Chapter 5: Training

The old man was a sadist.

This was not Arjun's opinion. This was an objective assessment based on empirical evidence gathered over the first month of training, during which Parashurama — who insisted on being called "Guruji" and nothing else, because "Parashurama is a title and titles are for temples, not for training grounds" — systematically dismantled every assumption Arjun had built about his own capabilities and rebuilt them from the foundations.

Day one: Guruji had placed a clay pot on the sparring ground — a flat area of packed earth in the cavern outside the shack, lit by crystals that Guruji had installed himself "back when crystals were cheaper and my knees were better." The pot was the size of a cooking vessel. Guruji had pointed at it.

"Tod," he said. Break it.

Arjun had punched the pot with his Agni Mushti. The fire fist connected. The pot shattered. Fragments scattered across the sparring ground, trailing smoke.

Guruji had looked at the fragments. Then at Arjun. Then at the fragments again. His expression was the expression of a man who has asked a chef to prepare a meal and been handed a bag of raw onions.

"Phir se," he said. Again.

He'd placed another pot. Arjun had broken it. Another. Broken. Another. The pile of clay fragments grew. Arjun's Siddhi points depleted — each Agni Mushti costing four points, his total pool of thirty-eight draining fast.

"Aur ek," Guruji said, placing the twelfth pot.

"Siddhi khatam ho gayi," Arjun said. My Siddhi is finished.

"Toh bina Siddhi ke tod."

Then break it without Siddhi.

Arjun had punched the pot. Without fire, without enhancement, just the raw physical strike of a Vanara fist on baked clay. The pot cracked. His knuckles split. Blood — dark, Vanara blood — ran down his fingers.

"Phir se."

He'd broken fourteen pots that day. His hands were ruined by the end — knuckles split, the small bones bruised, the Vanara healing factor working overtime to repair damage that Arjun kept inflicting. Guruji had watched each break with the same expression: assessment, not satisfaction. Evaluation, not praise.

That night, sitting on the shack's porch, his hands wrapped in leaves that Guruji had gathered from the jungle — leaves that contained a natural analgesic, their sap numbing the pain while the healing factor did its work — Arjun had asked: "Aaj ka matlab kya tha?" What was the point of today?

Guruji had poured soma. Handed Arjun a cup. Drank from his own.

"Tujhe pata hai ki tu Agni Mushti se pot tod sakta hai. Yeh main bhi jaanta tha. Tujhe pata nahi tha ki tu bina Agni Mushti ke bhi pot tod sakta hai. Ab pata hai."

You knew you could break a pot with Agni Mushti. I knew that too. You didn't know you could break a pot without Agni Mushti. Now you know.

"Lekin mere haath —"

"Theek ho jayenge. Kal tak naye jaisa. Lekin jo tujhe aaj pata chala — ki teri shakti sirf abilities mein nahi hai, tere shareer mein bhi hai — woh nahi jayega."

They'll heal. By tomorrow, good as new. But what you learned today — that your power isn't only in your abilities, it's in your body too — that won't go away.

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The training had a structure. Not the structure Arjun expected — not the disciplined progression of a martial arts class or the systematic curriculum of an engineering college. Guruji's structure was organic, responsive, the structure of a teacher who had been teaching for millennia and had long since abandoned any pretence of a syllabus.

Mornings: physical conditioning. Running the jungle — not the canopy running that Arjun had been doing, which was safe and efficient and exactly the kind of running a sensible organism would choose, but ground running, through the dangerous zone, past the predators that Arjun had been avoiding for weeks. Guruji ran beside him — or rather, Guruji walked beside him at a pace that matched Arjun's full sprint, which was either a demonstration of the old man's power or an insult to Arjun's speed or both.

"Bhag," Guruji would say when Arjun slowed. Run. And if Arjun didn't run, the old man's hand — enormous, calloused, carrying the strength of an immortal warrior in the casual grip of a disciplinary gesture — would connect with the back of Arjun's head with precisely enough force to motivate without injuring.

Afternoons: combat. Guruji sparred with Arjun the way a cat spars with a mouse — not to kill, not to harm, but to teach through the repeated, humiliating demonstration of the gap between what Arjun was and what Arjun could be. The old man's fighting style was not a style — it was everything, every martial tradition that had ever existed on Mrityuloka and several that existed only in Patala, blended into a fluidity that Arjun's Adaptive Interface couldn't classify.

Arjun would attack. Guruji would redirect. Not block — redirect. The difference was crucial: a block meets force with force. A redirect uses the attacker's force against them, turning their momentum into a weapon pointed at themselves. Arjun would throw his Agni Mushti — his best punch, his strongest technique — and find himself on the ground, his own fire-enhanced fist somehow having been guided past Guruji's body and into the dirt at his feet, the fire scorching earth instead of flesh.

"Tera punch seedha jaata hai," Guruji said, after the fifteenth time Arjun ate dirt. "Seedha accha hai. Seedha honest hai. Lekin seedha predictable bhi hai. Aur predictable ka matlab hai mara hua."

Your punch goes straight. Straight is good. Straight is honest. But straight is also predictable. And predictable means dead.

Evenings: meditation. This was the part Arjun hated most — not because it was painful but because it was still. Guruji would sit in the lotus position on the sparring ground, his massive body folding into the pose with a flexibility that shouldn't have been possible for a frame that large, and he would instruct Arjun to do the same.

"Aankhein band kar. Saans le. Apni siddhi ko mehsoos kar — yahan," a finger touching Arjun's sternum, "yahan nahi," a finger touching his head. "Siddhi shareer mein rehti hai, dimaag mein nahi. Dimaag direction deta hai. Shareer power deta hai. Dono ko jodna seekh — toh tu kuch ban sakta hai."

Close your eyes. Breathe. Feel your siddhi — here, not here. Siddhi lives in the body, not the mind. The mind gives direction. The body gives power. Learn to connect them — then you can become something.

Arjun meditated. Or tried to. His mind — the Mumbai mind, the phone-checking, notification-responding, multi-tab-browsing mind of a digital native — resisted stillness the way water resists being held in an open palm. Thoughts leaked. Plans formed and dissolved. Memories surfaced: Neha's jaw tightening, his mother's chai, the orange seats of the 332 Limited, the feel of the overhead bar in his hand before the tyre burst.

"Khayal aayenge," Guruji said, without opening his eyes. "Aane de. Jaane de. Tu dariya nahi hai — tu dariya ka kinara hai. Khayal paani hai. Paani aata hai, jaata hai. Kinara rehta hai."

Thoughts will come. Let them come. Let them go. You are not the river — you are the riverbank. Thoughts are water. Water comes, goes. The bank remains.

The metaphor was old. Arjun had heard versions of it in every meditation app he'd ever downloaded and deleted within a week. But hearing it from a being who had been meditating for longer than the river metaphor had existed gave it a weight that no app could provide.

He meditated. Badly, at first. His Vanara body was better at stillness than his human body had been — the primate capacity for extended motionlessness, for sitting in a tree for hours watching, waiting, the patience of a species that hunted through ambush rather than pursuit. But his mind was still human. Still restless. Still reaching for a phone that didn't exist in a pocket he no longer had.

It took two weeks before the stillness came.

Not as absence — as presence. A moment where his mind stopped reaching and started receiving, where the constant output of thoughts paused and the input of sensation took over. He felt his Siddhi — not as a number on a display but as a physical reality, a warmth in his core, a reservoir of energy that pulsed with his heartbeat and flowed through channels he hadn't known his body contained. Nadis. The energy channels that Ayurveda described and that he'd always dismissed as unscientific until this moment, sitting in the lotus position on packed earth in the seventh underworld, when he felt them for the first time — not as metaphor but as anatomy, as real as his veins, carrying siddhi the way veins carried blood.

"Aa gaya," Guruji murmured. There it is.

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The weeks accumulated. His stats climbed.

Shakti Darshan

Jeev: Vanara — Mushti Vanar Naam: Arjun Starr: 27

Prana — 1,420/1,420 Tapas — 1,890/1,890 Siddhi — 980/980

Gun: - Bala — 142 - Chaalaki — 198 - Buddhi — 95 - Pranashakti — 132 - Sahansheelata — 189 - Tejas — 87

The numbers told a story of imbalance. Chaalaki and Sahansheelata — agility and endurance — dominated, because Guruji's training prioritised movement and survival over raw power. "Bala se ladai jeet sakte ho," the old man said. "Chaalaki se ladai se bach sakte ho. Bachna zyada zaroori hai."

With strength you can win a fight. With agility you can survive a fight. Surviving is more important.

Arjun's Agni Mushti had reached Level 11. The charge time was down to point six seconds — blink-fast, the fire manifesting almost instantly, the punch now leaving craters in stone and charring Keet chitin through two layers of armour. But Guruji was not satisfied.

"Ek ability," he said, shaking his head. "Ek active ability pe itna depend karta hai. Agar Agni Mushti counter ho jaye — agar koi paani ka praani mile, ya agni-resistant — toh tu kya karega?"

One ability. You depend so much on one active ability. If Agni Mushti gets countered — if you meet a water creature, or something fire-resistant — then what will you do?

The answer, Guruji explained, was in the siddhi. Not in the abilities the system provided but in the raw energy itself — the prana, the tapas, the siddhi that flowed through his nadis and powered everything. The abilities were templates. Structures. Channels through which the energy flowed in predetermined patterns. But the energy itself was formless, shapeable, capable of being directed in ways that the system's templates did not account for.

"System tumhe ek raasta dikhata hai," Guruji said. "Agni Mushti. Shakti Chori. Shabdadrishti. Yeh raaste acche hain. Lekin sirf raaste hain. Agar tu enerji ko seedha control karna seekh le — bina template ke, bina system ke — toh tu apne raaste bana sakta hai."

The system shows you one path. Agni Mushti. Shakti Chori. Shabdadrishti. These paths are good. But they're only paths. If you learn to control the energy directly — without templates, without the system — then you can make your own paths.

This was what the meditation was for. Not mindfulness. Not peace. Control. The ability to feel the siddhi in his nadis, to move it with intention, to direct it to specific parts of his body without the system's intermediation. Raw siddhi manipulation. The skill that separated a template user — someone who pressed buttons on the cosmic interface — from a practitioner — someone who understood the energy itself and could shape it with will alone.

The first breakthrough came on a Tuesday. Or what Arjun thought of as Tuesday — the crystal-light's cycle didn't map perfectly to a seven-day week, but his human mind insisted on the structure.

He was meditating. The siddhi was moving — he could feel it, the warm current flowing through his nadis in the pattern that his daily meditation had mapped. He focused on his right hand. Drew the siddhi there. Not through an ability — through intention, through the mental equivalent of flexing a muscle he'd never used before.

His hand glowed. Not with the orange fire of Agni Mushti — with a golden light, the raw colour of unprocessed siddhi, the energy visible for the first time without the filter of a system-defined ability. The light was warm. The light was his.

"Bahut accha," Guruji said. His voice was soft — the softest Arjun had ever heard it, the voice of a teacher witnessing a student's first real step. "Ab usse hath mein rakh. Mat chod. Control kar."

Very good. Now hold it in your hand. Don't let go. Control it.

Arjun held it. Three seconds. Five. The energy pulsed, wanting to disperse, wanting to flow back into the nadis and return to its natural circulation. He held it through will alone — the mental grip trembling, the effort equivalent to holding a live fish in a wet hand.

Seven seconds. The glow intensified. His hand began to shake.

Nine seconds. The glow flickered.

Eleven seconds. The energy broke free, flooding back into his body in a rush that left his hand tingling and his head spinning and his Siddhi meter flashing a warning:

Siddhi: 340/980 — RAPID DEPLETION DETECTED

He'd burned through 640 Siddhi points in eleven seconds of raw manipulation. The inefficiency was staggering — his Agni Mushti used four points per activation. Raw manipulation had used fifty-eight per second.

But it worked. The energy had responded to his will, not to a system template. He had touched the raw power beneath the interface, and the touch — however brief, however costly — had changed his understanding of what was possible.

Guruji handed him soma. Arjun drank. The soma replenished his siddhi faster than natural regeneration, the divine drink feeding the energy system the way glucose feeds the body.

"Phir se," Guruji said.

Arjun closed his eyes. Reached for the siddhi. Began again.

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