(Real-time mystery style)
The message arrived at 2:17 a.m.
"We found something beneath the sea.
It wasn't stone.
And it wasn't human."
Ananya stared at her phone, the blue light trembling in her hands.
Dwarka was not new to secrets.
But this message felt… wrong.
She was a junior epigraphy researcher, working with coastal archaeology teams. Her life was manuscripts, carbon dating, broken scripts—facts, not faith.
Yet the sender was Dr. Raghav Mehta, a man who never joked, never exaggerated.
And the subject line chilled her:
"Krishna was here later than we thought."
Present Time: Dwarka Coast
The Arabian Sea was unusually calm when Ananya arrived.
Fishermen refused to sail that morning.
"Samudram shaantam ledu, amma," one old man warned.
"The sea is quiet because it is listening."
Underwater scans from the previous night glowed on the monitor—structures beneath Dwarka, older than expected. Much older.
But one chamber didn't match Harappan patterns.
Its walls were engraved—not in Sanskrit, not in Prakrit—but in a script no historian had officially recorded.
And at the center of the chamber lay a stone disc, smooth as if shaped yesterday.
Carved on it was a single symbol.
🌀
Not chakra.
Not wheel.
Something else.
The Impossible Carbon Date
Back at the lab, Ananya ran the dating test herself.
The result appeared.
She ran it again.
And again.
Her breath caught.
The stone wasn't ancient.
It was less than 80 years old.
Impossible.
Dwarka submerged over 3,000 years ago.
No one should have placed anything there recently.
Unless…
Someone had returned.
The Palm-Leaf Manuscript
That evening, a temple priest requested to meet her.
He was blind in one eye and carried a wrapped bundle.
"This manuscript," he said softly, "is not meant to be read until the sea speaks again."
Ananya unfolded the brittle palm leaves.
One line was translated clearly:
"I did not leave when the city drowned.
I left when humans forgot how to listen."
The signature beneath froze her.
It was not a name.
Just two words:
— Vāsudeva
The Night Vision
That night, Ananya dreamed.
She stood on Dwarka's shore.
The sea parted—not violently, but respectfully.
A figure stood in the distance, not glowing, not divine.
Just… human.
He looked at her—not as a god, but as someone tired of waiting.
"You study history," he said.
"But history studies you back."
She woke up with tears on her face.
And a message on her phone.
Sent at 2:17 a.m. again.
"The chamber opened by itself."
"And the disc is missing."
Chapter Ends With This Line:
"If Krishna had returned, it was not to be worshipped—but to correct something humanity had done terribly wrong."