December 6, 1992. 2:47 PM.
In his Pune study, Rajendra was not watching the news. He was watching the Silent Choir's resonance scanner.
The graph, usually a multi-colored tapestry of humanity's quiet prayers and anxieties, had turned into a single, screaming, jagged line of crimson. It spiked vertically, the numbers beside it flashing in frantic panic.
PSYCHIC ENERGY OUTPUT: 950% OF BASELINE
SPECTRAL ANALYSIS: PRIMAL RAGE / TRIBAL HATRED / SACRIFICIAL FERVOR
LOCATION CONCENTRATION: AYODHYA, UTTAR PRADESH
WARNING: RESONANCE FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED. SHIELD INTEGRITY AT RISK.
The ship wasn't just harvesting energy. It was choking on it. The raw, unfiltered hatred pouring out of Ayodhya was like pouring petrol into a diesel engine. The amplifier groaned under the strain, its corrupted lattice glowing a sickly purple-red.
On the television, muted, the scenes played out. The kar sevaks swarming the domes. The first bricks falling. The dust rising like a funeral pyre for secular India.
Rajendra didn't see a political disaster. He saw a metaphysical oil spill. And he had the only suction pump in existence.
He picked up the secure phone. Dialed the Nashik ashram.
Suryananda answered, his voice thin with real terror. "They've done it. They've torn it down. The country will burn."
"Good," Rajendra said, his voice devoid of emotion. "Fire purifies. But uncontrolled fire destroys the forest. You need to become the firebreak."
"What? How?"
"Go to Ayodhya. Not to preach peace. They won't listen. Preach purpose. Give that fire a target. A better target."
Ayodhya, December 7. Dawn.
The city wasn't a city anymore. It was a raw nerve. Smoke hung in the cold air. Chants of "Jai Shri Ram!" clashed with wails of grief and fury. Mobs roamed, eyes wild, looking for the next thing to break.
Into this walked Swami Suryananda.
He didn't arrive with a peace convoy. He arrived with twelve of his most physically imposing brahmacharis—all ex-wrestlers from Punjab, now in saffron—and a MAKA-provided van with a powerful PA system. He went not to the rubble, but to the angry Hindu crowd gathered near the Ram temple office, their blood still up, looking for a Muslim mohalla to vent on.
He climbed onto the van's roof, grabbed the microphone. He didn't smile. He didn't look serene. His face was a mask of shared, divine fury.
"JAI MAA KALI!" he roared, the speakers blasting his voice over the mob.
They turned, startled. It wasn't the Ram chant they expected.
"You think this is over?" he thundered, pointing a trembling finger not at the distant mosque rubble, but at a gleaming, whitewashed mansion on a hill overlooking the town. "You tear down one structure, and you think you've won? LOOK! Who lives there in luxury while you sleep on the streets? Who took your donations for the temple and built palaces for himself?"
The mob followed his finger. The mansion belonged to the local MP, a man famous for his corruption and his tokenistic Hindu nationalism. A man who was, at this moment, safely locked inside with armed guards.
"Kali is dancing!" Suryananda screamed, his voice breaking with a passion that was half-acted, half-born from the terrifying psychic storm he could feel pounding at his senses. The amplifier's output was bleeding into him. He saw faint, bloody halos around the most hate-filled in the crowd. "But she dances on the THROATS OF THE FALSE! The thieves who wear tilak and steal from Ram's own children! THAT is the demon Maa wants you to slay today!"
A low-frequency pulse, emitted from a MAKA drone camouflaged as a news helicopter, washed over the crowd. It was tuned to the theta brainwave state—inducing suggestibility, amplifying aggression. To the mob, it sounded like a deep, approving roar from the heavens.
With a collective howl, the mob turned. Like a river redirected by a divine hand, they surged away from the Muslim quarters and up the hill toward the MP's mansion.
Rajendra watched from orbit. On the scanner, the chaotic, diffuse crimson energy began to coalesce. To focus. It was still hatred, but now it had a vector. A purpose he had assigned. The feedback loop stabilized. The Silent Choir stopped groaning and began to drink deeply.
RESERVES: 18%... 22%... 27%...
He was no longer just harvesting prayer. He was farming vengeance. And the crop was monstrously abundant.
By evening, the MP's mansion was a smoldering shell. The mob, spent and strangely euphoric, dispersed. Suryananda, surrounded by his men, gave interviews to the shell-shocked press.
"The people's fury is divine justice," he said, sweat and ash streaking his face, his eyes glowing with an unsettling fervor. "But divine justice is precise. It seeks the truly corrupt. Not the innocent."
The headlines the next morning were unanimous:
'SWAMI CHANNELS AYODHYA FURY AGAINST CORRUPT MP'
'SURYANANDA: THE PROPHET WHO STEERED THE STORM'
He wasn't a peacemaker. He was a storm shepherd. And India had never seen a holy man like him.
Back in Pune, Rajendra looked at the reserve counter, now holding steady at a rich, deep 31%. The crimson light from the scanner reflected in his eyes.
He had taken the single most destructive psychic event in modern Indian history and turned it into his battery. He had weaponized a saint to weaponize a mob.
The math was clean. The morality was not.
He muttered a line that had been circling his mind since the crisis began, a lyric from a song in another life that now felt prophetic: "I build my walls up with their broken faith…"
He hadn't just built walls. He had forged an entire fortress from the shattered bricks of a broken mosque and the burning rage of a divided nation. And it was the strongest structure he had ever built.