"Your assessment of me may not be entirely fair," Jon said slowly. "Of course, you're right—I did deceive you just now."
"Naturally." Grindelwald chuckled with a hint of pride. "Even without magic, no one can fool these old eyes of mine."
"But that doesn't really matter, does it?" Jon said calmly. "As Predictmagus, what we see isn't the true future. So even if I told you how you and Professor Dumbledore die, it would only be a lie."
"Exactly. We're not those charlatans who pretend to be prophets," Grindelwald nodded.
"What we can see is merely the world's trajectory. I've been idle here for decades, thinking about this, and I've been able to piece together certain things…"
"Predictmagus itself is an astonishing form of magic—imprinting a complete future into an infant's mind. No matter how powerful a wizard or magical creature may be, that's impossible… unless this world itself created us."
"The world tells us its future course," Grindelwald paused, then added, "which means… what we should be doing is changing that course."
"The world gave us a mission? It's alive?" Jon exclaimed, shock written all over his face.
Grindelwald snorted. "More or less… all signs suggest that our wizarding world possesses a certain degree of self-awareness. It's vague and fragile, but it is indeed alive."
"You mean… something like a Star Soul?" Jon couldn't help asking.
"That's a rather odd term," Grindelwald muttered. "But yes, that's essentially it. When this world realizes that a genuine crisis already exists, it reacts…"
"Like an immune response when a body is invaded by pathogens?" Jon asked quickly.
"What's that?" Grindelwald frowned. "I don't quite understand what you mean… but the emergence of Predictmagus is undoubtedly one of the wizarding world's responses."
"So everything you did before 1945 was meant to change the world's course?" Jon asked again.
"Yes—but I failed," Grindelwald nodded. "That's why I once believed I was wrong. But now it seems the problem wasn't my ideals—it was my methods."
"Why?" Jon asked, curious.
"Because of you." Grindelwald's eyes fixed firmly on Jon. "I never imagined that within my lifetime I'd see another Predictmagus—let alone one born into a muggle family, the complete opposite of my own."
"So… the world is still facing a real crisis?" Jon frowned slightly.
"Obviously," Grindelwald said with a faint smile. "I pointed this out long ago."
"The conflict between the muggle world and the wizarding world?" Jon said calmly.
"Precisely." Grindelwald adjusted his posture.
...
"The conflict between muggles and wizards has existed for thousands of years," Grindelwald said slowly. "For a long time, the wizarding world and the muggle world remained in a state of balance. Wizards are undeniably more powerful, but our numbers are far smaller—roughly one wizard for every ten thousand muggles."
"More than a thousand years ago, that balance was broken. The rise of the Church allowed muggles to unite and overcome their fear of wizards. Those centuries were the darkest era for the wizarding world—witch hunts were rampant, deliberate murders of wizards were commonplace, and every wizard lived in fear and danger."
"But change soon followed. Between the tenth and eleventh centuries, several wizarding schools were founded. They abandoned the crude, outdated master–apprentice system and established a new academy-based tradition. Young wizards learned to control their power, received proper magical education, and a systematic magical framework gradually took shape. During those two centuries, all kinds of magic advanced at astonishing speed."
"The Secrecy Decree of the seventeenth century was the key to restoring balance. Centuries of effort allowed wizards to completely overthrow the Church's power and carry out a worldwide religious reformation. At the same time, the wizarding world and the muggle world were fully separated."
"Pierre Bonaccord—the first President of the International Confederation of Wizards and the proposer of the Secrecy Treaty. In 1924, I obtained a page from his diary, enough to confirm that he was one of us."
"He was Predictmagus?" Jon asked softly.
"That's right." Grindelwald nodded. "After winning a decisive victory in the thousand-year war against the Church, Bonaccord chose to hide the wizarding world. That decision caused enormous controversy at the time, but Bonaccord suppressed all opposition with his overwhelming power. To this day, Liechtenstein refuses to join the International Confederation of Wizards as a gesture of protest against Bonaccord."
"That balance lasted for several more centuries—until I was born." Grindelwald's expression turned grim. "I don't know what the muggle world is like now, but in the hundred years before my imprisonment, its development outpaced the combined progress of several thousand years before it. By contrast, the wizarding world barely changed at all—it simply stagnated."
"If this continued, the muggle world would inevitably become more powerful than the wizarding world. When that happens, the wizarding world would face utter annihilation."
"So the balance was about to be destroyed, and the wizarding world was on the brink of irreversible ruin. To change this, my solution was to unite the entire wizarding world and intervene before the muggle world could react—strangling their rise at its very beginning," Grindelwald said coldly.
"I provoked a terrifying war, hoping it would plunge the muggle world into prolonged chaos and fear, halting their development. But in the end, I failed—which is why my path failed."
"Yes, you were wrong," Jon nodded. "Because the balance wasn't about to be broken—it had already been broken."