Agastya opened his eyes. A sharp, suffocating pain struck his chest immediately, as if a jagged railway spike had been driven through his sternum and left to rust.
His breath hitched, breaking into uneven, shallow gasps as his lungs fought to expand against the crushing pressure. It was dark around him, wrapped in the heavy, sultry heat of the city night.
He couldn’t clearly see where he was, but his senses, honed by decades of survival in the smog-choked alleys, went immediately to work. The air smelled foul—a thick, metallic stench of iron and copper that tasted heavy on the back of his tongue. It was mixed underneath with the faint scent of coal smoke, damp earth, and stale flour. Blood. And it was nearby.
His clothes felt dry and stiff against his skin, yet his tactile memory screamed that his heavy, dark coat and the shirt beneath it had been soaking wet only moments ago.
Moving with agonising deliberation, he placed his palms flat against the cold teakwood floorboards and slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position. Gravity felt wrong.
Every minor movement dragged against a profound, unnatural weight inside his body. His muscles felt heavy, sluggish, and entirely stiff, as though the steam had been let out of his own biological engine.
They ached with the deep, cellular exhaustion of tissue that had endured something it was never meant to survive.
Suddenly, the agony in his chest intensified. It grew exponentially, expanding far beyond what his disciplined mind was prepared to endure. It was a sharp, overwhelming spike of pure torment—something he could neither ignore nor compartmentalise.
It pressed outward from deep within his ribs, as if a rusted gear were trying to violently grind its way out of his flesh. The pain tore through him in blinding, hot waves.
His body trembled violently. His breath broke into a jagged hiss as the primal urge to scream surged up his throat. He clenched his jaw until his teeth ground together, barely holding the sound back, trapping the weakness behind his lips.
In the dim, soot-stained light, his right hand dropped to the floor, searching blindly for support. His fingertips brushed against a puddle of something thick, sticky, and uneven. It felt half-congealed and half-wet.
He paused, his breath shuddering, and slowly brought his stained fingers closer to his face. The metallic smell was overpowering. It was undeniably human blood.
‘What is inside me?’ he thought, his mind racing as his left hand hovered over his agonising chest.
At the lightest touch against his sternum. His fingers met something hard, round, and metallic protruding from the torn flesh. It was moving. The object was physically pushing itself out of his chest cavity, forced upward by an impossible internal pressure, like a piston firing in reverse.
The tearing sensation grew sharper, burning like a branding iron with each passing second, until suddenly—with a sickening, wet pop—it breached the surface.
A broken, ragged scream finally escaped him.
The sound filled the cramped space around him, echoing off heavy brick walls. His hand moved on pure reflex, catching the bloody object as it tumbled from his chest.
For a long moment, he could do nothing but sit there in the dark. His chest heaved as he tried to regulate his breathing, battling the overwhelming shock that still radiated from his sternum to his fingertips.
Slowly, his fingers tightened around the small, heavy object. He rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, tracing its smooth, cylindrical form, sliding along its length toward the blunt, heavy tip.
His blood ran cold. It was a bullet. A perfectly intact, lead round from a heavy mechanical revolver.
The realisation settled over him with the weight of a collapsing bridge. He knew the calibre. He knew the heavy, brutal weight of the iron. It was the exact type of ammunition he loaded into his own custom cylinder.
Before he could process the impossibility of the situation, the pain shifted. Amidst the burning ache, he felt a sudden, rushing warmth deep within his chest. The blood that had pooled and slowed around his heart began to move again. It flowed weakly at first, but steadily gained rhythm, pumping through his veins with renewed, forceful life.
Sitting in the pain, the darkness, and the suffocating stillness, Agastya felt as though he had been dropped into the lowest circle of hell. If any ordinary man had been in his place—waking up in the dark, expelling his own bullet from a stolen chest—they would have lost their minds. They would have screamed, wept, and run blindly into the smoggy streets.
But Agastya did not move. He endured the horror in absolute silence. He was an assassin forged in the industrialised underbelly of the empire. He was a man trained by monsters to withstand the unimaginable. Panic was a luxury he had discarded decades ago.
Suddenly, the silence was broken by a sharp, electrical crack—like a spark of raw aether snapping across a copper coil. Above him, a dull, jaundiced yellow light flickered to life from two brass-caged oil bulbs mounted on opposite walls.
The darkness receded just enough to reveal the carnage. Beneath him, the floor was painted in a massive, spreading pool of his own blood. It was thick, heavy, and already beginning to dry into dark, rust-coloured flakes.
Agastya pressed his shaking, blood-soaked hand against the gaping hole in his chest, gritted his teeth, and slowly forced himself to stand. His legs trembled, but they held his weight.
Across the room, fixed to the plastered wall, hung a rectangular mirror set in a carved wooden frame.
Agastya ignored the rest of the room. He didn’t look at the walls, the furniture, or the shadows. He walked straight toward the glass, his boots leaving sticky, crimson footprints on the floor, and stopped dead in front of it.
He lowered his gaze to his chest and slowly, hesitantly, pulled his hand away from the wound.
The moment the pressure was released. A fresh wave of pain surged through him, heavier than before. Yet, what he saw unfolding on his own skin made him freeze in absolute disbelief.
The blood that had soaked his clothes and smeared across his chest was no longer dripping. It was moving backwards. The crimson droplets began to crawl against gravity, sliding across his skin and sinking back into the open wound, as if drawn inward by a pneumatic vacuum.
It didn’t dry. It simply vanished, absorbed back into the flesh like monsoon rain soaking into parched earth.
Within moments, the blood vanished completely from his torso, leaving his skin unblemished, as if the horrific bleeding had never occurred. Even the clothes look like they were just washed a moment ago.
Then, before his analytical mind could process the impossibility of the sight, the wound itself began to change. The torn, jagged edges of flesh drew inward.
Beneath the surface, muscle fibres knit themselves together with terrifying speed, twisting and pulling taut like tightening steel cables. Cartilage and bone fused with a sickening crunch that he could feel more than hear.
Finally, new skin stretched rapidly over the surface, smooth and unbroken, sealing the gap and erasing the fatal injury as though it had never existed.
Agastya stood before the mirror, his chest rising and falling with slow, deep breaths. His body felt entirely different. It felt completely, unnervingly new. Before he could look up at his own face, the room around him ignited.
A brilliant, burning amber light erupted from the floorboards beneath his feet. He looked down, his eyes narrowing against the glare. A massive, intricate design had illuminated across the floor. It was a complex, glowing yantra— an ancient geometric mandala (Formation) perfectly fused with the schematic lines of clockwork machinery.
The lines pulsed with a rhythmic, mechanical heartbeat, projecting the faint sound of grinding brass gears directly into his mind.
Without warning, a blinding headache struck him. It hit all at once, a psychic blow that drove him to his knees. Memories that did not belong to him surged into his consciousness. They flooded his mind—the smell of rising yeast and cardamom, the hiss of the steam-ovens, faces in the crowded market, the quiet hum of a mundane life—flashing faster than he could process.
When he finally forced his eyes open, the laws of physics had broken entirely.
The objects around him had begun to float. A heavy teakwood table and several overturned chairs slowly levitated from the ground, drifting upwards as if the room had suddenly lost its gravitational pull. To his left stood a heavy iron-banded door, and in front of it, a long wooden counter. The counter was covered in broken fragments of thick glass and spilt wheat flour.
The glass shards and the white powder were lifting slightly into the air, spinning slowly in the amber light. A heavy brass weighing scale hovered nearby, its chains swaying without wind.
As Agastya looked around, a strange, creeping sense of familiarity took root in his mind. Something about the layout of this room, the colonial-era masonry mixed with the old city stonework… it felt known.
‘What is this place?’ he thought, his sharp eyes scanning the floating debris. ‘Why does it feel so familiar? Like I’ve been here before.’
His astonishment deepened into profound, unsettling dread when the movement shifted. The objects did not remain suspended in the air. They began to reverse.
Slowly, deliberately, as if guided by the invisible hands of a celestial engineer, each displaced piece of the room drifted back toward its origin.
A broken chair tilted midair, correcting its trajectory before lowering itself smoothly to the floor. The splintered fragments of its wooden legs flew upward, snapping perfectly back into the joints. The cracks vanished, leaving the wood whole.
The heavy teak table followed, gliding through the air and settling onto the floorboards with quiet, mathematical precision.
The broken glass did not simply fall. It gathered. Each jagged shard rose from the floor, trembling faintly in the glowing light before sliding through the air like a film reel playing in reverse. They aligned piece by piece. Sharp edges met sharp edges. The cracks zipped shut. Within seconds, the shattered display case was whole again, the thick glass smooth, flawless, and unbroken.
The brass weighing scale dropped heavily onto the counter with a metallic clank.
The spilt flour swept backwards, funnelling perfectly into the heavy jute sacks in the corner. Behind the counter, a purple velvet curtain slid across its brass rail on its own, closing with a soft, final swish.
Everything had returned to its place. It was not repaired randomly or imperfectly, but restored with absolute, terrifying exactness.
It was as though the great clockwork of the universe had been forcibly grabbed and wound backwards, restoring only the environment while leaving Agastya untouched.
The assassin stood perfectly still, his breathing slow and measured, watching the impossible unfold.
Agastya knew technology. He knew the limits of heavy iron, pressurised steam, and primitive aetheric batteries. He knew that no machine manufactured in the empire could unshatter glass or force blood back into a vein.
A cold realisation settled over him. This was something far beyond the limits of industrial science. It was an arcane manipulation of reality.
‘Yeah,’ he murmured to himself, his voice sounding strange and hollow in the quiet room. ‘It’s magic. It has to be.’
As the room settled into absolute stillness, looking as pristine as a painted picture, the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place. The layout. The teak counter. The purple curtain.
This was the bakery. The very place his handlers had sent him to hours ago. The site of his final, fatal mission.
He spun around quickly, his hand instinctively dropping to his waist where his heavy revolver should have been, searching the shadows for the baker. But the shop was empty. There was no trace of the middle-aged target with the impossibly heavy presence.
Slowly, the glowing clockwork yantra on the floor began to fade. The aetheric amber light dissolved into the wood, sinking away until only the dim, familiar warmth of the two oil lamps remained, casting long shadows across the shop.
Agastya turned back to the mirror.
For a long time, he just stood there. He planted his hands on the restored counter and stared into the glass, his gaze fixed on the reflection, waiting for his brain to correct the hallucination. But the image did not change.
The face staring back at him was not his own. The jawline was softer, the skin a shade darker, and it lacked the jagged scars of a lifetime of knife fights in the slums.
But the eyes—they carried an immense, heavy presence that Agastya instantly recognised. The way the face held itself, the subtle tension in the neck, it all felt completely alien, yet intimately known.
He leaned closer, letting the horrific details settle into his disciplined mind. Then, the ultimate recognition hit him like a physical blow.
It was the baker. It was the exact same middle-aged man he had assassinated earlier that night. The target who had stood before him, manipulating the very air around him with those unnatural abilities.
Agastya swallowed hard, his throat dry as dust, desperately trying to maintain his professional calm. But the conclusion was undeniable, staring him right in the face.
This body was not his. He was trapped inside the corpse of the man he had murdered.
A sudden, aggressive growl from his stomach broke the suffocating silence.
The sheer absurdity of the sensation almost made him laugh. He had just woken up from the dead, expelled his own bullet from a stolen chest, watched time violently rewind itself, and realised his soul had been hijacked.
Yet, his new biological shell was demanding to be fed. It seemed like a ridiculously mundane, almost insulting thing to feel, given the cosmic horror of his situation.
Pushing the absurdity aside, he forced himself away from the mirror. He cast his stolen eyes over the racks of fresh bread loaves resting behind the purple curtain. But as he began to walk toward the food, something entirely out of place caught his attention.
A leather-bound diary.
It wasn't shoved onto a shelf or left carelessly by the register. It was placed precisely in the dead centre of the heavy teak counter, illuminated perfectly by the overhead lamp. It sat there with deliberate intent, its brass clasps gleaming slightly.
It was placed as if whoever had reset this room knew exactly who would wake up, and exactly where he would look.
Agastya stopped. The gnawing hunger in his stolen stomach was instantly suppressed, shoved aside by the paranoid instincts of a master assassin. He approached the counter with slow, silent steps, his eyes locked on the leather cover, stepping headfirst into the next layer of the mystery.