Of all the characters a man could wake up inside, he had drawn the worst one.
He had opened his eyes as Ran Aberan, seventh prince of the Airen Empire. Unlike the other royal children, Ran had pitch black hair where his siblings had beautiful gold, and he had been born without manis, the special power possessed by the imperial family. Because of this, everyone in the palace treated him as a defective prince, a thing that belonged in the trash.
That was not even the biggest problem. Ran was a minor villain from the novel Dark Header, and he was destined to suffer a horrible death shortly after the main story began.
He was still turning that thought over when Sain arrived, the very man whose job in this story was to make everything worse for him. Sain came in with a budget proposal and held it out to be signed, saying that it was an important matter that could not wait.
Ran knew he was being played for a fool. The document was fabricated. The real purpose of it was to embezzle the seventh prince's share of the imperial budget, and the reason a servant could dare such a thing was that Sain was a relative of the empress, an exceptional woman whose influence reached across that entire world. Sain even had the nerve to mock him openly while he waited, wondering aloud whether His Highness had perhaps forgotten how to sign his own name.
"Don't think about anything," Sain said. "Just sign it. Right there."
Those words stunned him, because before he ever entered this story, his life had already been a disaster in exactly this shape. A supposed friend from high school had convinced him to sign a suspicious investment deal without properly reading it. Two years later the friend had vanished, leaving him buried in debt and barely able to afford food.
Then, in his filthy apartment, reading Dark Header for the hundredth time, his nose had suddenly begun to bleed. His heart had failed. He had died alone on the floor.
He was not going to live like that again.
"This document," Ran said, "is a clear waste of budget."
Sain's eyebrows climbed. He expressed genuine surprise that the seventh prince actually thought so, then recovered and commended Ran for his sharp intuition. "But sign it first, Your Highness. I'll review the figures for you afterwards."
Sain was still in the middle of that piece of garbage when Ran hurled a jug at him. It struck him before it crashed to the ground and scattered into pieces across the carpet.
Sain freaked out. "What has suddenly gotten over you?"
Ran feigned ignorance and said his hand had only slipped.
Deep down, he knew something about Sain that Sain did not know he knew, because he had read the novel more than a hundred times. It was not a lie that Sain was a relative of the empress. But in reality it was nothing more than a distant relationship, so distant that the empress did not know Sain existed at all.
Sain was still trying to understand what was going on when Ran completely lost it and shoved the table over. Sain stared at him, utterly shocked.
Ran had no idea how he had gotten into this story. He had no intention of dying the way the original had.
"You're going to take responsibility for what just happened," Ran said.
In his past life he had been essentially an NPC, standing where he was told and signing what he was handed. In this life he intended to take the bull by the horns. He knew everything that happened in this novel, and he was going to use it.
"Get on your knees," he continued, in the same intimidating tone. "The carpet is dirty now. Clean it."
He looked absolutely menacing while he said it, because this time around he planned to survive no matter what it took.
The imperial family were, for all practical purposes, known as gods. All things in this world existed solely for them. They alone possessed the special abilities, and their beautiful blonde hair made them look literally like the incarnation of gods walking among people.
To Sain, the royals were the very symbol of nobility. That did not include Ran. The seventh prince was, in his private opinion, absolute trash. Everyone knew Ran as stupid and short-fused, and that hideous black hair made him look more like a crow's leavings than an imperial royal. Sain saw him as a pathetic loser who acted cowardly in front of the other royals.
He seethed as he knelt, thinking about how much he had spent in bribes only to end up serving trash like the seventh prince. Even so, he had no choice but to swallow his pride, because even an abandoned, powerless royal still carried an imperial bloodline, and he was an ordinary servant.
He scrubbed the floor clean. He rose, informed Ran that it was done, and turned to leave.
Ran shattered another teacup on exactly the same spot.
Sain jumped and spun around, demanding to know what His Highness intended by that.
"You spent all that time cleaning," Ran said, mocking him. "Consider it an opportunity to practice your cleaning skills." Then, sternly: "Clean it up. Faster than you did before."
Infuriated, Sain told him that he was acting a bit strange today, and tried to intimidate him by invoking the empress's name.
It did not scare Ran in the slightest. He knew that Sain had never so much as seen the empress's shadow, let alone spoken to her, and yet the man dared to use her name as a club. That was the moment Ran realized he would have to knock some sense into this disrespectful servant now, before he became a nuisance later.
He turned to the maid standing by the wall.
"Anna. Cover your ears." His voice went hard. "If you dare eavesdrop, I'll chop off your fingers."
Terrified, Anna quickly acknowledged the order and clamped her hands over her ears so tightly that all she could hear was the muffled shape of Ran's voice. She could not hear the words. She did not need to. When she finally looked up, Sain's face had gone completely pale, and it was clear that whatever the seventh prince had said had done a number on him.
Later that day, while doing chores with the other servants, Anna brought up the sudden change in the seventh prince's behaviour. Everyone agreed with her. They explained fearfully that Ran was scarier than he used to be, that the tantrums used to be loud and stupid and now they were something else.
The servants also worried that with this strange new attitude of his, none of them might live much longer. Even so, they were relieved that they had not crossed paths with him recently, since he had been spending most of his time confined to his quarters.
Then one of the maids reminded Anna that she was the one assigned to clean his room.
The reminder left Anna feeling extremely uneasy.
Meanwhile, the source of all this dread was outside enjoying the cool weather with a cup of tea, thinking carefully about how to behave like the real seventh prince so as not to draw suspicion. He had noticed that all the servants seemed to be avoiding him now, including Sain, who was usually so arrogant in his presence. Since the day he had been thrashed, Sain had not come anywhere near him.
Ran actually preferred it that way.