Eighty‑seven years.
That number feels strange when I let it settle in my thoughts. In my old life, eighty‑seven years would have been an entire lifetime. Here, it is merely a chapter—one defined not by conquest or catastrophe, but by patience. By restraint. By watching the world move forward without me.
I have remained in hiding all this time.
Not because I lack the strength to act, but because I finally understand the cost of acting too soon.
From my sanctuary—hidden behind layers of misdirection, wards, and narrative masking—I watch the world through scrying mirrors and distant spells. I never look directly. Never too often. Power leaves ripples, and ripples invite attention. Instead, I observe intermittently, carefully, like a scholar peering through cracked glass.
The First Spinjitzu Master still lives.
That alone is humbling.
He has changed, though. Time has worn him down in ways battle never could. His power remains immense, but it is quieter now, more deliberate. He spends less time waging war against darkness and more time shaping balance—guiding, teaching, preparing the world for an age without him. I see it in the way he moves, the way he pauses before acting, the way he looks at what he has created as if already mourning its eventual loss.
He knows he cannot last forever.
The Overlord, by contrast, refuses to accept such truths.
I have watched him reform, fragment by fragment, cycle by cycle. Darkness clings to him like a curse that cannot decide whether it wants to die or dominate. Each return is slower than the last, more calculated, more insidious. He has learned from his failures—especially from me, though I doubt he consciously realizes it.
He schemes now instead of charges.
That worries me more than his armies ever did.
Over the decades, Ninjago itself has changed profoundly. Species that once warred now coexist, not perfectly, but persistently. New cultures have risen atop the bones of old ones. Cities have expanded. Myths have softened into legends. Legends into stories told to children who no longer believe they could be real.
That disbelief is powerful.
Magic here has thinned—not vanished, but diffused. It hides beneath technology, ritual, tradition. Spinjitzu remains, but it is no longer a singular force. It is becoming… inherited. Taught. Standardized.
Predictable.
I have spent decades studying this evolution.
Ninjago's magic is stabilizing. Where once reality bent easily beneath will and belief, now it resists. The world is growing roots. That makes godlike interventions harder—but subtle ones easier. Influence works better than domination. Ideas spread faster than armies.
I have adapted accordingly.
My own magic has changed in response. Forbidden spells no longer scream when I invoke them; they whisper. I have rewritten their casting matrices using Ninjago's narrative framework, binding their effects to plausibility, coincidence, and delayed consequence. A spell no longer needs to explode to be devastating. Sometimes it only needs to be accepted.
I rarely move my physical body anymore. When I do, it is under layers of disguise so natural even I forget what I truly look like. Age has ceased to matter. My form reflects expectation rather than reality. To some, I am an elderly scholar. To others, a wandering mystic. To most, I am nothing worth remembering.
That is by design.
Despite my caution, I have not been idle. My mind magic ensures that memory is no burden; every book I have read, every spell I have studied, every battle I have observed remains perfectly intact. I revisit moments from decades ago as if they happened yesterday, dissecting them with the clarity of distance.
The First Spinjitzu Master's greatest weakness is not power.
It is legacy.
Everything he does is to prepare the world for his absence. That means successors. Systems. Order. Stability. All admirable. All exploitable. A world built to survive without its creator is one that can be guided—redirected—once the creator is gone.
And he will be gone.
Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon enough.
The Overlord, meanwhile, grows impatient. I sense it in the cadence of his reappearances, in the increasingly desperate gambits he attempts. He hates waiting. He hates subtlety. Every century that passes without his victory feels, to him, like an insult carved into existence.
I smile at that.
Because I have learned to wait.
There are whispers now—tiny, fragmented rumors drifting through the world. Stories of old magic stirring. Of shadows that think. Of a presence that watches but never intervenes. I did not start these rumors directly, but I did not stop them either.
The world is beginning to remember that not all powers announce themselves.
Eighty‑seven years in, and I am stronger than I have ever been—not in raw output, but in control, precision, and understanding. I no longer seek to stand above gods. I seek to stand between them.
When I finally step out of hiding, it will not be as an enemy charging into battle.
It will be as a constant the world has already accepted.
And whether the First Spinjitzu Master or the Overlord realizes it or not…
The age they are preparing foris not the one they expect.