Dying was... grey.
In 2025, the man who had been a cynical, underachieving historian felt his frustrated, forgettable life drain away in a sterile hospital room. He had known, in agonizing detail, what went wrong with the world, but never had the power to do anything but write footnotes about it. His last thought was one of complete, bitter regret.
Then, he smelled sandalwood.
A high-pitched whirr cut through the scent. A ceiling fan, spinning lazily. Sunlight, thick with dust motes, streamed in through a barred window.
"Arjun? Son? Are you awake?"
The voice was warm, soft, and laced with a worry that felt... new. He tried to sit up, and his entire perspective was wrong. The bed was too big. His limbs were too light. He looked at his hands. They were small, thin, and brown.
He scrambled off the cot and stumbled toward a small, wall-mounted mirror.
The face that stared back was not his. It was a boy. Twelve years old, perhaps, with large, intelligent eyes, a painfully thin frame, and a mess of black hair.
"Arjun!" The woman—his mother—rushed to his side, placing a cool hand on his forehead. "You've been staring at nothing for five minutes. You fainted at school, the Headmaster said. Are you feeling dizzy?"
He looked at her. Her name surfaced in his mind, a gift from the body he now inhabited. Radha Varma. She wore a simple, faded cotton sari. She was beautiful, but tired, the deep-set exhaustion of a life spent worrying about every rupee.
"I... I'm okay," he managed, his voice high-pitched and unfamiliar. "What... what day is it?"
"It's August 22nd, beta. You have a test on Monday, but don't worry about it now. Just rest."
His eyes darted around the tiny, two-room apartment. Everything was dated. The calendar on the wall, with a picture of a Hindu deity, said 1991.
His breath hitched. 1991.
He staggered to a small table where a newspaper lay folded. The Times of India. The headline wasn't about a new app or a climate crisis. It was about Manmohan Singh's new LPG reforms.
Liberalization. Privatization. Globalization.
He wasn't just in the past. He was at the starting line. The exact moment modern India was about to be born. A wave of vertigo, far stronger than his previous faintness, hit him. This wasn't a dream. This was a second chance, a canvas so blank and vast it was terrifying.
And as that thought—that single, electric realization—crystalized in his mind, a voice spoke, not in his ears, but in the center of his soul. It was cold, neutral, and powerful beyond comprehension.
[Bodhi System Initializing...]
[Host Soul Detected. Transmigration confirmed.]
[Binding... Complete.]
[Welcome, Host Arjun Varma. Your mission is set: Elevate.]