Date: March 24, 2023
Location: Restricted Perimeter Site 3B, Bodh Gaya
I've been accused of being "stern," "rigid," even "paranoid" over the past few days.
Maybe I was.
But they don't understand the burden of authority—of walking the fault line between discipline and disaster. This site isn't just dirt and stone. It feels... sentient. The ground breathes differently here. Something ancient listens when we speak.
I've kept the team tight. Controlled. Not because I enjoy discipline, but because I have to. This isn't just another excavation. One mistake here, and we don't just lose context—we risk unearthing what was never meant to be uncovered.
Still, today felt... clearer. Some tension dissolved.
Kavya, one of our Indian researchers, approached me in the early morning light with a faint smile. "You're not wrong, Sir," she whispered, handing me a charcoal rubbing of a newly discovered pillar. "They just don't see it yet."
There was an unspoken apology in her eyes. I nodded.
The core team's harmony is returning—slowly. Shunji (Japan), Ashan (Sri Lanka), and Sonam (India) have taken the lead in cataloguing the etched boundary seals we uncovered last night. Rohan and Priya—both ASI interns—have been cross-referencing inscriptions with old Jain-Buddhist hybrid scripts. What's unusual is that the language seems neither purely Pali nor Sanskrit, and carries structural elements unfamiliar even to Liang's linguistic algorithms.
Yes, Liang's finally speaking to me again. I think Lu helped broker that silent truce. She still doesn't fully trust me, but after the death of Anoma, no one trusts much of anything.
The relics are speaking.
This morning, we uncovered a sealed sandstone vault—its carvings blackened not with soot, but something else. Oil. Thick, congealed, and fragrant in a way that turns the stomach. Burnt jasmine. Old blood. Resin. Decay.
Inside: bone fragments, metallic strips with script etched so finely they could only be read under polarized filters, and—most unsettling—two identical statues of a monk.
No eyes. No mouth. But they're not eroded. They were made like that.
The same faceless monk from the first chamber we discovered beneath the shrine hill.
We're now certain that the figure is not a representation of the Buddha, nor any known Bodhisattva. The shaved head and posture mimic traditional iconography, but everything else defies it. This figure clutches a broken lotus in one hand—petals rotted—and the other hand holds a flat object that, under scanning, resembles an unbound manuscript.
Whoever he was, he wasn't seeking enlightenment. He was documenting something else.
According to the translation fragments, he refers to himself only as Vighnakara—"The Interrupter."
The text we pulled from the vault mentions a rite called Pashantarakriya—a ritual of "layered silence," supposedly meant to "thin the veil between final awakening and eternal recursion." That phrase alone sent chills through the entire documentation team. Especially because the next line, translated roughly by Zhang, reads:
> "Those who walk the path beyond the eighth seal do not wake as men. They are blessed in burning. They chant but never speak. They see, but never blink."
We believe this monk—The Interrupter—was conducting some kind of transgressive ritual. Something Buddhist schools erased deliberately. A counterfeit Nirvana. A cycle not of liberation, but containment.
A soul loop.
I had to step away after reading that.
Back in my tent, I ran my fingers along the page. A smear of blood—a papercut from nothing sharp. The paper hummed faintly, like held breath. I wrote this entry not because I wanted to, but because I had to write something. Anything. Because silence around this place swells like a tide.
At night, the wind through the ruined chedi moans differently. And today, the intern Raj claimed to hear chanting while inside the vault chamber. We dismissed it—until Liang said she heard it too, hours later, while documenting samples.
She played a recording for us. It was just static.
But beneath it, for one fractured second, I swear I heard my own name.
I'm Advait Sen. I've led dozens of digs across this country. I've walked through forgotten cities and unearthed the bones of kingdoms. But never... never have I felt a place study me back.
Tomorrow we open Chamber Theta.
Something was buried there that the monk wanted no one to touch.
I'm beginning to think he didn't die trying to protect the manuscript.
I think he wrote it after.
~Advait