Kyungha, the narrator, slowly resumes a thin routine after surviving the brutal summer—still barely eating or sleeping, writing daily farewell letters at dawn, and walking a nearby trail as autumn turns to a frigid late December. One morning she receives a single-word text from her old friend Inseon: her name. Subsequent messages summon her urgently to an unfamiliar Seoul hospital and ask her to bring ID.

Kyungha recounts how she met Inseon two decades earlier as a magazine photographer partner, and how Inseon went on to become a respected documentary filmmaker—producing films on Vietnamese women assaulted by Korean soldiers and on a former Manchurian independence fighter—before turning the camera on herself, shelving her triptych, training as a carpenter, and moving to Jeju to care for her aging mother, who died four years ago. Kyungha assumes the urgent summons must concern a workshop accident.

At the hospital, Kyungha finds Inseon in a six-bed ward; Inseon has severed the tips of two fingers with an electric saw two days earlier. Neighbors found her unconscious, rushed her by truck to Jeju, then flew her to Seoul. To prevent the reattached nerves from dying, a paid carer must jab needles into the open wounds every three minutes around the clock for three weeks to keep them bleeding. Kyungha watches, horrified, as the carer performs the procedure; Inseon admits she has considered amputation but resigns herself with her characteristic phrase, "I'll carry on in any case."

As snow begins to fall outside, Inseon and Kyungha recall the night, four years ago at Inseon's mother's funeral, when Kyungha first described her dream of black trees and proposed the ninety-nine-log project, which Inseon agreed to host on her inherited Jeju land. Repeated postponements followed, until in August Kyungha called to cancel the project entirely; Inseon revealed she had already begun, and quietly said she would carry on regardless.

Inseon now confides, in a near-whispered monologue, that as she lay in agony in the back of the delivery truck crossing Hallasan, she thought of Kyungha's book about the massacre—of all those struck by bullets, blades, and cudgels—understanding through her own pain what their suffering must have been. Kyungha realizes with dread that Inseon was injured while carving the human-shaped logs for their shelved project, and blames herself. Inseon brushes the guilt aside: that is not why she called Kyungha here. Her voice suddenly clear, she says she has a favor to ask.