For days, the campus of Prakash Institute in Southern India looked like a war zone. Riot police in khaki uniforms stood guard with batons, barricading the students who had gathered to protest the destruction of the last stretch of urban forest in the nearby region of Kanchala Gudi. Four hundred acres of sacred green land were sold silently to a corporation called Nexterra Infra that promised smart homes, malls, and sky gardens built on the bones of ancient soil.
Mira was among the protestors. She had always believed the forest breathed its kind of language. That morning, as tear gas hung in the air and chaos cracked through the crowd, she slipped through the thorned edge of the woods and disappeared. Hidden under twisted roots, coughing, eyes burning, she waited out the violence. That was when she found the book.
It was not buried deep. Just tucked beneath an old neem tree, sealed in wax cloth and tied with threads of dried vines. The Ledger of the Green, handwritten in fading ink, bound in bark and strange, pressed leaves. The language inside shifted as she read. One page in Sanskrit, the next in perfect Telugu, the third in English, yet always understood.
The first entry chilled her.
"The collapse will not be loud. It will be a quiet shedding. When the final tree falls, the world’s breath will slow, and currency will change, not to gold, but leaves. The richer the roots, the brighter the world."
Mira turned the pages frantically. Each one spoke of a timeline, a reckoning, a rebalancing. And a warning: those who had destroyed the forests would not only lose their wealth but their right to remain.
The book burned cold in her hands, and she was unaware of how the collapse would unfold.
Days later, it began. A few days later, it began. It felt eerier than the COVID pandemic
The world markets crashed. Banks failed. Satellites flickered and went silent. In what experts called a global biotechnological collapse, digital currency vanished overnight. Oil became worthless. Paper money, too. Nothing worked except the Earth.
In its place rose something no economist could fathom: the Leaf Standard. No one knew how it started. But in villages and forests, barter emerged using dried neem, peepal, and rudraksha leaves. Their value changed by age, rarity, and the health of the tree it came from.
And then, like prophecy, forests began reclaiming cities.
Nexterra Infra, the titan behind deforestation in Kanchala Gudi and dozens of other sites, found its vast empire useless. Their buildings were intact but dead. Empty skeletons without purpose. They had no trees. No leaves. No value.
Its CEO, Rajan Mehta, once listed among India’s wealthiest, tried to recover. He approached former investors, begging for a single sapling. He offered gold, real estate, even his wife’s heirlooms. But no one helped. His empire had razed every living root for concrete, and now no forest would recognize his claim.
A man who once sat in leather chairs now slept under a metal roof in the ruins of his showroom. He was not just bankrupt. He was invisible.
Mira watched all this unfold from her hidden sanctuary in the woods, where the book whispered new truths every week. She became its guardian. Children from nearby villages came to her with leaves, and she taught them how to read their stories. Every tree had a tale. Every forest had a ledger. They remembered.
She remembered the tears in the eyes of old villagers when the forests had been cleared. She remembered the sound of birds that once filled the skies falling silent. The pain of watching deer flee bulldozers. The horror of elephants wandering into highways, lost. It was not just nature. It was family to many. A breath. A soul.
One night, under a blood moon, the final message appeared:
"He who betrays the breath of Earth shall be buried in its silence."
That was the night the forest came for Rajan Mehta.
Some said it was a hallucination, a collective panic. Others swore they saw the vines move, thick roots bursting from sidewalks, branches twisting like arms. Cameras captured the moment his last standing tower cracked, swallowed whole by soil and green. By dawn, where once stood concrete, there was only moss. He was never seen again.
Back in the forest, Mira closed the book.
She did not smile. This was not about revenge. It was balance. A recalibration of a world gone blind with greed.
As wind passed through the canopy, the trees bowed slightly toward her. Glowing leaves drifted down like snow. Children danced beneath them, collecting their future in baskets made of bark.
And in that silence, Mira remembered.
She remembered how, during the COVID years, when the world had gone indoors, the Earth had come alive. Skies turned blue again. Rivers began to sing. The dolphins returned. Birds nested where they had vanished decades ago.
For a brief time, Earth had breathed without us.
"Maybe," she whispered, "we were always the virus. Maybe this was Earth’s immune response."
She walked to the ancient neem tree where it all began and placed the book into its hollow. It glowed softly, pulsing with green light. She was not its owner. No one could own the forest. She was just its memory-keeper.
As the perspective pulled back high above the treetops, above the rolling green hills and the quiet villages pulsing with light and harmony, the Earth below looked reborn. Not ruined, but rewoven. The age of cement had ended.
And as the mist gently curled through the canopy, the forest seemed to hum with ancient memory, leaving behind only a whisper in the wind:
"Only this could save the world from greed. Not humans."
React
