Salt. Steel. Two words. Two chains.
One gripped the stomach. The other, the spine.
For centuries, the British had taxed one and forbidden the other.
And now, Vikramaditya would take them both back.
Salt was always political. It was everywhere, in every Indian kitchen, yet the British held it by the throat. Salt pans were owned by the Crown. Local production was either banned or taxed. Anyone found harvesting coastal salt could be beaten, jailed, or worse.
Vikram didn't protest it. He didn't march. He didn't beg.
He simply bought land.
Small, scattered patches along the coastline of Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Odisha. Not under his name, but under proxies — dead names, forgotten widows, shell farmers. All coordinated through Magicnet.
He recruited salt workers, many of whom had been ruined by British raids. Each was linked through touch, and their skills mapped:
Brine Layering
Drying Time Calculation
Crystal Quality Sensing
He fused their orbs into a single custom skill: Optimized Salt Harvesting.
Then uploaded it to new workers — young men from villages who had never touched the sea before.
Within two months, his first batch yielded three times the colonial average. Quietly packaged in blank sacks and moved by bullock cart at night. Distributed through street vendors and grain sellers. Priced lower than the Crown's.
The result: a black market of white powder.
British officers were baffled. Seizures increased, but so did supply. And every time they arrested someone, they found no names, no ledgers — only silence.
Magicnet wiped all memory of the operation from any non-linked mind.
And the salt kept flowing.
Steel was harder.
British control over steel was brutal. They owned every furnace, every rail mill. Any native attempt to smelt large-scale was sabotaged or taxed into death. Even TISCO, run by Tata, was leashed under Crown scrutiny.
Vikram needed steel not just for rifles and rail — but for sovereignty.
So he started where no one would look:
Scrap.
In the ruins of burned villages, discarded railway parts, broken agricultural tools — he collected iron. Magicnet-linked sweepers and rag-pickers in Calcutta and Bombay were trained to spot useful metals. A new skill was created: Material Reclamation Awareness.
These scrap piles were quietly moved to a secret smelting plant outside Durg.
The furnace there wasn't British-built. It was designed by a former tribal ironsmith, who Vikram had touched months ago.
The man had never written a single formula.
But inside Magicnet, his unspoken instincts — heat judgment by smell, density by strike — were replicated perfectly.
He fused this with skills from British engineers, and created Advanced Local Metallurgy.
The first batch of pig iron came out darker, denser, stronger than anything bought from Calcutta.
And the British didn't even know it existed.
From there, Vikram split the steel operation into three:
Civilian Tools: Axes, ploughs, cart wheels — distributed under rural welfare programs. Cheap, strong, and stamped with a new brand: Shaktidhara.
Weapon Parts: Shipped in pieces, disguised as farm equipment, and assembled only at hidden caches.
Rail Material: Smuggled into minor stations where loyal stationmasters quietly replaced colonial track pieces with Vikram's alloy — one mile at a time.
By the end of the year, over 60 kilometers of rail ran on native steel.
The British never noticed.
They were too busy inspecting ledgers.
Money came through hawala — now fully under Vikram's control. The same network once used to fund illegal British deals now funded Bharat's rebirth.
Laundered money from pro-British merchants was rerouted. Every paisa used against Bharat was returned with interest — in the form of salt bags and steel rails.
Even debt collectors in Bombay unknowingly carried notes bearing Vikram's watermark, not the Queen's.
To the outside world, nothing had changed.
No newspaper reported it.
No protest was led.
But inside every village where a new steel plough was handed out, every kitchen where black-market salt returned flavor to the dal — Bharat was returning.
Not loudly.
But permanently.
And Vikram knew: you don't win wars by shouting.
You win them by feeding your people.
And by arming their silence with salt and steel.