One year.
That was all Ba Sing Se needed.
I was seventeen now—young by appearance, irrelevant by reality. Age meant nothing when time itself bent around preparation. The city no longer resisted me because there was nothing left to resist with.
I didn't overthrow Ba Sing Se.
I completed it.
Every major business answered upward through layers I controlled. Military generals coordinated through advisers who were loyal. The Dai Li were no longer a secret police—they were an elite order, disciplined, selective, and terrifyingly efficient.
There was no single point of failure.
There was no Long Feng-shaped weakness.
There was only structure.
In the Spirit World, my education continued.
I found a Lion Turtle far from human paths—ancient, patient, unimpressed by ambition. It did not teach quickly. It taught correctly. Energybending was not a technique to be copied. It was a language that had to be learned from first principles.
Chi.
Intent.
Spiritual resonance.
Consent.
It took me a full year to do what Avatars before me seemed to accomplish effortlessly.
And I resented that.
Not the difficulty—but the dishonesty of history.
Aang and Korra had been given understanding. I had to build mine piece by piece, mapping chi pathways by trial, correcting mistakes that could have shattered my spirit if I lacked control.
But when I succeeded—
I understood it.
Not as a miracle.
As a mechanism.
Giving bending was harder than taking it.
Taking bending was collapse—severing pathways, disrupting flow.
Giving it meant alignment.
The body had to want it.
The spirit had to accept it.
The chi had to recognize itself.
I failed dozens of times.
Then I succeeded once.
Then again.
And again.
I discovered the rule quickly: ancestry mattered less than resonance. Descendants of benders carried echoes—spiritual shapes waiting to be filled. With careful energybending, those echoes could be awakened.
Not everyone.
Not recklessly.
Only those who fit.
Non-benders with deep spiritual inclination gained earth or water bending. Slowly. Safely. Permanently.
The implications were enormous.
The Dai Li expanded—not in size, but in depth. Loyalty deepened when power was earned, not granted arbitrarily. Soldiers stopped thinking of themselves as tools.
They thought of themselves as chosen.
Assassination techniques followed.
Not because I intended to rule through fear—but because deterrence required teeth.
The Dai Li's old methods were refined. Silent movement. Earth-assisted concealment. Precision strikes designed to incapacitate rather than massacre.
I taught restraint as doctrine.
Kill only when necessary.
Disappear always.
Metal and lava benders became specialists—rare, heavily monitored, devastating when deployed. They weren't weapons.
They were keys.
Ba Sing Se prospered.
Trade expanded.
Crime declined.
Infrastructure strengthened.
Information flowed upward cleanly.
The Earth King ruled in comfort, believing he had an advisor who handled complexity so he didn't have to. The people believed they lived in the safest city in the world.
Both were correct.
And far beneath the ice, the Avatar slept on.
When he woke, he would not return to a world begging for balance.
He would return to a world that had already chosen its shape.
And for the first time since Wan Shi Tong's library, I allowed myself a single, quiet thought:
If balance means stagnation… then perhaps imbalance is what saves the world