The Sound That Connects Everything

Inside a coffin-sized aircraft that defies every law of conventional flight, Panthulu hears it—the sound that haunted his nightmares for twelve years. The same high-pitched frequency that filled his childhood room the night his father died. The same blue-white energy that burned patterns into walls and stopped every electronic device in Urumupalli.

But this time, the sound isn't an accident. It's technology.

"The Io material contains enough energy to slice through the temporal plane itself. Eight minutes to bend time. Eight minutes to change everything."

A Terrible Realization

As the bodyguard explains the miracle of temporal fold technology—how Dr. Balu's equations unlocked the secrets of Jupiter's volcanic moon—Panthulu's world fractures. The Vatican didn't just discover time travel. They discovered what killed his father. And they weaponized it.

His summons isn't an honor. It's a confession of guilt wrapped in diplomatic courtesy. They need him—the survivor, the witness, the priest's son who lived when thirty others in Urumupalli died—to help them perfect their instrument of temporal manipulation.

Meanwhile: A Lake of Liquid Gold

Elsewhere—or perhaps elsewhen—young Balu stumbles onto impossibly green grass, his older self vanishing the moment they arrive. Before him stretches a forest of titans, trees so massive that ten men linking hands couldn't encircle their trunks. And beyond: a lake that shouldn't exist.

The water doesn't merely reflect light—it captures it, holds it, transforms it into liquid gold. Each wave crest throws back the sun amplified, creating a mosaic of brilliance that defies physics and common sense alike. When Balu drinks, every cell in his body sings with sudden vitality. This isn't just water. This is renewal made liquid.

The Giant Child and His Father

A boy appears—ten years old by his face, six and a half feet tall by his frame, built like a warrior from mythology. He speaks Sanskrit not as a dead language scholars reconstruct, but as a living tongue flowing with casual confidence. Behind him comes his father: eight feet of scarred muscle and nobility, carrying a bird nearly the size of a pony.

Young Balu's hands are tied—gently, symbolically—and he's marched toward walls that make modern architecture look like children's blocks. Stone fitted with precision that would make contemporary engineers weep, rising fifty feet into a sky that feels older than time itself.

The Court of Impossible Things

Beyond the bronze gates, the walls are covered not with paint but with gems—rubies the size of fists, emeralds that could serve as dinner plates, diamonds that would fund nations. The sculptures tell a story of victory, of a king who stood alone against armies of the impossible: beings with wings, four arms, elongated ears, skin in colors that suggest otherworldly origins.

The courtyard holds hundreds—all impossibly tall, all visibly afraid of something that can't be solved with weapons or strength. When the bell sounds, silence falls like a blade. And then he appears.

"The king's every movement carried grace that ballet dancers spent lifetimes trying to achieve and never quite reached. Looking at him felt like looking at the sun: simultaneously irresistible and dangerous, beautiful and terrifying."

The Prisoner's Address

Guards march through the parted crowd, surrounding a figure with russet fur and prehensile tail—walking upright with human dignity but clearly not human. At the base of the sixty steps leading to the throne, the prisoner speaks two words that stop time itself:

"Shri Rama."

Young Balu's mathematical mind, so good at calculating quantum probabilities, finally completes the impossible equation. The ape-like prisoner. The divine king. The gem-studded walls telling stories of victory over supernatural armies. The Sanskrit spoken as a living language.

They haven't just traveled through time. They've traveled to the heart of the Ramayana—to when gods walked as men and legends were simply history waiting to be written.

Two Journeys, One Sound

In a cramped aircraft hurtling through temporal folds, Panthulu discovers his father was murdered by those who would become gods of technology. In an ancient courtyard that shouldn't exist, young Balu watches King Rama—avatar of righteousness—prepare to pass judgment on a monkey-faced prisoner named Hanuman.

Both men hear the same sound. Both confront impossible truths. And somewhere, lost between the folds of time, an older Balu who visited his younger self has vanished into mystery.

The Questions That Remain

What happens when you change a story that's already been written? Where did old Balu disappear to? And what will Panthulu do when he reaches the Vatican—the institution that turned temporal exploration into the weapon that destroyed his childhood?

The mathematics of time travel, it turns out, were the easy part. Understanding what to do once you arrive—that's where everything gets complicated.

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