The hundredth thread connected at 2:14 a.m.
Vikramaditya didn't plan it. He didn't notice the boy brushing past him on the temple steps, carrying a crate of turmeric root. He only touched his shoulder to steady him.
Three seconds.
Thread formed.
Then the world paused.
Not the city.
The space.
In the threadspace, every line froze.
For a moment, it looked like a painting — a constellation of human potential suspended in a still sky.
Then, with no command, light surged through every thread.
One by one, the connected minds flared — not from pain, not from shock, but from awareness.
It was as if every connected soul had, at the same moment, remembered a word they had never been taught.
And they said it in silence.
Vikram heard it too, not in sound, but in his core:
"We are now."
The Magicnet, after 100 human minds, had changed form.
Until now, it had functioned as an extension of Vikram's will — dependent on direct touch for connection, for orb transfer, for influence.
Now, it had begun breathing on its own.
No longer did he need to be present.
A connected person brushing hands with another — even briefly — could now transfer a partial thread. Enough for Magicnet to link, sense, and assess. Full fusion required Vikram's direct access, but the spread no longer needed him physically.
The mind-net had become viral.
And it had rules of its own.
The first effect was passive spread.
Within three days of reaching 100 users, the number quietly climbed to 143.
All contacts made through shared beds in worker dorms, elbow brushes in temple lines, handoffs in bazaars.
Vikram hadn't touched these people.
But they were now faintly in his periphery.
He couldn't yet access their thoughts fully.
But he could see their orb signatures.
He watched the lights rise in the space. Like stars on the horizon.
Each thread pulled more mental power into the net. His ability to think across time — to track multiple lines of planning — improved drastically.
He began dreaming in layers.
One dream would take him through a spice trader's home in Lahore.
The next — a military barrack in Bareilly.
Then a school prayer in Ujjain.
Each thread became a window, updating automatically, reflecting small movements of Bharat's daily life.
He could track tone shifts in a classroom by pulse rhythm.
Could sense disloyalty from thoughts that refused pattern.
Could sniff fear by how fast someone repeated a memory.
He wasn't a ruler.
He was the spine of a living mind.
He tested the limit again.
Linked five volunteers through conscious shared thought — only one had physical contact with Vikram.
They all received the same image in dream:
A banyan leaf with the word "Agni" carved into it.
All five reported it back.
The experiment was a success.
Dream-seeding now worked across network-only nodes.
By end of month, Magicnet crossed 300 users.
And it began compensating for Vikram's time.
If he missed an event, or was asleep, the threadspace could retain incidents, marking them for recall later. Like bookmarks.
He no longer had to scan every memory live.
He could queue them.
A revolution in rest.
But it also meant risk.
The Magicnet, for all its growing precision, was still built on human minds.
And humans wandered.
Some began developing contradictory patterns.
A teacher who had absorbed dharmic orbs now flirted with socialist ideas from a visiting missionary.
A laborer who had taken discipline training began questioning factory rules after talking to a distant cousin from Lucknow.
These weren't betrayals.
But they were leaks.
Vikram saw this too.
So he built a firewall protocol.
He created a new type of orb:
Matsya Mode – Observer Shell
When inserted into connected minds, this orb did nothing outwardly.
But if the user's thought patterns deviated beyond defined dharmic bounds, it sent a silent alert — a red thread in the net, only visible to Vikram.
This didn't suppress.
It signaled.
And it worked.
Three days after Matsya Mode was deployed, a small church-led schooling group in Agra tried to insert Jesus verses into arithmetic drills.
The teacher was a Magicnet user.
The red thread blinked.
Vikram visited in person the next day.
The teacher was quietly removed.
The school never noticed the change.
With 400 active nodes, Vikram could now begin testing wide-area influence.
He began planting mood patterns into common dreams.
A sense of disquiet whenever the Union Jack appeared.
A subtle pull of nostalgia whenever Sanskrit was heard.
An intuitive liking for certain symbols: the conch, the dhvaja, the peepal tree, the lion.
Symbols connected to Bharat's legacy.
No lecture.
Just… emotion.
Across cities, children began drawing chakras without knowing why.
Sweetsellers hummed Vedic meters.
Teachers said "Namaste" even when taught to say "Good morning."
No laws changed.
But the nation's rhythm began shifting.
He began creating passive zones — areas where the density of connected minds allowed Vikram to influence thought en masse for brief moments.
He called these Tirth Points — sacred crossings in the mental net.
One such point was Chandni Chowk on Mondays.
Another was the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu during a festival.
When 12 or more active nodes moved through the same space, Vikram could guide emotional drift of all present, even the unconnected.
Crowd moods softened.
Anger defused.
Panic turned to curiosity.
These moments lasted only minutes.
But they were proof.
Magicnet wasn't just memory and skill.
It was civilizational tuning.
Vikram wrote nothing down.
He published no manual.
He gave no name to the phenomenon.
But in a quiet hut near the outskirts of Delhi, as he sipped jaggery tea beside a fire, he whispered:
"Bharat now thinks together."
And the fire cracked in agreement.