The rain had stopped over Patna, but the air still felt heavy.
Standing outside the quiet house of Dr. Vedant Thakur, Manasvi looked at the locked door for a moment.
"…Guess I'm not knocking."
CRASH.
With a single kick, the door burst open.
She stepped inside.
The moment she entered, she froze.
The entire house was covered in blood.
Not just stains.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were painted with strange mystical symbols drawn using real human blood.
Complex circles.
Ancient-looking scripts.
Symbols twisting across the walls like a ritual.
Manasvi narrowed her eyes.
"…What the hell…"
She pulled out her phone and opened the camera.
Click.
She took a photo of the wall.
Then she looked at the picture.
Her expression changed slightly.
In the photograph…
The walls looked completely normal.
No blood.
No symbols.
Just plain white paint.
"…So they don't appear in pictures."
She took a few more photos.
Every image showed the same thing—nothing unusual.
"Great… supernatural nonsense again."
Manasvi slowly climbed the stairs toward the upper floor.
The house was silent.
Too silent.
Her instincts suddenly flared.
Something moved in the darkness.
Without hesitation, she pulled out her Uzi.
A shadow shot toward her.
From the darkness, tentacles made of pure black energy lunged forward like spears.
Manasvi jumped aside instantly.
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT.
Her gun fired a burst of bullets.
The dark creature screeched.
The tentacles writhed violently before dissolving into black smoke.
The hallway fell silent again.
Manasvi lowered the Uzi slightly.
"…Security system, huh?"
She walked further into the room.
There was a family painting hanging on the wall.
Dr. Vedant stood in the center.
A woman beside him.
Two children smiling.
For a moment Manasvi stared at it.
"…You had a family."
Then she noticed something odd.
The painting frame looked thicker than normal.
She grabbed the frame and pulled it down.
Behind it…
A metal lever.
"Well now…"
She pulled it.
CLUNK.
Suddenly the entire house began shaking.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
The floor shifted.
Then a section of the ground slowly slid open.
Revealing a staircase leading underground.
Manasvi turned on her flashlight.
"Of course you had a secret basement."
She stepped down carefully.
The staircase continued deep into darkness.
When she reached the bottom…
She froze again.
It wasn't a basement.
It was a massive underground library.
Rows upon rows of enormous bookshelves stretched across the chamber.
There were over a thousand books stored there.
Each one looked ancient.
Manasvi approached one shelf.
She pulled out a book.
Immediately her arm dropped slightly.
"…What the—"
The book was unbelievably heavy.
It weighed as much as a motorcycle.
She placed it on a table with effort.
Then she looked at the title engraved on the cover.
"Preserver of Yin and Yang."
She slowly opened it.
Inside were thousands of pages filled with strange diagrams, symbols, and writing.
At the corner of the book, a note indicated the total pages.
15,000 pages.
Manasvi looked around the enormous library again.
Every single book here looked just as massive.
Most of them had over 5,000 pages each.
Her mind raced.
"…What are these things?"
Was Dr. Vedant really just a scientist?
Or had he been studying something far older…
After 5 hours
In an unknown location, far from any government facility or city surveillance…
A dim room was filled with scattered equipment, maps, and documents.
Manasvi stood near a large metal table.
In her hands was the massive book she had recovered from Dr. Vedant Thakur's underground library in Patna.
She placed one hand under the book and tossed it across the table.
"Catch."
A tall man standing on the other side grabbed it.
Michael, one of her trusted allies.
The moment he caught it, his arms dropped slightly under the weight.
"…Damn."
He placed the book carefully on the table.
"For a book, its size and weight are completely abnormal."
Michael opened the massive cover slowly.
Dust rose from the ancient pages.
He examined the strange characters written across the first page.
His eyes narrowed.
"…This language…"
Manasvi crossed her arms.
"You can read it?"
Michael nodded slowly.
"It's Sumerian."
"That's… extremely old."
He ran his fingers over the title carved into the page.
Preserver of Yin and Yang
Michael leaned closer to the text.
"Yin and Yang… that concept is famous in Chinese philosophy."
"But something feels wrong."
He turned a few pages.
Ancient diagrams.
Symbols of balance.
Complex cosmological patterns.
Michael whispered quietly.
"…Why does this feel older than thousands of years?"
Manasvi walked closer to the table.
"Michael."
He looked up.
"Do you think the Forest Organization is connected to Dr. Vedant Thakur?"
Michael remained silent for a moment.
Then his expression hardened.
"There's a high chance."
"If Vedant had books like this… then the Forest Organization was definitely involved."
Manasvi clenched her jaw.
"…Those bastards."
She leaned against the wall.
"First they experimented on us…"
"Now they're destroying almost everyone."
Michael raised an eyebrow.
"What exactly does the Forest Organization do?"
Manasvi looked at him.
Her expression darkened.
"You think it's just a criminal group
She shook her head.
"The Forest Organization isn't merely an organization."
Her voice became colder.
"They conduct human experiments in the name of evolution."
"They create mercenaries."
"Use them as test subjects."
"If those experiments fail…"
"They kill them."
She paused.
"And sometimes they turn the survivors into slaves."
Michael's expression slowly changed.
Manasvi continued.
"It's an organization connected to things far beyond Earth."
"Things across the cosmos."
Michael frowned.
"What do you mean by cosmos?"
Manasvi stared at him silently for a moment.
Then she answered quietly.
"There are entities out there in the universe."
"Beings humanity doesn't even know exist."
"What I know about them…"
"…is only the tip of the iceberg."
She walked toward the window and looked outside.
Her reflection in the glass looked distant.
"I used to be part of their experiments."
Michael's eyes widened slightly.
"They called it Human Experiment Code 29."
She slowly turned back toward him.
"And I was their first successful subject."
The room fell completely silent.
Then she spoke again.
"I escaped."
But her voice became quieter.
"To escape…"
"I had to kill my own younger brother."
Michael looked down at the ancient book again.
The weight of the situation finally sinking in.