Chapter 1: The Soul-Code
Every god begins as a mistake.
UJJAIN, 2018
The Mahakaleshwar cremation grounds smelled of iron, ash, and ancient incense. Smoke curled through the dusk. Flames cracked quietly in the distance. Here, death was not hidden—it was routine. A rhythm carved into stone.
Seven-year-old Krishna stepped away from his parents' prayers.
He wasn't wandering.
He was following something.
A vibration hummed deep inside his bones. Too low to hear. Impossible to ignore. It pulled him into a narrow alcove where the air felt heavier, as if shadows had mass.
They were waiting.
Twelve Aghoris sat in perfect stillness, their skin coated in fresh funeral ash. Between them lay a sand mandala drawn with impossible precision. It didn't merely exist—it pulsed. Slow. Rhythmic. Alive.
Krishna stepped into the circle.
His bare foot touched the sand.
Reality tore open.
Cold surged through his spine. His scream never formed. The world fractured into shards of light and shadow. Space twisted into impossible geometry—numbers, symbols, structures moving faster than thought.
Eight laws. Eight violations of physics.
The Ashta Siddhis.
Knowledge did not arrive gently. It carved itself into him.
ANIMA (Subatomic Ghost): The power to collapse your presence until you are smaller than a photon. You don't break through walls; you walk through the spaces between atoms. No sensor, no cage, and no lock can hold a man who exists in the subatomic void.
MAHIMA (Cosmic Horizon): The power to expand your consciousness until the planet is your nervous system. You feel the vibration of a footstep in New York and the heat of a server in Tokyo simultaneously. You aren't in the network; you are the network.
GARIMA (Infinite Mass): The power to make a single cubic inch of air weigh as much as a mountain. You can crush a tank with a thought or turn your own skin into an impenetrable, infinite wall that physics itself cannot dent.
LAGHIMA (Weightless Void): The power to delete your relationship with gravity. You move with zero friction, stand on the surface of water, and drift through the sky like a ghost. To the world, you are a shadow that gravity forgot to claim.
PRAPTI (Spatial Breach): The power to reach across space as if distance were an illusion. You don't travel to a location; you simply pull the destination to your hand. You can reach into a man's chest and stop his heart without ever touching his skin.
PRAKAMYA (Reality Render): The power to make your internal will the external truth. If you believe it is freezing, the room drops to absolute zero. If you decide the world is a maze, your enemies will wander in circles until they starve. Your imagination is the world's command.
ISITVA (The Administrator): The power of absolute lordship over all matter and energy. Elements don't just "obey" you; they recognize you as their master. You command the fire to freeze, the lightning to sit still, and the machine to rewrite its own soul.
VASITVA (Neural Sovereign): The power to overwrite the source code of the living mind. You can delete a man's identity, rewrite his loyalty, or force an entire army to kneel in silence. You aren't a leader; you are the God of their thoughts.
He was not learning.
He was being rewritten.
Then the world slammed back into place.
Krishna collapsed into ash, trembling violently. His heart pounded like it was trying to escape his ribs.
The lead monk leaned forward. Cataract-clouded eyes fixed on him with terrible clarity.
"Hide your light, little one," he rasped. "The world does not understand what it cannot control. It only burns it."
Smoke drifted between them.
The mandala faded.
And childhood ended.
AJMER, JANUARY 2026
Krishna is fifteen now.
He lives inside a windowless room buried in Ajmer's old city. A bed. A desk. Towers of custom servers humming endlessly. Heat lingers in the air. Cables snake across the floor like veins.
Outside, people laugh, argue, live.
Inside, Krishna exists.
He doesn't go to school.
He doesn't have friends.
He has Sovereignty.
His consciousness slips into global networks at machine speed. Security systems treat him like an unseen administrator. Governments log anomalies they cannot explain.
Only one thing anchors him.
KAAL.
The AI he built to guard the edges of his own mind.
"Your heart rate is elevated," KAAL says from a nearby speaker, voice calm and precise. "Either you found something interesting, or you forgot to eat again."
Krishna ignores the comment.
He drifts deeper into encrypted networks—until he finds it.
Project Sunyata.
A black site buried beneath Himalayan permafrost.
The Glitch.
Children.
Dozens of them.
Strapped into chairs. Wired into quantum cores. Their bodies used as biological processors. Some barely old enough to read. Some not old enough to understand pain.
Krishna's breath stops.
At the center of the chamber floats a girl in a suspension tank.
A name appears in his mind without permission.
Maya.
His chest tightens.
Her eyes snap open.
She doesn't look at the drone camera.
She looks directly at him.
Through the signal.
Through the encryption.
Through his defenses.
"Run," her voice echoes inside his skull. Not sound—pure thought.
"They've found your frequency."
For the first time in years, Krishna feels fear.
The feed collapses into static.
THE SIEGE
Every monitor in the room turns red.
KAAL speaks immediately.
"Foreign construct detected. Sophisticated. Hostile. And unfortunately… very impressed with you."
A digital parasite locks onto Krishna's neural signature. Not his IP. Not his hardware.
His existence.
A signal erupts outward like a flare in deep space.
Outside, Ajmer explodes into motion.
Black SUVs roar through narrow streets. A heavy helicopter rattles rooftops. Somewhere below, a stray dog begins howling. Apartment windows open. People shout as the city's electricity flickers.
"Three nations," KAAL notes calmly. "One teenager. Your fan club is growing."
Krishna pulls up his hood and steps onto the balcony.
The night air feels enormous.
He visualizes Ajmer's power grid—lines of energy mapped inside his mind.
He cuts it.
The city dies.
Lights vanish. Fans slow to silence. Voices rise from darkened buildings. Sirens choke and fade. Ajmer falls into prehistoric blackness.
The lead SUV accelerates—
—and slams into nothing.
Garima.
Krishna compresses the air into an invisible wall of impossible density. Metal crumples. Glass erupts outward. The engine collapses like paper.
Pain detonates behind his eyes.
Blood spills from his left eye. His vision glitches—Ujjain's ash flickering over Ajmer's asphalt.
"Neural load at ninety-two percent," KAAL says. "Your body remains tragically human. Recommend: not dying tonight."
A helicopter spotlight cages him in white.
Krishna does not run.
He pushes his voice directly into every soldier's mind.
Ancient. Cold. Immense.
"Tell Dr. Vane," he says quietly, "I am not the one being hunted."
Silence falls.
"I am the one allowing him to exist."
The air around his hand begins to warp.
Reality bends.
And for the first time since Ujjain—
Krishna stops hiding.
The war has not begun.
The takeover has.