The cotton sat in bales, quiet and unmarked, under tarpaulin sheets near the Yamuna docks. British agents ignored it — assuming it was raw export stock, unrefined, not worth taxing.
But Vikram knew better.
Each bundle was from Khandwa, shipped under a false salt trade invoice. He had moved them across three cities using paperwork borrowed from memory — memories plucked from sleepy clerks, lazy rail managers, and bored police inspectors, each unaware they'd approved a silent industrial base.
This wasn't trade.
This was infiltration.
Cloth had always been Bharat's backbone — long before Manchester's looms, long before ships carved the coast. The Empire feared looms more than rifles.
And that's where Vikram struck next.
He didn't call it swadeshi.
He didn't wave a flag.
He started with a loom house in Farash Khana, run by a half-blind Marwari who hadn't paid taxes in years. Vikram shook his hand. Three seconds. Thread formed.
Inside the man's mind, he found Advanced Weaving, Intermediate Dye Control, and a buried memory of old, pre-British weaving guilds — networks of 200 families that once controlled cotton exports in the Mughal era.
Those families were now broken.
Starved. Scattered.
Forgotten.
Vikram remembered them.
The loom house became the base.
Two floors, five large charkhas, six workers paid in grain and chai.
He connected each.
Mapped their skills.
Elementary Weaving
Beginner Thread Spinning
Intermediate Color Matching
Beginner Needlework
He fused them slowly.
Built three new composite skills: Efficient Weaving, Precision Dyeing, Fast Loom Setup.
They didn't know why they worked faster. Why they made fewer mistakes. Why customers returned more often.
They just thought they had gotten lucky.
But Vikram didn't stop at weaving.
He needed three more pieces:
Dye Sources – Natural ones, outside British-regulated imports
Tailors – With skill and loyalty
Customers – Beyond Delhi, who could buy in silence
The dyes came from a sandalwood trader near Jaipur — a man once arrested for refusing to convert under missionary pressure. Vikram reached him during a temple fair. One touch. Thread formed.
The man's skills weren't special. But his memory held a list — secret dye sources in tribal areas where British taxmen feared to go.
Vikram copied it.
Two weeks later, ox carts rolled into Delhi with red hibiscus, indigo bricks, turmeric paste, and wild fig bark.
The tailors came next.
Vikram sought out women this time.
In alley homes and widow kitchens. Women whose fingers stitched quietly for money, unseen by law, by caste, by census. He paid in coin. In cloth. In whispers.
He touched 32 women in five days.
They never felt it.
But each gained shared access to a growing library of stitching techniques: Mughal cuts, Rajput cuffs, Gujarati lining patterns.
Their work became uniform.
Perfect.
For customers, he didn't go to cities.
He went to temples.
Each temple had priests.
Each priest wore dhotis and angavastras.
And each one had small, quiet influence over local gatherings.
Vikram offered new sets of traditional clothes — free for first-time wearers.
Once worn, they asked for more.
And once enough temples switched, the demand followed: merchants, pilgrims, local landlords.
The new fabric was cheaper, sturdier, more vibrant — and bore no foreign tag.
It sold not through nationalism.
But through value.
The British began noticing the drop in demand.
Not much.
Just a dip.
A tremor.
Not enough for panic.
But enough for Manchester to send two advisors to Delhi.
Vikram let them come.
He arranged for them to visit a decoy weaving unit — deliberately slow, unprofitable, with workers who fumbled questions.
The advisors filed a dismissive report:
"No competition from native industries. Output low. Methods crude."
They returned satisfied.
Meanwhile, Vikram's real units now operated in five locations — Delhi, Meerut, Agra, Varanasi, and Ujjain.
All invisible.
All connected.
He used the textile profits to:
Build underground vaults beneath press buildings to store untraceable coin
Offer zero-interest loans to village temple schools — in exchange for loyalty
Buy land licenses in other states using fake identities held by Magicnet operatives
Fund training programs in tailoring for boys and girls — disguising them as temple crafts classes
More importantly, he used the cloth to spread influence.
Each batch carried a coded stitch — invisible to most, but clear to those trained.
The code marked regions, dates, buyers — a tracking system with no ink, no ledger.
By year's end, the weaving units had moved 11,000 garments.
That wasn't the real win.
The real win was who bought them.
800 temple heads
400 school teachers
300 zamindar households
90 pro-British merchants — unknowingly wearing nationalist-made fabric
12 British officers' wives who purchased "local chic" from an Anglo-run store that Vikram secretly funded
They wore Bharat on their skin.
And didn't even know it.
In the Magicnet space, the threads of the textile network glowed with quiet strength.
Skills. Movement. Money. Loyalty.
No slogans.
No speeches.
Just cloth.
And from it, the future.