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- Kailasa Mountain, Bharat -
- March 18, 1939 | Dawn -
Far from the restless hum of Ujjain's marble halls and Bangalore's chattering machines, Aryan found himself standing alone beneath a cold, endless sky. Here, on the slopes of Kailasa, the wind felt like it could peel the world apart — sharp, clean, untouched by cities or ambition. For a moment, it felt good to be just a speck of warmth beneath the shadow of ancient stone.
He stood still, boots pressed into frozen earth dusted with old snow, his breath drifting out in quiet puffs. Behind him, a small pack rested against a rock — little more than a few flasks of water, strips of dried fruit, a folded piece of parchment inked with runic markers. No guards, no council, no whispered calls of Samrat. Here, there was only him. And the land.
He had been pushing this off for weeks. There were always papers to sign, deals to broker, people to reassure. Every time he'd told himself, Tomorrow I'll go. But tomorrow always brought another crisis, another meeting. And maybe, deep down, a part of him had feared it too — the sheer scale of what he was about to do.
But now, the moment had come. He could feel it — the land itself seemed to hum beneath his boots, threads of something older than time thrumming up through stone and bone. Kailasa: the spine of Bharat's spiritual energy, the point where the invisible veins of this living land all gathered, breathed, and pulsed out into every field, river, and village.
He pulled his thick shawl closer around his shoulders and sat down cross-legged, boots pressing into a thin crust of frost. The dawn was bleeding out slow gold across the peaks, and the first rays struck the back of his neck like a blessing.
Inside his mind, a gentle voice unfurled — Vaani, the steady warmth of his Meta-System, clearer than the wind around him.
"Aryan, spiritual vein alignment is optimal. Conceptual barrier matrix: ready. Chant protocols loaded. Are you prepared to begin?"
He exhaled slowly. A stray memory floated in: 'Leave a node for Kamar Taj. Do not seal the sky so tight the world chokes'. The Sorcerer Supreme's calm warning echoed like a bell. 'The universe is a fragile weave. Cut too many threads, and even the strongest barrier becomes a prison'.
"Understood, Vaani," Aryan whispered, voice nearly lost in the wind. "Run final checks."
A moment of quiet — then a faint hum in the back of his skull, like a million libraries whispering at once. The Knowledge Pack he'd purchased from the System Store — barrier designs from beyond any one universe, ancient seals, dimensional valves, pressure channels that bled chaos into calm. He had read it all, poured it into the hollows of his mind, let it root in his bones until he no longer knew where the knowledge ended and he began.
He opened his eyes, now burning with a deeper shade of blue than the usual — Enhanced Vision piercing the layers of the mountain, tracing luminous rivers of spiritual energy beneath the rock. Veins of power twined together here like silver threads, vibrating just below the surface. This was it — the heart. The source.
With a slow breath, he pressed his right palm flat to the stone, fingers spreading wide as if he were trying to feel the heartbeat of the world. Beneath his hand, the rock seemed to shift — not physically, but in a way that made the mountain feel suddenly alive, aware of him, waiting.
"Vaani," he murmured, eyes half-shut, "Begin the link."
A pulse of warmth shot up his arm — a soft spark that flickered behind his eyelids. Slowly, gently, he sent his mind out — a slender thread, weaving down into the veins below. He felt it all: the warmth of rich earth far below the snow, the pulse of rivers carrying prayers from temple towns, the hush of old forests where no footstep had fallen in centuries. 'All of it… all of it is mine to guard'.
And so he began.
The first chant slipped from his lips like breath, old syllables no human tongue spoke anymore except here, now, with him. The runes beneath his palm glowed faintly, drawn out of the stone itself as if the mountain had been waiting for this moment since before the first fire was lit in Bharat.
Hours passed. The sun climbed and fell, shadows stretched and shrank. Aryan's mind stretched with them — layer upon layer of the spell rising from him like rings of light, each spun out from his voice and blood and the runes he carved with thought and fingertip.
He saw It in his mind's eye: the Barrier. A living veil — thick enough to turn aside missiles and monsters, smart enough to bend with the world's breath so the fabric of reality did not tear at the seams. A shell that would turn back any hostile action towards this land, whether physical or meta-physical, even the claws of beings from the countless dimensions of Hell, from Nightmare's dimension, from the choking dark where Dormammu waited. Yet within it, the single node — the passage left open for Kamar Taj, the fine seam that would keep the universe from splintering.
By the second day, his throat was raw, but his mind burned bright — every rune locked into place inside the spiritual vein beneath him, every word pressed into the bones of the land. Sleep flickered at the edges of his vision, but he did not yield. Not here. Not yet.
By the fourth day, the winds howled like wolves, but Aryan did not flinch. He felt the Barrier knitting itself into the sky, a thin, invisible skin that wrapped around mountains, rivers, cities, people. It felt like he was building a second skin for Bharat — something no blade could pierce, no spell could shatter, unless it came with love, never with hate.
On the sixth day, he knew the final chant was near. He felt the whole land breathe through him — millions of heartbeats threaded together with his own.
When at last he opened his eyes again, they were clear — not blue, but calm, deep as still water. He drew in one long breath of mountain air and exhaled the final words of the spell, voice hoarse, steady, ancient as the peaks above him.
The runes beneath his palm flared once — brilliant, blinding — then sank back into the stone, hidden forever beneath the flesh of Bharat.
Aryan Rajvanshi sat there for a long moment, alone on the frozen slope, shoulders slack with exhaustion, lips curved in a tired, almost childlike smile.
This land is safe, he thought, head tipping back toward the endless sky. Safe enough for dreams to grow.
Then, with the wind whispering secrets only the mountain could understand, he let his eyes close — and for the first time in days, drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep.
—
- Kailasa Mountain, Bharat -
- March 25, 1939 | Midnight -
In the hush that settled after Aryan drifted into his first real sleep in days, the mountain itself seemed to hold its breath. Thin clouds curled around the snow-capped peaks like silk scarves caught in a lazy wind. Somewhere far below, the rivers ran steady and secret, carrying his promise through villages that would never know what had just been done for them.
And high above, invisible to the eyes of farmers, traders, or even the sharpest soldier, a second skin settled over Bharat. The Veil. Runic lines, ancient glyphs older than any scroll, spun out in a lattice so fine it felt like nothing — yet it was everything. A heartbeat away from reality, hidden in the seam between worlds, the barrier shimmered and settled in place.
It hummed low at first, threads of energy slipping through the soil, twining around forests, threading across cities, drifting over the salt air of the coasts. It slipped into the cracks of temples, the shadows of quiet mountain passes, the dusty courtyards of small villages where children still dreamed beneath oil lamps.
The shield was smart — alive in its own strange way, sensing threats not by muscle or metal but by the taste of intent. An arrow fired in peace would pass. A hand raised in kindness would feel nothing. But the blade of a demon's claw, the creeping dread of a mind that fed on nightmares, the hungry whisper of a portal from the realms of rot and ruin — those would find themselves pressed back as if they'd struck an unbreakable mirror.
In that silent moment, Bharat changed. And somewhere in the hidden corners of the multiverse, that change did not go unnoticed.
—
Elsewhere…
A flicker of blue flame sputtered in the airless dark of a place that was not quite space, not quite time. Dormammu's endless dimension stirred — a river of shifting smoke and screaming light. An eye opened where no eye should be, narrow and glistening like an open wound.
"Something… closes," it rasped, voice like stone dragged over bone. "A door barred where none was before."
It turned Its gaze toward Earth — more specifically, that restless slice of land called Bharat. A land where its shadows had once drifted freely in the forgotten corners of fear.
Dormammu did not like doors. Especially locked ones.
—
Deep beneath the mortal realm, in the sour heat of his personal abyss, Nightmare opened his mouth in a grin that split his sharp face in half.
Dreams were his pasture. Fear was his crop. And yet tonight, when he reached a clawed hand toward a sleeper in Bharat, he felt it — the slick resistance of Aryan's new veil, like cold glass pressed to his palm.
His grin tightened into something brittle.
"Interesting," he hissed, leaning back on his throne woven from tangled minds. "A mortal king dares chain the seam of sleep. I'll have to meet him myself."
—
In a circle of ash far older than any empire, a council of hooded shapes whispered beneath flickering green candles. Their language was not meant for living tongues, but the feeling behind it was clear — suspicion, hunger, curiosity.
The barrier's flare had rung through certain hidden places like a struck bell. The world was always a web, and when a thread is pulled too tight, the spiders come to see who's playing at weaving.
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