a hole above spilled across ancient carvings. He approached, brushing away the dust with calloused fingers.
Symbols.
Earth. Water. Fire. Air.
All arranged around a single circle, etched in gold.
Not the Avatar symbol.
Older.
Rougher.
At the center, a single inscription—carved not in any language he recognized, but one he somehow understood:
"The one who bends without spirit, shall bend the spirit in turn."
Fang Yuan stepped back, breath catching in his throat.
What did it mean?
The answer didn't come. But something else did.
A sound. From deeper within.
He turned—instinct roaring to life. A presence emerged from the shadows.
At first, he thought it was a person.
But no… this creature was too tall. Too narrow. Its limbs too long, like willow branches. Its face was blank—white like porcelain, with no eyes. No mouth.
Just the faint, golden glow of spirit energy flickering where eyes should be.
Fang Yuan froze.
The spirit did not speak. It simply raised a hand, palm outward.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then Fang Yuan felt it.
Pain.
His chest throbbed. His limbs tensed. Something inside him—some coil of energy—resisted whatever the spirit was doing.
And the spirit recoiled.
A flicker of alarm—maybe even fear—crossed its blank face.
Fang Yuan fell to one knee, gasping.
"What… the hell was that?"
But the spirit was already gone, vanished like mist into stone.
Left behind, only silence and the lingering hum of something ancient.
That night, he returned to camp later than usual, more aware than ever of how watched he was.
Not just by humans.
By the world itself.
He sat near his fire—small, controlled. This time, the flame obeyed. It burned steady, gentle, as if the encounter in the cavern had taught him something he couldn't quite name yet.
He pulled the map from his bag and stared at it, eyes tracing the lines to the northern coast.
If he was going to learn what he was, if he was going to understand why the spirits feared him, he needed knowledge.
Real knowledge.
The libraries of Ba Sing Se.
The sages of the Northern Water Tribe.
The scrolls hidden deep beneath the Fire Nation.
He would travel. He would learn. Not just bending—but balance, history, consequence.
Because something inside him wasn't normal.
And the world already knew it.
He folded the map and stood.
Tomorrow, he'd move west. There was an abandoned Earth Kingdom shrine in that direction, said to house relics from before the Hundred Year War.
Maybe it would have answers.
Or maybe more questions.
Either way… the journey had only just begun.