Chapter 5: The Veins Beneath

Arjun had done plenty of strange things in his life—breaking into abandoned forts, live-streaming temple exorcisms, even once getting chased by a very aggressive peacock in Rajasthan. But dowsing for ancient energy lines using a hacked-together myth-tech scanner and a pair of vibrating prayer stones was a new personal record.

His bag hung heavy across his shoulder, stuffed with the old maps, Kamat's notes, and his makeshift Ley Finder—a cobbled mess of Ramesh's frequency modulator, the three temple relics, and a painfully fragile Raspberry Pi Bete had jury-rigged into a handheld scanner. The whole thing looked like someone had tried to build a ghost detector out of scrap radios and religious guilt.

"Alright," Arjun muttered, stepping out into the warm Mumbai night. "We follow the veins."

Bete's voice crackled from his Bluetooth earpiece. "Clarification. We follow ancient fault lines filled with unstable metaphysical energy that probably caused at least two temple collapses and one historic cow stampede."

"Details."

Arjun unfolded the map, tracing his route. The next major node sat somewhere near Dongri, buried beneath layers of illegal construction, forgotten shrines, and one extremely inconvenient chicken market.

The walk was a reminder of how layered Mumbai really was. Every corner was history stuffed inside more history, wrapped in plastic, painted neon, and then forgotten until someone like Arjun came along to poke at it. What looked like a random paan shop had once been a colonial police checkpoint, the grimy footbridge over the railway had been a caravan route before the British even landed. Cities like Mumbai didn't have a past. They had sediment—time piled so thick, you had to dig just to breathe.

Half an hour later, Arjun stood in front of a crumbling wall with three layers of old paint peeling off, a temple squeezed between a mobile repair shop and a barber who specialized in cricket player haircuts.

"This is it," Arjun muttered.

"This is what?" Bete asked.

"The next anchor point."

The temple itself was a non-place—the kind of shrine people walked past without really seeing, offering a quick namaste before buying a SIM card next door. Its history had been flattened into routine, a leftover echo of something that had once mattered.

Arjun knelt at the entrance, setting down the first prayer stone.

It vibrated instantly.

"Bingo," Arjun whispered.

The second stone joined it—this one carved from darker quartz, its edges worn down by centuries of hands brushing against it in prayer. It hummed in harmony with the first, like two strings finding the same note. Arjun's cobbled-together Ley Finder flickered to life, reading the faint pulse running through the ground beneath him.

"Confirmed," Bete said. "There's a frequency signature under this place. Faint, fractured, but it's still alive."

Arjun stepped inside. The shrine was small, barely a room, its idol covered in layers of garlands and half-melted candles. Nobody seemed to care that he was poking around. Shrines like this were invisible—too sacred to dismantle, too minor to maintain.

He knelt beside the idol, fingertips tracing the floor. Stone, old and cracked. But there—a seam.

"Hidden hatch," Arjun whispered. "You seeing this?"

Bete whistled softly. "That's not standard temple architecture."

Arjun dug his nails into the seam, working it loose. Underneath was a small stone compartment, no larger than a shoebox. Inside lay a copper scroll, its surface dark with age but still intact.

The inscriptions weren't Sanskrit.

They were something older.

Arjun held it up to the flickering candlelight, heart pounding as the symbols shifted under his gaze, almost as if they were adjusting themselves to be understood.

"This isn't just a node marker," Arjun breathed. "It's a message."

"Translate."

Arjun's fingers ran instinctively over the characters, tracing patterns he'd seen scattered across half a dozen cultures—Vedic spirals, Babylonian knots, even traces of what looked like proto-Harappan sigils. The languages didn't match, but the meaning bled through.

"Severed for protection.Disturb not the sleeping gate.Within lies that which spoke the First Word."*

Arjun's throat tightened. "It's a containment warning."

Bete's voice was unusually quiet. "What exactly did they seal?"

"Not what." Arjun swallowed hard. "Who."

The old stories flickered in his memory. Every ancient myth that spoke of something sealed beneath the earth—the Naga gates, the Asura locks, the Primordial Vaults. They weren't fairy tales. They were engineering reports written in metaphor.

"Holy shit," Arjun whispered. "The ley grid wasn't just for power. It was a prison lock."

"You opened part of it last night," Bete said.

"Yeah."

"And you're about to open another one."

"Yeah."

"Cool. No notes."

Arjun stuffed the scroll into his bag, heart hammering as he backed out of the shrine. The air outside felt too thin, like he'd just surfaced from deep water. People bustled past—shoppers, beggars, drunk college kids—and not one of them knew they were walking over a lock holding back something ancient enough to predate human fear.

"Where to next?" Bete asked.

Arjun checked the map. The next anchor point was deeper—under a demolished stepwell, now paved over with a parking lot.

"Hope you like breaking into municipal property."

"Love it."

They walked into the night, history shifting under their feet, every step bringing Arjun closer to a truth no historian was meant to find. And somewhere, far below, something shifted in its sleep, recognizing the pulse of its ancient prison waking for the first time in millennia.

Arjun had barely stepped out of his flat that evening when the questions started.

"Arjun bhai!" Mrs. Fernandes from next door poked her head out, eyes narrowed. "What was that noise last night? My dog was barking at the wall for a full hour, and my mixer stopped working halfway through my dosa batter!"

Arjun forced a sheepish grin. "Just…uh…some old wiring issues, Aunty. Nothing serious."

"Wiring, my foot," she muttered. "Felt like the whole floor was vibrating. Fix your nonsense experiments or I'll call the society chairman."

Arjun gave his most innocent smile and bolted down the stairs before Mrs. Fernandes could deliver further threats involving broomsticks or her husband's police connections.

The watchman at the gate glared at him too, waving his stick like a medieval guard dog. "Beta, what are you doing up there? That sound—I thought gas cylinder was exploding! Some residents already complain."

Arjun raised both hands in surrender. "I'm fixing it, baba. Promise."

On the street, he could still feel it. The pulse that had run through his flat hadn't stayed there. It had bled out into the building's foundations, humming through concrete and steel, brushing past wires and pipes like fingers along a harp. The building remembered.

And if the building remembered, so did Arclight.

Inside a black SUV parked two streets away, Arclight's surveillance team had caught everything. They hadn't just heard the hum—they had measured it, mapped it, and logged every anomaly it triggered.

The air conditioning units on the sixth floor shorted out for exactly eight seconds. Electrical flow through the building's circuit board shifted into a non-standard frequency, something that didn't match any known power grid signature. The streetlights outside flickered in sync with the pulse.

And for precisely forty-three seconds, a low-level electromagnetic distortion spread outward from Arjun's flat, detectable as far as the police station five blocks away.

The lead agent, a man in his forties with a military buzz cut and a patience level barely above zero, held up his phone. The screen showed a live feed of Arjun, walking toward Dongri, his bag slung over his shoulder.

"Send the data to Mr. Thorn," the agent said. "He's heading for the next node."

"And if he activates it?" his partner asked.

"We watch," the agent said. "For now."

Arjun's path to the buried stepwell wound through some of Mumbai's oldest neighbourhoods—narrow gullies crammed with tea stalls, paan shops, and enough history to choke an entire museum. The old map from Kamat's archive was fragile, held together by hope and tape, but it led Arjun straight to his target.

Technically, the stepwell no longer existed. The British had filled it in decades ago, and modern Mumbai had paved over it to create a parking lot sandwiched between two grimy residential buildings. But the ley line under it still pulsed—faint, broken, but unmistakably alive.

Arjun leaned against a parked scooter, pretending to check his phone while his other hand held the Ley Finder inside his bag. The screen flickered as soon as he stepped closer to the lot.

"Definitely here," he muttered.

Bete's voice crackled in his ear. "You realize you're about to commit felony archaeology?"

"Historical reclamation," Arjun corrected.

"Breaking into a parking lot with a crowbar."

"Details."

The lot itself was empty except for a rickety metal gate and a half-asleep security guard whose phone addiction was the only thing keeping him awake. Arjun waited until the man's attention drifted into YouTube shorts territory before slipping over the low wall, landing in a crouch between two battered scooters.

The map had shown the stepwell sitting roughly seven meters down, its entrance sealed with concrete and forgetfulness. Arjun wasn't equipped for excavation, but he had a simpler plan—find the thinnest point, and listen.

He placed the prayer stones directly on the pavement, right where the ley node sat buried. The stones hummed immediately.

"Bete," Arjun whispered. "Feed the signal through the modulator."

"You are a lunatic."

"Not wrong."

The frequency modulator activated with a soft whine, and for a moment, nothing happened.

Then the ground sang.

It wasn't loud. It was barely audible over the distant traffic and the sputtering fan in the watchman's shed. But to Arjun, kneeling with his palms flat against the concrete, it was like pressing his ear to the skin of a giant beast and hearing its heartbeat.

The stone remembered. It remembered water flowing down ancient steps, remembered chants drifting up to a forgotten sky. It remembered hands placing offerings—and it remembered the day it was sealed.

The hum twisted, discordant, as if the stepwell itself was warning him to stop.

Arjun didn't.

He adjusted the frequency, matching it to the hum in the relic stones—and the pavement cracked.

A thin fracture ran between the stones, tracing the outline of what had once been the well's mouth. Arjun's heart hammered as he pried at the edge, fingers working loose a chunk of crumbling cement. Below it, stone steps glistened faintly with trapped moisture, descending into the dark.

"Open sesame," Arjun whispered.

He slipped inside before the guard could notice, torch clenched between his teeth.

The stepwell was a skeleton. Its bones were soaked in time, walls slick with condensation and moss. Arjun descended carefully, light flickering over carvings that hadn't seen daylight in nearly a century. They were prayer inscriptions, mantras meant to seal rather than summon.

Halfway down, his foot hit something hard.

A copper disc, tarnished but intact, embedded into the step itself. Arjun knelt, brushing away grime to reveal the same spiral sigil that had been on the scroll under the last shrine.

This wasn't just a node anchor. It was a keyhole.

"Oh boy," Arjun whispered.

He placed the prayer stones on either side of the disc, adjusting the frequency modulator once more. The stones vibrated, harmonics building—this time not a hum, but a whisper.

Not in any language Arjun knew.

But in something older.

He could feel it in his bones, the same way you feel thunder in your chest before you hear it. The well wasn't just marking the node.

It was a conduit.

The air grew colder. Water trickled somewhere unseen. And then—

The whisper answered.

A voice—or something that had once been a voice—spoke through the stones, a layered sound made of crackling fire, grinding stone, and wind through hollow bones.

Arjun couldn't understand the words, but the meaning stabbed straight into his gut.

"You are too early."

"You are too late."

"You are not the first."

And then the frequency overloaded, the stones cracking in half, the modulator sparking out in a shower of light. Arjun fell back, heart pounding, gasping for breath.

Bete's voice jolted to life. "What the hell just happened?"

Arjun stared at the broken stones. "Someone else tried this before."

"And?"

"They failed."

The air inside the well felt heavier, like something old had stirred awake, blinked once, and settled back into waiting. Arjun scrambled back up the steps, sealing the entrance behind him as best he could, and bolted into the night.

Behind him, the broken ley line hummed softly—like a pulse trying to find its rhythm again.