The soil was no longer soil. It was a variable set. Its behavior was measurable — loamy on top, harder below, granular at specific intervals, and varied subtly across twenty-seven steps from the northeast to the southwest. I marked it. Not on parchment, but in my mind, as a data grid.
When I had tilled the first patch under Father's guidance, I had done so like any village boy. Now, I approached the land as an open system, one which accepted inputs — seeds, water, labor — and gave outputs: grain, health, perhaps profit. But only if the parameters aligned.
I woke before the others, not out of discipline but necessity. The dew held temporal clues. It told me when transpiration began, how long the soil retained moisture, and what creatures came earliest to the field. My brother still called me simply Bhadrak — never Arjunārya — but in my mind, I'd recompiled the kernel of who I was.
A strange infestation appeared in our southern patch. Tiny aphids — I called them that though the village knew no name — sucked the stems dry. Father said it was a sign of wrath from Devi when prayers were skipped. I smiled politely. Then I spent the night analyzing which plots were most affected and correlated them to shade cover, moisture levels, and seed age.
They weren't random.
I ran my fingers through a set of ruined stalks and murmured not a prayer, but a hypothesis.
The next day, I planted marigold along the fringe. The flowers weren't sacred here — they were decorative to most. But their scent and chemical emissions repelled the aphids in my old textbooks. In four days, the infestation halted. I burned the worst batch, rotating the crop layout to stagger vulnerability.
Father called it divine insight. I let him. He didn't see me muttering matrix operations while feeding goats, nor knew I tracked pest migration by noting the morning pattern of ants.
I was training my neural net — not digital, but mental.
Kittu followed me one evening as I traced glyphs into the earth.
"What is this, bhaiya?"
"A map. Of hunger."
He laughed, but I didn't.
By week's end, I had charted the productivity of each quadrant. In this age, there were no machines. But I became the machine. Each plant was a data point. Each season a training epoch. Each harvest a performance metric.
One day, a village elder stopped by. He warned my father that I was spending too much time with leaves and stones. That I was not behaving like a good Shudra. That knowledge not tied to immediate ritual was dangerous.
I noted the statement.
Then, at night, I whispered to myself: He is not a Shudra. He is a student of all systems.
The next morning, I felt a shift. Not outward — the world remained the same. But within, my mind now accepted it as fundamental. No one, not even divine agents, would question it. Even the gods, if watching, would see my quiet resolve and shrug: it was now consistent with reality.
So I learned faster.
Rainfall that week broke patterns. The clouds arrived early. The old men prayed to Indra. I studied bird flight and wind vectors.
I dug a trench, low and wide. Others scoffed. When rain came, their fields drowned. Ours breathed.
My reward was not praise, but insight: prediction based on non-linear systems worked better with localized data than old almanacs.
So I began to build my own.
Each sunrise I watched the sun's angle and shadow. I measured shadow length with stones and wood, drawing ratios with my fingers, correcting by a mental sine table. Slowly, I built a model — part astronomy, part intuition, part desperate JEE-level need to master what I could control.
For this world was chaos. Caste, fate, and karma — they were opaque functions. But the crop? The rain? The beetle that destroyed grain in nightfall? That I could decode.
Every pest taught me logic. Every weed taught me adaptation.
Even fire became a tool. When I learned that heat killed parasite eggs hidden in dry thatch, I burned a border before storage. My father thought I had gone mad. Until the rat plague skipped our barn.
I smiled. That was enough.
Sometimes, I did miss screens. Spreadsheets. Python. But then, I realized my own mind could simulate — with patience. The sun was my clock. The stars were my code. And the silence of the fields? That was my console output.
One day, I stood beneath the neem tree and whispered to the wind:
"I will never be your prisoner."
The wind, true to form, did not answer.
But the neem dropped three perfect leaves, each forming a triangle on the dirt.
I picked them up.
The system was listening.
By the third season of sowing, I had a hypothesis: yield was a function of soil quality, water timing, pest resistance, and — most dangerously neglected — human error.
I did not speak this aloud. To my father and Kittu, I simply worked harder, kept quieter, and watched everything. But inside me, the formulas ran like wildfire.
The old yield predictions were stories passed down orally. They spoke of good years and bad with the poetry of rain gods. I replaced them with mental regressions: yield vs rainfall, vs sowing depth, vs insect presence per square cubit.
The villagers laughed when I paced the edge of the northern field each morning. They didn't know I was calculating evaporation rate through shadow length and humidity scent. Yes, scent. With no hygrometer, I trained my senses.
"Do not overthink the soil," my father warned. "It listens more to care than calculation."
I nodded. But I did both.
I began testing plant spacing. Wider gaps gave higher per-plant yield but lower total harvest. I optimized for household consumption first, then surplus. I used game theory — rudimentary but sharp — to decide how much surplus to risk in trade.
Because the trader from Panchal always under-weighed. I verified it one market day by subtly adjusting my own weights. The lie was systemic. I whispered truth beneath my breath:
"He cheats in half weights."
Next market, he stumbled publicly, admitting a scale flaw.
My lie was a thread. Reality obeyed.
But such gifts I now used sparingly. My power had matured — it only worked on myself. This truth was isolating, but freeing. No one could benefit unless I chose. The gods could not trace it. No one could question its origin.
So I used it not to command — but to become.
I set an internal protocol: every hour spent in discipline, learning, toil — would return in value. And it did. I memorized the nitrogen cycle from rot, studied the fungal bloom patterns from cow dung fermentation, and rebuilt our water collection to minimize algae.
Kittu watched, puzzled. "You study everything."
"I don't study. I calibrate."
He laughed. "What is calibrate?"
I ruffled his hair. "Making sure the world listens properly."
Every night, I updated my ledger — not of rupees, but of events. A pest sighting. A cracked grain. A fight between birds. These were not noise. They were early signals.
Entropy was the enemy. But entropy also spoke.
I mapped infestation likelihood by time of day and grain age. Father called it luck when we began rotating grain storage. I called it anomaly detection.
We lost no grain that season.
The sunlight, too, became a factor. Its warmth, angle, intensity. I tracked crop orientation, finding minor differences based on seed tilt. Facing northeast gave 3% more grain in marginal sun.
I created seed aligners using clay molds.
Others mocked them. Then copied them.
One morning, an elder asked why our field stayed greener. I told him the soil here listened better. He nodded gravely.
He would not understand a conversation about pH and microbial density. So I gave them metaphor, and kept reason for myself.
But I missed one thing.
I had over-irrigated one quadrant by trusting surface gloss — not depth moisture. The crop yellowed. A small loss. But a lesson.
Even in a simulated mind, assumptions failed.
So I modified my routines. Inserted random checks. Like adversarial testing in a model. I stopped trusting visual cues alone. I built a soil probe from scrap copper and stick.
When the yield came, it was not double. It was 28% higher.
Not godlike. Just earned.
But that year, none in the village went hungry. We sold grain and bought books from a traveling Jain merchant.
Books! On astronomy, mineral medicine, and one curious scroll on southern farming.
My father joked I read faster than I plowed. I did not tell him that in each line, I saw a new system model waiting to be debugged.
That evening, I stood in the field, as fireflies rose. I whispered not a truth — but a vow.
"I will make this soil know me. Not as master. But as algorithm."
And the wind, this time, answered with stillness. Like a system waiting for its next input.