Ujjayini — Vedha Shala
Eshaan did not show the palm leaves to anyone on the way back to the main hall. He kept them wrapped inside the cloth given by the archivist and held them beneath his arm, walking faster than usual but not so quickly that anyone would notice. The discovery had unsettled him more than he wanted to admit. He had gone into the old storage room looking for a missing astronomical manuscript and had instead found evidence that someone had entered the room recently, a locked chest that appeared to have been placed there deliberately and three damaged leaves containing a phrase that he knew should not have been there. The Nine Seats. It was only three words, yet those words were enough to make every other thought in his head become connected to the same question. He had spent months trying to understand the Nine Books and the Navagranthika, and now he had found a reference to something that sounded as though it belonged to the same hidden history.
