The first sensation was not sight or sound, but a smell.
It was a complex, long-forgotten perfume: the slightly chalky scent of whitewashed walls, the sharp tang of mothballs from the wooden wardrobe, a faint, sweet-musty note of old comic books, and underneath it all, the unmistakable aroma of his mother's sambar bubbling in a kitchen he hadn't lived in for fifteen years.
Siddanth Deva's eyes snapped open.
He wasn't in his cramped, sterile apartment in Bengaluru, with its view of a concrete high-rise and the incessant hum of a server farm. The air he was breathing wasn't filtered by an AC unit. It was thick, warm, and humid, stirred by the lazy thwack-thwack-thwack of a three-bladed ceiling fan that desperately needed oiling.
He woke with a start, a gasp catching in his throat. The gasp felt... wrong. It was too high-pitched.
He sat bolt upright. The world swam. He was on a narrow, squeaking cot, not his queen-sized mattress. The bedsheet beneath him was not 800-thread-count Egyptian cotton; it was coarse, block-printed cotton, softened and thinned by a thousand washes, in a pattern of violent green-and-yellow flowers he thought his mother had thrown out decades ago.
"What...?" he whispered, and the voice that came out was a reedy prepubescent squeak.
It was his voice. But it was the voice he had at ten.
His 30-year-old mind, sharp and cynical, forged by a decade of corporate drudgery and failed startups, tried to impose order. "Dream," it supplied instantly. "Stress-induced, hyper-realistic dream. You probably fell asleep reading that article about time travel."
But the smell. The fan. The quality of the light—that specific, buttery-yellow morning sun that only ever seemed to stream into this particular window in his parents' old house in Hyderabad.
He looked around, and the fragile scaffolding of his logic dissolved like sugar in hot tea.
This was his old room.
Not a re-creation. Not a memory. It was.
The walls were a pale, peeling lime green. And they were covered.
To his left, tacked up with rusting drawing pins, was God himself. Sachin Tendulkar, bat raised high, the MRF logo a slash of red against his whites, acknowledging a century. Siddanth's 30-year-old self had met the man once, a brief, awkward handshake at a corporate event, but the 10-year-old in him who had prayed to this poster... his throat tightened.
Next to Sachin was The Wall. Rahul Dravid, mid-cover-drive, a portrait of impossible grace and focus. And there, grinning maniacally, was the Nawab of Najafgarh, Virender Sehwag, his bat a blur. Ganguly, Kumble, Srinath. The whole pantheon. They were all there, their colours faded by the sun, their edges curled.
His eyes darted from the posters, trying to find a single thing that was 'wrong', a single anchor to his 'real' life. They found nothing.
In the corner, by the small wooden desk where he used to do his homework, sat his first cricket bat. A heavy, Kashmir willow behemoth with a battered 'SS' sticker peeling off. It was the bat his uncle had given him. The bat he had used when... when he...
Wait.
Siddanth looked closer. The bat wasn't the one from his memory. His memory was of a bat held together with electrical tape, a massive chunk missing from the toe end after a disastrous attempt at a yorker on their concrete street.
This bat... this bat was pristine. The grip was still white rubber, not greyed and slick with sweat. The face was unblemished, save for a few light 'knocking-in' marks. It sat in the corner as if it had just been bought.
A cold dread, far deeper than simple confusion, began to creep up his spine. His heart hammered, a tiny, frantic drum against his ribs.
He swung his legs over the side of the cot.
His legs.
They were tiny.
They were thin, brown, and covered in the miscellaneous scrapes and mosquito bites of a 10-year-old boy. His feet dangled, not even close to touching the cool, red oxide floor. He stared at them, dumbfounded. He wiggled his toes. Ten tiny toes wiggled back.
This wasn't a dream. A dream didn't re-engineer your entire physiology.
"No," he breathed, the high-pitched voice cracking. "No, no, no."
He scrambled off the bed, his landing clumsy, his new, lower center of gravity betraying him. He stumbled, catching himself on the desk. His hands, the hands he used to type a hundred words a minute, to sign cheques, to hold a whiskey glass... they were small, the knuckles soft, the nails bitten short.
He looked up and saw the mirror.
It was a small, oval mirror in a cheap plastic frame, screwed to the side of the wardrobe. He approached it like one might approach a venomous snake.
The face that stared back was not his. Not the 30-year-old Siddanth Deva, with the tired, hollow-looking eyes, the beginnings of crow's feet, the permanent five-o'clock shadow, and the receding hairline he was so desperately in denial about.
The face in the mirror was round, with chubby cheeks and big, terrified, impossibly clear brown eyes. The hair was a thick, unruly mop, cut in the classic 'mushroom' style of the early 2000s that his mother had to drag him to the barber for. It was him. His 10-year-old self. The gap in his front teeth from where he'd fallen off his bicycle was still there.
He reached up a small, trembling hand. The boy in the mirror did the same. He touched his cheek. The skin was soft, elastic, new.
He backed away, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. "This is impossible. This is... I'm insane. I've had a psychotic break. That's it. I'm in a hospital right now, and this is just... a... a..."
His eyes searched wildly for an answer, for any answer. They landed on the calendar hanging from a nail next to the light switch. It was a cheap, tear-off calendar from a local Hyderabad jeweler, with a garish print of Lakshmi on the top.
He shuffled closer, his bare feet sticking slightly to the floor. He already knew what he would see. He knew it with a sickening, bone-deep certainty.
The date, circled in red ink by his mother's hand, was:
JUNE 10, 2001.
2001.
He was 10 years old again.
He staggered back, his mind, his 30-year-old, data-driven, logical mind, screaming in protest. It was as if his entire consciousness—twenty years of experience, of love, of heartbreak, of soul-crushing failure, of tiny, insignificant victories—had been compressed and forcibly jammed into the skull of a child.
He collapsed onto the cot, his head in his tiny hands. His mind reeled. 2001. The twin towers were still standing. Smartphones didn't exist. 'Social media' meant talking to your friends in the gully. And he... he was 10.
He sat there for a long time, listening to the thwack-thwack of the fan and the distant, familiar call of the koel bird outside. The initial tidal wave of panic and existential horror slowly... receded. It didn't disappear, but it left behind a strange, quiet shore of thought.
If this is 2001...
A memory, sharp and exquisitely painful, lanced through him. A memory he had suppressed for over a decade, buried under layers of corporate jargon and financial reports.
The smell of mud and sweat. The roar of a small crowd at a local Hyderabad U-19 selection match. He was 18. He was fast, he was talented, he was so close. A scholarship, a spot in the Ranji trials... it was all laid out. And then, the slide. A desperate dive to save a boundary. The pop. Not a crack, but a wet, sickening pop.
His leg.
His 30-year-old self still walked with a slight limp on rainy days. The career-ending injury. A torn ACL, a badly botched surgery, and a physiotherapy regime he had given up on out of sheer, bitter despair. It was the pivot point of his life. The exact moment the bright, upward trajectory of his dreams had snapped and sent him plummeting into the mundane reality of the life he'd just left.
But if this is 2001...
His hands, which had been clutching his head, moved. Slowly, with a dreadful, electric anticipation, he moved his left hand down to his pajama-clad leg. He ran his small fingers over his left knee.
He felt for it. The long, puckered, angry scar from the surgeon's knife. The slight divot where the muscle had never quite grown back, right.
There was nothing.
There was just the smooth, unbroken, resilient skin of a 10-year-old boy.
He pulled up the loose pajama leg, his heart doing a frantic, painful rhythm against his ribs. He stared. It was a perfect, scrawny, 10-year-old knee, complete with a small, healing scrape from yesterday's gully cricket match. But there was no scar. No trace of the injury that had defined and destroyed his life.
The injury hadn't happened yet.
It was seven years in the future.
Siddanth Deva stared at his knee, and the last vestiges of his initial shock were burned away by a new, brilliant, and terrifying emotion.
It wasn't just confusion anymore. It was excitement.
No. It was more than that. It was euphoria. It was the wild, ecstatic joy of a condemned man given a full pardon.
He had 20 years. Twenty years of knowledge. He knew which stocks would rise. He knew who would win every World Cup. He knew the dot-com bubble would burst and that something called 'Bitcoin' would be worth a fortune.
But none of that mattered.
He looked from his perfect, unblemished knee to the posters on his wall. To Sachin. To Dravid. To the pristine, unbroken bat in the corner.
He had a second chance.
He wasn't just a 30-year-old mind in a 10-year-old's body. He was a 30-year-old cricketer who knew exactly how his body would fail him. He was a man with 20 years of hindsight on fitness, on nutrition, on technique. He knew about core strength, about modern physiotherapy, about the mental side of the game—things that were barely whispered about in 2001's cricketing circles.
He knew not to make that dive. He knew how to train to strengthen the ligaments before they tore.
He got to his feet. The boy in the mirror was no longer terrified. He was... intense. A 30-year-old's calculating, ruthless focus stared out from a 10-year-old's eyes.
He made a vow. Not to his 10-year-old self, but to the bitter, disappointed 30-year-old man he had been.
"I will not waste this," he whispered, his new, high voice hardening with a resolve it had no right to possess. "I will not end up in a cubicle. I will not be a 'what if'. I will use every single day. I will train smarter, work harder, and play better than anyone in history. The injury won't happen. The failure won't happen. This time... this time, I will become the best. I swear it."
The moment the vow was cemented in his mind, absolute and unshakeable, a sound echoed inside his skull.
DING.
It wasn't an audible sound. It was... a sensation.
Siddanth froze. "Amma?" he called out, his voice wavering, thinking his mother had rung the pooja bell. (Amma = Mother)
No reply. Just the distant sizzle of dosas hitting a hot tava.
And then, it appeared.
Floating in the air, right in front of the Sehwag poster, was a translucent blue screen. It shimmered, like a heat haze over a highway. It was about two feet wide and one foot tall, and it was covered in text.
Siddanth's 30-year-old mind, which had just accepted time travel, barely blinked. His 10-year-old body, however, yelped and fell backward onto the cot.
He stared at the screen. He could see his room through it. The text was in a clean, white font.
[Welcome, Player.]
"Player?" Siddanth whispered. He tentatively reached out a hand. He was a 30-year-old man. He knew this. But the irresistible, childlike urge to touch the impossible thing won out.
His small, brown fingers went... right through it.
There was no sensation. No heat, no cold, no electric shock. His hand simply passed through the screen as if it were a projection of light. He pulled it back, staring at his fingers.
The screen changed.
[Host consciousness successfully integrated with 10-year-old vessel.]
[Detected Host Vow: [Best Player in the Cricket world].]
[Activating Starter Gift Protocol.]
"Host? Vessel?" Siddanth was breathing fast again. "What... what is this? Am I... did I get a cheat?"
The excitement that had been simmering now exploded. This was just like the manhwa he read on his... (on the phone he wouldn't own for another eight years). A system. He had time-traveled and gotten a system. The universe hadn't just given him a second chance; it had given him a rocket-propelled super-boost.
The screen flickered and changed again.
[The path to becoming the "best cricketer" is long and arduous. A gift is provided to aid the Host.]
[Since Host has chosen his career, the Starter Gift will be tailored accordingly.]
Below the text, a single, pulsating, virtual button appeared. It was rectangular and blue, and the word on it was simple:
[START]
Siddanth's mind, the 30-year-old cynical mind, was gone. In its place was a 10-year-old boy who had just been handed the keys to the universe, and a 30-year-old strategist who saw the tool for what it was.
He laughed. It was a strange, giggling, high-pitched sound, but it was filled with pure, unadulterated joy.
"Okay," he said, his voice trembling with the force of his grin. "Okay, let's play."
He looked at the [START] button. He couldn't touch it. Was it voice-activated?
He took a deep breath.
"Start," he commanded.
The blue screen dissolved. The [START] button vanished. In its place, a new, much larger interface appeared, filling his vision.
It was a roulette wheel.
But it wasn't a normal roulette wheel with numbers. This wheel was sectioned off into dozens, maybe hundreds, of slivers, and each sliver contained a name.
His eyes widened as the wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then accelerating into a blur. He could just make out the names as they whipped past.
Sachin Tendulkar... Brian Lara... Shane Warne... Glenn McGrath... Wasim Akram... Ricky Ponting...
It was a pantheon. A pantheon of legends, of gods. He realized what this was. The system was giving him a gift from one of them. A skill? An attribute?
Imagine, his mind buzzed, Tendulkar's balance. Warne's 'flipper'. McGrath's line and length...
The wheel spun, a kaleidoscope of cricketing history. A 'clack-clack-clack' sound, which he knew was only in his head, echoed with his frantic heartbeat.
"Come on, come on... give me Sachin. Give me God."
The wheel began to slow. The names became distinct again.
...Muttiah Muralitharan... clack...
...Jacques Kallis... clack...
...Adam Gilchrist... clack...
It was slowing down agonizingly. His breath hitched. It passed Tendulkar, and he felt a pang of disappointment. It passed Lara.
It ticked over one... two... three more slots.
The 'clack-clack' became a single, final click.
The wheel stopped. The arrow pointed to one name, written in bold, white letters. A name that, in June 2001, meant almost nothing to the wider cricketing world. A name that was not yet a legend.
It landed on: AB de Villiers.