A prince cursed for betraying a sleeping friend

While Vararuchi remained in hiding, the king's own son Hiranyagupta was lost overnight in the forest, sharing a tree with a bear fleeing a hungry lion below. When the lion asked the bear to throw down the sleeping prince, the bear refused rather than betray a friend — but later, when their positions reversed and the prince alone was awake, fear got the better of him, and he tried to throw the sleeping bear down instead. The attempt failed only by chance, and the bear, waking just in time, cursed the prince with madness that would last until a third person correctly guessed exactly what he had tried to do.

A king's grief brings a hidden man back into the light

The prince returned home raving and out of his mind, and a devastated Yogananda, still believing his old minister dead, cried aloud that none of this would have happened if only Vararuchi were still alive to solve it. Shakatala, recognizing the perfect opportunity to clear his friend's name once and for all, revealed the truth on the spot: Vararuchi lived, and had been hidden in his own house the entire time.

A curse lifted, and a reputation fully restored

Brought before the king, Vararuchi needed only a moment — aided, as always, by Sarasvati — to name the prince's exact betrayal aloud, breaking the curse instantly and proving beyond doubt that he had never touched the harem at all. The ashamed king offered him wealth and honors in apology, but Vararuchi, having recovered the one thing that mattered to him, quietly declined and simply went home.

A homecoming that brings only grief

What waited for him there was worse than anything the king's suspicion had cost him. Believing the false news of her husband's execution, Upakosha had taken her own life in grief, and the shock of losing her had broken his mother's heart soon after. Vararuchi collapsed at the news, and after the first storm of mourning passed, he found he no longer had any taste left for the world he had fought so hard to be welcomed back into. He gave up his position, his home, and his ambitions entirely, and withdrew to a quiet grove to live as an ascetic.

News from the outside world reaches a man who has left it

Living apart from the world did not make Vararuchi entirely deaf to it, and one day a traveling Brahmin passing through told him everything that had happened at court since his departure. Shakatala, it turned out, had never abandoned his old hunger for revenge — he had simply been waiting, all this time, for the right instrument.

A furious scholar becomes exactly that instrument

That instrument arrived in the shape of a young Brahmin named Chanakya, whom Shakatala found one day furiously uprooting a plant of grass that had pricked his foot — a man, Shakatala judged, capable of truly terrifying resolve once provoked. He arranged for Chanakya to be given the seat of highest honor at a royal ceremony, only to have the king strip that honor away from him at the last moment in favor of a rival. Humiliated in public, Chanakya swore before witnesses that he would destroy King Yogananda within seven days — and, through a fearsome rite performed in secret with Shakatala's help, did exactly that.

A dynasty ends, and an old debt is finally paid

With Yogananda dead and his other son also removed, Shakatala installed Chandragupta — true heir of the original Nanda line — on the throne, with Chanakya as his minister, and considered his hundred sons at last, however grimly, avenged. His purpose spent, the old minister retired from public life for good and vanished into the forest himself.

A final disillusionment, and a journey toward death

Hearing all this from the traveling Brahmin, Vararuchi felt the last of his attachment to the world of kings and courts dissolve completely. He resolved to end his mortal life at last, and set out for the sacred hermitage of Badarika, deep in the mountains, to do so.

A small lesson taught along the way

On the road, he passed a vegetarian hermit whose hand had been pricked by a blade of grass, and — testing the man's spiritual pride out of simple curiosity — used his own remaining magic to turn the hermit's blood into ordinary plant sap. The hermit, delighted, declared himself instantly enlightened, and Vararuchi gently corrected him: true knowledge, he said, cannot be reached at all while a man still clings so eagerly to pride in his own achievements.

A curse ends where it began, at the edge of a story

Reaching Badari at last, Vararuchi called on the goddess who had guided him throughout his mortal life, and she taught him a final meditation by which he could release his body through inner fire. He completed it there, at peace, and his freed spirit rose back to its true home among the gods — his portion of the ancient curse fully paid. Far away in the Vindhya forest, Kanabhuti remained exactly where he had always been, still waiting patiently for the second half of the promise: the arrival, sooner or later, of a man named Gunadhya.