In this city, you can turn dust and spit into gold. Near the old colonial port there are a series of buildings known as the nest farms, large featureless slabs towering a floor above the warehouse rows with no windows and many tiny holes lined up on the outside. Inside are swifts, which build nests out of their saliva. The nest farmers harvest these to export as a delicacy. Pale-white and fibrous, authentic birds' nest is a highly lucrative good. A good ten kilos of harvest fetches half a year's wages for the lowliest nest farmer - and that's just in the bad years.

The first inkling that something had changed was that the swifts were no longer remaining in their nests. They flew in and out, clamouring even above the noise of the electronic birdcalls the farmers played to draw them in. For a time, no nests were formed; the swifts were too agitated to even settle in their roosts. Alarmed, the nest farmers sent a young boy into the heights of one farm, up into the nooks and crannies where the nests were, to report on what he could see. He returned with a chunk of something brown and flaky in his hands. This would later be known as one of the first places where the karang was found.

Later on, it was realised that animals could not stand the stuff - even though consuming it is hardly lethal or distasteful, no more so than eating sand. Rats will chew through concrete, but they will avoid karang. It even repelled ants when ground up into dust. So that explained why the swifts were not happy. But that wasn't the end of it, because the boy returned with something else, too.

In his back pocket was a piece of a material that looked like marble with the contour of wood. Upon closer inspection, it was fibrous, like the birds' nests, and bent in the farmers' hands like rock candy. One of them risked a taste: to his surprise, it melted easily on his tongue, coagulating into a sticky smooth substance.

"Amrita!" he exclaimed to the gathered crowd. His face shone, and there were tears in his eyes.