Date: April 6, 2023
Location: Unknown chamber — we stopped naming them.
I woke to screaming.
Again.
Not the startled scream of discovery.
Not fear. Not even pain.
This was the kind of scream people make when something takes their face.
I didn't run. I didn't need to.
By now, I know the sound of death.
This one belonged to Rahul.
My junior assistant. Young. Smart. Devoted. Dead.
They found him by the well shaft. Or what used to be a well. Now it's something else. A pit. A mouth. Its bricks are wet.
Not with water.
It… leaks when no one is near.
Rahul's face—
I don't think—
There's no point describing.
It's gone.
His forehead bore the same sigil. The Silent Tongue. Again.
But this time… there were two more marks beneath it. Like branching limbs.
A sequence. A counting.
It's marking the deaths.
There's blood on my notes. I think it's mine. I don't know.
I keep forgetting people.
Where's Liang?
I… I think I saw him yesterday. No. Two days ago.
Was he the one chanting in his sleep? Or was that… Zhang?
Zhang. Yes.
He hanged himself.
The rope was made from his own shirt.
His feet were raw. Like he tried to walk up the wall first.
We're not sleeping anymore.
If you sleep, you dream.
If you dream, he whispers.
Bhantaragya.
That name—
God, it burrows in.
When I close my eyes, I see his book. Not the physical one. The one inside my mind. Pages made of skin. Words moving like centipedes.
He made something. A shortcut to Nirvana. Yes. But it was a lie. A trap. A crack between realities, and now something older crawls through.
The monks… the followers… they weren't cursed.
They volunteered.
They wanted to be hollow.
They believed Nirvana meant absence—no desire, no pain, no soul.
He gave them that.
He peeled their minds into vessels.
And now—
Now we're becoming like them.
I caught Priya staring at the wall for six hours.
She didn't blink.
She was mouthing the chant.
When I asked her what she saw, she smiled.
Her teeth were bleeding.
The Japanese intern—Souta—
He's missing.
Gone.
His journal, however… we found it in the alcove behind the main chamber.
He translated parts of the ritual scrolls. He performed them.
He believed Bhantaragya was a misunderstood bodhisattva.
He thought we had uncovered a gateway to a purer path.
He invited it.
He started all of this.
…My hands shake now when I write.
The pages look warped.
Sometimes, I see symbols forming between the lines—faint, black, wet.
Then gone.
We tried calling out.
Still no signal.
No radios. No satellite phones.
The power died this morning.
And the sun—
It rose, but it's wrong.
It flickers.
There are two shadows now, cast by nothing.
We are sealed.
The interns cry at night. Some hum to themselves.
Two are missing.
Nobody asks where they went anymore.
I tried to seal Chamber Theta.
The door was already sealed. From the inside.
The symbols carved on it match the sigils we found on the corpses.
It's not a chamber anymore.
It's a womb.
Something gestates there.
Something watches us from it.
I keep writing to stay human.
But I feel the words slipping.
I've started to hear the diary speak back to me.
I know that's insane.
But what if it isn't?
I read the same sentence ten times and it's different each time.
I wrote:
> We are trapped.
Then I read it again. It said:
We are chosen.
Then again:
> We were always his.
My name.
I scratched it out last night.
On every surface.
I don't want him to find it again.
He keeps carving it onto the walls.
Advait.
Advait.
Advait.
I'm not me anymore.
I'm just the next page in his scripture.
If someone finds this—if anyone—burn it.
Burn it all.
Don't look for us.
Don't open the seal.
And if you hear chanting—don't listen.
Even silence has a tongue here.
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