In 2025, Eshaan Vikram Shresth is an archaeology professor at the New Nalanda University - brilliant, overlooked, and quietly consumed by a love of civilizations that died before the world could appreciate them. When he follows a hidden alignment in the ruins of the original Nalanda into a subterranean sanctum, he stumbles upon a secret the world has kept for over two millennia.

The Nine Unknown Men, the legendary society founded by Emperor Ashoka the Great after the Kalinga War, are real. They have kept their vigil across centuries, guarding nine books of knowledge so dangerous that no single era could be trusted with them. And one of those books - the Ninth, has been waiting. For him.

The Quill of Sociogenesis, dark and iridescent and impossibly alive, does not ask Eshaan's permission. It chose him. And next thing Eshaan knew, he is ten years old, frail, suffering from a disease and lying in a clerk's house in Pataliputra and the year is 1178 CE.

He carries two things into this new life: the accumulated knowledge of a modern historian who has spent his career studying exactly what went wrong with India, and the mark of a cosmic mandate written in his own flesh. He knows the invasions coming. He knows the betrayals, the fractures, the missed chances. He has read every book, studied every empire that rose and fell in this soil.

Now he will build the one that doesn't.

Disclaimer - This Novel series is an Isekai medieval India historical fantasy. I don't wish to hurt anyone's feelings and would like to trace an alternative history for Indian Subcontinent, exploring the possibilities if the events unfolded in a different way and also with fantasy elements like divine weapons from mythologies, but those elements doesn’t appear until later.

Connect with me at -

Discord: nerdastrologer
Email: nerdastrologer@gmail.com

Chapter 66 - The Man Who Wasn't There