In the dream, John and the dreaming listener move through the flooded, ruined compound where John’s followers once made barricades. John raises skeletons to clear debris, finds canned peaches in the wrecked kitchen, and begins explaining the final days before Earth’s evacuation.

John says his group discovered that the FTL evacuation was a fraud: the trillionaires had converted wealth into material resources, fabricated passenger manifests, and planned to abandon most of humanity. After John’s group warned their government, the evacuation schedule accelerated from months to days. Because John had not yet learned how to find or use the soul, he chose to stall the launch by threatening Pan-Euro’s orbital gate access with a suitcase nuke and, through a puppeted dead politician, wider nuclear retaliation.

G— carried the armed nuke as a dead-man’s switch, while John’s friends reacted with horror to the escalation. C— and N— married in the compound amid the crisis, but the moment quickly collapsed into conflict. Armed ex-cultists turned against John, took hostages, and attacked the building, forcing John’s followers to build the barricades seen in the dream.

Overwhelmed by negotiations, the attack, the launch countdown, and his friends’ anger, John locked himself in a bedroom. The nun came to him with P—’s gun, prayed, and shot herself so John could witness a soul at the instant of death. John finally perceived the human soul, but through it he also perceived the vast, screaming presence of the dreaming listener: the soul of Earth.

As fighting spread through the compound, John collected the souls of the dying, including his friends. After G— was the last survivor, John stopped G—’s heart, triggering the nuke, then used the puppeted politician to begin nuclear war. John consumed the deaths of humanity, reached for Earth’s soul, hurt it, partially incorporated it into himself, and made a body for it from his blood, bone, vomit, and earth.

John says that by hiding himself in Earth’s soul and Earth’s soul in himself, he became God, but it was still not enough. John destroyed the planets and satellites while trying to reach the fleeing ships, but most of the FTL fleet escaped beyond his reach. At the end, John recalls that the newly embodied Earth accused him of repaying its choice with horror, called itself a hideousness, asked where the people had gone, and still told him it loved him.