"Five crores, Chairman. Minimum."
Rishabh Mathur stared at the spreadsheet on his laptop, rubbing his temples. He was sitting in the air-conditioned mobile laboratory on the Aether Holdings wasteland, but he was sweating through his shirt.
Across the steel table, Dr. Arindam Bose was frantically sketching diagrams on a whiteboard. "The prototype works flawlessly, Rishabh, but scaling it to handle millions of liters of tannery runoff requires heavy industry. We need twelve industrial-grade titanium centrifugal pumps. We need massive steel holding vats. And the synthetic polymer mesh has to be woven by a specialized chemical plant in Gujarat."
"I understand the science, Doctor," Rishabh groaned. "I'm looking at the math. Five crore rupees. Over a million US dollars. Our commercial loan covered the land and the security. It didn't cover building a futuristic water treatment plant. We are going to default on our contractor agreements by Friday."
Sitting on his peeling wooden bed in the Subhash Chandra Boys' Hostel, Dev pressed the Motorola burner phone closer to his ear.
"Don't panic, Rishabh," Dev said, his voice a calm, distorted hum through his handkerchief. "Prepare the legal paperwork for a massive injection of Foreign Direct Investment. Route it through the Mauritius shell company we discussed. The capital will be in our accounts by tomorrow morning."
"Tomorrow?" Rishabh asked, stunned. "Chairman, you can't just manifest five crores overnight. Where is this money coming from?"
"I am liquidating a digital asset," Dev replied simply. "Have the contracts ready."
Dev hung up. He didn't have time to explain the concept of cryptocurrency to a 2010 accountant.
It was 2:00 AM. The dormitory was pitch black, filled with the heavy, rhythmic snoring of two dozen orphaned boys. The room smelled permanently of phenyl floor cleaner and damp plaster.
Dev pulled his thin, moth-eaten blanket entirely over his head, creating a small, dark tent. The only light was the faint, sickly blue glow of the Motorola flip-phone screen illuminating his face.
In 2026, transferring a million dollars across borders took a biometric thumbprint and three seconds. In 2010, moving that kind of capital invisibly required navigating the absolute frontier of the dark web. There were no sleek crypto exchanges or mobile apps.
Dev opened the phone's basic web browser. The GPRS 2G internet connection was agonizingly slow. He watched the pixelated loading bar crawl across the top of the screen for two full minutes just to load a text-based IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel.
Back in Chapter 2, Dev had installed a silent mining program on PC Number Seven at the cybercafe. Since 2010 mining difficulties were virtually non-existent, that single CPU had been harvesting thousands of early Bitcoins for weeks.
But Bitcoin alone wasn't worth five crores yet. To get that kind of liquidity, Dev was packaging his massive cache of untraceable coins with something far more valuable: a perfectly coded, 2026-era high-frequency trading algorithm.
He was currently in a private, encrypted chat with a Russian cypherpunk and black-market broker going by the handle Ivan_0x.
Ivan_0x: The algorithm checks out. Backtesting shows a 14% yield advantage over standard Wall Street scripts. I will take the code and the 10,000 BTC blocks as a package. 1.2 Million USD.
Dev's thumbs hovered over the sticky, plastic T9 numeric keypad. To type a simple message, he had to press the keys multiple times. Press 7 four times for 'S'. Press 3 twice for 'E'.
It was a maddening, high-stakes test of patience.
Ghost: Agreed. Route fiat to the Cyprus escrow. Once confirmed, I release the algorithmic keys and the BTC seed phrase.
Ivan_0x: Routing now. Awaiting your 24-word seed phrase for the wallet transfer. Do not go offline, or I pull the escrow.
Dev pulled his premium leather notebook from beneath his pillow. It was filled with alphanumeric codes and complex ciphers. He found the page with his 24-word Bitcoin recovery phrase.
He started typing. The tiny keys clicked softly in the silent room.
Word 1: Apple. Word 2: Zenith. Word 3: Horizon...
He was on the eighteenth word when the heavy wooden door of the dormitory suddenly groaned open.
Dev froze. His thumbs stopped over the keypad.
Footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. Heavy, deliberate boots.
It was Warden Gupta.
Gupta was a cruel, bitter man in his fifties who smelled perpetually of cheap rum and stale tobacco. He routinely skimmed money from the orphanage's already pathetic food budget to fund his gambling habits. He hated the boys, and he loved catching them breaking the rules.
Dev quickly pressed the phone against his chest to hide the blue light, but it was too late.
The heavy boots stopped right next to Dev's cot.
Before Dev could react, the moth-eaten blanket was violently ripped away.
The harsh beam of a heavy brass flashlight hit Dev directly in the eyes, temporarily blinding him. He squinted, his heart rate finally spiking.
"Well, well, well," Warden Gupta sneered, his breath reeking of alcohol. He looked down at the fourteen-year-old boy.
Gupta didn't see a corporate mastermind. He saw a scrawny, penniless orphan holding a brand new, expensive Motorola flip-phone and a premium leather-bound notebook. In Gupta's mind, there was only one possible explanation.
"You little thief," Gupta hissed.
Before Dev could say a word, Gupta's heavy, calloused hand swung down.
Crack.
The slap was brutal. It echoed like a gunshot in the silent room. Several orphans gasped, waking up and shrinking back against their pillows in terror.
Dev's head snapped to the side. His lip split against his teeth, the metallic taste of blood flooding his mouth.
Gupta snatched the phone from Dev's hands. On the screen, the cursor was still blinking on the nineteenth word of the seed phrase. The transfer was incomplete. The $1.2 million was suspended in the digital ether.
"No," Dev said, his voice tight. He reached for the phone. "Give that back. You don't understand what you're interfering with."
"I understand perfectly, you street rat," Gupta snarled, snatching the leather notebook as well. "Stealing electronics? You think you can hide this in my hostel? I'm taking this to my office. In the morning, I'm going to beat the skin off your back, and then I'm dragging you by your ear to the Kotwali police station."
Gupta turned off his flashlight. He turned his back on Dev, marching out of the dormitory and slamming the heavy wooden door behind him, locking it from the outside.
The room plunged back into pitch blackness.
The silence was deafening. From the adjacent cots, Dev could hear the terrified whispers of the other boys. They pitied him. They knew what happened to kids Gupta dragged to the police.
Dev sat perfectly still on his thin mattress. He didn't cry. He didn't tremble.
He slowly raised a hand and wiped a drop of blood from his split lip. His dark eyes adjusted to the gloom, staring at the locked wooden door.
If Ivan_0x didn't get the rest of that seed phrase tonight, the Russian would cancel the escrow. Aether Holdings would lose the five crores. Dr. Bose's facility would halt construction. MLA Shukla would smell the blood in the water and crush them.
His entire empire was collapsing because a drunken warden wanted to pawn a stolen cell phone.
Dev lowered his hand. The icy, terrifying void returned to his eyes. He realized his fundamental mistake. He had tried to play the role of the invisible, helpless orphan to avoid suspicion. But weakness was a liability. He couldn't wage a multi-million dollar shadow war if he was constantly at the mercy of a mid-level bureaucrat.
He didn't just need his phone back. He needed to conquer this building.
You want to drag me to the police, Gupta? Dev thought, the cold smile returning to his bloody face. Fine. Let's call the police.