The unnamed narrator recounts a recurring dream first experienced in summer 2014, two months after publishing a book about a massacre in a city she calls G—. In the dream, she stands on a snowy plain crowded with thousands of black, lopped tree trunks resembling huddled human figures, until she realizes the sea is rushing in to wash away buried bones. For four years she assumed the dream was tied to the massacre's victims, but a recent reinterpretation suggests it may be a personal omen about her own life.

Over those four years, the narrator endured painful partings, both chosen and forced upon her. By late spring of the present year, she had moved into an apartment outside Seoul with no family to care for and no job. She spent two months in near-total seclusion, barely eating, suffering migraines and stomach spasms, and drafted a will that she could not address to anyone. The sense of obligation toward an unknown executor finally pushed her to leave the apartment, eat juk, and resume living, though without reconciliation with life.

A heatwave with a broken air conditioner compounds her suffering. Each night she tries to write a proper farewell letter, repeatedly tearing up her drafts. She recalls that her nightmares began in winter 2012 while researching the massacre book—dreams of bayonets, of climbing into wells where bullets and viscous liquid drowned women and children, of confronting the man who ordered the massacre while burning matchsticks dictated how long they could speak. She also recalls a sleepless night in 2013 when she saw thirty silent reservists march past her, an event she has never told anyone.

She had hoped publishing the book in May 2014 would end the nightmares; it did not. Unable to release the image of the snowy plain with its black trunks, she proposed to a documentary-maker friend a project: planting ninety-nine black-inked logs in a chosen place and filming them awaiting snow. The friend agreed, but four years passed without execution.

On the heat-drenched night that frames the chapter, the narrator finally tears up her unaddressed will. As dawn cools the room and she drifts off, the snowy plain returns. This time she recognizes that the bones higher up the hill remain safe, dry, and untouched by the tide, while she must abandon the lower bones already lost and climb to the crest through rising water. She understands this as the only way to go on living.