The eruption has passed. The year of those who remain begins.

On September 22, 2062, Baekdusan erupted. A building that fell in twenty-two seconds; thirty-seven dead. But death did not end in twenty-two seconds. Volcanic ash settles quietly in the lungs, the lid of a shaken seabed cracks open, and behind a closed door the temperature of a reactor rises. Volume 7 follows one year of that slow disaster.

Before her satellites in Menlo Park, Lee Hye-jin reads the temperature of Yongbyon and the red dot in the Yellow Sea, while in a study in Danyang, Kang Min-ho carries on the characters of the 946 bamboo slips with a trembling hand. In an eighteen-pyeong villa in Pyeongju, Kim Do-hoon and Park Eun-seo take in the orphaned So-eun as family, and Lee Seo-jin, the perpetrator's granddaughter, quietly opens the door her grandfather had closed. In a church in Yanji, Kim Eung-su — who carried his ancestral tablets across the border on his back — waits for the first steps of Naru, a child born at the Tumen River.

Satellite and nose, data and smell, notebook and paper, courtroom and dinner table. People who never meet each face, from their own place, the single question the same mountain left behind: what did the destruction close, and what did it open.

A story in which a thousand-year-old record explains today's data, and two rolls of gimbap set out by an eight-year-old become a more precise mourning than any adult's funeral. In a place where one child's first steps are stronger than a UN resolution, this book says, quietly — the barley tea is always there, and the record does not stop.