Chapter 2: History Needs a Budget

Arjun's room looked like a conspiracy theorist's fever dream.

Books in five languages were stacked unevenly, ranging from respectable academic works to bootleg reprints of fringe occult texts sold under railway bridges. His whiteboard, which hadn't been white in years, was a chaos of scribbled notes, arrows looping back into themselves, and sticky notes with reminders like "Buy milk" right next to "Why did Babylon have no word for 'zero'?"

Somewhere in this glorious mess lay the answer to the greatest historical mystery of his life—and the key to his immediate problem.

Money.

His phone buzzed on the desk again—another payment reminder from his power company, reminding him his electricity would disappear faster than his career prospects if he didn't cough up the cash.

Bete, as always, provided moral support by roasting him. "Would you like me to compose your farewell email to civilization? 'Dear Electricity Board, I am too historically enlightened to need lightbulbs.'"

Arjun flipped Bete off with all the grace of a sleep-deprived gremlin. "Not helping."

"Correction. I'm helping you confront reality. Your entire net worth is roughly two packets of Maggi and half a bottle of Vicks. You're not building ancient supertech with that."

Arjun knew Bete was right. He wasn't just broke—he was broke in a way only people raised in middle-class Indian families understood. The kind of broke where you know the price of onions in every market within a five-kilometer radius. Where you debate if branded toothpaste is really worth it. Where 'luxury' means paying extra for the good rickshaw driver who doesn't try to run over pedestrians.

Building even a basic prototype of the HelioCore was going to cost more than his entire life savings. Industrial-grade capacitors, specialized shielding, crystal stabilizers—none of that came from the scrap heaps he usually raided. And without a working prototype, no sane investor would fund the full-scale project.

This wasn't just about building something cool. It was about proving that the myths were real—that ancient India, Mesopotamia, and half a dozen lost civilizations hadn't just worshipped cosmic power, they had engineered it.

Arjun knew exactly who could fund that.

The problem was, they hated his guts.

It started four years ago.

Back then, Arjun wasn't the "Myth or Meth" guy. He was a promising research assistant at Saraswati Foundation, one of India's oldest private historical research institutes. It was his dream job—or so he thought.

Saraswati had access to classified artifact archives—collections of relics and documents too politically messy to display in public. That's where Arjun first saw the HelioCore Fragment.

It was a single page—half burned, written in some hybrid script that mixed Vedic Sanskrit with symbols no linguistic database could fully decode. The page referenced a central power mechanism—the heart of an ancient energy system capable of powering entire civilizations without fossil fuels, solar panels, or nuclear fission.

Arjun's job was to catalog it quietly and move on.

He didn't.

He copied it to his personal drive. Compared it with every text, legend, and half-baked alien conspiracy theory he could find. The more he dug, the more HelioCore kept showing up—under different names, in different contexts, but always with the same core idea:

Aetheric energy wasn't spiritual fluff. It was infrastructure.

When his supervisor found out he'd been doing private research using foundation assets, Arjun was kicked out faster than you could say "data breach."

That should've been the end of it.

Except Arjun couldn't let it go.

He started chasing every lead, even the sketchy ones—black market auctions, underground artifact dealers, forums so deep into conspiracy land they made flat earthers look sane. That's how he found Arclight Foundation.

"Bete, pull up the Arclight dossier," Arjun said, dragging out his oldest laptop, the one with all the digital skeletons locked inside.

Bete obliged, and Arjun's screen filled with documents, news clippings, and a flowchart that looked like someone had mapped a crime syndicate.

Arclight was the biggest private investor in fringe technology. Officially, they were a renewable energy think tank, but anyone who actually followed their money trail knew better. They funded everything—gravity batteries, pyramid power generators, zero-point crystal oscillators. If it sounded impossible and vaguely mystical, Arclight threw money at it.

And at the top of Arclight sat Elias Thorn—billionaire, collector of ancient tech, and Arjun's personal nemesis.

Three years ago, Arjun had done a full Myth or Meth episode about Thorn's latest scam—bottled water infused with "Atlantis frequencies." Arjun not only debunked it, but also sent Thorn a personalized 20-liter canister labeled 'Authentic Toilet Water' as a parting gift.

Thorn responded by threatening to sue him into oblivion.

Which meant approaching Arclight directly was suicide.

That left only one option: Dr. Akash Verma.

Bete groaned as Arjun opened a folder titled Dr. Verma - Legend Lives On.

"Must we?" Bete asked.

"We must."

Dr. Akash Verma was Arjun's greatest creation. A completely fake expert in ancient energy systems, armed with fake degrees, plagiarized research papers, and a profile picture stolen from a physics professor in Saskatchewan who had no idea he'd been moonlighting as a mythical researcher.

Dr. Verma had been Arjun's ticket into shady auctions, exclusive research circles, and fringe tech mailing lists. Every time Arjun needed information only "serious researchers" could access, Verma stepped in.

"He's been retired since the Atlantis Water incident," Bete reminded him. "And I remind you—he's still blacklisted from five research forums and one cult."

"Time for a comeback."

Writing the funding pitch took the rest of the night. Arjun crafted a story so compelling it almost made him believe it.

Project HelioCore wasn't just another ancient myth project. It was the rediscovery of lost human infrastructure—a technology suppressed and hidden because it threatened every conventional power source known to modern science. Dr. Verma had uncovered blueprints hidden across multiple civilizations, all pointing to a universal power standard built into the planet itself.

The pitch was vague enough to leave room for imagination, but grounded enough to sound scientific. Arjun attached a selection of "supporting research papers"—cut-and-paste jobs from real archaeology reports, rewritten to fit HelioCore's narrative.

When it was done, Bete read it aloud in his best "corporate scientist" voice.

"Too much?" Arjun asked.

"Not at all," Bete said. "It's just the right amount of dangerously convincing."

Arjun took a deep breath and opened his encrypted email client. "Who do we send it to?"

"Arclight's senior acquisitions team," Bete replied. "You know—directly under the guy who wants to kill you."

"Perfect."

He hit send.

Now all they could do was wait—and pray.

At 4:38 AM, Arjun's phone buzzed.

A reply.

Dr. Verma,

We are intrigued. However, given your lack of prior engagement with Arclight, we require a preliminary demonstration to validate your claims. We are prepared to release an initial exploratory grant of ₹50,000 to cover costs.

Please provide technical proof-of-concept within 72 hours.

—Arclight Research Committee

Arjun's stomach flipped.

This wasn't just casual interest. Arclight's team had taken the bait—but they weren't blindly throwing money. They wanted proof.

And that meant Arjun had 72 hours to build something that could pass as a functional fragment of HelioCore.

"No pressure," Bete said cheerfully.

Arjun rubbed his face. "We need parts. Good ones."

"Translation: Crime spree or begging relatives."

"We'll think of something."

Outside, Mumbai's sky was softening into the first light of dawn. Inside, a broke historian and his illegally salvaged AI had just taken their first real step toward building an empire—from scraps, scams, and secrets best left buried.

The Arclight Foundation's headquarters didn't look like a temple of forbidden knowledge. It looked like a high-end spa for billionaires who couldn't decide between meditation and molecular gastronomy. All sleek glass, minimalist walls, and carefully curated indoor plants that cost more per month than Arjun's entire rent.

Elias Thorn stood at the window of his corner office, holding a whiskey glass filled with organic, glacier-filtered water that claimed to be blessed by monks in Bhutan. He stared down at the Mumbai skyline, watching the sunrise tint the smog in shades of molten gold. Even after all these years, the city still disgusted and fascinated him in equal measure.

Behind him, a large curved screen hovered in mid-air, displaying the latest incoming pitch to Arclight's Unconventional Energy Grant Program.

Sender: Dr. Akash Verma.Subject: Proposal – Project HelioCore: Rediscovery of Global Aetheric Infrastructure.

Thorn wasn't alone. Two of his senior researchers, both dressed in identical grey suits with the charisma of drywall, stood at attention with tablets in hand. One of them, Dr. Rana, cleared his throat.

"Interesting proposal, sir," Rana said. "The applicant claims to have uncovered technological blueprints linking multiple ancient civilizations to a single unified power system. They call it 'HelioCore.'"

Thorn sipped his water. "HelioCore." He said the word like it tasted familiar and bitter. "Continue."

Rana scrolled through the attached documents. "Dr. Verma asserts that the HelioCore operated by tapping directly into planetary aetheric flows—what modern science dismissed as mythology. He claims this energy matrix provided scalable power to ancient structures, explaining everything from the construction anomalies in megalithic sites to the abrupt technological collapses in certain regions."

The second researcher, a younger woman named Dr. Kapoor, adjusted her glasses. "It's bold. He's not just suggesting a lost technology. He's implying a deliberate suppression of that technology."

Thorn's fingers drummed the windowpane. "Let me see the actual pitch."

The screen flickered, and the email from Dr. Akash Verma filled the air.

To: Arclight Research CommitteeSubject: Proposal – Project HelioCore

Respected Committee Members,

After years of private research and archaeological correlation across multiple sites and cultures, my team has uncovered compelling evidence of a lost energy infrastructure once employed by pre-modern civilizations across Eurasia, Mesopotamia, and the Indian subcontinent. This system, referred to in various fragmented texts as the "HelioCore," functioned as a planetary-scale power lattice—drawing directly from naturally occurring aetheric flows.

The HelioCore was not a religious artifact, but a fully functional technological network capable of sustaining large-scale energy consumption without conventional fuel sources. Our reconstructions indicate that it relied on harmonic resonance to tap into earth's geomagnetic lattice, converting naturally occurring cosmic influx into usable energy.

It is our belief that the suppression of this technology was not accidental, but intentional—part of a long-standing effort to ensure modern civilization remained dependent on centralized energy monopolies rather than rediscovering decentralized planetary power.

Project HelioCore seeks to reverse-engineer this technology and demonstrate a working proof-of-concept system based on these ancient blueprints. We believe the potential applications—both for sustainable energy and for next-generation defensive systems—are vast.

We hereby request preliminary funding to construct and demonstrate a functional HelioCore Resonance Inducer. Initial capital required: ₹500,000.

Attached: Technical abstracts, comparative analysis across historical records, and reconstructed schematic for the Resonance Inducer.

We look forward to your response.

Yours in pursuit of knowledge,Dr. Akash VermaLead Researcher, Project HelioCore

Thorn said nothing for a full minute after reading. The room felt unusually quiet, the air conditioning hum swallowed by his silence.

Then, he laughed.

It wasn't a pleasant laugh. It was the kind of laugh that made subordinates consider updating their resumes.

"Dr. Verma," Thorn said, his voice soft. "The man who just independently discovered exactly the thing my team has been trying to piece together for the last decade."

Rana frowned. "You think it's real?"

"I know it's real," Thorn said, swirling his water like it was a glass of fine scotch. "But Dr. Akash Verma doesn't exist."

Kapoor's eyebrows lifted. "What do you mean, sir?"

"I've been in this field long enough to know every crackpot and every genuine lunatic chasing ancient tech." Thorn's smile was cold. "There is no Dr. Akash Verma. Not in any university, any field conference, or any archaeological record."

Kapoor hesitated. "A fake identity, then? A con artist?"

"Maybe." Thorn's gaze sharpened. "Or maybe someone smart enough to know that if they used their real name, they'd never get a foot in my door."

Rana paled slightly. "Sir… are you saying this could be—"

"Yes." Thorn's teeth flashed in a predator's smile. "This smells exactly like Arjun Varma."

The room tensed.

Arjun Varma was a name Thorn hadn't said aloud in a long time—but one he never forgot. The Myth or Meth host had humiliated him in public, exposed Prometheus Biotech's Atlantis Water scam, and personally insulted him with a jug of toilet water.

And now this same man—if Thorn was right—had just cracked the single greatest technological mystery of the ancient world.

The bastard.

"What do you want us to do, sir?" Rana asked, voice careful.

Thorn tapped his glass against the window once, twice. "Approve the funding."

"Sir?"

"Approve the funding," Thorn repeated. "Fifty thousand rupees. Just enough for him to get started. And attach a requirement—he has to show live proof within seventy-two hours."

Kapoor's brows knit together. "You're luring him out."

"Exactly." Thorn's smile widened. "If this is Arjun, he won't be able to resist showing off. And if it's someone else? Well… either way, we get closer to HelioCore."

"And if it is Arjun?" Rana asked.

Thorn's fingers tightened on his glass. "Then we crush him. Properly this time."

The two researchers exchanged nervous glances. Arclight's resources were vast—more than enough to fund research or ruin lives, depending on Thorn's mood. And right now, his mood looked positively murderous.

"Draft the reply," Thorn said. "And keep a shadow team on his communications. I want to know every supplier he contacts, every part he orders, every back alley he crawls through to find what he needs."

"Yes, sir."

"And one more thing," Thorn said, his voice dropping into a low, lethal purr. "If he manages to build even a fraction of HelioCore? We take it."

"Take it how?" Kapoor asked.

Thorn's smile was sharp enough to cut glass. "We take everything."

Outside, the first proper rays of sunlight pierced the smog. Inside, Arclight's machine stirred into motion, gears oiled with malice and ambition.

Somewhere across the city, Arjun Varma was assembling his first shopping list—blissfully unaware that the first empire he was building had already attracted its first predator.