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Underneath the neon skin of Suryanagar, the djinn market breathed like a wounded god.
Arjun followed Ishani down a staircase most people didn't notice—a scuffed iron hatch in an alley labeled as condemned by city authorities three years ago. The scent hit first: rust, incense, stagnant water, and something faintly metallic, laced with turmeric and ozone. A splintered wooden arch marked the threshold, painted with symbols he couldn't identify.
"I thought the djinn market was just a name," Arjun muttered.
Ishani didn't slow her pace. "Names are the first lies we learn," she said. "What matters is what bleeds behind them."
The staircase unspooled into a massive underground bazaar—maybe five or six stories below the street, but somehow vast enough to feel like a city in itself. Glimmering orbs floated above stalls manned by masked traders. Hollow-eyed vendors whispered prices in half-spoken languages, offering relic powders, memory drugs, body augments, and glowing artifacts sealed in glass.
"This place isn't on any map," Arjun said, voice breathless. Not awestruck. Half-terrified.
"It's not meant to be," Ishani replied. "The djinn below only invite the desperate, the dying, or the chosen." She cast him a sideways glance. "You just might be all three."
They passed a woman with stars tattooed across her scalp, selling bottles of "distilled fortune." A man missing both eyes read from a floating scroll without blinking. Children with metallic limbs played tug-of-war with a spectral chain. Every step was a hallucination—but real.
"Who exactly were those people chasing me?" Arjun asked as they ducked beneath blue silk drapery and into a quieter corridor lined in violet stone.
"Private retrieval unit from an offshore myth-tech corporation," she said, crouching beside a steel gate fringed by prayer beads and flex-cables. "Think: mercenaries who get paid to recover dangerous stories."
"Stories?"
She keyed open the gate with what looked like a bone shard carved into a key. "The chip you picked up? It's not storage—it's transmission. Memory. Meta-mnemonic code bound in language older than civilization. They'll kill to contain it, because myth isn't dead, Arjun. It just needed speakers."
Arjun rubbed his palms over his face. "This is insane. I fix things. Wires. Motherboards. I flunked philosophy in college."
Ishani gave him a fleeting smile. "Then stop thinking of myths as metaphors. They're schematics. And your ancestors? Coders and conjurers both."
Inside the chamber beyond the gate, dozens of candles flickered in hanging clay pots. An engine-pulse throbbed somewhere in the ceiling. In the center stood a massive marble table etched with a rotating ring of ancient letters, orbiting a lotus-shaped terminal.
"What is this place?"
"A forgotten node of the Black Archive," Ishani said. "Technically illegal. Officially condemned. Spiritually volatile."
She placed the chip into a hexagonal slit on the terminal. The system hummed to life—holographic glyphs spinning into a spectral network above them. Threads and circles danced—maps without coordinates, voices bound in light.
A spiral of symbols coalesced, forming a slow-unfolding mantra:
"Yet the child who carries no memory may speak the tongue that was cut from the world."
Then the image changed—an old city burning beneath thunderclouds shaped like serpents. In its shattered square, a figure stood with a copper blade drowning in firelight. Above, a symbol shone: a broken crown framed by whispering shapes, too ancient to name.
Arjun stumbled backward. "Why is that symbol familiar?"
"You've dreamt of it," Ishani said softly. "We all have. The First Shastra. The story that shattered time."
She turned, more serious now. "Whatever lives in that chip—whatever named you—it's tied to the Viśranti Protocol."
"I don't know what that means."
"You will. Most don't survive learning. But… you're still breathing."
A crack rang from the corridor outside.
Ishani froze, drawing her baton. "They found us."
Arjun started to speak, but a deep clanging overwhelmed his voice—alarming, echoing, metallic and living. Then the far wall dissolved—yes, dissolved—into refracted geometry, and from within it stepped a figure cloaked in smoke and silhouette, face hidden behind a metal mask shaped like a lion's jaw.
Ishani whispered. "Oh no. They've sent a myth-binder."
"What the hell is that?" Arjun said, stumbling behind the chair.
"Someone who's bound half to memory, half to meat. A re-animated myth, loyal to whatever faction dug it up first."
The figure spoke—not with words, but with pressure. Arjun felt it thrumming through the air.
"THE BOY IS THE THREAD. CUT THE THREAD. STOP THE RETURN."
The relic responded in Arjun's pocket—flaring with heat. He cried out, but didn't fall.
The lion-faced figure raised a hand etched with memory-strands and symbols that danced between timelines. The table trembled. The holograms screamed in light.
Ishani pulled something from her belt—a curved glass disc—and slammed it to the floor. The entire room cracked like a mirror, and the floor beneath them gave in.
They fell. Fell through light. Through shadow. Through memory.
Fell toward the next story.
**End of Chapter 3**