Inspector Rishi’s investigation into the murders attributed to Vanaratchi, the forest spirit, leads him to uncover an elaborate plot.
The murder of Robert, a wildlife photographer, in the forest brings Rishi to Thaenkaadu. The mystery surrounding Robert’s murder is rather unusual.
Robert’s body was found wrapped in a cocoon woven by insects, surrounded by poisonous flowers, yet there was no poison in his blood.
Furthermore, Rishi and his team do not find any evidence at the crime scene that would prove human involvement in his death.
Abdul, the man present with Robert at the time of his death, claims that the forest spirit named Vanaratchi is behind the murder.
Robert becomes Vanaratchi’s first victim, and Abdul is the first eyewitness to have seen Vanaratchi.
The truth behind the murders
Twenty years ago, the Kaanagar performed a ritual involving mass suicide to summon Vanaratchi after all their attempts to stop mining in the forest failed.
Vanaratchi is described as a fierce spirit with a resemblance to ghosts and devils. The spirit terrorizes humans while protecting the forest.
Rishi and his team discover that the only common link between the murder victims is that they have all harmed the forest in some way.
Their deaths appear to be the work of a supernatural entity that is punishing them, which instills fear of Vanaratchi among the villagers.
However, when Rishi returns to the cave where the ritual was conducted, he discovers an exit on the cave’s ceiling, leading him to believe that some of the Kaanagar might still be alive.
Some of the Kaanagar children managed to escape the cave during the ritual, including Sathya, Kathy, and Abdul, among others. They were adopted into different families and kept their identities secret.
Now that they are adults, they are protecting the forest, much like their ancestors. However, they are doing this by committing murders in Vanaratchi’s name.
Rishi consults Yamuna, whose father is an expert in herbal plants, and learns that the cave drawings represent rare herbs found only in Thaenkaadu.
The Kaanagar were the only ones able to access these unknown and undocumented herbs, which they used to create various medicines and sedatives.
Sathya’s group is using the sedatives that their tribe made to paralyze their victims and induce cardiac arrest. These unknown sedatives cannot be detected in toxicology tests.
Humans cannot control webspinners, the insects that have been weaving cocoons around the bodies of murder victims, but there is a way to attract them to the bodies.
The killers have been using the pheromones secreted by the roots of the giant tree in the cave to lure the webspinners to the bodies of their victims, resulting in the bodies being wrapped in cocoons.
Sathya’s group found a way to get away with murders while instilling fear in people to prevent them from harming the forest.
They would not have been caught had it not been for Rishi, who never once believed in the involvement of the supernatural.
However, by the time Rishi closes the case, his skepticism about the supernatural diminishes, given his own inexplicable encounter with an entity that could only be Vanaratchi.
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