The land wasn't flat. It curved.
Wheat fields dipped gently across the horizon like folds in a tired bedsheet. Small canals ran narrow and stubborn between them, dragging the smell of silt and cattle dung wherever they flowed. It was the kind of place British clerks called "undeveloped." A backwater. Forgotten.
But Vikram didn't see fields.
He saw routes.
Food. Men. Steel. Shelter. Secrecy.
A hundred kilometers from Delhi, a zamindar named Raghunath Singh held five entire villages — and more importantly, the only functioning granary between Meerut and Ghaziabad. It wasn't enormous. But it fed a thousand mouths. His estate sat on the old Mughal canal route and three ox-cart lanes that hadn't been mapped by colonial rail surveyors.
Vikram needed it.
Not to control harvests. Not yet.
He needed storage. Land. And loyalty — the kind that didn't come from a treaty, but from something deeper.
Something harder to shake.
He arrived as a guest.
No announcement. No title. Just a khadi kurta, a bundle of printed leaflets, and a quiet smile. The estate gates creaked open after one of Vikram's boys had passed word three days earlier — promising printing contracts and silent distribution.
"Raghunath Singh respects those who make things happen," the boy had said. "But don't speak too high. He doesn't like being challenged."
Vikram didn't challenge.
He listened.
He watched.
He absorbed.
And after dinner — a mild thali served on brass — he made his move.
The estate had a small veranda with carved wooden beams and an old iron bell near the stairs. Raghunath Singh stood beside it, swirling tobacco in his cheek, spitting occasionally between sentences.
He was tall. Heavy. With a sharp brow and the slow, constant look of a man always calculating what someone wanted.
"You're from Delhi?"
"Yes."
"Printer?"
"Yes."
"Revolutionary?"
Vikram smiled. "Would I be here if I wasn't?"
The zamindar chuckled.
"True. What is it you want, boy?"
Vikram held out a small paper — hand-written accounts, showing how illegal British tariffs had cost Raghunath ten percent more for grain transport the previous year. He'd sourced the data from a customs officer's memory, now quietly stored in Magicnet.
The zamindar read. Then stared.
"How do you know this?"
"I listen more than I speak."
Raghunath narrowed his eyes.
"And what are you offering? Advice?"
"No. A trade."
They spoke for an hour.
No slogans. No politics. Just quiet logistics.
Vikram offered press connections for tax document forgeries. Better rates on salt via his hidden black market ties. And access to skilled labor for canal maintenance — workers who didn't ask for coin, only food and beds.
In exchange?
Land.
One unused storage facility near the granary. And a corner of a cow shelter — empty, cracked, forgotten. Both fenced, both ignored.
Raghunath didn't say yes.
But he didn't say no.
He invited Vikram to stay the night.
That night, Vikram sat beside the granary keeper.
An old man with cracked heels and steady hands. A lifetime of farming etched into his walk. As they sat sipping buttermilk, their shoulders brushed.
Three seconds.
Thread formed.
Vikram entered his memory space that same night.
It wasn't rich with facts.
But it was full of truth.
Which servants were loyal. Which boys stole grain. Which traders undercounted deliveries. Which of Raghunath's cousins secretly sold stored food to British depots behind his back.
And one more thing.
A memory: Raghunath himself, eight years earlier, standing beside the granary's floor with two dead peasants at his feet. He hadn't killed them. But he hadn't stopped the men who had.
Vikram held the thread longer.
Not to judge.
To understand.
He left early the next morning.
Said nothing about the deal.
Made no promises.
But two days later, a cart arrived at Raghunath's estate.
Inside: new forged tax receipts, British-mimicked canal permits, and stamped ration tickets — perfect, undetectable, untraceable.
Raghunath said nothing.
Just sent back a folded note.
"Use the granary. Quietly."
And another line:
"That cow shelter? Yours too."
Over the next two weeks, Vikram turned both into shadows.
The granary wasn't just a storage unit now.
It became:
A secure distribution depot for salt, grain, and forged documents
A training station for rural operatives embedded with Magicnet
A hidden clinic for wounded boys in case Delhi turned violent
A covert teaching center, where future village schoolmasters were taught re-written Dharmic history and technical basics
The cow shelter?
He re-roofed it.
And used it to test a primitive radio decoding unit, assembled from parts brought through the black market and assembled by a teenager who now carried Intermediate Telegraph Engineering — pulled from the mind of a drunk British operator.
But the bigger success wasn't logistics.
It was Raghunath himself.
Vikram touched him only once — casually, during a greeting, hands briefly grasping at the threshold of the granary.
Three seconds.
Thread formed.
He saw everything.
The ambition.
The fear.
The debt.
The desire to be remembered not just as a landholder, but as a protector.
Vikram didn't alter his memory.
He didn't need to.
He simply dropped a single new belief in during sleep — subtle, almost invisible:
"Vikram isn't here to take your power. He's here to make sure you keep it — through Bharat's rise."
The next day, Raghunath ordered two of his strongest cousins to assist the boys rebuilding the shelter.
He never asked what they were doing.
And never reported the activity to the district collector.
Within a month, Vikram had thirty rural routes.
All unofficial.
All unpatrolled.
All tied to estates held by men like Raghunath — proud, paranoid, and slowly falling under the spell of quiet control.
He didn't threaten them.
He didn't bribe them.
He simply gave them what they needed to remain important in a future that was rapidly slipping away from the old world.
And in return, they gave him space.
Stone.
Safety.
And slowly… allegiance.