The news didn't break in a national paper. It began as a smudge of ink in the Rayalaseema Times, a regional Telugu daily with a circulation that barely reached Hyderabad. The headline was stark, vernacular, and devastating:
"Whose Hand Closes the Sky? The 'Sage's' Famine and the Merchant's Full Coffers"
Shanti saw it first. A copy, dog-eared and translated by a grim-faced Ganesh, was placed on her desk in the Shenzhen site office. She had just returned from the inspection, her nerves still vibrating from the confrontation with both Colonel Wei and Rajendra.
The article was written by a journalist named Ravi Kumar. It was not sophisticated, but it was rooted in the soil. Kumar didn't write about shell companies or meteorological data. He wrote about his uncle's sun-cracked peanut fields in Anantapur. He wrote about the hopeful, then confused, then desperate faces in the local market as grain prices began their inexorable climb weeks before the monsoon officially failed. He wrote about whispers of big companies from the north buying up trainloads of sorghum and millet.
And then, he made the connection. He had a cousin who worked as a clerk for a rural procurement agent. He'd seen the purchase orders. The buyer was a company called "Bharat Annapurna Supplies," a subsidiary of a subsidiary, but one whose ownership trail, after some digging, led back to a familiar name: MANO Industries.
Worse, he had a timeline. He noted the date of Swami Suryananda's sorrowful discourse on "the land's moral parching"—a full ten days before the state agriculture ministry's first official drought advisory. He juxtaposed it with the spike in Bharat Annapurna's procurement activity, which began the week after Suryananda's speech.
"Did the sage see the future," Kumar wrote, his prose simple and crushing, "or did he read the merchant's ledger? When the holy man speaks of sin, do we look to the heavens, or to the air-conditioned offices where the price of a child's next meal is decided?"
The article ended not with an accusation, but with a question that was worse: "Who profits from our tears? The gods, or the men who pretend to speak for them?"
Shanti read it three times. The cold fury from the day before thawed into a sick, heavy dread. This wasn't about fraud. This was about blood. This was Rajendra's "perception management" manifesting as real human suffering, with MANO's fingerprints on the scales.
Ganesh stood before her, looking older than his years. "It is a small paper, Shanti-ji. But the story… it is the kind that travels. It has the smell of truth. It will be picked up."
"Has he seen it?" Shanti asked, her voice hollow.
"Bhai is on his way back from Shanghai. He lands tonight."
She looked at the article again. Ravi Kumar had included a grainy photo of a withered field and a weeping old woman. It was cliché, but it was real. This was the "clean business." This was the ledger she was trying to protect.
Rajendra read the article in the back of the Contessa on the way from Sahar Airport, the translation typed on a single sheet by a tense Ganesh. The monsoon rain sheeted down the windows, blurring the city into a watercolor of misery.
He felt nothing at first. Just a dull, professional assessment of the threat vector. Local journalist. Emotional appeal. Factually shaky but narratively potent. The standard playbook was to quash it: a defamation suit, pressure on the paper's owners, a counter-narrative of MANO's charitable food distribution (which did exist, as a tax-efficient afterthought).
Then he read Kumar's final question. "Who profits from our tears?"
His mind, trained to see networks, suddenly made a different connection. He saw not just a journalist, but a node. A node that had connected Suryananda's speech to MANO's procurement to rising prices in a local market. The node was motivated not by money, but by a visceral sense of injustice. That made it unpredictable. Dangerous.
He arrived at the mill to find Shanti waiting in his office. The Rayalaseema Times article lay on his desk like a corpse.
"You predicted this," she said. It wasn't a question.
"We mitigated market volatility," he corrected, the merchant's defense rising automatically.
"You created a shortage and profited from it. You used a man pretending to be a holy man to prime the market for your speculation." She picked up the paper. "This isn't a corporate scandal, Rajendra. This is a village scandal. This is the kind of story that turns a company's name into a curse whispered over starving children. You can't sue a curse. You can't buy off a ghost."
"What do you want me to do?" The frustration bled into his voice. "Undo the purchases? Flood the market and take a massive loss? That's not business. That's sentiment."
"It's survival!" she shot back, slamming the paper down. "You're thinking like a smuggler in a corner. This isn't a border to be secured with a bribe or a threat. This is a well you've poisoned. The only way to fix it is to cleanse it. Publicly. Completely."
She outlined her demand, and it was far worse than cutting ties with Suryananda. "You will have Bharat Annapurna release its entire grain stockpile into the Rayalaseema market at cost. You will announce a matching donation for drought relief. You will publicly, and humbly, state that while MANO's procurement was legal, the company failed to foresee the perception of profiteering, and it will make amends."
The financial loss would be enormous. It would wipe out the profits from the entire Shenzhen factory's first quarter. It would be a public admission of guilt, even if couched in corporate PR.
"And Suryananda?" Rajendra asked, his voice tight.
"He will go on a 'penitent retreat.' He will say his vision was of the suffering, not the cause, and that he misinterpreted the divine message. He will disappear for a few months. The connection must be severed, visibly and painfully."
It was a complete surrender. It was burning a fortune to appease a ghost.
"And if I refuse?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"Then I walk into the Rayalaseema Times office myself," Shanti said, her eyes holding his without a flicker. "I give them the Swiss meteorological invoice. I give them the shell company trails. I confirm every one of Ravi Kumar's suspicions and add ten more. I will turn his local tragedy into a national crucifixion. I will burn your ledger, your network, and this company to the ground, and I will use the truth as the torch."
She meant it. He saw it in the absolute, unshakable resolution in her face. This was no longer about fraud. It was about a line, drawn in the dust of a drought-stricken field, that she would not let him cross.
The rain hammered the office window. The merchant in him calculated the losses, the shattered strategies, the humiliation. The part of him that was still Rajendra Shakuniya, who had stood on a factory floor with his father, saw the weeping old woman in the grainy photo and felt a shame so deep it was physical.
He was silent for a long time, the weight of the poisoned well pressing down on him. He had turned landslides into lanes and storms into prophecies. But this—the simple, angry truth of a hungry village—was a force his networks couldn't reroute and his coin couldn't buy.
"Alright," he said, the word tasting of ash. "Do it. Release the grain. Make the donation. Issue the statement."
"And Suryananda?"
"Tell him to pack for a long retreat to the Himalayas. No visions. No discourses. Silence."
"And MAKA? The rest of it?"
He looked at her, the fight gone out of him, replaced by a vast, cold emptiness. "You win, Shanti. I'll give Ganesh the instructions to begin the separation. But understand… dismantling it will take time. It's not a switch. It's an ecosystem. Cutting it off too fast could cause its own… eruptions."
She nodded, not in triumph, but in grim acceptance. "Just see that it's done. Start with the grain. Clean the well."
As she left, Rajendra remained standing in the middle of his office. The victory over Colonel Wei felt meaningless. The intricate architecture of his power—the cosmic trades, the political marriages, the prophetic whispers—had just been cracked by a single, honest question from a local journalist.
He looked at his hands. They had built factories, held alien artifacts, wielded a blade of pure nanotechnology. But they could not hold back the consequence of his own calculations. The poisoned well was of his own digging. And the only way to drink clean water again was to drain it completely, no matter how much it cost.
He sat down at his desk, picked up a pen, and began drafting the order to liquidate the grain stockpiles at a loss. It was the first entry in a new ledger. One where the only profit that mattered was survival, and the only currency left was penance.