Maa was in full festival mode. "Navratri aa gaya hai, beta! Nava-ratna! Nine nights, nine forms of Maa Durga. This is not just puja, this is shakti ka samay."
The house smelled of flowers and ghee. Little diyas were lined up. Maa had even convinced Huilan to wear a simple red chunni. "For the goddess," Maa said, and Huilan, after a moment's hesitation, took it. Her version of respect.
I nodded, did the aarti, ate the prasad. But my mind was in two places. Here, with the family. And up there, with the machine.
The Silent Choir was humming, fat on prayer. Reserves at 3.1%. The junk amplifier was doing its job—sucking up the planet's spiritual static like a thirsty bhookha bhediya.
But the interface had a new tab I'd found. "Resonance Focus." It was primitive. Like an old radio tuner. You could turn a dial, and the amplifier would… lean. Favor one frequency over others. If the shield was a blanket of noise, this made one part of the blanket louder.
The cost? Turning up one dial turned the others down. The overall shield got weaker. Trade-off, yaar. Always a trade-off.
On the fifth night of Navratri—the night for Maa Skandamata, but really, the night when the drums got loudest—I looked at the system graph. The band for "Durga/Kali Archetype" was a solid pillar of orange-gold and crimson light, towering over the blues of hope and the ambers of fear. India was screaming the goddess's name with one voice.
Why not? A small experiment. Just for tonight.
I reached out with my mind and grabbed the crude dial. I pulled it. Away from the messy soup of prayers. Towards that single, blazing, familiar frequency.
The graph shifted. The orange-crimson band swelled, becoming a monolith. The other colors faded to a faint murmur. Shield integrity dropped from 100% to 85%. A risk. But for one night?
I left it. Went back downstairs. The bhajans were playing. Maa was teaching Huilan a clapping pattern. "Jai Ambe Gauri…"
I slept. The machine above worked, now with a new, specific hunger.
Somewhere in Portugal, a convent.
Sister Maria awoke with a gasp. The dream was fading, but the echo remained. A rhythm. Words she did not know. "Ya Devi Sarva Bhuteshu… Shakti Rupena Sansthita…" They sat on her tongue, foreign and ancient. She crossed herself, murmuring a Hail Mary. But the Sanskrit syllables hummed beneath it, a strange, powerful bass note in her soul.
Shaolin, China.
Master Li finished his evening form. As he held the final stance, a heat bloomed in his dan tian—not the usual qi, but something fiercer. A vision flashed: a woman with too many arms, seated on a lion, serene yet terrifying. He dismissed it as zao xiang—a stray mental image. But his next punch, testing the air, cracked.
South Side, Chicago.
Marcus finished his patrol, the streets quiet. Too quiet. In his dream that night, he wasn't running from the old ghosts. He was standing his ground. And a dark, dancing figure was behind him, her shadow covering the whole block. He woke up, not scared, but sure. Clear. Like a purpose had been etched into his bones.
The next morning, I turned the dial back. Shield integrity normalized. The festival noise would fade. The experiment was over. Data recorded: focused amplification possible. Cost: significant shield dilution.
I had my morning chai. Maa was happy. Huilan looked less stiff. The world was fine.
I had no idea what I had just broadcast. I had taken the concentrated faith of a billion people for a specific, fierce, compassionate idea of the divine… and for one night, I turned my planet-sized speaker towards the stars and cranked the volume on that single song.
And a nun, a monk, and a guard on the other side of the world had heard a whisper of the chorus. A whisper that stuck.
The dial was back to neutral. But the echo? The echo was just beginning.