Date: March 13 , 2023
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They told us to open the scroll again.
I did.
And Anoma is dead.
She died without a sound—just crumpled where she stood, like her bones evaporated. Not a scream. Not a twitch. Her face was twisted in awe, like she saw something beautiful as it killed her.
And now her tent smells of roasted lotus.
We're twenty on this expedition. Were twenty. A team curated by the International Buddhist Heritage Foundation, a dream collaboration across Asia. Eleven are Indian. The rest: two from Thailand, three from China, two from Japan, one Korean ethnologist, and one archivist from Sri Lanka. We are the best of our fields.
And now we are trapped.
No one believes me—yet they all look at me like I did something. I heard one of them whisper "Netra dosha." Eye curse. Another muttered about an Atakekuyō—a Japanese term for spirits who die prematurely and wait for company.
What are they trying to do??
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We had set up Sector 4 for analysis. Anoma, our Sinhalese archivist, was studying a series of etched fragments I had laid out—five bark leaves, their language backwards yet somehow intimate, as if the soul knew it before the mind did. She traced a finger over the third leaf and whispered, "This isn't a prayer. It's a tether."
Five minutes later, she collapsed.
By the time we reached her, her skin had thinned to a paper sheen, her veins dark like black ink, her eyes wide open and milked over. No pulse. Her mouth slightly parted, teeth clamped on her own tongue—as if to stop herself from saying something.
The scrolls are doing something. To us. To time. To the air itself. I've started hearing sounds just below the silence—a dull thrumming, like a breath drawn in and never let out.
And I found something else today.
Not an artifact.
A name.
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In the deepest chamber, hidden behind a fractured mural I mistook for mineral rot, I uncovered a glyph. The characters were impossible—neither Devanagari, nor Brahmi, nor Siddham. But I recognized the pattern. The glyph wasn't a word. It was a face.
Faceless.
Oval. Stretched. Eyes sealed shut by golden thread. The same figure from my dreams.
And below it, scrawled in miniature, using powdered bone ink:
> "Bhantarāgya."
Not a name I knew. It doesn't exist in any canon. I ran it through every lexicon. Nothing. But I broke it apart.
"Bhanta": derived from "Bhante"—a way to address monks.
"Rāgya": twisted from "Rāga"—desire, passion.
So, Monk of Desire? Desire-shaped Monk?
No. That's not it. This thing wasn't seeking Nirvana.
It was manufacturing it.
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I can't sleep. I tried using my laptop to transcribe the bark leaf translations. The system booted normally for about ten seconds, then froze. The screen flashed red. I managed to take a photo before it blacked out:
॥ न शून्यं, न रूपं, न मोक्षः ॥
THE VOID IS NOT VOID.
THE FORM IS NOT FORM.
THERE IS NO RELEASE.
The characters were written backwards, mirrored in Sanskrit—yet appeared front-facing in the reflection on my glasses. My glasses.
I threw the laptop in panic. When I picked it up again, it was running code.
Lines and lines of cycling script, like it was... decrypting something alive. Here's a snippet I copied by hand:
sudo chant ./bhantargya --mirror-mode
>
align frequency: ████_██_███
>
invoke/loop: sutra[n-1] [Nirvana Folded]
>
user_soul : queued
>
No, it wasn't code.
It was a ritual. A digital invocation. And I had run it.
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Everyone is tense. People are packing quietly. Two of the Thai researchers have locked themselves in the truck, chanting. Professor Liu from Beijing vomited twice during breakfast and said, "The mountain is watching." I don't know what he was trying to say.
No one's going down the shaft again. But I know I have to. Anoma didn't just die. She was taken. Her death was a placeholder. Something filled her skin and moved her bones for a few moments before letting go. I saw it. The way her neck twisted after her death.
I recorded it. It's gone. The footage corrupted. Replaced by an audio file labeled OM_SHIVMAYA.mp3.
It's 33 seconds of silence.
And then the sound of something wet crawling over stone.
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I can't leave.
I think we're not outside it. I think we're inside the Nirvana. Folded.
Every sutra a hinge.
Every chant a door.
And every time I read, I give it shape.
Bhantarāgya was not a monk.
He was a cartographer of souls.
And he mapped a Nirvana that never ends.
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If I stop writing, I forget.
But if
I keep writing, it knows I remember.
And it likes that.
So I'll write. Even if it takes me with it.
Even if you're next.
~ Advait
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