Volume 4: Emerald Roots

Light guides, fire blazes, and wisdom reveals, but life is the foundation of all. Deep within the Amazon’s untamed heart, an emerald awakens, pulsing with the power of nature itself. This is the story of the fourth chosen, a guardian of the wild, and a battle that threatens to uproot the world. Welcome to Emerald Roots.

Chapter 1: The Call from the Deep

Amazon Rainforest, Brazil, April 5, 2025—one week after the events in New York. Rain pattered relentlessly on the dense canopy, a symphony of drips and rustling leaves filling the humid air. In a small camp nestled among towering trees, Sofia Alvarez, 27, knelt beside a folding table, her hands caked in mud. Her curly brown hair was pulled into a high ponytail, her sun-kissed skin gleaming with sweat under a faded tank top. A Brazilian environmental activist with Spanish roots, Sofia had spent three years fighting to save the Amazon from loggers and miners, her green eyes blazing with fierce determination.

Today, she’d clashed with a gang of illegal loggers, their chainsaws silenced—for now—by her team’s protests. Exhausted, she trekked back alone, checking a ravaged patch of forest. Tripping over a fallen root, she landed near a hollowed-out tree trunk. Inside gleamed an emerald—vivid green, larger than her fist, radiating a primal energy. “What’s this?” Sofia murmured, brushing dirt from its surface. As her fingers touched it, a warm surge flooded her body, and the wilted plants around her sprang to life—vines curling, leaves unfurling in seconds.

She yelped, dropping the emerald, her breath hitching. “Madre de Dios…” Before she could process it, a distant boom shattered the silence—black smoke billowed eastward. Racing back to camp, she found her team—five activists—bound and gagged by loggers in black gear. Cassian Vex stepped forward, his gray eyes glinting like steel under the rain. “Sofia Alvarez,” he said, his voice a low growl. “I know you have the Emerald of Vital Growth. Hand it over, or they die.”