The vision was not a vision. It was a drowning.
Kalpit wasn't just seeing the cavern's structural weaknesses; he was experiencing them. He felt the crushing weight of five kilometers of city-plate pressing down on the rock above. He felt the slow, inexorable decay of the durasteel beams, the molecular-level rust creeping through them like a cancer.
GROOOOAN.
The sound was not in his ears, but in his bones. It was the sound of a million tons of metal screaming its silent, centuries-long agony. The information was a torrent, a firehose of raw data flooding the single, leaky faucet of his mind.
His legs gave out.
THUD.
He hit the cold floor, his body convulsing. The world was a blueprint of imminent collapse, a terrifying schematic of stress and entropy. Every object was screaming its own fragility at him.
"Too much! It's too much!" he gasped, clutching his head.
"The vessel is weak. The influx of Prana is overwhelming his neural pathways," Anasuya's sharp, clinical voice cut through the noise. He heard the shuffle of her feet as she rushed towards him.
"Patience, Anasuya," Vashistha's calm voice commanded. "The circuit must be allowed to complete itself. He must ground the energy, not fight it."
Ground it? Kalpit felt like he was the ground, and the entire city was about to fall on him. He felt a pressure on the back of his neck, a cool hand that seemed to drain the chaotic energy. The sensory overload receded, the roaring in his mind softening to a dull hum, and then darkness claimed him.
He awoke to the smell of medicinal herbs and the soft beep of a bio-monitor. He was in a small, spartan room, lying on a simple cot. The walls were smooth, unadorned rock, lit by a soft, ambient glow.
A wave of nausea hit him as he sat up. The memory of the vision, the feeling of the world's crushing weight, was still fresh.
"Easy," a voice said. Rishi Anasuya was sitting on a stool nearby, cleaning a complex-looking medical instrument. "Your bio-signs are stable, but your neural activity is still erratic. Like a console that's been hit by a power surge."
Kalpit rubbed his temples. "What… what did you do to me?" he asked, his voice raspy.
"Vashistha didn't do anything to you," she corrected, not unkindly. "He simply opened a door that was already there. The Muladhara Chakra. In your terms, think of it as a dormant bio-processor at the base of your spine. It's designed to interface directly with the physical world, to read its energy, its structure."
She gestured around the room. "MAYA's system emits a constant, low-frequency signal that keeps this processor, and six others like it, suppressed in every human. It's how they keep the herd docile. Your… condition… makes you immune to that signal."
"My condition," Kalpit repeated bitterly. "You mean this curse." He looked at his hands. They felt alien to him. "I'm not a processor. I'm a person."
"You are both," Anasuya said, her gaze softening slightly. "That is the truth humanity has forgotten."
The stone door to the room slid open and Vashistha entered, holding a simple metal cup filled with water. His presence filled the small space with a quiet authority.
"The first sight is always the most violent," the old sage said. "You saw the world as it is: a constant state of decay and stress. A system forever straining against its own collapse. You felt the Adharma in the very steel and stone."
"I don't want to see it," Kalpit snapped, a spark of his old Sump-rat defiance returning. "Turn it off."
"I cannot," Vashistha replied calmly. "But you can learn to focus it. A lens that is not focused sees only a blur. A mind that is not focused sees only chaos."
He placed the metal cup on a small table in front of Kalpit. "Look at this cup."
Kalpit hesitated, then obeyed. At first, it was just a cup. Then, the sight flickered on. The cup became a nightmare of shimmering atoms. He saw the microscopic fractures in its surface, the impurities in the alloy, the memory of the heat that forged it, the inevitable future where it would corrode into dust. A headache began to throb behind his eyes.
"Stop it!" he grunted, shutting his eyes.
"You are trying to see the cup's past and its future," Vashistha instructed, his voice a steady anchor in the storm of sensation. "You are seeing its every possibility. That is the path to madness. See only its present. Its purpose. See its Dharma."
"Its purpose?" Kalpit asked, confused. "It's a cup. It holds things."
"Precisely," Vashistha urged. "Its purpose—its Dharma—is to contain. To hold this water. It is a vessel. Focus on that single, simple truth. Let the rest of the noise fade away."
Kalpit took a deep, shuddering breath. He opened his eyes and looked at the cup again. He ignored the atomic shimmer, the history, the decay. He focused only on its function. It holds water. It is a vessel.
Slowly, miraculously, the chaotic overlay of information began to recede. The dizzying blueprint of stress and fracture faded from his vision. The cup was just a cup again, solid and real, holding the still, clear water.
Kalpit blinked, a profound sense of relief washing over him. He could control it. He could turn it down.
He looked up at Vashistha, a new, strange feeling dawning in his chest. It wasn't belief, not yet. But it was the first crack in the wall of his disbelief.
Just then, a klaxon blared through the Ashram, a sharp, intrusive sound that shattered the room's tranquility.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Rishi Atri's voice echoed from a hidden speaker, laced with panic. "Vashistha! We have a breach! Not physical—digital! Something is in our network!"
Vashistha's calm demeanor vanished, replaced by a grim intensity. "On my way." He looked at Kalpit. "Get dressed. The lesson is over. The test has just begun."
They hurried to the main control center, a circular chamber humming with the activity of dozens of acolytes at their consoles. Atri stood before a massive holographic display, his face pale. The display showed a swirling vortex of malevolent red code attacking a sphere of placid blue—the Ashram's defense network.
"What is it?" Vashistha demanded.
"It's a Hunter-Killer program. An apex predator AI," Atri said, his fingers flying across his console. "It's not trying to break in with force. It's… learning. Adapting. It's dismantling our logic bombs, bypassing our firewalls one by one. I've never seen code like it."
VWWWIRRR—CRACKLE!
A section of the blue sphere collapsed, consumed by the red vortex.
"Main shields are at forty percent!" an acolyte shouted. "It's found the geothermal masking frequency! It's trying to get a lock on our physical location!"
Anasuya swore under her breath. "If it broadcasts our position, Kali will send everything."
"Then we cannot let it," Vashistha stated. His eyes scanned the frantic scene, the desperate fight in the digital realm. His gaze then fell upon Kalpit, who was watching the holographic battle with a strange, new perception.
To the others, it was just swirling light and code.
But Kalpit, with his newly opened eye, saw something else. He saw the structure. He saw the architecture of the attacking AI. It wasn't a chaotic vortex; it was a weapon, beautifully and terribly designed. And like any structure, it had stress points. It had load-bearing logic paths.
It had flaws.
Vashistha saw the look of focused intensity on Kalpit's face. He understood in an instant.
"Atri, pipe a direct feed of the Hunter-Killer's source code to this terminal," the old sage commanded, pointing to a console next to him.
"Master, what for?" Atri asked, distracted. "No one can out-code a dedicated Asura-class AI!"
"He is not going to code," Vashistha said, his voice low and powerful, grabbing the attention of everyone in the room. He placed a hand on Kalpit's shoulder.
He looked Kalpit in the eye, his gaze piercing. "You see the weakness in steel and stone. You see the stress points in a building."
The terminal next to them lit up, displaying the raw, impossibly complex code of the Hunter-Killer program. It was a waterfall of alien symbols and logic.
"Now," Vashistha commanded, his voice ringing with divine authority, "look at the code. Find its fracture. And break it."