Aditya stood at the edge of the forest for a long moment after Bodhidharma disappeared between the trees.
'Don't rush', he thought. 'You have two years before he leaves. Take your time.'
He looked down at his jeans and t-shirt.
'Clothes first', he decided. 'Everything else after.'
He turned away from the direction Bodhidharma had gone and walked toward the sound of water he had been hearing since he arrived. Following it felt logical — water meant people, and people meant civilization, and civilization in ancient South India meant cloth merchants and weavers and someone who could solve his very obvious problem.
The river was larger than he had expected — wide, clean, moving with the particular unhurried certainty of water that had been flowing this way for centuries before he arrived and would continue long after he left. The banks were lined with flat stones worn smooth by generations of use.
He knelt at the edge and looked at his reflection.
His face looked back at him — sharp, defined, twenty two years old and completely out of place in the sixth century.
'Interesting situation', he thought without particular distress.
He cupped his hands and drank. The water was clean in a way that had no modern equivalent — not filtered, not treated, just genuinely pure. It tasted like the forest smelled.
He stood up.
Downstream, perhaps half a kilometre away, he could see smoke rising above the treeline. Cooking fires. A settlement.
He walked toward it.
The village was small but not primitive.
That was the first thing that struck him as he approached from the forest edge and stopped where the trees thinned enough to observe without being immediately seen. Perhaps forty or fifty structures — some wood, some stone, arranged with a logic that spoke of long established community rather than temporary settlement. A central area where people moved with the ease of daily routine. Children running between the buildings. Women carrying water. Men working at various tasks — weaving, tool making, food preparation.
The NZT was still active. His eyes moved across everything quickly, absorbing and cataloguing — the clothing styles, the social dynamics, the way people addressed each other, the hierarchies visible in small gestures and spatial relationships.
'I can work with this', he thought.
He looked down at himself one more time.
Then he walked in.
The reaction was immediate but not hostile.
People noticed him the moment he stepped into the village — the clothing was impossible to miss, the fabric and cut entirely unlike anything anyone here had seen. A few children stopped and stared openly. An older woman carrying a clay pot paused and looked at him with the careful assessment of someone deciding whether to be concerned.
Aditya kept his posture easy. Non threatening. Curious rather than purposeful.
A man of perhaps fifty approached him — solidly built, the kind of weathered competence that came from decades of outdoor physical work. He looked Aditya up and down slowly, his eyes spending considerable time on the jeans.
"Who are you?", he asked. In Tamil — older than modern Tamil, more formal in construction, but with the NZT active Aditya caught it completely.
"A traveller", Aditya said. "From far away. I have been walking for many days."
The man looked at his shoes.
"What are those?", he asked.
'Fair question', Aditya thought.
"Footwear from my land", he said. "Different from here."
The man considered this for a moment then apparently decided that a traveller from a distant land wearing strange footwear was not sufficiently alarming to require further investigation.
"You need food?", he asked.
"I need food", Aditya said. "And cloth. I wish to dress as the people here dress. My own clothing is not suitable for this land."
The man looked at him for another moment.
Then he nodded once and gestured for Aditya to follow.
He spent three hours in the village.
The man's name was Murugan — a farmer, one of the senior members of the community, the kind of person whose opinion mattered and whose hospitality set the tone for everyone else. Once Murugan had decided Aditya was acceptable the village followed his lead without much discussion.
He was given food — rice and a vegetable preparation and something in a clay cup that smelled fermented and unfamiliar.
He looked at it for a moment.
'No', he thought simply.
He set the cup aside politely and drank the water instead. Nobody commented. Murugan glanced at the untouched cup once and then returned his attention to his own meal without making anything of it.
He ate with genuine appetite and made no attempt to hide his enjoyment of the food which seemed to go over well.
While he ate he listened.
The NZT allowed him to track multiple conversations simultaneously — absorbing the language patterns, the specific vocabulary of this time and place, the rhythms of ancient Tamil in actual daily use.
By the time he finished eating his Tamil had shifted — not dramatically, but measurably. Less formal, more natural, more grounded in how these people actually spoke.
'Useful', he thought.
The clothing problem was solved by a woman named Kavitha — perhaps thirty five, the wife of the village weaver, practical and unbothered by the unusual in the specific way of people who had seen enough of life to prioritise function over ceremony.
She looked at what he was wearing with the expression of someone assessing a problem.
"Take those off", she said, gesturing at his jeans. "I have something that will fit."
He changed behind the weaver's workshop — jeans and t-shirt folded and stored carefully in the pocket space, replaced by a simple dhoti and an upper cloth that Kavitha adjusted with efficient expertise until it sat correctly.
She looked at him when he was dressed.
Tilted her head slightly.
"Better", she said. Simply.
He looked down at himself.
He looked like he belonged here now. Not perfectly — his bearing still carried the quality of someone from a completely different world — but convincingly enough.
'Good enough', he thought.
By mid afternoon he had gathered everything he needed from the village.
The layout of the surrounding area. Where the palace was. Where the school was. How Bodhidharma operated.
That last part was the most important.
The villagers spoke of Bodhidharma — always as the prince, always with deep reverence — with a specific pride that went beyond ordinary loyalty to royalty. He ran a school near the palace grounds. Students came from surrounding areas to learn from him — martial arts, medicine, breathing practices, things that had no single name because they encompassed too much to be reduced to one. He taught openly and without restriction to those who were serious enough to merit teaching.
The school had structure. It had students. It had a rhythm of daily practice that the whole community around the palace had organised itself around in the way that extraordinary things, when they exist in a place long enough, become simply part of how that place works.
'So that's the entry point', Aditya thought. 'Not Bodhidharma directly. The school first. Earn a place among the students. Work up from there.'
He also heard something else.
A name — mentioned once, briefly, by Kavitha while adjusting his upper cloth — spoken with the particular warmth that certain names carry when they belong to someone genuinely beloved.
Devanayaki.
Kavitha had said nothing more. Just the name, in passing. But the way she had said it — quiet, fond, carrying the weight of something unspoken — had told him everything he needed to know.
He thanked Murugan and Kavitha genuinely and left the village as the afternoon light began to shift.
On his way back through the forest he passed the clearing where he had first seen Bodhidharma.
He stopped for a moment and looked at the space.
Empty now. Just trees and light and the sound of water somewhere nearby.
'Two years', he thought. 'Plenty of time to do this properly.'
He walked on.
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