Neshkoro was five hundred people and a gas station. That's not dismissive — it's the kind of honest smallness that defined thousands of Wisconsin villages, places that existed because someone built a church and a tavern at a crossroads and enough people agreed to stay. When the Corporate Consolidation came, Neshkoro didn't resist or negotiate or even particularly notice. The young people had already left for the Nexus or Meridian. The old people died. The buildings emptied. By 2155, the village was officially depopulated — a status that meant, in practice, that it was deleted from every corporate database and left to whatever came next.

What came next was the forest. Central Wisconsin's rewilding, accelerated by climate shift and the absence of human management, was already pushing hardwood and pine back into abandoned agricultural land. But Neshkoro got something else. In 2162, a Helix BioSystems atmospheric seeding experiment — part of a carbon capture initiative designed more for tax credits than environmental benefit — deposited a modified mycorrhizal network across a two-hundred-square-kilometer zone that included Neshkoro. The modified fungi were designed to accelerate root growth and soil carbon fixation. They worked. They worked far too well. Within a decade, the forest around Neshkoro had grown with a density and speed that alarmed the few people still monitoring satellite imagery. Trees that should have taken fifty years to mature reached full canopy in eight. Undergrowth became impenetrable. The mycorrhizal network itself became visible — bioluminescent threads running through the soil and up tree trunks, pulsing faintly at night, creating a forest that glowed from within. Helix classified the experiment as 'completed' and stopped monitoring. The forest kept growing.

Neshkoro Verdant is what grew back. The village structures are still there — engulfed, incorporated, dissolved into a forest that treats human architecture as scaffolding. The old church steeple rises from a canopy of engineered oaks. The gas station is a root-wrapped cavern. And people live here — not many, maybe three hundred — drawn by the forest's strange beauty, its pharmaceutical potential, and its absolute impermeability to surveillance technology. The mycorrhizal network interferes with signal propagation in ways that Saltmarsh engineers can't explain and Helix scientists won't discuss. Drones that fly over the canopy lose navigation. Satellites can't penetrate the leaf cover. The Verdant is a black hole on every map, and the people who live in it prefer it that way. They are herbalists, mystics, biotech scavengers, and a handful of rogue Helix researchers who came to study what went wrong and stayed because they realized it might have gone right.