For Vikramaditya, bullets were only half the battle. The other half was minds.
Engineers. Designers. Craftsmen. Men and women who understood not just how to fix machines, but how to rethink them.
And Bharat had plenty — buried under humiliation, working as clerks, typists, or factory coolies for the Empire.
He only had to reach them.
His first source was the Imperial College Registry — names, skills, locations. It was off-limits to natives. But a Magicnet-linked clerk in the records office was already feeding Vikram every sheet.
He began marking profiles:
Men expelled for political reasons
Students sent abroad and returned silent
Failed applicants rejected for caste or "improper temperament"
Those were his first recruits.
The invitations came not on paper, but through chance.
An old schoolmate bumped into them. A stranger in the queue for jaggery said, "You ever fix a pressure valve?" A beggar at the train station handed them a folded note without a word.
Those who followed the clues reached a locked door in an alleyway.
Behind it — a candle-lit room, tools on the walls, a kettle boiling.
And a man with calm eyes saying, "Do you still want to build?"
They didn't trust him at first. Why would they?
But Vikram didn't offer speeches. He offered metal. He offered plans. He offered answers.
The first group — eight men and two women — were from different castes, regions, and training levels. One had worked in a London shipyard. One had only apprenticed with a clockmaker.
All were given the same offer:
Food
Shelter
A place to design
And no interference from politicians, landlords, or priests
Only one condition: loyalty not to Vikram — but to Bharat's future.
Magicnet did the rest.
Every handshake, every tool passed, every shared tiffin — Vikram touched and learned. He mapped skills, frustrations, secret breakthroughs.
He didn't just copy knowledge.
He understood their limits.
And then helped them break through.
A man struggling with recoil angles was fed data from a tribal arrow fletcher in Bastar. A woman trying to build steam pressure models was linked to an old train mechanic from the Deccan.
Fusion across centuries.
The engineers formed into four primary cells:
Ballistics and Weapons (based in Gwalior)
Mechanics and Tools (in Madurai)
Energy and Motion (in Calcutta)
Communications and Signals (in a secret bunker outside Bhopal)
Each cell worked in isolation, but the Magicnet kept them in sync. Designs drafted in one location would be visible to all connected engineers in sleep. Corrections could be made subconsciously, and tested the next morning.
Failures dropped. Output tripled.
They called it the "Midnight Conference."
By the year's end, Vikram had over 200 engineers, most unknown to the British.
Their inventions included:
A water-filtration device for rural deployment
A handheld communication machine for Sthirakaya field units
Adjustable gears for carts to scale hill terrain
A fully indigenous lathe machine using local materials
None of it bore names.
Only symbols. Only numbers.
Because names could be hunted.
But ideas — especially when shared across 200 connected minds — could not be erased.
Vikram didn't just want weapons.
He wanted sovereignty of thought.
And now, he had the minds to build it.
Let the Empire have its universities. He had something older:
An empire of problem-solvers rising quietly beneath the feet of their masters.
They would build the next age with no slogans. No flags. Only results.