Kyungha regains awareness lying in deep snow at the bottom of an incline, having fallen after misreading a fork in the trail to Inseon's house. She had stepped off the bus in the snowbound village, found the shop closed, and trudged through fields, basalt walls, and a cryptomeria grove using fading twilight. At the three-pronged fork, she chose the widest path and tumbled into what she realizes is a dried-up streambed—the historical dividing line of a village burned and its inhabitants slaughtered during the 1948 evacuation orders.

Hurt but not broken, having lost her phone in the fall, Kyungha curls into her puffer coat to preserve heat. Her thoughts drift to Ama the budgie, whose survival depends on her arrival, and to Inseon's account of how birds fall asleep instantly when light vanishes. She recalls the second film of Inseon's triptych, in which a woman survived a Manchurian winter by burrowing into snow, sustained by the burning need to know why she alone was spared a Japanese ambush, losing four toes to frostbite.

As cold gives way to a dangerous warmth and drowsiness, Kyungha contemplates whether the snow falling on her is the same water that fell on the Jeju massacre victims, on Taiwan's thirty thousand dead, on Okinawa's hundred and twenty thousand—islands of slaughter Inseon had named in her film. Memories of the living crystallize before her in luminous clarity, and she nearly surrenders to sleep.

A faint tapping at her fingertips—like Ama's beak, like the bird asking to be petted—rouses her. She wakes to find the snow stopped, clouds parting, and a half-moon illuminating the streambed. She climbs back to the fork, takes the correct gentle slope, and pushes through underbrush that cuts her face. At last she sees a wavering light: Inseon's workshop, its iron door still gaping open from the day Inseon was carried out bleeding, the lights never turned off, snow blowing inside.