There were no restrictions on who could take part in the measuring. Everyone sat it out anyway, every time, except the first prince.
That was simply because manis rankings, once measured, were almost never overturned. So the first prince used the ritual as a stage. The amount of manis a royal held was equivalent to the magnitude of his power, and Rasia liked to remind the table of the figure. He was marking his territory. He was showing them all that he was destined to be the next emperor.
Unfortunately, today was a bad day for Rasia.
The moment he tried to channel manis into the tablet, he started coughing up blood.
The second prince rushed to his side. The whole table broke apart at once, everyone scrambling and shouting for a doctor.
Ran sat stunned in his seat at the end, though he was the only person in the room who understood what he was looking at. He had read this scene countless times. He knew that Rasia would soon join his ancestors, coughing blood from every orifice in his body, and he knew what that meant.
The main story had begun.
Manis was a special power that usually manifested in the royal family and their bloodline, though the shape it took differed from person to person. Rasia, the first prince, wielded water manis. The second prince wielded fire. Rasia's destiny had been set in stone the moment he laid his hand on that blue tablet, and Ran had known from the very start what the measurement would have shown: Rasia had only ever had enough manis to cover a little over half of the stone.
Now that the story had begun, there were about six months left until the next big incident.
Except that was the part that made no sense. According to the book, Rasia was not supposed to cough up blood for another six months, and only after that would the main protagonist make his appearance. Everything had come early.
Ran worried at it all the way back to his quarters. The story was already drifting off its rails, and the clearest evidence of that was the seventh prince himself, who could transform into a crow when he was not supposed to possess a single drop of manis. Was this all a coincidence? Or had his own arrival upset some kind of balance?
Later that night, at Rasia's castle, the doctor examined the first prince thoroughly and reported that there was absolutely nothing wrong with his body. He added, with the confidence of a man reciting scripture, that the bodies of royals were gifts from the gods, and remained unaffected by disease or injury.
Unsatisfied with that answer, Rasia nearly choked him for babbling instead of finding the cause of the illness. He cursed under his breath and chased the doctor out of the room.
Frustrated, still hurling profanities at the closed door, Rasia slammed his fist into the mirror on the wall. Where had it gone wrong? He had been healthy and fine that morning. He racked his brain for anything that had been different, and no matter how he turned it over, everything had been perfectly normal until the ritual.
As he drove his fist into the shattered glass again, he released a little manis with the blow, and the pain that answered was instant and severe. That was when he understood. Every time he tried to use manis, his whole body felt as though it had been set on fire.
Rasia was afraid. At this rate he might never be able to use manis again, and that was a death sentence for any royal, let alone the first prince who was to inherit the throne.
He picked up his hookah for a smoke and tried to convince himself that bad things could not happen to him. He was different from other people. Other people were roadside trash. He took a pull from the tube and told himself it was probably nothing worth worrying about.
"You should lay off that," said a voice from the shadows, "if you want to survive."
Spooked, Rasia hurled the hookah at the figure in the corner and demanded to know who was there.
Ran ducked the flying pipe, noting as it went past his ear that Rasia really was a monster when it came to raw strength.
Then Rasia saw who it was and smirked. Not an assassin come to finish him. Just the useless younger brother with no manis.
"If I had been an assassin," Ran said, "you'd already be dead. You didn't notice anyone in the room until I opened my mouth."
That landed. Rasia looked distinctly uneasy, and Ran pressed it, remarking on the frankly terrible security in what was supposed to be the second most heavily guarded place in the entire empire.
Rasia demanded to know how he had entered in the first place.
"I climbed the wall," Ran said casually.
Rasia refused to believe him, since the wall was not exactly two feet tall, and Ran had no intention of convincing him. He went straight to the reason he had come.
"Your condition," he said. "Nobody has been able to work out what's actually wrong with your body. Have they."
Rasia stared at him, and then burst into laughter like a lunatic who had just been handed an epiphany. He praised Ran extravagantly for poisoning him, for arranging a bargaining chip to hold over the future emperor. Then he told Ran that he had miscalculated badly, and came forward to grab him.
"In a week you'll drop dead," Ran said, "with blood coming out of every hole in your body."
Rasia stopped where he stood.
"I didn't poison you. No tricks, nothing in your food," Ran went on. "Your body is going to deteriorate, faster and faster, until you die pouring blood from every opening you have. I don't know who did it to you. But if you want to survive this, you're going to listen to me very carefully."
Afterwards, Ran left the castle as a crow, relieved. Rasia was exactly as easy to use and exactly as cowardly as he had been in the novel. He had not even put a tail on his little brother. It confirmed what Ran had hoped: he would be able to use the first prince however he liked.
Beyond that, he was simply enjoying himself. The new ability made travelling to distant parts of the palace and the capital wonderfully convenient, with no carriage to arrange and nobody to explain himself to. Since he was already out, he decided to look over a few more places before calling it a day.
A few days later, Anna came to the seventh prince's room in a state.
He had not eaten anything or come out for two days. She was certain that if something bad happened to him behind that door, her own head would answer for it, and that fear pushed her into frantically banging on the wood and calling out for him.
When he did not respond, she made up her mind to force her way inside.
Ran opened the door at exactly that moment.
Anna lost her footing and went down face first, spilling the entire contents of the food tray across his shoes.
There was a long, awkward silence. Then she began to bawl her eyes out, apologizing over and over, begging him to end her life for her crime.
She kept crying and trying to explain herself at the same time, which only irritated Ran further.
"How exactly do you plan to take responsibility," he said, "for disturbing me and soiling my shoes?"
Anna offered to pay with her life and begged him to spare her family.
"Clean it up," Ran said. "Quickly. Then get lost."
Anna calmed down immediately and began tidying the mess, while Ran warned her never to approach his room again unless he personally called for her.