Aman woke with a scream. His clothes were soaked with sweat and he was shivering from fear and adrenaline. He was just an ordinary schoolkid. Coming so close to death had severely rattled him.

Curling up on the bed, he hugged his knees to his chest as he tried to get the vision of the battle between the demon and the gods out of his mind. But even as he squeezed his eyes shut, a flash of lightning and the stench of ozone assaulted him.

His eyes flew open as he took a shuddering breath.

It had been so close. Just a moment later and he would have died under the bolt of lightning. An insignificant casualty in the battlefield of the gods.

“N-ama,” his voice came out hoarse as he stuttered the word through chattering teeth.

[Yes.]

“What w-as that?”

[We apparently underestimated the dreamland. That, if I am not wrong was a battle between the bull demon Mahishasura and the Devas of the Court of Heaven.]

Aman clutched both of his hands together to stop them from shaking as he took deep breaths to calm himself.

The sound of rapidly approaching footsteps resounded outside his door and soon someone knocked rapidly on his door.

“Son? Are you all right? I heard screaming.”

It was the worried voice of his mother.

Stabilizing himself with great difficulty, he got out of his bed and walked to the door. By the time he opened it, he had regained some of his composure and his hands weren’t shaking as much.

Even then, when his mother saw him, she was alarmed. Shoving her way into the room, she smoothed back his hair and hugged him. “What’s the matter? You’re as pale as a ghost.”

He hugged her back before gently separating from her. “It’s nothing ma,” he said as he smiled reluctantly. “Just a nightmare.”

“Brother. Are you fine?” came a soft voice. Aman looked up to see that Preeti had managed to make her way to his door with the aid of her crutches.

As the doctor had mentioned, the first week would be one of the greatest changes after which the body would adapt to the soul sensor and the gains would plateau. It had only been three days and she was already able to walk around unaided, with only the help of her crutches.

Aman felt warm in his heart from the concern of his family. It desalinated the chilling shadow of death that had covered him and he felt a lot better.

He reassured them and sent them back with explanations of it only being a nightmare. Nothing more. They didn’t have to know how deadly the nightmare actually was.

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Closing the door and leaning his back against it, he exhaustedly sank down along it to the ground.

He inhaled deeply and exhaled.

“So… I met the infamous Mahishasura and the King of the Gods. On my first trip to the dreamland. Is my luck really that bad, or should I say good?”

[Actually, it wasn’t all luck. Try and remember what is supposed to happen later this week.]

“Later this week,” muttered Aman before it finally hit him. “You can’t mean… the Puja Vacations?”

[Exactly. After experiencing your situation and combining it with the current circumstances, I was able to finally get some clue to analyse some of the scrambled data that was present in the AI.]

[Apparently, the AI for the Spirit Dimension is just a torn down version of the one used in the Indian Institute of Eugenics to enter the dreamland. There are a few modules that have been simply removed and simplified. But the modification left some vague traces. With the clue I got now, I was able to reverse engine…]

“Stop! I don’t care. Get to the point. What is the reason I nearly got killed and is it possible to avoid danger? Otherwise, I don’t think going into the dreamland is any different from suicide.”

[Fine. The crux of the matter is that the dreamland is affected by the collective subconsciousness of the public. As many people are thinking about the myth that is the basis of the religious festival of Durga Puja which is arriving, the dreamland is showing scenes from the related myth.]

“So, that was the scene of Mahishasura attacking Heaven and battling the Devas of the Heavenly Court?”

[Yes. That was what it most likely was.]

“So, was that demon and those Gods real? Like, have they been perpetually conducting their fight throughout the aeons that have passed since their death? Were they even ever alive in the first place?”

[I don’t have the answers but, I feel that I have data on these topics encrypted in my memory. If we want to clarify this, we need to cultivate. But, if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that the demon and the gods were basically just constructs made up of nano-photons, shaped by the whims of the public subconscious.]

[Just like in an ocean, there are some swirls of water, these creatures were spawned by the agglomeration of the nano-photons in the dreamland. In fact, I got some readings off them. Other than Indra and Mahishasura, the rest of the Gods were just fuzzy constructs and a few of them even vanished and some new ones popped up even as the battle was going on.]

“Wait. How did you even notice with all the hectic stuff going on?”

[I have no emotions. Therefore, I am not crippled by fear. And anyway, whatever you see even from the corner of your eyes is recorded by the brain and I can access it. Perfect recall, if you will. That’s how I have data from even that situation.]

Suddenly Aman felt that there was a light screen in front of him showing the picture of the fight again, then it zoomed into a corner and there even amidst all the shaking of the frame, he managed to catch one of the forms of the Devas simply disintegrating and elsewhere, another just appeared.

“How are you doing this?” asked Aman as he tried to touch the screen and his hand passed through.

[The database of the AI was really useful. The screen is in your mind. I don’t have a hologram projector hidden in me.]

Aman sheepishly retracted his hand.

“Perfect recall is great and all… but how do you enter the dreamland safely? I don’t want to pop up in another one of these epic scenes. Next time I might not survive.”

[As I said, I managed to glean some stuff from the AI. Apparently, the Indian Institute of Eugenics only lets the players enter the dreamland at specific times and at lonesome places. It is basically calculated to minimize the chance of what happened to you happening to any one of them.]

[I have some of the metrics for calculation but I will have to analyse them more before we can enter the dreamland again with some measure of safety. Till then, I suggest that you view the changes in your soul. Our ordeal wasn’t for nothing.]