Date: April 1, 2023
Location: Bodh Gaya Site – Medical Tent, Temporary Archives
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Today, I did not wake alone.
I found footprints around my bedding—bare, ash-colored, inverted.
The interns swore no one entered. But I knew better.
Something came to watch me sleep.
A metallic scent clung to the air. Not iron. Something colder, older—like incense laced with mercury and funeral ash.
The same smell we recorded in Chamber Theta… before we ever breached the seal.
The body of Bhantaragya remains sealed beneath reinforced concrete.
But I now believe—we sealed only the vessel.
Not the voice.
Not the will.
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Aryan's voice came from Devraj's mouth during the night.
I swear to you—I am not imagining this.
Devraj still sleeps, jaw slack.
But around 3 a.m., he sat bolt upright, stared at us with eyes rolled back, and whispered:
> "The monk lied to himself first. The second lie was language."
> "The third lie was time."
He then vomited scroll fragments.
I wish I were joking.
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We laid out the fragments. And with help from Krisha, one of our Sanskrit interns, we began piecing together a clearer account of Bhantaragya's descent.
He was once a scholar of the Sarvastivāda school, an ascetic obsessed with the Buddhist concept of Anatta—non-self.
But he wanted more than freedom from ego.
He wanted to prove that liberation itself was a form of attachment.
> "The ultimate desire is to be free of desire. What if that desire is also a shackle?"
So he built a system.
A labyrinthine doctrine—a counter-Nirvana, where instead of dissolving, the soul compresses, feeding upon each life's echoes until it gains mass.
We now believe this is what he called "Sankharanic Ascension."
He tried to reverse Nirvana.
To become immortal through decay.
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I fear it worked.
But something went wrong.
Because the texts stop—abruptly. Mid-sentence.
And then the blood-sigil pages begin.
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I feel it watching us when we translate.
Liang admitted that he saw his deceased brother walking outside the eastern perimeter.
He screamed and ran after him.
When we found him, his fingernails were missing, and he kept trying to "draw the chant" into the sand with bloodied fingertips.
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I told the team to stop reading the texts aloud.
But it may be too late.
Reading them is also recitation.
Bhantaragya designed them like that.
A curse embedded in comprehension.
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Tomorrow, we return to the chamber—not the pit, but the western vault.
We found what seems to be a reverse-mandala, drawn in salt and crushed bones.
If there's a seal, I believe it's there.
I don't know how many more of us will survive.
But I'll keep writing.
Even if the ink dries in my veins.
~ Advait Sen
Lead Archaeologist, Bodh Gaya Dig
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