He smiled, grabbed his keys, and headed to the bookstore. For the first time, ₹450 felt like a bargain.

Arjun closed the laptop. The battery was at 100%. The search bar now read: "fuel and combustion by samir sarkar – buy physical copy" .

The first three links were malware traps. The fourth led to a grainy, scanned PDF where page 47 was a blurry thumbprint, and page 112 was missing entirely. “Good enough,” he muttered, and fell asleep with his head on the open laptop.

“Why are you doing this?” Arjun whispered, genuinely moved.

“And Arjun? Tell your friend Priya to stop searching for ‘free solutions manual.’ That summons an auditor.”