The Evil Emperor's Fragile Heart

Head Sage Yue laughed away to himself for quite some time before noticing the three pairs of eyes looking at him as if he had lost his mind. He gathered himself quickly and sat down in his chair again. There was a pinkish flush of embarrassment on his fair cheeks, but his light eyes were still very bright and eager.

He coughed lightly. "My apologies," he said. "I was a little carried away."

Mana raised an eyebrow. A little? More like a raving lunatic. Still, she didn't bother to point it out.

"I assure you that the secret is safe with me till such time that you choose to reveal the existence of the holy sceptre and its acknowledgement of Raven as its master," Head Sage Yue spoke quickly to reassure Mana and Raven.

Mana and Raven nodded in acquiescence. Since Azar didn't object, Head Sage Yue should be speaking the truth – or at least, he was sincere about it.

"About your ability to modify the memory of others – I promise that I will keep that a secret as well," Head Sage Yue promised.

Mana and Raven blinked at him in confusion.

"Is that a rare thing?" she asked curiously. She hadn't imagined that it would be, because she could do it, too. She and Raven – both of them were under the impression that it was quite commonplace for anyone with powerful dual elements of water magic and earth magic to learn this skill. After all, not every skill they found in the ancient master's inheritance was rare or lost or completely unknown – there were quite a few commonplace things as well. And this was one of the simplest and easiest spell they had found, so they hadn't really put much thought into it at all. It had taken the two of them a grand total of three minutes to learn and practice the spell with absolute perfection. (Three passing birds, who often dirtied Mana's window by using it as their personal toilet, had been successfully made to forget about Mana's window completely and had been redirected to Astra chambers instead. (Twenty more birds had been successfully redirected to Astra's chambers later on by Mana single handedly after Astra caused the whole incident that made Raven collapse, and no matter what anyone did, the birds would regularly go to Astra's window thrice a day to use it as their toilet. Mana had also cleverly put protection spells on the birds, so even if Astra ordered her servants to kill or drive away the birds – they wouldn't be able to hurt the birds at all, and if they were being particularly vicious, there would be a backlash on the person trying to injure the birds, instead.)

Even now, Mana and Raven would giggle every time they heard Astra and Mars complaining loudly about the bird droppings piling up on the window. And no one even knew why – it was their little secret. King Jaren was too busy to deal with Astra's tantrums anyway and after a few days of her complaining, he told her to clean up her window herself instead of creating a ruckus. That had been hilarious – Astra and Mars had tried to clean up the window themselves, but it so happened that their cleaning time somehow ended up clashing with the toilet break of the birds, and Astra and Mars had been covered with bird droppings from head to toe.

Everyone in the imperial palace had laughed about it for days!

After that, Mana and Raven had even tried the memory modification spell on some spies from the Amber Kingdom sent by Mars to spy on them – and the spies had instead collected all kinds of bird droppings from the entire imperial garden, put them in a trunk diligently until it was completely filled up, and then taken it back to Astra and Mars and deposited it under the bed.

The results had been rather hilarious.

Mana and Raven were quite happy with this easy and handy little spell that they had learnt and were quite liberal in its usage when dealing with their enemies. They had been ready to use it on Dawe if he had ended up accompanying Rook the day they had all spoken about General Aquila and discovered the fact that he was still alive. They would have done the same to Enca, too.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it hadn't come to that yet. Mana was actually itching to do something to Dawe, but was afraid that King Corvus might notice that there was something wrong with the boy and then question Mana and Raven about it. The old coot was definitely sharp – not as smart as Raven, of course, but he was definitely the smartest out of all of Raven's relatives that Mana had seen till now, and there was certainly some truth to the claim that King Corvus was responsible for most of the genes that gave Raven his brilliant brains! So, naturally, Mana was still wary of him and didn't want him to know about the memory modification spell at all!

Actually, they hadn't even discussed it with King Jaren or Big Brother Jules or anyone else, but that was out of a general lapse rather than out of a specific intention – Mana and Raven often practised on their own, trying out their combination magic and experimenting with different elements – and they didn't always end up discussing everything with the other members of their family or their friends. If some interesting mix could be made with earth and fire magic, then they would immediately tell Big Brother Jules about it – or if there was any particular single element magical skill they found that would be useful for Big Sister Bella or Fox, they would inform them – but in general, since both of them had more magical elements than the others, a lot of things they did were quite irrelevant to the others.

It was Head Sage Yue's turn to look utterly confused.  "Of course," he said, then he narrowed his eyes at the two children. "Do you mean to tell me that there are people other than Raven who can perform this magic?"

"Yes," Mana said simply. "I can.. It's one of the simplest things ever."