The sun was a white, lidless eye staring down into the black gullet of the canyon.
Against the scorched basalt, the two figures looked like a cruel joke of nature: a twelve-year-old boy, skin the color of polished bronze, and a sixty-year-old man who resembled a sun-dried root wrapped in bone-white rags.
Vyan’s pace had slowed to a crawl.
Every few minutes, he had to adjust his stance as Ansh stumbled, the old man’s one-handed grip acting like a leaden anchor on Vyan’s left shoulder.
Vyan felt a sudden flicker of frustration—a sharp, impatient heat in his chest—but his mother’s cold training immediately forced him to suppress it.
Why am I feeling this?
he wondered, his brow furrowing with a deep, quiet shame.
He is a man of the Law.
He is blind and broken.
I chose to carry him.
He blamed himself for his own impatience, entirely unaware that the devil on his shoulder was subtly, maliciously shifting his weight and draining Vyan’s physical stamina just to see how much the boy’s internal “Prana” would automatically flex to compensate.
Ansh, however, was no longer focused on Vyan’s physical endurance.
His mind was utterly haunted by the defensive vibration he had felt from the boy’s lap the previous night.
The way the golden sphere had hummed in the dark—it wasn’t just a simple protective ward.
It was a deep, ancient resonance.
”Child,” Ansh’s voice drifted over Vyan’s ear, sweet as poisoned honey.
“Forgive an old man’s curiosity… but that weight at your hip. When we rested last night, my ears caught a strange hum coming from it. A vibration of the ancient world. Tell me, what is this magnificent treasure you carry?”
Vyan, still a naive child of the isolated jungle waterfall, saw no reason for deceit.
To him, this frail elder was a fellow traveler of the Dharma, a scribe who had suffered for the Righteous Law.
”I found it in a tiny stone sanctuary, sir,” Vyan said with an open heart, his voice echoing off the black rocks.
“It was sitting at the very peak of the Sun-Scars, catching the light. It saved me from the beasts of the red sand. It makes a circle of peace where nothing can hurt you.” He spoke without guile, describing the brutal climb, the shimmering Glass-Locusts, and how the sphere reacted to the damp earth.
Behind him, Ansh’s mind went completely white with a sudden, violent surge of greed.
A sanctuary?
A peak?
The old man nearly tripped over a basalt spur, his breath hitching.
This naive brat didn’t just find a random spiritual trinket.
Looking at the sphere, Ansh thought, “He had stumbled upon the entrance of a Grotto—perhaps even a legendary Grotto, a hidden pocket-dimension of the ancient dead yogis.”
Ansh felt a bitter, toxic jealousy rise like acid in his throat.
What have I done wrong in my life?
I have spent Sixty agonizing years murdering, weaving, and crawling through the dirt for a single drop of Prana, losing my eyes and my arm in the slaughter, and this ignorant whelp just walks into a Grotto and picks up the key?
He ruthlessly composed his features, forcing his face into a mask of gentle, scholarly awe.
“A celestial ward? Truly, the Great Light shines upon your destiny, child. May I… may I have a look at this sphere just once? My hands are old and withered, but they still remember the geometry of anything.”
Vyan hesitated for three seconds—a brief heartbeat of pure survival instinct that he didn’t yet fully understand.
Then, his engrained sense of duty won out over the silent warning in his blood.
”Sure, humble old sir.”
He handed the golden orb back to the old man.
The moment Ansh’s gnarled, liver-spotted fingers clamped onto the cold metal, his very soul shivered.
He didn’t need sight to feel the intricate, microscopic gears of energy shifting beneath the casing.
His expert Yogi’s perception felt the energetic “teeth” of the artifact—this wasn’t a defensive talisman; it was a Key.
A master key designed to unlock the spatial gates of a hidden domain.
Who is this boy?
Ansh thought, his heart thudding violently against his ribs.
Is there a Grade 4 Yogi watching us from the shadows?
Is he a young master of a hidden enclave?
Is this a trap?
He frantically scanned the vertical canyon walls with his hidden vision, but there was absolutely nothing—only the boy’s radiant, massive, and entirely unrefined Prana.
”Child,” Ansh whispered, his voice trembling—this time with genuine, breathless shock.
“Do you even know what you hold? This is a Key to a Grotto. A sanctuary folded between the very layers of the world.”
Vyan stopped walking and scratched the back of his neck, his face blank with genuine confusion.
“A Grotto?”
Ansh froze.
He stared at the back of Vyan’s head, completely dumbstruck.
What child on this planet doesn’t know what a Grotto is?
Ansh’s mind raced in a frantic circle.
Even a child born with no Spindle knows of the hidden domains.
He stared intensely at the boy’s blank, bronze profile.
Vyan looked as though he were waiting for an explanation of a common cooking pot.
Ansh dropped his grandfatherly facade for a single, sharp moment, his voice cracking with sheer disbelief.
“Child… tell me something. Do you even know what Prana or Spindle is?”
Vyan tilted his head, the bright canyon sun catching the golden flecks in his yellowish-red eyes.
“No, sir. I don’t. I heard the word from my mother a few times when she made me train. But I don’t know what it actually means.”
A suffocating silence settled over the canyon, deeper and heavier than the black basalt walls.
Inside his rotting chest, Ansh was screaming.
It was a soundless, ecstatic, manic howl of pure triumph.
He has no master!
He has no background!
He is a flawless vessel of pure, prana, carrying the key to an ancient vault, and he is as completely ignorant as a newborn calf!
A wave of utter contempt for the boy’s mother washed over him.
An Asura-path practitioner?
She must have been an idiot!
How do you raise a monster with this much raw density and fail to teach him even the most basic laws of the world?
Ansh licked the blackish blood from his split lips, the dark intention behind his grin finally reaching its absolute peak.
To any passing traveler, they were just a crippled old man and a kind-hearted boy.
But to Ansh, this was the perfect, terrifying alignment of the stars.
”I see,” Ansh whispered, his voice instantly melting back into that melodic, trembling Dharma hum as he carefully placed the sphere back into Vyan’s hands.
“Well, perhaps it is better that way, little one. The world is a terribly complicated place for those who know too much. I will explain it to you on the way.”
He leaned his heavy, decaying weight back onto Vyan’s left side, his gnarled fingers digging into the boy’s bronze shoulder with a new, terrifyingly possessive strength.
Thank you, Gods, Ansh thought, a foul, violet light pulsing behind his milky cataracts.
He is mine.
He is entirely mine.
I will live again in that flawless flesh.
“Lead on, Vyan,” the devil whispered.
“Welcome to The Sovereign Of Kaliyuga! New chapters dropping daily.”