🇳🇵 File 009 — मांस बुद्ध (The Flesh Buddha)
Provenance: Fragmented texts, silkmerchant logs, and copper plate etchings.
Recovered from the Ymril
Valley, Upper Mustang. Estimated Time:
The year 1205 of our Lord.
This file does not conform to the pattern.
1. The Merchant's Testament (c. 1205 AD)
From a letter stitched into a wool saddle blanket. The author is named only as Badr.
Translated from a heavily corrupted Persian dialect.
The cold does not worry me. It is the silence. The passes are too quiet.
We cross the high road, and no bells ring. No shepherd calls.
We reached Ymril. The temple is large. Stone and mud, painted red. The monks were... happy.
Not the peace of God, but a wild, wide happiness. It was not right.
They asked little for the night's stay. They asked only for a prayer. A prayer to their god. They
called him Buddha The Compassionate.
I saw the chamber door. It was low, iron-bound. A slit near the floor. Like a mail slot, but thick.
I heard a sound from the slit. Not a bell. Not a chant.
It was a sound like a great mouth trying to swallow sand. Wet. Slow.
One young monk came near my fire. His left ear was gone. Clean cut. He saw me stare.
He put his two hands together. He bowed. He smiled that wide, too-happy smile.
"A gift," he whispered. "A sacrifice to the Great One. He takes our pain. He makes us whole.
It is only the body."
I left before dawn, left my finest silks. My prayer was to escape.
2. The Priest's Warning (Undated Copper Plate)
Found buried in a neighboring valley. Translated from archaic Tibetan.
The faith of Ymril is a sickness. It is not the path of the Noble Eightfold Way. It is the path of the
Beast.
They gather the poor. The sick. The travelers who fall. They bring them into the temple's dark Their god is Dvesshapurana—the Malicious Fullness. He sits and waits for them to feed him.
He is not made of gold. Not wood. He is made of want. And they feed that want with their own
flesh.
I went and I saw. I looked through the grate.
I saw the form. It was not a man. It was a ruin of men.
A mountain of parts. Fused. Bone mixed with tendon. Skin pulled tight over great, round shapes.
It was brown and red and wet. It was breathing.
The monks were on their knees. They held knives. Simple knives. They cut strips. Small pieces
of self. They held them up as offerings.
The thing moved. Slow. A hundred new fingers grew from the mass just to reach the offering.
It was beautiful in its terror. It was a god made of sinew.
The stench was of cooked meat and old milk. It clung to my clothes for days.
They are consumed by a joy that is not theirs. They are eaten piece by piece, and they thank
the mouth that eats them.
They believe they are not dying. They believe they are joining.
It is a mass suicide that is not suicide, but a single, shared, hideous hunger.
3. Archaeological Notes (1978 AD)
From the journal of Dr. Agnes Thorne. Handwriting is frantic.
Day 4: We have mapped the central chamber. It is circular.
The mass, the Flesh Buddha, takes up eighty percent of the space. It is fixed to the floor and walls. It is impossible to move.
The faces are the worst. Hundreds of them. They are not all dead. Some are just asleep.
Fused into the shoulder, the leg, the abdomen. Their eyes are closed. But they are there.
The mummified remains around the edge of the room were mostly incomplete. Missing hands.
Missing tongues. Missing whole sides of the body. They gave the parts over time.
They starvedthemselves while feeding the god.
We found the final, central offering. A great copper bowl, shattered. It held a final sacrifice.
Not a piece of flesh. A whole person.
The walls near the top of the chamber show damage. Not ancient damage. Fresh damage. As ifthe thing grew too large, too fast, and was scraping the stone.
The horror of this place is the joy. The monks did not panic. Their final positions—all ofthem—are of prayer.
Their faces, even in the dry death of mummification, hold that wide, wildsmile.
They were not forced. They wanted this. They rushed to become part of the body.
The mass broke. It did not die. It shattered. It looks like it tore itself into pieces. A biological explosion of muscle and bone. Why?
Did it consume the final meal and find that it was full? Or did it achieve the promised "Great Union" and find that the ultimate self was nothing but pain?
The central mass remains. Heavy. Dense. When the sun hits it, it seems to glisten, even now. Itis utterly solid.
It is not a pattern. It is a wound. A thing that grew and burst.
## Closing Notes — Dr. Nikolai Dvitra
This file arrived differently. It did not come from an archive or a log. It was a package of old reports, left on my desk, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. There was no sender.
The Pattern (Files 001-008) is the void. It is the absence, the clean subtraction that seeks to erase the memory of your life. It is the system trying to achieve zero-data.
This Ymril thing is the opposite. It is a terrible addition. It is the raw, pulsing urge to be—to be everything, all at once, in a physical, screaming, collective nightmare.
It is not trying to erase the past; it is trying to absorb all possible futures into one cancerous present.
The Pattern is an algorithm.
This is a plague.
It is a comfort to think that all darkness stems from one source. It allows us to draw a map.
The Ymril file shows me the truth: The universe is not broken in one way. It is broken in all the ways.
There is the clean, surgical horror. And there is the wet, joyful, feeding horror.
And they are both looking for us.
End of File.