The victory rush from his impossible heist evaporated the second Ishmaart processed his surroundings.
This wasn't his room. Not his actual room. The one he'd left—the one with the Hulk poster from 2012 and the decent Wi-Fi—that was gone. This was a smaller, meaner, dirtier box. The heat was a physical weight. The smell was old frying oil, mildew, and desperation.
"Kya downgrade hai yeh?" he mumbled, pushing himself off the gritty floor. What kind of downgrade is this?
The memories hit him not as a download, but as a sickening déjà vu. His name was still Ishmaart Shankar. But he was twenty, not twenty-four. He'd flunked out of a B.Com college in Ghaziabad. He was in Delhi, in a "paying guest" room in Karol Bagh that was basically a glorified closet. His parents thought he was "looking for job opportunities." He was mostly looking for the cheapest chai and a way to kill time.
The details were humiliatingly crisp. The landlord, a wheezing man named Tripathi ji who smelled of camphor. The single shared bathroom down the hall. The two hundred and thirty rupees in his tin box. The crushing, hollow shame of wasted days.
"Arey baap re," he whispered, sinking onto the creaking cot. Oh father. He looked at the futuristic metal shard in his hand, its sleek, alien lines a brutal contrast to the peeling paint and the garish calendar of Lord Ganesha on the wall. "So, the dukaan opened, but the maalik got demoted. Sahi hai." Great. The shop is open but the owner got demoted.
He was a time-traveling, dimension-hopping… nobody. With rent due in a week.
The blue system text pulsed, unhelpfully chipper.
[Primary World Updated: Marvel (Earth-199999). Temporal Coordinate: 2007.]
[User Status: Pioneer / Financially Challenged Civilian.]
Ishmaart stared. Marvel. 2007. The pieces clicked with a terrifying finality. He wasn't just in a different version of his world. He was in the world. And he was years early for the main event.
A sudden, grinding headache bloomed behind his eyes. The system chimed again.
[Integration Side-Effect: Temporal-Memory Assimilation. Temporary discomfort is expected. Recommendation: Hydrate.]
"Hydrate?" Ishmaart scoffed, looking at the empty plastic jar that served as his water bottle. "Paisa nahi, pani nahi, lekin inter-dimensional business plan hai. Shandaar." No money, no water, but I have an inter-dimensional business plan. Fantastic.
He needed noise. Something to drown out the panic. He spotted a small, beat-up transistor radio on the wobbly table—a relic from the memory-Shankar's life. He flicked it on, tuning through the static hiss.
A crackly Hindi news bulletin filled the room. "...aur America mein, industrialist Tony Stark ki mystery Afghanistan Yatra par sawaal uth rahe hain. Unke spokesperson ne kaha hai ki yeh ek routine weapons demonstration tha, lekin..."
Ishmaart froze, his blood turning to ice-water.
Tony Stark. Afghanistan.
The words hung in the humid air, heavy with destiny. The headache spiked, and with it came not memories, but knowledge. Flashes of a scene he'd never watched but somehow knew: a desert, a cave, the blinding flash of an explosion, the cold terror of captivity.
He knew. He knew what was happening right now, thousands of miles away. Tony Stark wasn't on a routine trip. He was in a Humvee, joking with soldiers, seconds away from his life being torn apart by his own company's weapons.
The radio news moved on to cricket scores.
Ishmaart sat in the sudden, mundane quiet, the weight of the universe settling on his skinny shoulders. The metal shard in his hand felt insignificant. He was holding proof of one impossible world, while sitting in the starting blocks of another—a world where gods would walk, aliens would invade, and a billionaire in a cave was about to become the most important man on the planet.
And he, Ustaad Ishmaart Shankar, was in a sweaty room in Karol Bagh with two hundred rupees.
A wild, chaotic laugh burst out of him. It was either that or scream.
"Tony Stark abhi cave mein hai," he said to the empty room, his voice tinged with hysterical awe. "Hulk bhi abhi doctor hai. Captain America…" he calculated, "…woh toh abhi bhi ice cream ki tarah baraf mein jam gaya hoga." Tony Stark is in a cave right now. Hulk is still a doctor. Captain America… he must still be frozen like an ice cream pop.
The sheer scale of it was absurd. He had a backstage pass to the dawn of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his backstage was a dump.
he machine shard was useless here. No, worse than useless—if someone saw it, they'd ask questions he couldn't answer. He needed something… convertible.
His eyes fell on the calendar. Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, lord of new beginnings. A thought, insane and brilliant, struck him.
He focused on the humming tether in his mind—the Anchor, First Refuge, tied to the ruins near 2B. He could send and receive things. Small things. What did that world have? Broken machines. Weird plants. Glowing rocks?
"Sample," he muttered. "Small. Simple. Something no one has seen before."
He envisioned the spot. He focused on the act of receiving, of pulling something through the dimensional stitch he'd sewn. He held out his hand, palm up.
There was a soft pop of displaced air. A small object materialized, dropping into his palm with a light clink.
It was a gear. But unlike any gear on Earth. It was made of a strange, white-gold metal, intricate and flawless, about the size of a two-rupee coin. It was eerily clean, as if brand new, yet it felt ancient. Tiny, glowing script—machine language from a dead civilization—was etched along its teeth. It pulsed with a faint, warm light.
[Item Acquired: Ancient Machine Core Fragment (Intact). Source: Nier: Automata World. Rarity: Uncommon. Properties: Self-Cleansing, Minor Aesthetic Glow, Unknown Alloy Composition.]
Ishmaart stared at the beautiful, impossible piece of engineering in his grimy hand. In the world it came from, it was probably junk. Scrap from a civilization that had wiped itself out twice over. Here, in 2007 Delhi…
A plan, audacious and utterly Ishmaart, began to form. He wasn't a scientist. He wasn't a warrior. He was a talker. A seller. A man who could convince a chaiwala that Rajinikanth was a cosmic entity.
He rummaged in his bag and found a small, velvet pouch that had once held a cheap locket. He dropped the glowing gear into it. The soft light shone through the fabric.
He needed a target. Someone with money, an eye for the unique, and loose enough morals not to ask too many questions. The memory-Shankar supplied the answer: Jagdish Bhai. A "curio dealer" with a shop in the back alleys of Chandni Chowk. A man who traded in "antiquities" of dubious origin. The kind of man who might buy a story.
"Chalo," Ishmaart said, standing up, a new energy crackling through him. The fear was still there, buzzing underneath. But it was now mixed with a sharp, thrilling purpose. He had a universe to navigate, a financial crisis to solve, and a front-row seat to history.
He pocketed the pouch, its otherworldly glow a secret against his thigh. He looked at the radio, now playing a film song.
Somewhere in a desert, Tony Stark's life was exploding. Here in Karol Bagh, Ustaad Ishmaart Shankar's was just beginning. He had to get rich, and he had to do it fast. Because this new world wasn't going to wait for a broke guy in a barsaati to figure things out.
He stepped out into the blistering Delhi noon, the gear a hidden star in his pocket, his mind already crafting the pitch.
"Jagdish Bhai," he practiced under his breath, adopting his most confident ustaad tone. "Aapko ek cheez dikhani hai. Samjhiye, yeh sirf gear nahi hai… yeh kisi doosri duniya ka DNA hai." You have to see something. Understand, this isn't just a gear… it's the DNA of another world.
He merged into the chaotic human river of the street, just another skinny youth in the crowd. But he alone was carrying a piece of a distant, ruined future, walking into the dawn of an age of heroes. The first merchant of the multiverse was open for business.