CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VAULT BELOW THE SOIL
The entrance to the underground wing wasn't marked by steel doors or blinking lights. It sat behind a false wall in the temple room—a room no longer used for prayer, only silence. A carved panel of Vishnu concealed the access mechanism. One press at the right pressure point beneath the statue's foot, and the wall slid open with a soft hiss.
Thakur stepped into the descending corridor, lit by warm amber light. The walls were lined with sandstone and copper veins, part of an aesthetic he insisted on—technology without losing the feel of the land. Down here was where the true face of his estate lived. Where masks were left behind, and purpose took over.
The lab was massive, more of a private research complex than a laboratory. What began as a basic compound for herbal study had, over the years, transformed into a hybrid hub of ancient engineering and modern ambition. Thakur didn't fund it for philanthropy. He built it to secure what he believed was stolen, suppressed, or destroyed by centuries of theft disguised as history.
He walked past glass chambers where scientists in plain clothes studied neurological feedback loops triggered by Vedic mantra frequencies. Another chamber had a vertical tank, suspended with clear blue fluid, inside of which floated a metallic sphere etched with geometric Sanskrit—one of his most prized finds. And beyond that, a weapons vault—containing things not built, but reconstructed.
In his youth, Thakur had disappeared from his family for nearly two years. While others assumed he'd gone abroad to study, he was wandering through ancient temple ruins, tribal knowledge rings, and underground collectors across North India and Nepal. He had spent nights in remote villages deciphering copper plates, bribing forest guards to access forgotten shrines, and interrogating elders who spoke in riddles.
That's when he found it.
The first bundle of ancient scripture fragments—smuggled away during the British exodus, hidden in oil-stained cloth, brittle with age. He spent months translating them with the help of an old monk who claimed to have once walked the ruins of Nalanda. The texts weren't religious, not in the way colonizers labeled them. They were manuals—guides on weapon resonance, memory inscriptions, and energy channeling through sound and structure.
One scroll had diagrams eerily similar to magnetic propulsion models now used in Western aerospace labs.
Another described a "vijay vṛkṣa"—a mythic tree that could emit sound waves to purify or destroy, depending on alignment.
It all pointed to one truth he'd come to believe fully:
> "India was the cradle of science," he once told Amrita in a rare moment of openness. "But it was never meant to conquer. It was meant to stabilize. That's why they burned it. If you want to dominate, you erase the ones who knew how to build peace."
Europe's sudden leap in knowledge, to Thakur, was not genius. It was theft—sanitized, funded, and rewritten. Nalanda, Takshashila, and Vikramashila weren't just places of learning—they were the wellsprings of human evolution, snuffed out not by time, but by design.
Now, he was rebuilding from fragments.
His weapon prototypes reflected this synthesis. One resembled a traditional trident, but was laced with internal frequency emitters tuned to resonate with brainwave patterns—non-lethal but capable of shutting down cognition for minutes. Another appeared as a palm-sized disc, deceptively light, that emitted directional pulse vibrations—capable of bending steel if calibrated correctly. All of it drawn from what had once been written off as mythology.
On a wall lined with weapons, there hung one device he hadn't yet dared test: a staff embedded with an iron crystal supposedly excavated from a cave tied to the Naga legends. The script on it referenced energy redirection, and the side effects of misuse were... unpredictable.
He stared at it often. Like a man trying to decide whether to open a gate or leave the lock undisturbed.
His team wasn't made of traditional scientists. Many of them were quiet obsessives—disgraced academics, backroom savants, outcasts from conventional labs who found in Thakur's mansion something they couldn't get elsewhere: freedom, funding, and protection from oversight.
They didn't know the full scope of his vision. Only that it was going somewhere beyond politics.
He made sure none of them were indispensable. Every formula was copied by three hands. No single mind had access to the whole.
He trusted no one.
Not entirely.
Except the lab itself, and the scrolls locked in the vault at the lowest level—where only he had the code.
As he passed through the weapons chamber, one of the tech aides approached hesitantly. "Sir… the resonance readings from the iron lattice structure are showing anomalies again. It might be reacting to that object you brought last month."
Thakur turned, thoughtful.
"Let it react," he said. "Anything that stirs now might be remembering something it once was."
He stepped deeper into the facility, toward a sealed room where the ancient scrolls were being digitized—painstakingly, word by word.
His expression didn't change.
But inside, something stirred.
The sense that what he had begun for selfish reasons—for curiosity, control, survival—was starting to pull at threads larger than his name.
He liked that.
He liked knowing that he could still play god, even in a world that had long stopped believing in them.
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