As their conversation gradually faded, Hamsa felt the fatigue of the day finally catching up to him. The cool night air on the balcony had been refreshing, but now the heaviness behind his eyes reminded him just how long the day had been.
He pushed himself away from the stone railing and walked back into his room.
Chotu, who had been lying near his feet the entire time, rose immediately and followed. The tiger padded quietly across the floor before settling beside Hamsa's bed, curling up as if he had always intended to sleep there.
Hamsa let out a quiet breath as he sat down on the bed. With a small motion of his hand, the mana stones embedded in the walls dimmed and then went dark, leaving the room lit only by faint moonlight slipping through the windows.
He pulled the long body pillow closer and adjusted himself comfortably.
A moment later, Adi drifted in through the doorway, his spiritual form hovering lazily near the ceiling.
Just as Hamsa was about to close his eyes, he spoke.
"By the way," he said casually, "we're having another session tonight."
Adi's eyes narrowed slightly.
"And to make it more interesting for you," Hamsa continued, "instead of the usual copies of me with different personalities, I'm going to change things up. Tonight they'll look like my friends from my old world."
Adi stared at him for several seconds.
At first, he assumed he had simply misheard.
Then he realized he hadn't.
"What?!" he snapped. "Come on, kid. You know that's not good for your brain."
He folded his arms, clearly irritated.
"And besides, even if they look and act like your old friends, they're still just copies of you. It's still your mind doing all the work."
Hamsa simply shrugged.
"True. But deal with it."
Adi looked visibly defeated.
The reality was that Hamsa had very few people he could speak to freely.
And when it came to anything even remotely related to his past life, he had no one at all, except Adi.
No one in this world knew he had lived another life before this one. To them, he was simply the Yuvraj—brilliant, unusually capable, occasionally strange, but still just a young Yuvraj.
That meant there was no one he could openly discuss his long-term plans with.
No one except Adi.
But even that had its limits.
So Hamsa had created his own solution.
Inside the endless white void where Adi normally existed—a strange mental space that technically resided within Hamsa himself—he had discovered he could manifest almost anything he wished.
People.
Objects.
Entire environments.
At first, it had simply been experimentation.
But eventually he began creating copies of himself.
They weren't perfect clones, but they were functional—capable of thinking, debating, and analyzing problems from slightly different perspectives.
Before long, those copies were holding structured discussions.
The debates resembled council meetings or parliamentary sessions. Each version of Hamsa would examine an idea, argue against it, propose alternatives, and test the weaknesses in his own plans.
In effect, he had built an entire advisory council inside his own mind.
It wasn't perfect.
At their core, the copies were still him—each one representing a different side of his personality and how that version of him might tackle a problem.
But Hamsa believed something imperfect was still better than nothing.
So despite its limitations, he continued using the system.
Running those discussions during the day, however, proved impractical.
Maintaining the constructs demanded too much of his attention. Trying to conduct those debates while also working in the real world was distracting and inefficient.
So he moved the sessions to the night.
While his body slept, his mind worked.
Of course, that created a new problem.
Running constant mental simulations placed enormous strain on the brain. Over time, that level of activity should have caused fatigue, damage, or severe mental exhaustion.
Hamsa solved the biological side of that problem in the only way available to him.
Mana.
By channeling large quantities of mana directly through his brain, he accelerated the body's natural healing processes. Tiny strains, stress damage, and microscopic fatigue in the brain tissue were repaired almost immediately.
In simple terms, his brain regenerated faster than it could wear itself out.
It was not something a normal person could survive.
But Hamsa was not a normal person.
He also used a smaller version of the same technique during the day.
When studying, he would feed mana into his mind to sharpen his perception. Books, documents, diagrams—he could scan through them with extraordinary focus, absorbing information at a speed that would have been impossible under normal circumstances.
Meanwhile, inside the white void, one or two copies of him continued working through the same material simultaneously.
There was, however, one situation where he absolutely refused to do this.
While Using Mana.
Using mana—especially the immense quantities Hamsa controlled—placed heavy demands on the brain. Trying to run his internal simulations at the same time would be reckless.
So whenever he fought, or whenever mana manipulation in a meaningful way was required, the entire system shut down.
Even with those precautions, his mind rarely experienced true rest.
Physically, however, he managed.
The constant mana-driven healing prevented lasting damage and even accelerated the development of his brain over time.
Whether that was entirely healthy… was another matter.
Back in the room, Hamsa stretched and settled deeper into the bed.
Near the bed, Chotu lifted his head briefly, watching him.
Adi still hovered nearby, clearly displeased.
"You're overworking your brain again," he muttered. Most of the complaint came from the fact that he would soon have to deal with Hamsa's mental copies. The rest was genuine concern.
Hamsa closed his eyes.
"Probably."
Adi sighed.
Hours later, after Hamsa had fallen asleep, Chotu quietly climbed onto the bed.
The tiger nudged the body pillow aside with his head and curled up in its place beside him.
____________________________________________________
Guest Residence.
First Floor; Padmavathi's Room.
While Hamsa slept peacefully, Adi was experiencing what he would have personally described as torture.
Inside the endless white void that served as his usual domain, he now found himself sitting through what looked like a parliamentary session.
Eight versions of Hamsa sat around a long table. Except they did not look like Hamsa.
Each one had taken the appearance of one of Hamsa's friends from his previous life.
They argued. Constantly.
Strategies, policies, possibilities, consequences—every idea was picked apart, examined, rebuilt, and attacked again from another angle.
And Adi had been dragged into the middle of it.
He rubbed his forehead.
"This is actual torture," he muttered.
None of the copies any attention to his plies.
--------
On the opposite side of the Royal District, the guest residence was steeped in quiet.
The night's warmth still lingered in the large bed where two figures lay beneath a loosely draped blanket. Their bodies were bare, their breathing slow and unhurried in the calm that followed intimacy.
Padmavathi rested against Ranapala's chest, her head nestled comfortably on his arm.
They talked and laughed in a low voice for a while and then silence fell.
Then Ranapala broke the quiet.
"By the way…" he said, staring up at the ceiling. "I might not be able to come here for a while."
Padmavathi lifted her head slightly and looked at him.
"Why?"
Ranapala exhaled slowly before answering.
"It seems the Yuvraj has decided to personally train me in mana usage for the next few days."
He shifted a little, adjusting his arm beneath her.
"And he's also assigned me to accompany him whenever he visits the Guard Academy… or leaves the Royal District."
Padmavathi frowned.
"And that stops you from coming here?" she asked, narrowing her eyes slightly. "You could still visit. Even if it's just to talk."
Ranapala hesitated.
"Well…" he said slowly.
"It seems the Yuvraj has noticed that I've been coming here every night."
Padmavathi raised an eyebrow.
"He didn't say anything directly," Ranapala added with a dry laugh. "Just warned me not to lose myself."
She studied his face quietly and then turned around to lay on his arm again.
The silence that followed was heavier than the one before.
After several seconds, Ranapala cleared his throat.
"So… how have your studies been going?" he asked, trying a little too obviously to change the subject.
Padmavathi didn't answer.
A few seconds passed before she spoke.
"Why are you suddenly asking about studies?" she said. "You hate studying. Even if your life depended on it."
She shifted slightly and tilted her head to look at him.
"And remind me again… who was just complaining about all the studying he has to do as part of his training?"
Ranapala stared stubbornly at the ceiling.
Why me…
"Well, I was just asking," he muttered and turned to her. "I'm always talking about my day anyway, so… tell me about yours."
Padmavathi was quiet again.
"Well…" she said at last. "They've been going well."
She paused, searching for the right words.
"But it's difficult to explain."
Ranapala glanced down at her.
"The Yuvraj's classes and the things he teaches are… strange."
"Strange?" Ranapala asked. "As in they don't make sense?"
"No," she said, shaking her head lightly.
"That's the strange part. They make perfect sense."
She shifted slightly against him before continuing.
"They're just… advanced."
"Sometimes he teaches things that are completely new. Other times he takes existing knowledge and builds on it in ways no one has thought of before."
She paused briefly.
"And because of that, he ordered me to spend as much time as possible studying in the temple library. Mostly mathematics and science though."
Ranapala let out a soft whistle.
"So he really is some kind of anomaly."
Padmavathi looked up at him again.
"What do you mean?"
Ranapala thought for a moment.
"Well… in the Guard Unit—and honestly across most of the district—people talk about the Yuvraj like he's some kind of anomaly."
He turned his head slightly to meet her gaze.
"And the things he does only make that feeling stronger."
He continued thoughtfully.
"I mean… no matter how he looks or carries himself, he's still what? Eleven years old?"
"I've seen his younger brother, Rajkumar Garuda. Even though he looks fourteen or fifteen, you can still tell he's just a ten-year-old kid at some closer obsurvation."
He shook his head.
"But the Yuvraj…"
"When you're around him, it feels like you're speaking to someone older than even me."
He paused before adding,
"And a lot of the guards say the same thing."
Padmavathi nodded slowly.
"That doesn't surprise me. Even in the temples, both students and gurus praise him endlessly."
She continued,
"You know the new way we've been writing numbers for the past few years?"
Ranapala nodded. "They are easier to work with, but a little difficult to write on everything." he added.
"Well, that was the Yuvraj's idea."
Ranapala blinked in surprise. Until that moment, he had never known where the new system had originated.
"He's also developed several new formulas and mathematical concepts. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if an entirely new field of study eventually forms just to understand the things he comes up with."
She paused, her expression growing thoughtful.
"And the strange part is… sometimes even he can't fully explain why certain things work."
Ranapala blinked.
"What do you mean?"
"He knows they work," she said quietly. "But he doesn't always have the proof."
Her voice lowered slightly.
"And there's that as well…"
Ranapala immediately noticed the change in her tone.
"What?"
Padmavathi hesitated.
For a moment she looked as though she were debating whether she should speak at all.
Then she sighed softly.
"Well… the Yuvraj has also spoken about some other ideas."
Padmavathi frowned slightly, clearly struggling to put the thoughts into words.
"They sound… alien," she admitted. "Things no one here even talks about."
She paused for a moment before continuing.
"He says he found small hints of them in some very old texts. Fragments, really. The ones he showed me… they did make it seem like he might not be imagining it."
Her expression grew more thoughtful.
"But the strange part is how he talks about them."
Ranapala frowned slightly. "Explain?"
Padmavathi hesitated before answering.
"It's like… he already knows they're true."
She shifted slightly, staring at the ceiling now.
"Like he isn't trying to discover them. He's trying to explain them."
Rnapala blinked.
"He keeps working out ways to justify them—building arguments, creating methods, searching for proof."
Another small pause.
"But he says he still lacks the means to actually prove them yet."
She looked back at Ranapala.
"And that's the unsettling part. For something we not know of… he speaks about these things with the certainty of someone who has already seen the answer."
Ranapala blinked again.
"And what exactly are these ideas?"
"That," Padmavathi said firmly, "I cannot say."
"Orders."
A small, mischievous smirk tugged at Padmavathi's lips.
"Besides," she added lightly, "I'm fairly certain your head would melt before you understood half of it."
Ranapala immediately bristled.
"Hey!" he protested, a little louder than he should have. "I'm not that dumb! I can understand things if someone explains them properly. I may not be as smart as you, but I'm not stu—"
Before he could finish, Padmavathi quickly pressed her hand over his mouth.
"Do you want the entire residence to hear you?" she whispered sharply, her eyes narrowing.
Ranapala blinked at her from behind her hand.
After a moment, he slowly raised his hands in surrender.
Padmavathi studied him for another second before finally pulling her hand away.
"Honestly," she muttered, shaking her head. "Even when you're certain it's not fully safe, you still lack the most basic survival instincts."
Ranapala rubbed his mouth, grumbling under his breath.
"You started it."
Padmavathi's smirk returned.
"I did."
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then she shifted slightly, settling more comfortably against his chest. Ranapala instinctively adjusted his arm around her so she could rest more easily.
After a second, she reached up and lightly tapped his chin with her finger.
"Next time," she whispered, "try thinking before you start shouting."
Ranapala caught her hand before she could pull it away.
Padmavathi rolled her eyes but didn't try to take her hand back.