Date: March 28, 2023
Location: Base Camp, Chamber Theta, Bodh Gaya Site
---
I don't think I've slept.
Or maybe I did—just long enough to wake into a deeper layer of this waking dream.
There are voices again. This time not inside my head, but in the stone.
The walls breathe. I hear Sanskrit murmurs from corners that shouldn't echo.
Some of the interns have stopped speaking entirely.
Liang swears someone stood above his bed last night whispering the Anta-Vaana chant in reverse. But no one else saw it. His roommate insists the tent flap never moved.
I don't know who to believe anymore.
---
Today, we retraced the entire excavation grid. The symbols are spreading.
They weren't here before—not when we laid out the grid two weeks ago.
Now they've etched themselves onto rocks, under our work tables, even on the backs of clipboards.
We triple-checked the drone footage. Those carvings weren't there when we recorded Chamber Theta.
And then there's the worst part:
Yui's tent caught fire.
We still don't know how. No fuel. No open flames inside.
Just screaming, and when we reached it—the tent was boiling from the inside.
The autopsy (as far as we dared) showed a charred spiral on her forehead.
That makes three.
Three dead. Each with the same sigil.
Each following a verse in that cursed chant.
---
And then Zhang—God help him—broke.
He confessed it.
The ritual.
The recitation.
He thought it was a discovery. A historical reconstruction.
He thought he was re-enacting Bhantaragya's path to Nirvana.
Not opening what Bhantaragya sealed with his blood.
He said he only wanted to impress the committee. Make the international archives.
He said, "The chant felt sacred—pure, even. I didn't know. I didn't know—"
But it doesn't matter now.
Because he bears the fourth line of the spiral chant.
And we all know what comes next:
> "The rest—become vessels."
---
We tried to leave. All of us.
We hiked to the ridge. Past the marker stones and rusted boundary gates.
And what we found—
Nothing.
Just desert.
Plain, white earth. A horizon loop.
No birds. No trees. No road.
Just the feeling that the world had curled up behind us and sealed shut.
No GPS. No compass function.
Even the sun sat frozen—just slightly east of noon. It never moved.
We circled back.
This isn't Bodh Gaya anymore.
Not in the way that matters.
We are within Bhantaragya's loop now.
A liminal fracture. A soul trap.
I fear we were not excavating a tomb—but stepping into the burial.
---
The team is panicking.
Interns cry in corners. The Chinese group prays loudly. Some of the Indian members blame us for being too hasty with the scrolls. The Japanese assistant, Hiroshi, sits in complete silence. Won't eat. Won't blink.
I try to calm them. I told them I'm sending all notes, logs, scans, and entries into the central database. I lied.
Nothing sends.
The files just circle endlessly—mocking digital spirals.
---
So here is my plan:
We have twenty core team members.
And nearly a dozen more interns, from various institutes and nations.
Not everyone is cursed yet. I will segregate the exposed group. Minimize spread.
We'll focus on Scroll Theta-7. It holds fragments of the Opposition Rite—something that seems like a spiritual sealing.
Bhantaragya references it as "the inverse whisper" or "ritual of drowning the fire."
But most of it's encoded.
We've found clay tablets with scorch patterns resembling Bhantaragya's crest… but reversed.
I believe they represent his disciples who tried to stop him.
The backstory will continue tomorrow.
If I survive the night.
---
If I begin speaking in tongues,
If I forget my name,
If I write an entry that feels too smooth, too lyrical—
That is not me.
Burn the page.
Do not believe this diary forever.
Even paper can become a mouth.
— Advait Sen
Senior Archaeologist
Entrapped, but not surrendered.