The first thing I felt when I woke up was heat.
Not ordinary heat, either. This was the kind that pressed down on me like a living thing, as if the sun had decided I personally offended it. My skin burned. My lips were cracked. Sand clung to my face, my clothes, the inside of my mouth. When I forced my eyes open, the glare above was so bright it made them water instantly, and for a few long seconds all I could do was squint up into the white blaze of the sky and wonder if I had somehow woken up inside an oven.
When my vision finally settled, I pushed myself upright and looked around. Desert. Nothing but desert. Waves of sand stretched in every direction, broken only by enormous spikes of stone jutting from the ground like the teeth of some buried beast. The air itself seemed to shimmer. Even the wind, what little there was, felt hot enough to peel skin.
Then the memories hit.
I sucked in a sharp breath and nearly toppled over again as they crashed through my head, one after another, so sudden and complete it felt like somebody had swung a hammer into the back of my skull. My name was Jinx. No last name. Never had one. I was an orphan, and the orphanage that had been the closest thing I had ever known to a home shut its doors when I was ten. After that, I was thrown out into the street and left to survive however I could. Life was cruel, but cruelty had a way of teaching fast. I learned to steal food without getting caught, learned which alleys were safe to sleep in, learned how to run, how to lie, how to watch people's hands instead of their smiles.
I also learned that something was very wrong with me.
From the time I was little, strange things happened whenever I was in danger. If older kids cornered me, the wind would kick up and throw dust into their eyes or shove them off balance just long enough for me to bolt. If I was being chased, shadows seemed to bend around me, swallowing me into spaces I shouldn't have been able to hide in. More than once I slipped into darkness smaller than my own body and somehow vanished while people were staring right at me. At first I thought I was cursed. Later, after enough fear and enough trial and error, I realized what I really had.
Wind.
Darkness.
Two elemental powers, and one of them was a problem.
Wind had always felt easy. Clean. Alive. It listened when I reached for it, flowed around me like an old friend, and even when I failed, it failed gently. Darkness was different. Darkness obeyed too, but every time I used too much of it, something in my head shifted. My thoughts got sharper, meaner, heavier. Small grudges grew teeth. Bad ideas started sounding reasonable. I understood early on that if I lost myself in it, there might not be enough of me left to come back. So I focused on wind. I trained it, hid it, refined it, and over the years I got good—good enough to call myself a master, even if there were still things about it I didn't understand. Darkness, I kept on a tighter leash. I learned enough to use it when necessary, but never enough to let it start using me.
Then came the most important memory of all, the one that explained why I was half-dead in a desert.
Before this moment—before waking here—I had been following an old map in search of a katana. Not just any katana, but a relic tied to a war from the age of the First Spinjitzu Master himself, a weapon born from the aftermath of one of his battles with an ancient evil. The scroll describing its location had been damaged and incomplete, but clear enough to point the way. So I came to the desert.
And the desert killed me.
Or rather, it killed the Jinx who had been here before I woke up in his body.
I sat there for a while, letting that truth settle. This body was mine now, but the quest wasn't originally. The previous Jinx had crossed all this way chasing that blade and paid for it with dehydration, exhaustion, and a little too much confidence in his own ability to survive the sun. I could almost respect it. Almost.
I pushed myself fully to my feet, swaying only a little, and breathed out slowly. "Well," I muttered to nobody, my voice cracked and dry, "that was embarrassing."
The wind answered first.
It curled around me in a thin, cooling spiral, brushing the sweat from my skin and taking some of the bite out of the heat. Instantly, my head cleared a little. I closed my eyes and let it gather properly, wrapping me in a light current that cooled my body and pulled at the sand around my ankles. Better. Not good, but better.
The desert had claimed one Jinx already. It wasn't taking me too.
I scanned the area and spotted a piece of worn parchment lying half-buried nearby, pinned in place by a little ridge of sand. I went to it, crouched, and brushed it clean. The map. The old ink had faded, the edges were frayed, and one corner had nearly rotted away, but the key marks were still visible. There was an X in the middle of what looked like a cluster of mountains, and just northwest of it, off by itself, a lone mountain standing apart from the rest like a marker. I looked up, narrowed my eyes against the light, and found it on the horizon.
There.
So that was my direction.
I folded the map carefully, tucked it away, and started walking.
The first stretch was miserable. Even with wind constantly circling me to cool my skin and keep the worst of the heat off, the sun made every step feel heavier than the last. Sand shifted under my feet. My throat stayed dry no matter how much I swallowed. My clothes clung to me, and sweat kept trying to run into my eyes. Still, I kept going, letting the wind guide my pace and shave some of the resistance from the air in front of me. I wasn't foolish enough to sprint through a desert when I'd only just inherited a dead body, but I moved faster than any normal person would have been able to.
Hours passed. The lone mountain slowly slid behind me. The desert remained endless right up until the moment it suddenly didn't.
By the time the sun began dipping toward the horizon, painting the sky in streaks of red and purple, I reached the cluster of mountains marked on the map. What I found there should not have existed.
After miles of scorched sand and dead air, I stepped into a place where sakura trees bloomed in the dark.
For a long moment, I simply stood there and stared. Pale blossoms glowed softly beneath the growing night, their petals drifting through the breeze like scraps of moonlight. The stone all around them was ancient and weathered, yet the scene carried a quiet beauty so delicate and unreal it felt almost sacred. It was the kind of place that made noise feel disrespectful.
A narrow passage wound between the mountains. I followed it, my footsteps soft against the stone, the scent of cherry blossoms replacing the smell of dust and heat. The path twisted for several minutes before it finally opened, and when it did, I stopped dead.
A hidden valley spread out before me.
At its heart lay a vast lake so still and clear it reflected the moon like polished glass. The water was deep enough that the bottom disappeared into darkness, and on one side I could see it feeding a waterfall that spilled silver in the night. Rising out of and around the lake were ancient structures—elegant, carved, and impossibly old—resting on narrow spans of stable ground and linked together by stone walkways and wooden bridges. They looked less built than placed, as if an entire forgotten civilization had been arranged carefully over the water and then abandoned by time.
I walked forward slowly, my earlier exhaustion fading beneath a growing sense of awe. The arches were delicate. The carvings were intricate. The wooden bridges creaked softly beneath my weight, and the lake below mirrored every movement in ripples of moonlight. The wind carried the rustle of sakura leaves and the faint scent of clean water. After the brutality of the desert, the entire place felt like stepping into a dream.
And somewhere in that dream, the sword was waiting.
I crossed one of the bridges toward the largest central structure, my hand resting unconsciously near where a sword would have hung if I had one. The air here was different. Not heavier exactly, but charged. Ancient. There was power sleeping beneath the silence of the place, and even before I found proof, I knew it had to be connected to the relic.
That certainty only deepened when I found the bodies.
The first structure I entered held several corpses sprawled across the floor in varying stages of decay. Their clothes, armor, and strange bearing matched what I recognized as mist nobles from old tales of Sekiro—eerie, noble-looking things, now reduced to twisted husks and hollow eyes. I stared at them for a moment, then kept moving. The dead were unfortunate, but not unusual. The more I explored, the more of them I found. Okami warriors lay scattered along the paths, near pillars, half-collapsed beside railings and stairs, all of them long dead. Whatever had happened here had happened a very long time ago, and it had happened brutally.
At last I arrived at a large open gate, grand enough that even in ruin it carried authority. The Floor Viewing Gate, if memory served. Inside, leaning against a wall with his body gone limp and brittle with time, sat the corpse of what looked like the Okami leader. One of his hands still clutched an ornate scroll.
"Well," I said quietly as I approached, "if you're not using it."
I eased the parchment from his fingers and unrolled it with care. The script was old, but readable enough. What I found made my eyes widen.
Three techniques.
The first described the art of imbuing a weapon with an element, allowing a blade to become an extension of a wielder's elemental power rather than just a sharpened piece of metal. The second outlined a way to generate lightning—not true lightning in the same overwhelming sense as the Elemental Master of Lightning, but a derived technique taught long ago through principles passed down from the First Spinjitzu Master. The third described lightning redirection, a method of drawing dangerous energy through the body and guiding it safely back out rather than being destroyed by it.
I read it once. Then again.
And then I got an idea.
"Can darkness become lightning?" I asked out loud, staring at the scroll like it had personally challenged me.
It sounded insane. Which meant it was worth trying.
An old tale from another world drifted up in my mind, one about Uncle Iroh explaining the movement of lightning—not as rage alone, but as a force to be guided through the body with calm precision. Fire becoming lightning was one thing. Darkness becoming lightning was something else entirely. But principles were principles, and if elemental power could be shaped, adapted, and transformed, then maybe I had a chance.
I found a secluded spot near the lake and sat cross-legged on the stone. The water shimmered quietly beside me. Petals drifted past. Somewhere far off, wood creaked in the breeze. I closed my eyes and reached inward.
Darkness answered at once.
It was cold where wind was free, dense where wind was light, and it coiled through me like ink through water. I focused on it, not as a void this time but as stored potential. Compression. Friction. Release. I imagined it changing state, turning violent and sharp, crackling with force.
The first attempt exploded in my face.
I jerked backward with a yelp, smoke rising off my hands. "Okay," I muttered, blinking rapidly. "Rude."
The second attempt was worse. The third made my arm spasm. The fourth nearly knocked me into the lake.
Still, failure told me something every time. Darkness resisted transformation, but not completely. It could be agitated. Forced into movement. Driven until it started to hum differently beneath my skin. So I kept going, using the redirection principles from the scroll to guide the energy through specific paths in my body, keeping it from building too chaotically in one place. Again and again I reached for that edge between control and catastrophe.
Hours passed.
Night thinned into pre-dawn gray, and by the time the first light began creeping over the horizon, I was exhausted, burned, and grinning like an idiot.
A thin, jagged bolt of black-violet lightning danced in my palm.
It was small. Unstable. More of a savage spark than a true bolt. But it was real. Dark lightning. I could feel the nature of it immediately—sharper and more corrosive than ordinary electricity, humming with the same cold malevolence that lived inside my darkness, only now given speed and bite.
I laughed breathlessly and let it fade. "Oh, that," I said to the empty air, "is definitely going to be useful."
After a short nap—because near-death, travel, and experimental self-electrocution had finally caught up with me—I got moving again. I opened the Flower Viewing Gate and stepped back into the early morning light. The bridge ahead had collapsed in the middle, the broken planks hanging over clear water. I studied the gap for half a second, then shrugged.
"No problem."
Wind gathered at my feet. I ran, pushed off, and felt the current boost me into the air. I cleared the broken span easily and landed on the other side in a controlled slide. More dead Okami warriors lay scattered around, but I ignored them and kept searching. Eventually my eyes caught another structure perched on a cliff, cut off from the path below. No stairs. No ladder. No obvious route.
Naturally.
I circled the area until I spotted a tree jutting from the mountainside, its roots wedged into stone. Sturdy enough. I backed up, took a breath, then sprinted. Wind surged around me, lightening my body, catching me as I leaped. I landed on the tree, used the bend of the trunk as a springboard, then threw myself backward into a boosted flip. The current under me thickened like an invisible cushion, carrying me the last stretch until my boots hit the cliff edge.
I straightened and looked out over the valley. From up here the lake shone like a mirror. The sakura trees glowed. Ancient roofs curved over still water and old stone. It was beautiful enough to make a person quiet.
Then I opened the doors to the house and went inside.
The structure led me through a series of silent rooms and into a backyard where a small koi pond sat tucked beside the building. Two thin-looking fish drifted lazily through the water. They looked half-starved, which was impressive considering I had just crossed a death desert. I crouched, pulled out a piece of bread from my pocket, crumbled it, and tossed the bits in one at a time. The koi snapped them up immediately.
"Yeah, yeah," I said as I fed them another handful. "You're welcome."
After that, I climbed the nearby stairs, passed more ancient bodies, and finally reached the summit.
That was where I found her.
The shrine sat open to the sky, old and overgrown, touched by wind and time. At its center rested the body of a woman, long dead, seated as if in eternal prayer. She held the relic across her lap with both hands, cradling it even in death. Vines and age had claimed the shrine, but not the strange dignity of the scene. Beside her lay another scroll, fragile and worn.
I knelt and unrolled it carefully.
The woman had been a priestess from the age of the First Spinjitzu Master, one of his earliest friends. With her had stood a priest and a blacksmith, both also close to him. During the ancient war against a great evil, some remnant of that evil's power had been left behind after a battle. The priestess brought that residue to the blacksmith. Together—with the priest present—they attempted something impossible. They sought to forge a weapon by replicating, in twisted form, the principles behind the creation of the Golden Weapons.
The Golden Weapons embodied creation and life, forged from the elemental power of the First Spinjitzu Master. This new blade was meant to embody the opposite: death, ruin, destruction.
Its name was Silence.
But once it was completed, everything fell apart. The priest killed the blacksmith and stole the sword for himself. The darkness within it overwhelmed him soon after and destroyed him in turn. The priestess, learning the truth, fled with the blade to her homeland—Fountainhead Palace—only to arrive in time to witness her people slaughtered by warriors loyal to that same great evil. Realizing what the sword represented and what it might yet become in the wrong hands, she carried it to the highest point of the mountain. There, after swallowing a red spider lily and another herb to grant her final sleep, she died with the blade in her arms so no one else could claim it easily.
When I reached the end of the scroll, I realized something wet had touched my cheek.
I lifted a hand and wiped it away.
Black.
For a second I only stared at the stain on my fingers. Then I looked back at the priestess, at the care with which she had chosen her end, at the burden she had carried to keep this thing from becoming a calamity, and something in my chest tightened.
Slowly, I bowed my head and clasped my hands. "I don't know if prayers count when they're coming from me," I said quietly, "but I'll give it a shot anyway."
The shrine answered with silence.
"I promise," I continued after a moment, "I'll keep it out of the wrong hands. Yours. His. Mine. Whoever's. I'll honor what you tried to protect, even if I have to drag that promise across the whole world."
Only then did I reach for the sword.
The moment my fingers closed around it, I felt the power inside.
Silence was a katana, but only in the broadest sense. The blade looked as if black-violet blood had been crystallized mid-flow and hammered into shape without ever truly becoming still. Jagged, layered ridges ran along its length like frozen veins, and a deep purple glow bled through the darker mass beneath, as though liquid shadow and lightning had been sealed inside transparent obsidian. The edge curved elegantly despite its unnatural texture, and the whole thing carried a pressure that made the air around it feel colder. The hilt was wrapped dark, worn by age yet intact, and the guard framed the weapon with a quiet severity that made the blade feel less forged and more awakened.
It was beautiful.
It was wrong.
It fit my hand like it had been waiting.
A pulse of darkness traveled up my arm, but unlike the raw influence of ordinary shadow, this was focused—dense, ancient, and familiar in a way that made the back of my neck prickle. My own element answered it immediately.
"So that's how it is," I murmured.
With genuine reverence, I sheathed Silence at my side. The weight settled against my hip as if it had always belonged there. I stood at the shrine for a long minute after that, overlooking the lake and the drifting sakura below, letting the moment sink into me. Then I gave the priestess one last quiet prayer, took some of the abandoned gold left in the ruins—because sentiment was nice, but being broke was still annoying—fed the koi one more time, and left Fountainhead Palace with the location burned into my memory.
Once I was back in the desert, I let the wind decide where to take me.
It cooled me as I walked, gathering in front of my face in a curved current that acted like a moving shield against the heat. I followed that pull for a couple of hours before, at last, I crested a rise and saw a ship sitting where a ship absolutely should not have been sitting.
The Destiny's Bounty.
I stopped and stared. "Huh," I said. "Either fate likes me, or it has a very weird sense of humor."
The ship seemed empty from a distance. No obvious movement. No voices. No sign the ninja were already aboard. I had just started walking toward it when a tremendous roar split the air. The ground trembled under my feet. A blast of cold wind hit me so hard it cut straight through the desert heat, and it carried a smell I did not expect in the middle of the sands.
Fish.
Slowly, I turned.
A massive ice dragon stood behind me with a familiar white ninja on its back.
Zane looked down at me with polite curiosity while the dragon loomed overhead like winter made flesh. "Why, hello there, stranger," he said. "Is this your home by chance?"
I looked from him to the ship, then back again. "No, I just happened to follow the wind and it guided me here," I said with a grin. "But if we're invoking finders-keepers rules, then yes, it's technically mine."
Zane blinked. "Follow the wind? I'm sorry, but I do not understand."
I laughed softly and lifted a hand. Wind gathered over my palm, spinning tighter and tighter until a miniature tornado danced there in a neat little column. The look on Zane's face was worth every near-death experience I had suffered so far.
"But I thought my friends and I were the only Elemental Masters," he said, genuine confusion slipping into his usually composed voice.
"Oh, you poor sheltered snowflake," I said fondly. "Don't take it personally. There are more Elemental Masters in the world than most people realize. Some never awaken fully. Some hide. Some only use fragments of what they have. My name is Jinx, by the way. And you are obviously Zane, Elemental Master of Ice and one of the four ninja."
He climbed down from the dragon, still studying me carefully. "That is correct. Then you are…?"
I kept the tiny tornado spinning in my right hand and let a ribbon of pure black smoke curl from my left. "Jinx," I repeated. "Elemental Master of Wind and Darkness."
That shocked him all over again.
We ended up talking for nearly an hour beside the ship while his dragon settled nearby. Zane, once he got over the surprise of me existing, proved just as straightforward as I expected. He told me about his teammates, Master Wu, their adventures so far, and eventually the current issue occupying all four ninja: the prophecy of the Green Ninja and the ridiculous competition they had apparently turned it into. By the time he finished explaining some of Master Wu's attempts to manage the chaos, I was laughing hard enough that I had to wipe tears from my eyes.
"Sorry," I said once I managed to stop, "but none of you are the Green Ninja."
Zane tilted his head. "That is… a very definitive statement."
"Because it's the correct one," I said. "From what you described, you and the others misunderstood the prophecy. One of the ninja will rise to become the Green Ninja, yes, but that doesn't mean one of the current four has to transform into something else. Elemental power isn't a hat you swap when you're bored. It belongs to a person until they pass it on or die. Kai is Fire. Jay is Lightning. Cole is Earth. You are Ice. None of those become Green. Which means the simplest answer is that another ninja will join you, and that person will be the Green Ninja."
Zane considered that in silence, his expression unreadable in the way only he could manage. "It is a coherent theory," he admitted at last, "but still only theory. I do not believe the others would accept it without stronger evidence."
"Hahaha, fair enough, my icy friend," I said. "Then let me give you something better than theory."
His attention sharpened immediately.
I rested a hand on the hilt of Silence as I spoke. "Long ago, during the war between the First Spinjitzu Master and a great evil, remnants of that evil's power were left behind after one of their battles. Those remnants were collected by a priest and brought to a blacksmith. With them was a priestess, and all three of them were close companions of the First Spinjitzu Master. They had even been present when the Golden Weapons were forged from his elemental power. The priest, foolish or ambitious or both, decided to imitate that miracle. The Golden Weapons embodied creation and life. He wanted a fifth kind of weapon—one born from the opposite, one that held death and destruction."
Zane listened without interrupting, the weight of the story settling visibly over him.
"When the blade was finished," I continued, "the priest murdered the blacksmith and took it for himself. The darkness inside consumed him. The priestess recovered the weapon and fled to Fountainhead Palace, only to find her people slaughtered by servants of that same ancient evil. Realizing what the sword represented, she carried it to the highest shrine, took a final sleeping draught, and died with the weapon in her hands to keep it from being claimed. The scroll I found was damaged—burned in places—but it still held one important idea. Just as the Golden Weapons respond to the right hands, other great weapons may choose their wielders too. And if the Green Ninja is tied to the First Spinjitzu Master, then there may be conditions to that identity none of you have fulfilled."
For the first time since our conversation began, real sadness showed on Zane's face. "That is a tragic history," he said quietly. Then his gaze dropped to the hilt at my side. "May I ask what became of this weapon?"
I drew in a breath and unsheathed Silence.
The blade emerged with a whisper like something alive exhaling after a very long sleep. Purple-black light shimmered along its jagged crystalline length, and a cold, oppressive force rolled outward the moment it touched the open air. The desert wind around us shifted uneasily. Zane's eyes widened at once.
"This," I said, holding the sword so he could see it clearly, "is Silence. The weapon forged from the remnant of that ancient evil. It's in my possession now."
Zane stared, transfixed. Even the dragon behind him rumbled low in its throat.
"It radiates tremendous instability," he said after a moment, his voice quieter than before. "I have only felt power like this once—when my brothers and I combined the Golden Weapons. Even then, the force nearly threw us away from it."
"That makes sense," I said, lowering the blade slightly while keeping it unsheathed. "The Golden Weapons are power born from creation. Silence was born as their opposite. It doesn't just hold destruction—it resonates with the kind of element that can draw that side of existence out. My darkness answers it, and because of that, I can bring out more of its true power than most people ever could. In the same way the Green Ninja, once they reach their full potential, might be able to wield the combined form of the Golden Weapons properly, I'm probably one of the few who can wield this without immediately dying or being devoured by it."
Zane's eyes shifted from the blade to me. "And you intend to keep it?"
"I intend to guard it," I corrected. I looked down at Silence, watching that black-violet sheen pulse faintly along the edge. "Light always casts shadow, Zane. Good and evil, creation and destruction, order and ruin—pretending one side can exist without the other is how people make disasters. My job isn't to worship darkness or let it run wild. It's to make sure the balance doesn't break. If there must be someone holding the blade born from shadow, then for now, that someone is me."
For a moment the only sound between us was the wind passing over the sand and the faint crackle of dark power curling around Silence's edge.
Then Zane nodded slowly, still staring at the sword with open wonder. And I could tell from his face alone that whatever he had expected to find in the desert that day, it definitely had not been me.
Zane nodded slowly, his eyes lingering on Silence with the kind of open fascination he probably would have denied if I pointed it out. Even after I finally slid the blade back into its sheath and that oppressive pressure faded from the air, his gaze remained fixed on my hip for several seconds. Whatever Zane had expected to find when he came flying across the desert on an ice dragon, I was fairly certain an unknown Elemental Master wielding a weapon forged from the leftovers of some ancient evil wasn't anywhere on the list.
We talked for another hour after that, although the conversation became considerably less dramatic once we moved away from ancient prophecies, dead civilizations, and potentially world-ending weapons. Somehow, it eventually ended with Zane deciding that now was apparently the perfect time to make pies for his family. I didn't question it too much. The Destiny's Bounty had clearly been used as a traveling home before being abandoned here, and after searching through part of the lower deck, Zane found an old portable cooking stove tucked away with several pieces of camping equipment. It was basically a metal box with a small burner underneath and enough room to function as a makeshift oven once Zane regulated the temperature with his ice. Why anyone had left flour, sugar, spices, and several other ingredients aboard was another question entirely, but I wasn't about to complain when food was involved.
Watching him work was strangely entertaining. Zane approached baking with the same concentration I imagined he used while fighting skeletons. Every measurement was exact. Every movement had a purpose. At one point he stared at a measuring cup for almost ten seconds before adding what looked like a single additional grain of sugar, apparently satisfied only after achieving whatever perfect ratio existed inside his head. By the time he finished, there were several pies cooling nearby, each apparently made with one of his brothers in mind.
Then he made me one.
Sweet potato.
I took the first bite while it was still warm and immediately stopped moving.
Zane glanced toward me. "Is something wrong?"
I slowly looked at him, then back down at the pie. "Zane."
"Yes?"
"If anybody ever tells you being a ninja isn't working out, become a baker."
He stared at me for a moment as if seriously processing the career advice. "I will keep that alternative in mind."
I laughed and went back to eating.
I savored every bite. Maybe nearly dying of dehydration had lowered my standards, but I doubted it. The crust was crisp without being dry, the filling was smooth and sweet without making my teeth hurt, and the spices actually complemented each other instead of fighting for dominance. By the time I finished, I briefly considered asking him to make another one before deciding I had enough dignity left not to beg.
Eventually Zane climbed back onto his dragon, intending to gather the others and bring them to the Bounty. Apparently, if the ship was still intact, there was no reason for the ninja not to reclaim it.
"I should return shortly," he told me from the dragon's back.
I leaned against the railing and raised one hand. "Take your time, icy friend. I'll try not to steal your house while you're gone."
Zane paused. "You already attempted to claim it through what you called the 'finders-keepers rule.'"
"Attempted?" I asked, placing a hand over my chest. "That's a hurtful accusation. I successfully claimed it. I'm simply allowing you to use it."
He stared at me for several seconds before the dragon spread its wings. I could have sworn I saw the smallest hint of amusement in his expression before he took off.
Once he disappeared into the distance, I looked around the empty desert, stretched my arms above my head, and immediately decided I had nothing better to do than experiment with dangerous supernatural powers.
A perfectly responsible decision.
I moved a fair distance away from the Bounty first. I might have claimed the ship as mine five minutes ago, but that didn't mean I wanted to accidentally blow a hole through it.
The first thing I worked on was Darkness.
Not anything entirely new, at least at first. There were certain techniques I remembered from my previous life—fragmented bits of abilities from stories and worlds that still existed somewhere in the mess inside my head. Blackbeard's darkness immediately came to mind. If I remembered correctly, three of the most useful applications had been Black Hole, Liberation, and Kurouzu.
Obviously, my Darkness wasn't exactly the same power. I wasn't going to assume that because something worked in one world, my element would politely obey the same rules here. But the principles were useful.
For Black Hole, I spread Darkness across the sand around me and tried to give it a pulling property rather than simply letting it exist as shadow. The first attempts accomplished absolutely nothing besides making the ground look ominous. After that, I started thinking less about creating gravity and more about making my Darkness behave like something that wanted to swallow whatever entered it.
That worked better.
Sand began sliding toward the black patch beneath my feet.
Then pebbles.
Then several larger rocks.
I stopped before experimenting on anything heavier because I liked having functional legs.
Liberation was easier once I understood Black Hole. If the Darkness could pull things into itself, then the reverse should allow me to violently eject whatever it had taken. My first attempt launched half a pound of sand directly into my own face.
I stood there in silence for several seconds, blinking through the grit.
"Successful," I decided.
Kurouzu took longer. Instead of spreading the attraction through an area, I concentrated it into one hand. The effect wasn't nearly as powerful as the version I remembered, but after enough attempts I managed to make a loose stone jerk across several feet of sand and slam into my palm.
That one immediately earned a grin.
"Oh, that's going to be annoying."
Annoying for everyone else, obviously.
I also continued working on my black lightning. Yesterday I had barely managed to produce a single unstable bolt without exploding myself. Now that I understood the sensation better, generation came slightly easier. Darkness compressed through the pathways I had learned from the lightning scroll, changed state, and erupted between my fingers in jagged black-purple arcs. The lightning still wasn't anything close to what an actual Elemental Master of Lightning should be capable of, but it had stopped trying to blow my hand apart every third attempt.
Progress.
While watching the dark electricity crawl between my fingers, though, something stirred in the back of my mind.
Not a complete memory.
More like a fragment.
I remembered studying supernatural abilities in my previous life. Powers, elements, applications, classifications—the kind of pointless hobby that suddenly became significantly less pointless after reincarnating with actual elemental abilities. I couldn't remember everything I had read, but four terms surfaced clearly enough that I whispered them under my breath.
"Umbra-Ergokinesis. Darkness Empowerment. Umbra-Pyrokinesis. Umbra-Electrokinesis."
I looked at the lightning dancing across my palm.
Well.
That answered one question.
Umbra-Electrokinesis—dark electricity. I had apparently stumbled into one of those applications already by modifying the principles of lightning generation.
Basic Darkness manipulation was what I had been doing since childhood: shadows, concealment, constructs when I could manage them, and whatever strange properties my element naturally possessed. These four were something more specialized. Umbra-Ergokinesis would mean turning Darkness into actual energy rather than merely manipulating shadow. Darkness Empowerment sounded less like a technique and more like strengthening myself through exposure to or absorption of Darkness. Umbra-Pyrokinesis was obvious.
Dark fire.
I frowned.
"That one's going to be annoying."
Unlike lightning, I didn't have a convenient scroll explaining exactly how to produce fire.
I stood there thinking about it for perhaps twenty seconds before smacking myself across the forehead.
"Idiot."
I already knew how lightning had been created.
Why couldn't I work backward?
Lightning generation involved separating and manipulating energy until the difference became violent enough to discharge. Fire, at its simplest, needed heat, fuel, and a reaction capable of sustaining itself. If I could make Darkness move violently enough against itself, friction might generate the heat necessary to begin the transformation. And I wasn't entirely blind to the principles of fire manipulation either. I still remembered Iroh's explanations of firebending, along with the lesson the dragons had represented—that true fire wasn't just anger or destruction. Fire was energy. Breath. Life. Heat given movement.
The foundation was there.
I just had to figure out how to force Darkness through it.
Then another thought hit me.
I stopped.
The dark lightning faded from my fingers.
There was something about my memories that I had been avoiding ever since I woke up.
I remembered things from my previous life, yes.
But I didn't remember my previous life.
Not properly.
I knew skills. Concepts. Fragments of shows, games, anime, abilities, techniques, random pieces of information I had apparently spent an unreasonable amount of time studying. I remembered enough of Avatar to understand Iroh's principles. I remembered Blackbeard's techniques. I knew Ninjago existed and recognized certain people and ideas when I encountered them.
But ask me what happened through the entire story of Ninjago?
Nothing.
Pieces at best.
And even those pieces felt like they were already beginning to blur around the edges.
Worse than that were the personal memories.
There were almost none.
I couldn't remember my old home. Couldn't remember friends. Couldn't remember what my own face had looked like. Couldn't remember birthdays, conversations, places I'd lived, or even the sound of somebody from my old life calling my name.
I knew things about myself without remembering the experiences attached to them.
I knew I'd been lazy.
That certainly survived.
I knew my imagination had always run wild. I knew my morals had been… flexible, to put it politely. I remembered having some mental problems too, though even those existed more like facts written on a piece of paper than wounds I could actually feel.
One stood out more than the others.
My mother.
Apparently, in my previous life, I had possessed an almost painful desire to be with my mother.
I knew that.
But I couldn't remember her.
No face.
No voice.
No warmth.
Nothing.
And because there wasn't an actual person attached to that feeling anymore, the absence didn't hurt the way I knew it should have.
I sat down on the sand and stared at my hands.
That should have disturbed me more than it did.
Maybe this world had stripped away emotional attachments while leaving useful information behind. Maybe reincarnation simply didn't transfer memories perfectly. Maybe my brain couldn't contain two complete lives and had kept whatever it considered useful while throwing everything else into a furnace.
Or maybe there was another explanation I hadn't discovered yet.
Either way, I couldn't change it.
There was another strange problem too. Wind and Darkness weren't exactly comforting elements when it came to figuring out who my biological family might have been. If elemental powers were inherited—and Zane's story certainly suggested there was some connection between Elemental Masters and bloodlines—then logically someone before me should have possessed Wind, Darkness, or both.
Yet nothing in the memories of this body gave me anything.
No parents.
No relatives.
No family name.
Nothing but an orphanage and two elemental powers that, in most stories I remembered, belonged to people who were either villains or suspicious enough that everyone assumed they were villains.
I sighed and fell backward into the sand, staring into the sky.
"At least I get to start fresh," I muttered, letting one arm fall over my eyes. A small smile crept across my face despite everything. "And hell, now things will be interesting."
That was enough depressing introspection for one day.
I sat back up.
Dark energy first.
I held my hand out and tried simply forcing Darkness into an energetic state.
Nothing happened.
I tried again.
Still nothing.
"Wonderful."
Brute force wasn't going to work.
So I changed approaches.
I crossed my legs and closed my eyes, letting my breathing slow. Wind moved quietly around me, but I ignored it and sank deeper into the sensation of Darkness inside me.
What was Darkness?
Not what people thought it was.
What was it actually?
Darkness was mysterious.
Secretive.
Quiet.
It existed in every closed room, every cave, every shadow beneath a tree. It waited beneath beds and inside graves. It surrounded people before they were born and remained long after they died.
People associated it with evil because they feared what they couldn't see.
But Darkness itself wasn't evil.
Neither was it good.
It could hide a murderer.
It could also hide someone fleeing one.
It could terrify a child.
It could give shelter to an animal escaping a predator.
Darkness tempted. Darkness concealed. Darkness could corrupt because it offered places where consequences seemed distant and unseen.
But it was not simply the opposite of Light.
They defined each other.
Light created shadow simply by existing.
And Darkness…
Darkness had been there before the first flame.
Before stars.
Before creation filled emptiness with something bright enough to see.
And if everything ended one day, Darkness would still be there afterward.
Waiting.
Everlasting.
The thought settled deeper than I expected.
Something inside me shifted.
My eyes snapped open.
A strange sensation had gathered beneath my palm.
Not smoke.
Not shadow.
Not lightning.
Energy.
I slowly turned my hand upward.
A sphere floated above my palm.
It was light purple—almost lavender at the center—but the color deepened toward its edges until black-violet wisps curled around it like smoke being drawn into orbit. Unlike my normal Darkness, which felt cold and heavy, this hummed against my skin with condensed potential.
I stared at it.
"Oh."
The sphere pulsed.
"Ohhh."
My grin widened.
I looked around until I found a large boulder sitting perhaps thirty feet away.
There was really only one responsible scientific procedure available.
I pointed my palm at it.
The sphere shot forward.
For less than a second, nothing happened.
Then the boulder exploded.
Stone fragments burst outward as a purple-black flash ripped through its center, throwing dust and debris across the desert. Wind instinctively curled around me, knocking the smaller fragments aside before they could hit me. When the dust cleared, half the boulder was simply gone and the remainder had cracked down through its base.
I slowly lowered my hand.
"…Okay."
A faint purple glow still clung to my fingertips.
"That is definitely staying."
About an hour later, I had learned two important things.
First, Umbra-Ergokinesis was real.
Second, repeatedly firing concentrated balls of dark energy was exhausting.
I had gotten better at forming them, at least. Smaller ones were considerably easier and could be launched quickly, while larger ones demanded concentration and drained noticeably more stamina. The power wasn't free, and trying to brute-force too much Darkness into a sphere made it unstable enough that I stopped experimenting after one detonated six inches away from my hand.
I still wanted that hand.
Dark fire could wait until later.
For now, I found a shaded section beside the Destiny's Bounty, folded my arms beneath my head, and decided that the greatest technique ever invented was called taking a nap.
I had no idea how long I slept.
What woke me was a tap against my shoulder.
I groaned, shifted onto my side, and considered pretending I hadn't felt it. Another tap came.
Persistent.
Slowly, I opened one eye.
Zane stood over me.
That wasn't surprising.
The people behind him were.
A red ninja. A blue ninja. A black ninja. A girl I immediately assumed was Nya from Zane's stories, and standing slightly behind all of them was an elderly man dressed in white, his long beard and bamboo hat making his identity impossible to mistake.
Sensei Wu.
For a few seconds, nobody said anything.
They stared at me.
I stared back.
Then my eyes drifted toward the pies Zane had apparently brought them, back toward the collection of armed strangers surrounding my nap spot, and finally up to Zane.
I yawned, pushed myself onto one elbow, and gave them the friendliest smile I could manage.
"Hello there."