The Evil Emperor's Fragile Heart

Jules refused to budge.

Prince Liam tried to cajole him for several minutes – but Jules was much too clever and much too protective of Mana to let the guy through. Ultimately, Prince Liam could only grit his teeth and leave.

Jules returned to Mana, Raven and Bella with a dark face and reinstated the privacy barrier.

"Mana, you are not to meet that horrible guy on your own. If he tries to approach you at any time, just throw an attack spell at him and run," Jules said. He turned to Raven. "You try and stick to Mana as much as possible and try not to leave her alone at any time."

Raven nodded seriously. "I will, Big Brother," he promised in a solemn voice. "I will stay close to Mana at all times and I will protect her with everything I have."

Mana looked at Raven's beautiful little face, still childish, and felt that a few years later, when both of them were no longer children, if he said something like this in this very manner, she would feel her heart skip a beat, definitely.

Jules was very satisfied with Raven's attitude. "Good," he said, clapping Raven lightly on the shoulder. "You are a very good boy, Raven, and I don't want anyone other than you hovering near my little sister. You are the only one that is deserving of our little Mana. You are the only one that is worthy."

Raven flushed, and Mana resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

"We need to do something about that Liam, though," Bella pointed out. "He is not going to give up so easily. You saw how shamelessly he came up today and he was so desperate to meet Mana. And it is not a secret that King Orion has had his eyes on Mana for a while now, isn't it?"

Jules frowned. "Papa turned them down ages ago," he said.

"Papa is a good, decent man," Bella said with a shrug. "Do you expect people of the Amber Kingdom to be the same?"

Jules shook his head. "They are scoundrels, especially the royal family," he murmured. "Grandpa was schemed against as well, that is why he left."

"Prince Liam's magic was destroyed in the backlash from the destruction of the array at Verdant Hills, wasn't it?" Raven said suddenly. "I felt a bit of magic radiating from him right now, though. It is different from the usual fire magic of the Amber Kingdom that King Orion or Crown Prince Mars have – or even what I remember Prince Liam having from earlier."

Mana, Jules and Bella looked at Raven in surprise. None of them had felt anything – even Jules, who had been speaking with Liam at the door and was the closest to him in terms of proximity.

"He was masking his magic, I am sure," Raven said. "But there was a little bit that leaked out when Big Brother refused him and he was agitated."

"What kind of magic was it?" Mana asked curiously. If Raven said that he had sensed some magic, none of them would doubt that he had.

Raven bit his lip. "I am not completely sure," he said quietly. "But it felt a little like what Zed had…"

Jules, Bella and Mana were immediately alarmed.

"Do you think Zed has come to the Amber Kingdom and is teaching necromancy to Prince Liam?" Bella asked fearfully, looking at Jules with worry spreading across her beautiful face.

Jules rubbed his temples. "It is possible," he murmured. "He wanted to come to the Amber Kingdom even the first time that we met him, remember? At the time, we even thought that perhaps the cursed living ghost corpse was being kept around here somewhere…"

"He has probably not been able to break the rainbow net yet, if he is showing himself to the public and even colluding with King Orion and Prince Liam and other people from the Amber Kingdom," Mana murmured. "It's a pity that we don't have a tracker or something on the rainbow net that would let us know its position or its status – then we would be able to find out any time where it was and whether it had been broken or not…"

Raven's eyes narrowed and he looked at Mana. "Tracker?" he asked, his mind already running a mile a minute. "How does that work?"

Mana shrugged. She had no idea about the details and blueprints and making of any tracker of any nature – but she did know about its functions.

"I don't know how it works, but I can tell you what it ought to be doing," she said. "I don't know if we could make something like that…"

Then she went on to explain the concepts of GPS and tracking and tracing and functions that she was used to in the modern world.

"We would need very detailed maps," she pointed out after she finished explaining. "Maps that would have even the smallest houses or roads or even potholes in the roads charted on them. Then we would need something which could monitor the real time situation of all these locations all the time, so that we can pull out the information of any area at any time that we want and see what is happening there. And if we have a tracker or a tracer on any object, then we would be able to see where that object is going even as it moves, and we would be able to locate it at all times. Of course, these are different functions – one is a full time monitoring, and one is tracking a particular object – but in either case, we would still need a detailed map, wouldn't we? If the map is not very detailed, we would only be able to get an approximate location of everything." Mana tapped her chin thoughtfully. Actually, even an approximate location was not a bad idea, and she thought of older tracking devices and locators in the modern world, before mankind had managed to send up satellites and draw detailed digital maps that would be able to track real time exact locations of everything and everyone. She even remembered sonar and briefly explained that as well.

Jules, Bella and Raven were intrigued by the ideas that Mana had given them just now. She had mentioned some of these things briefly when they were building their communication devices, but right now, the discussions were far more detailed and they understood a lot more – and they also understood that this was not a project that they would be able to execute immediately or in a matter of a few weeks. This was something that would easily take years and years of work. Just getting that many details of every single place in the world would take a long time, let alone setting up something that would be table to keep an eye on everything all the time.

But the seeds had been sowed, and with help from Fox, the five youngsters would once again shock the entire magical world a few years later with something phenomenally heaven defying. But that was for later. For now, they would not be able to do anything on that scale at all.

But they could definitely come up with a rudimentary form of a tracker, for sure. The four youngsters started discussing on what could work and what would not work, and what kind of spells they could possibly use be able to track something – even an approximate location would be good enough for them now; they were starting from scratch after all.

"We have to have two things to start with," Raven murmured, tapping his chin as his hands started sketching something on a sheet of paper. "A small thing, that would be unnoticeable, that we could plant on someone or something – it should be small and inconspicuous enough to remain unnoticed, but also sturdy enough that it would be able to stick to what we plant it on and not get destroyed easily…"

Bella nodded thoughtfully. "And the second thing we need is a receptor of some sort – something that would be connected to the small object that we have planted on our target," she said, her blue eyes shining. "Even if we don't have a map immediately, at least the receptor could keep tracking the small object and keep pointing us in the general direction."

"And we could have something like a trigger for proximity – like a sensor of sorts. The closer the object is, the louder the noise on the receptor or the brighter the light on the receptor or something of that sort," Jules said, tapping his nose with a pen, as was his habit when he was deep in thought and fully focussed on something.

Mana was too busy being impressed by these three ultra smart young people around her. She had just given them a rough idea of what the end result should be like, and they had already managed to plan out this much?!