The Twelve Kingdoms: Dreaming of Paradise

closing in on his three-score-and-ten.
    This rekindled sense of his own "mortality" could prove dangerous. Even though the word "lifespan" meant nothing to them, the king and the ministers who served him couldn't help but keep track of their "real" age: the ages at which it was not strange for them to be still alive, and the ages at which, by rights, they would have otherwise lived a "full life."
    And at the same time, in the world below, all the people they used to know were disappearing one by one.
    In fact, this wasn't something they witnessed personally. Being listed in the Registry of Wizards or the Registry of the Gods inevitably broke their relationships with people in the world below. Climbing above the Sea of Clouds, their birthplace became just another one of the kingdom cities. "News from home" rarely reached them, and nobody came to visit.
    And yet it was impossible not to imagine their passing and imagine that he wouldn't be long for the world either. He couldn't escape the thought that he alone had been left behind to live a life whose ending he could not fathom.
    A life's worth of time had been exhausted, and what did he have to show for it? Some looked backward and were overcome by the meaningless of it all. Others looked forward and were overcome by a terror of the unknown.
    The ministers listed upon the Registry of Wizards faced these same turning points, and sudden resignations were hardly unexpected. But a king couldn't just walk away from it all and end his life in the face of some vague sense of futility and fear. And so Heaven's hand would be forced instead, and the chaos unleashed.
    Such a king created the very inevitability he resigned himself to. Rikou and others identified it as a "passive resignation."
    In any case, once he had made it past that point in time when he should have no time left, he would catch his second wind. Having crossing over that mountain, a dynasty could expect a long life ahead of it, and wouldn't face its next gauntlet until the three century mark.
    Rikou didn't know why this milepost was so perilous, but when a kingdom collapsed it always seemed particularly ugly. Respected and enlightened monarchs transformed into tyrants overnight. The people were slaughtered and the land laid waste.
    "They got over the mountain and made it to the one hundred and twenty mark. Split the difference, more or less."
    "Split the difference." Fuukan smiled. "I see. Many kings who cross that mountain make it to three hundred. But just as many don't."
    "True enough."
    Except that Rikou had been in Ryuu at the time of that first high hurdle. He'd wandered around and seen for himself how well that hurdle could be surmounted. The feeling he got at the time was quite positive. Things were looking up.
    There were definitely a good many kingdoms that made it through that gauntlet and yet collapsed before making it to the three-hundred mark. More made it than didn't, but made it through the storm with sails torn and taking on water, on the verge of abandoning ship.
    Rikou hadn't seen any signs of that in Ryuu. A sound hull, clear skies and calm seas.
    When he explained this, Fuukan raised an eyebrow and scowled a bit. "Yeah, I thought the same thing. I recall thinking that Ryuu was something of an enigma."
    "An enigma?"
    "It had taken on a form that wasn't obvious at first glance. I talked about that first real gale, but the real typhoon comes at a dynasty's inauguration. The first ten years of so after the coronation of a new king determined the structure of the new Imperial Court. It seemed to me that Rohou messed that up."
    "If they can't get it right out of the blocks, even with a bit of improvising here and there, the dynasty won't last long." Rikou glanced at Fuukan and grinned. "As far as that goes, once in a while you see an incoherent monster that doesn't know its head from its tail and lasts only a generation or two."
    Fuukan laughed. Rikou added with a thin smile, "Normally, a kingdom that begins in failure won't last a hundred twenty years."
    "You wouldn't think so. But Rohou held it together. More than that, when the first big test arrived, Ryuu did a complete about-face. Most striking was the legal system. It was so constructed so soundly that I could imagine the king turning his throne into a bed and the kingdom would carry on regardless."
    "True, true. I had to believe this was one capable man. Anybody who lays down that firm a foundation at that stage should make it to three