Seven years since Baekdusan woke again. Over a collapsed regime and severed rations, the story arrived first.

The final volume of the sweeping Baekdusan: A Thousand-Year Saga. Begun in a makeshift counseling room in Samjiyon, the Mitera Program spreads to Pyongyang and then across all of North Korea. Its method—never asking, only telling a story—loosens the petrifaction of the most closed land on earth and becomes the one rope holding people where the rice has run out. Anna Petrova, Jeong Su-min, and Kim Sun-yong, the first North Korean counselor, who wrote in her notebook "I want to become such a person too"—the seeds these three plant prepare a spring before reunification ever comes.

Meanwhile the three syllables Kang Min-ho recorded in his notebook for fifty years—"thing-like-oil"—become the 8.7-trillion-cubic-foot Yangyang offshore gas field, the economic foundation of reunification. Through the night of six nations at the UN Security Council, it leads at last to a simultaneous North-South vote and its 81.2 percent "yes." One name: the Republic of Korea. And a single black stone left by Baekdusan's eruption of 946 proves, across a thousand years, how destruction became a resource.

Whatever the sea sends, you must receive it all. Whatever the mountain sends, you must also receive it all. The eruption, the collapse, the leaving, and the being born again—without stopping.

The conclusion of an epic in which one generation's observation becomes the next generation's question, and ruin becomes rebirth.