As Ayaan stood rigid near the kitchen stove, the temperature in the small room began to spike unnaturally. A wave of intense, dry heat washed over his face, causing his skin to prickle. His eyes automatically darted toward the burner, and the moment they did, his pupils dilated completely, widening like a deer caught squarely in the blinding glare of oncoming headlights.
"Eh? Why the hell is the flame so high? Is this even normal?" he muttered aloud to the empty room.
His hand shook slightly as he leaned down to inspect the plastic dial of the fire regulator. He blinked once, twice, verifying the position. It was firmly set to the standard, low-heat marker. Yet, despite the mechanical setting, the brilliant blue flame was roaring aggressively, leaping upward toward the bottom of the heavy metal pot with a terrifying, wild intensity. The sheer volume of the fire defied the physics of the appliance, leaving Ayaan utterly bewildered.
"Fuck... did I somehow break the regulator?"
The terrifying realisation hit him like a physical blow, and a cold, sudden sweat immediately began to break out across his back, contrasting sharply with the blistering heat radiating from the counter.
"Sunidhi is literally going to murder me. She will skin me alive," he thought, a wave of pure panic invading his mind as he imagined his sister's reaction to a ruined kitchen.
But then, a second train of thought immediately derailed his panic, forcing him to analyse the situation more critically. "Wait a minute... I literally just walked in here and stood by the counter. I didn't even touch the knob. How could I have broken it?"
Despite his logical reasoning, the fire showed absolutely no signs of calming down. It continued to burn dangerously hot, hissing like a nest of angry vipers. If someone with an exceptionally keen sight or the perception of a true cultivator were standing in the room to observe the phenomenon, they would notice something far more sinister than a mere gas leak. The roaring fire wasn't just burning exceptionally high; the core of the flame was actively shifting, its standard blue-and-orange hue subtly warping into a deeper, unearthly colour spectrum that pulsed in sync with Ayaan's own erratic heartbeat.
Realising that this phenomenon was tied to something supernatural—perhaps a sudden fluctuation of the dense Prana he had felt earlier—Ayaan decided that standing right next to a potential explosion was a terrible idea. Without thinking over the logistics of his movements, he began to step backward, keeping his eyes glued to the flickering, changing colours of the intense fire.
However, his hyper-fixation on the stove made him completely forget a vital piece of information: when he had entered the kitchen earlier, his tall, mountain-trained physique had forced him to duck his head beneath the unusually low doorframe.
As he retreated blindly, his gaze still frozen on the roaring burner, his head collided violently with the solid wooden beam above.
CRACK.
"Oww!"
Ayaan let out a sharp cry of agony, clutching the top of his skull as a wave of dizziness washed over him. The sheer force of his own unyielding, physically reinforced body resisting the impact caused him to sink down onto his knees right there on the tiled floor. Groaning, he rubbed the sore spot on his head and slowly looked up at the point of contact.
To his absolute horror, the sturdy wooden doorframe was visibly dented and bent inward at a unnatural angle.
The moment his eyes registered the fractured wood, the entire mystery of the changing, roaring fire completely vanished from his mind. His attention shifted entirely to the ruined architecture of the apartment. In an instant, a vivid, terrifying image of an enraged Sunidhi flashed across his mental theater.
".....Fuck. Why is it always me?"
Ayaan groaned inwardly, burying his face in his hands as he sat on the kitchen floor, his mind frantically scrambling to think of any possible excuse, lie, or carpentry trick that could fix a bent doorframe before his sister walked through the front entrance.
Meanwhile, on the far side of the district, Ishani's father had finally left the boundary of the ancient forest. He stepped onto the pavement and began walking with a heavy, purposeful stride. However, the path he chose was entirely different from the route he had taken to get there; his instincts or some hidden knowledge guided his boots in the exact opposite direction of his home.
As he moved through the streets, a subtle tremor resonated through his soles. He could feel the deep bedrock of the city thumping rythmically beneath the concrete, a silent vibration that only a master of energy could detect. The more he felt the ground thump, the more hurried and urgent his pace became. He was explicitly heading toward a specific set of apartment coordinates, his mind locked onto a target.
But as he hurried past a familiar junction, his eyes caught sight of a small, weather-worn tea stall sitting casually on the side of the road. To his profound surprise, the person he was looking for—the individual he was currently traveling across the city to find—was already sitting right there, calmly lifting a clay cup of tea to her lips.
The moment he spotted her familiar silhouette, a heavy wave of relief washed over him, thankful that he wouldn't have to walk the entire distance across the district. Shifting his direction, he stepped under the canvas awning and entered the tea stall.
The person was seated comfortably in a rustic wooden stall. The very moment she registered who had just entered her immediate vicinity, a small, sharp grin cut across her stoic face.
"You know, your daughter almost completely missed my examination today," she said, her voice dripping with a freezing, authoritative clarity as she looked directly at Ishani's dad.
The older man didn't flinch. Instead, a matching, confident grin spread across his weathered features as he took a seat opposite her, looking directly into the piercing eyes of Professor Durga.
"Oh, come now. She is far too smart to ever miss your class on purpose... Professor Ice," the man countered smoothly, using a title that spoke of a long, shared history between them.
Back in the apartment, the minutes crawled by like hours. Ayaan was lying flat on his back on the sofa, his posture tense as his eyes constantly, anxiously darted toward the front door.
He had spent the last hour meticulously planning a detailed explanation for the fire and the bent kitchen doorframe, repeating the script over and over in his head so he wouldn't fumble when Sunidhi returned. But as the silence stretched on, a new anxiety began to take root. She was being late. It never, under any normal circumstances, took her this long to return from the local market just down the street.
Ayaan lifted his phone, tapping the screen to check the time. The digital clock read 3:00 PM.
His brow furrowed. She had walked out of the apartment at exactly 1:00 PM, explicitly stating she was just grabbing a carton of milk.
"She has never been this late before. Where on earth did she go?"
The thought echoed inwardly, heavy with a sudden, protective concern. He pushed himself off the sofa, abandoning his plan to hide in the living room. He needed to go down to the market bazaar and physically look for his sister. But the moment his feet hit the floor, the memory of that suffocating, supernatural dread he had experienced earlier on the streets came rushing back into his mind. His heart rate spiked instantly, transitioning into a fast, erratic thumping against his ribs.
A terrible intuition gripped him. Without wasting another second to think through the danger, and without even bothering to change out of his wrinkled clothes, Ayaan sprinted toward the entrance, burst through the front door, and bolted at full speed down the stairs toward the market.