Date: April 9, 2023
Location: Chamber Theta – Below the Bodh Gaya Site
If you're reading this…
Run your fingers over the page.
Do you feel the warmth still?
Then maybe Bhantaragya is still sealed.
Maybe we didn't fail.
But gods, at what cost?
---
We did it.
We think we did it.
We burned what could be burned—bones blackened to dust, the horn shattered with the mantra of eleven breaths. The bowl? It cracked the moment we chanted the Pratisara Hymn, smoke curling out as if it held breath this whole time.
The manuscripts—we found them deep under the mural floor. Moldy, rotting, but legible in places. Sanskrit, Pali, a tongue that bent inwards, not outwards. A script that seemed to watch you while you read it. Zhang coughed blood after reading one chant aloud. But we found the hymns. We found the last sealing rites. We followed them.
We lost almost all of them doing it.
---
There were twenty core members.
Now?
Three.
Four, if you count what's left of Arjun. But I don't know what he is anymore.
He doesn't blink. He hums sometimes—Bhantaragya's old lullaby. The one that made the ceiling bleed last night.
They died screaming.
They died chanting.
They died burning, with mantras pouring out of their mouths like smoke, like defiance.
Liang held the circle while the horn flared red—his eyes boiling in his skull.
Kavita slit her palms to draw the final symbol, whispering, "It's okay. It's okay. He'll rest now. He'll rest."
She didn't finish it.
I had to. With her blood.
---
We buried them under the final spiral.
Five glyphs etched in salt and teeth.
One fragment of the bone relic still hissed in my hand. I buried it deeper.
The chanting has stopped.
No more voices in the walls.
No more diary pages writing themselves.
No more dreams of the spiral uncoiling in my mouth.
We may have done it.
We may have stopped Bhantaragya.
But I don't know how long this peace will last.
---
I hear you turning the page.
Yes, you. You, reading this.
I left this here for a reason.
If you're here, if you found this diary…
Dig nothing.
Touch nothing.
Seal the chamber.
Leave the dead to rot in silence.
Let no one ever say that name again.
Bhantaragya.
My hand stuttered just now.
The pen tried to keep writing it.
No.
We sealed him.
We burned him.
We buried him with glyphs soaked in breath, blood, and ancient ash.
There are only three of us left.
Arjun. Me. Lusi
Lusi hasn't spoken since this morning. She stares at the spiral wall we couldn't break, fingers twitching like she's still counting glyphs. She whispers to someone who isn't there. She keeps drawing circles in her notebook. They never stop. She doesn't stop.
Maybe I should burn the notebook.
Maybe she's not Lu anymore.
---
My hands are weak.
I don't remember the last time I slept.
The wounds on my chest are still oozing from the circle that exploded during the second chant.
But we stopped him.
We did.
And if you're reading this, maybe you'll remember us not for what we found… but for what we buried.
---
This diary is your final warning.
Your only warning.
If you hear the spiral hum, leave.
Because Bhantaragya was not a man.
He was not a monk.
He was a direction, a pull, a hollow in the soul that craves to become god by forgetting what it means to die.
And we almost fed him everything.
Almost.
---
[End of Entry #25]
(A torn page follows. A faint bloody spiral is imprinted underneath.)
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