Date: April 5, 2023
Location: Chamber Theta, Lower Catacombs, Bodh Gaya
I do not know when I last slept. I do not know how many of us remain untouched.
There's a madness in the air. A slithering, patient madness that waits behind every whispered syllable of the ancient tongue we've unearthed. Chamber Theta… I should have sealed it the moment we opened it. The stench of something other still lingers—burnt copper, wet stone, and something like old prayers long since turned rancid.
This morning, the chanting returned. Faint. But not from us.
No one was chanting.
We were all gathered in the central archive chamber trying to decipher the newly found scribe—twenty-eight pages of rotting palm-leaf bundles discovered buried beneath a hollow slab behind Bhantaragya's weather-worn statue. They appear older than anything else we've found here—older even than the relics attributed to the Mauryan period. The script is pre-Pali, an angular, winding scrawl I've only seen referenced once, in a forbidden Sanskrit thesis suppressed by the ASI decades ago.
We finally identified the language as a hybrid of Brahmi with early Proto-Magadhi, but warped by something… unnatural. Some words aren't just glyphs. They move. Not metaphorically. When traced carefully with an archaeograph light, they ripple like ink dropped in water. Lu from the Chinese team saw it first. He hasn't spoken since.
Zhang tried touching one with a stylus to recreate it. His fingers blistered, and the stylus turned black. It hissed. No, I'm not imagining that. We all heard it.
From what we've translated so far, Bhantaragya—if we can still call him that—was not a name. It was a title. A corrupted echo of a once-great monk, the kind whispered about in forbidden oral histories, known as "those who ascended but never left." The texts describe him as a visionary. A practitioner obsessed with Nirvāṇa-Atīta—"the beyond of Nirvana." He believed that true transcendence was not liberation from suffering, but dominion over it.
He created a ritual, a layered spiritual architecture buried beneath layers of false enlightenment. A backdoor to Nirvana. But something happened—perhaps deliberately, perhaps not. He ruptured the cycle.
In his writings—yes, some are first-person—he speaks of entering "the realm of inverted flame," of tearing open "the sutras behind the eyes." These are not metaphors. The text describes literal sacrifices—tongues cut to silence doubts, minds bled of memory, sigils etched with the nails of monks who no longer slept.
And then, he writes of becoming. Not death. Not rebirth. Becoming.
He is not dead. Not in the way we understand.
He sleeps beneath.
And now I fear that sleep stirs.
This afternoon, while the others debated the implications of one passage—a disturbing chant linked to "the Severing of Illusions" rite—I noticed something scratched into the wall behind where the manuscript had been buried. A bloodstain. Not dry, but moist, fresh. We tried to sample it. It vanished in seconds under light.
At dusk, Lu collapsed. Foam at his lips, eyes rolled back, muttering a single word again and again.
Bhantaragya.
Bhantaragya.
Bhantaragya.
We locked him in the infirmary.
I am not a believer in ghost stories. I was a man of science. I am still one, I want to say. But something down here is unmaking the logic I've lived my life by. Even the air resists physics now—our instruments tick erratically, compasses swing in slow circles, and cameras refuse to record audio properly. All sounds recorded during the chantings are replaced with what sounds like boiling flesh and weeping.
I'm recording everything. I've instructed the few interns still coherent to catalog every artifact with physical, digital, and even charcoal rubbings. If any of us make it out, the world must know.
But here's what chills me deeper than all else—we found the names of monks listed beneath the title of Bhantaragya in a "lineage of inheritance." All were punished. Cursed. Each bore the sigil of "The Silent Tongue"—a bleeding rune that now we've seen on both Anoma's corpse and the latest casualty, Arun.
And the next name?
A faint outline.
Still being etched.
The outline is forming into Advait.
I write this by lantern light. My own breath fogs the mirror across the chamber, and every time I glance away, I see not my face, but that of the monk. His robes torn. Eyes empty. Mouth sewn.
But smiling.
God help us all.
—
Advait Sen
Senior Field Director, Ar
chaeological Survey of India
Bodh Gaya Excavation, Chamber Theta