Date: April 7, 2023
I don't even know if this ink belongs to me anymore.
I woke up to find three words already etched into this page, written in a style I do not remember learning.
"He still breathes."
Who does? Who wrote it? I touched the ink—it was fresh.
We lost four last night.
They didn't scream. Not even a thud. Just silence. And then their absence.
Lu, Kamlesh, Saito, and Arpita. Gone. When we broke open the sealed sub-chamber under Theta yesterday, something... shifted. The air feels heavier, smells like old ash and wet stone. The lights flicker even when the generators run fine. And Bhantaragya's name keeps echoing in the wind, like it's hiding in the walls themselves.
Their bodies were found stacked like offerings in the outer corridor. All with the same black-inked sigil etched into their foreheads—the Eye-Syllable of Devouring. We finally confirmed what we had only feared: it matches the symbol Saito had copied weeks ago from the scribe and chanted aloud, unknowingly unsealing Bhantaragya's breath into this world.
He was just curious. Just curious...
Last night, after the bodies were wrapped, some of the surviving interns tried to flee the site. The jungle around us has grown thicker, unnaturally so. The paths are gone. The GPS reads no coordinates. No radio signal. No satellite. It's like Bodh Gaya vanished and left us behind.
No one is debating anymore. There's no more denial. Only dread.
We're trapped.
---
I've grown weaker. My hands tremble when I write. The fever hasn't broken. I don't know what's real. I spoke to someone in the library archives this morning—Kavita, I think—but I found her diary later in the excavation tent. It was blood-soaked. She died two nights ago.
How did she talk to me today?
---
The sealing scripts. That's the only thread we cling to now.
Buried deep in the redacted manuscripts, Liang and Rajnath uncovered a pattern. Bhantaragya wasn't just sealed by force—he was bound by mirrored inscriptions: one series of chants to invoke him, another to deny his return. It took days of translation and ritual verification, even more just to piece together fragments that didn't drive us mad.
They say the original monks feared even writing these counter-scripts. That the act of scribing them could fracture the soul. So they hid them in reversed glyphs, coded chants that only activate under moonlight and spoken in dead Pali dialects.
Tonight, we try.
We've created a sealing circle beneath Theta. We will burn Bhantaragya's relics—what little we found—and bury the remnants beneath the sigils.
But it might already be too late.
---
I saw something in the mirror last night. A version of myself, with hollow sockets and no mouth. It mimicked me, movement for movement. And then it didn't. It tilted its head and reached out, while I stood frozen. It whispered something I'll never forget:
"You're not the last."
I don't know what it meant.
---
To whoever reads this—
We opened what should have remained shut. We pulled back layers not meant to be peeled. If you find this journal… seal it in salt and stone. Burn the soil around it. And do not read the scripts aloud.
We're trying to finish what the ancient monks started.
But Bhant
aragya is not just a memory.
He is a presence.
And he is hungry.