PUNARMRITYU: The Beast of Patala
Chapter 3: The Jungle Floor
Freedom in Patala was not what freedom meant in Mumbai.
In Mumbai, freedom was a day off. A Sunday with no plans, no calls from Neha, no emails from the agency, no obligations except the obligation to exist in a city that charged rent for the privilege. In Patala, freedom was simpler and more terrifying: you were free to go anywhere, do anything, become anything — and equally free to die in any of the thousand ways that the underworld provided for organisms that were Level 1, alone, and profoundly ignorant of the rules.
Matron Mosri had given him a choice after the syphoning. Three paths. She'd laid them out with the bored efficiency of a railway booking clerk explaining the difference between sleeper class and AC 3-tier.
Path one: join a sangh — a guild. Work your way up through the guild's hierarchy, take assignments, earn faction standing, gain power through institutional support. Slow, safe, steady. The corporate job of Patala.
Path two: find a guru. Seek out one of the powerful beings who took disciples, submit to training, earn power through apprenticeship. Faster than guild work, but dependent entirely on finding a guru willing to take a Level 1 Vanara with no connections and no remarkable abilities.
Path three: go solo. Enter the jungle. Fight, explore, survive. Earn power through direct combat and discovery. The fastest route to strength and the fastest route to death.
Arjun had chosen path three. Not because he was brave — he was emphatically not brave, he was a copywriter from Ghatkopar whose most dangerous experience before the bus had been eating street pani puri during monsoon season. He chose path three because paths one and two required things he didn't have: connections for the guild, reputation for the guru. Path three required only a body and a willingness to use it.
So he went into the jungle.
The first week was education through violence.
He learned that the insect swarms — the pale, dog-sized things with mandibles — were called Keet. They were Level 3 to Level 8, depending on the individual, and they hunted in packs of ten to thirty. A single Keet was manageable for a Level 1 Vanara with a fire punch. A pack of thirty was a death sentence wrapped in chitin.
He learned their patterns. Dawn — the crystal-light's activation cycle — triggered their emergence from the fungal beds where they slept. They hunted in expanding spirals, covering ground systematically, their chemical communication creating a network of scent trails that marked territory, food sources, and threats. The trails persisted for hours. If you stepped on a trail, the swarm knew where you were.
He learned to read the trails. His Vanara nose — more sensitive than his human nose by a factor he couldn't calculate — could detect the Keet pheromones from fifty metres. The smell was distinctive: astringent, metallic, like rusted iron dissolved in vinegar. He learned to navigate around the trails, through the gaps in the scent network, moving through the jungle the way a pedestrian moves through Mumbai traffic — not by going where you want to go but by going where the gaps are.
He learned to fight.
His Agni Mushti was the key. The fire fist, weak as it was, had one crucial advantage: the Keet were vulnerable to fire. Their chitin — pale, translucent, designed for a lightless environment — blackened and cracked under heat. A single charged Agni Mushti to a Keet's thorax was enough to kill it if the strike was precise, and his Vanara body, with its primate coordination and its combat-oriented reflexes, could deliver that precision.
The problem was the two-second charge time. Two seconds is nothing in a conversation. Two seconds is an eternity in a fight. He had to learn timing — when to charge, when to strike, how to position himself so that the two seconds of vulnerability didn't become the last two seconds of his second life.
He learned. Slowly. Painfully. With scars that his Vanara body healed faster than his human body would have but that still hurt, still bled, still served as reminders that this world did not grade on a curve.
By the end of the first week, he was Level 4.
Shakti Darshan
Jeev: Vanara — Mushti Vanar Naam: Arjun Starr: 4
Prana — 55/55 Tapas — 48/48 Siddhi — 38/38
Gun: - Bala — 7 - Chaalaki — 12 - Buddhi — 5 - Pranashakti — 6 - Sahansheelata — 5 - Tejas — 4
The stats told a story. Chaalaki — agility — was his highest attribute, nearly double his others. This was the Vanara body expressing its evolutionary priorities: speed and manoeuvrability over raw power. His Bala — strength — was decent but not dominant. His Buddhi — intelligence — was growing slowly, boosted by each successful encounter, each tactical decision that worked, each moment of problem-solving that the system registered and rewarded.
Level 4 in one week. He had no context for whether this was fast or slow. He had no other reborn souls to compare himself to. He had only the jungle, the Keet, the daily cycle of hunting and eating and sleeping in tree hollows, and the slow, grinding accumulation of experience that the Shakti Darshan tracked with mathematical precision.
He discovered Shakti Chori — the passive theft ability — on the fifth day.
A Keet — larger than the others, Level 7, its chitin darker and thicker — had cornered him against a rock face. His Agni Mushti was on cooldown, the two-second charge feeling like two hours as the Keet's mandibles clicked toward his face. He'd thrown a desperate punch — unenhanced, no fire, just the physical strike of a Vanara fist against a Keet's armoured head — and felt something happen.
Not the impact. Something beneath the impact. A pull. A transfer. As if the punch had created a channel between his body and the Keet's, and through that channel, something had flowed.
The Keet staggered. Arjun staggered. And at the edge of his vision, a notification:
Shakti Chori activated.** **Temporary passive acquired: Chitinous Hide (Starr 1)** **Duration: 1 ghati (24 minutes)
His skin hardened. Not visibly — the fur was still there, the Vanara body still looked the same — but beneath the fur, something had changed. The skin was tougher, more resilient, carrying the echo of the Keet's natural armour translated into Vanara biology.
He'd killed the Keet. The Agni Mushti came off cooldown and he'd driven it into the creature's exposed underbelly — the one spot where the chitin was thin — and the fire had done the rest. The Keet had collapsed, its legs folding beneath it, the smell of charred chitin filling the air with an acrid sweetness that reminded him, absurdly, of the tandoori smell from the restaurant below his Ghatkopar flat.
The Chitinous Hide lasted twenty-four minutes. In those twenty-four minutes, he'd fought three more Keet, and the stolen armour had absorbed blows that would have broken his bones without it. When the duration expired, the armour faded, and his skin returned to its normal Vanara softness, and he felt the loss like a phantom limb — the protection gone, the vulnerability returned, the body remembering what it had briefly been and mourning the loss.
But the ability had shown him something. Shakti Chori was not just theft — it was adaptation. Each stolen passive changed his body temporarily, gave him capabilities he didn't have natively, let him experience what other species could do. And with a 5% chance of permanent absorption, each activation was a lottery ticket — a small chance of keeping the stolen power forever, of adding it to his permanent repertoire, of becoming something more than a Level 1 template with a fire punch and a dream.
He hunted with purpose after that. Not just for experience. For passives. Every creature in the jungle had something worth stealing — the Keet had their armour, the tree lizards had their camouflage, the cave bats had their echolocation. He fought everything, stole everything, and tracked the results with the obsessive attention to data that his marketing background had trained into him.
Sixty-seven Shakti Chori activations in the first week. Zero permanent absorptions. The 5% chance was, apparently, exactly that — a 5% chance, not a guarantee, not a progression, just probability doing what probability does, which is disappoint you sixty-seven times in a row and make you wonder if the system was broken or if the universe simply enjoyed watching a monkey punch things and fail to steal their powers.
But the temporary buffs were valuable. He learned to chain them — steal a Keet's armour, use the protection window to fight something tougher, steal from the tougher thing, use that buff to fight something tougher still. A ladder of stolen powers, each rung lasting twenty-four minutes, each rung lifting him to a fight he couldn't have won without it.
By the end of the second week, he was Level 9.
The jungle had layers.
The top layer — the canopy, close to the crystal-light — was safest. Fruit, birds, small creatures, the occasional territorial primate that challenged him for branch space and retreated when he showed his Agni Mushti. The canopy was where he slept, where he ate, where he retreated when the jungle floor became too dangerous.
The middle layer — the understorey, the dense vegetation between canopy and floor — was where most of the life concentrated. Keet swarms, lizards, the medium-sized predators that hunted by ambush, waiting in the shadows of large leaves for prey to pass within striking distance. This was where he fought, where he trained, where his experience accumulated.
The bottom layer — the jungle floor, the dark ground between the root systems of the massive trees — was where he did not go.
The floor was dangerous in a way that the other layers were not. The creatures there were higher level — 15, 20, 30 — beings that had survived by being the most lethal things in their niche. He could see them from the understorey: shadows moving in the permanent twilight of the forest floor, shapes too large to be Keet, too fast to be the armoured things that burrowed in the soil.
And in the darkest parts of the floor, where the tree roots created caverns and the crystal-light didn't reach, there were sounds. Low sounds. Resonant sounds. The sounds of large things breathing in confined spaces, waiting with the patience of apex predators for something to descend from the safety of the trees.
He stayed in the middle layer. He was not ready for the floor. He knew this the way you know not to cross a Mumbai road during rush hour — not through calculation but through survival instinct, the deep primate awareness that says: not yet. Not yet. Build. Grow. Become something that the floor cannot kill. Then descend.
So he built. He grew. He punched things with fire and stole their powers and ate fruit and slept in tree hollows and checked his stats with the compulsive frequency of a man checking his phone, watching the numbers climb — slowly, steadily, the way compound interest climbs, each day's gain building on the previous day's total.
And at night — Patala's night, the crystal-light dimming to a deep amber that cast the jungle in shadows — he sat in his tree hollow and he thought about Mumbai.
About Neha, who would have received the news by now. The bus accident. The bodies. The identification process — dental records, Aadhaar card, the administrative machinery of death grinding through its procedures while the families waited. Would she cry? He thought she would. Not because she loved him — he wasn't sure she did, wasn't sure he'd given her enough to love — but because she had invested four years and the investment had failed, and Neha grieved investments the way traders grieve bad positions: with the specific sorrow of resources that cannot be recovered.
About his mother. Sunanda Mhatre. The woman who had raised him alone after his father left — not dramatically, not with shouting or suitcases, just a quiet exit, a door closing, a space in the flat that filled with silence and never refilled with anything else. His mother, who worked at a pharmaceutical company in Thane, who commuted two hours each way, who had saved enough to put him through engineering college (which he'd dropped out of) and then through a communications degree (which he'd completed with the minimum effort required to not fail).
His mother would not be OK.
The thought hit him in the tree hollow, in the amber dark, and it hit with a force that his Vanara body was not equipped to process. The grief was human grief — the specific, complex, layered grief of a son who has died and cannot tell his mother he is alive, cannot tell her he is sorry for the years of adequacy when she deserved excellence, cannot tell her that the chai she made — with too much sugar and not enough ginger, the exact opposite of good chai, the chai he'd complained about his entire life — was the thing he missed most in this underground world of crystal-light and fire punches and stolen powers.
He pressed his face into his fur-covered knees and he cried. The Vanara cry was quiet — a keening, low and sustained, the sound a primate makes when it is alone and knows it. The jungle absorbed the sound. The crystal-light pulsed, indifferent. The world did not care that Arjun Mhatre missed his mother's chai.
But Arjun cared. And the caring — the human caring, the Mumbai caring, the Ghatkopar-second-floor-one-BHK caring — was the thing that kept him climbing, kept him fighting, kept him punching Keet with fire and stealing their powers and watching his numbers grow.
Not because the numbers mattered. Because the numbers might, someday, be large enough to find a way home.
© 2026 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.