Zetian slips into one of Qin Zheng's locked memories within the dream realm, experiencing it from his perspective as a small child. She sees his mother, drunk in a brothel-like room, swinging a wine bottle at him and dragging the broken glass across his face while screaming wishes that he had died. The vision ends, leaving Zetian face-to-face with Qin Zheng in a white realm, who clutches the jagged scars she has just witnessed being inflicted.

Qin Zheng acknowledges that she has met her mother-in-law. Zetian notes that he keeps the scars on his spirit form despite being able to choose any appearance, and he explains he has no memory of an unscarred face. He leads her along an illusory glowing pink Southern Ocean and recounts what happened to his mother: after being captured into an enemy brothel, she could only continue sex work upon returning to Qin, since family and society rejected her. Once Qin Zheng earned a pilot's salary, he installed her in a residence near the military base, not out of forgiveness but because she was, for years, all he had.

He reveals that his mother eventually killed herself by slitting her wrists in the bath during one of his unification campaigns, and that today is the anniversary of her death. He speaks of her trying to abort him as a fifteen-year-old in the brothel, and how he came to understand that the conditions of her world shaped her cruelty. He mourns who they both might have been under different circumstances.

Wading into the glowing waves, Qin Zheng declares that there must be more beyond this ocean and these stars, that they were born in a cage for the gods' amusement. Zetian affirms their shared goal of making the gods pay, recalling Taiping and Qin Zheng's calculations for reaching the stars. The shared vulnerability shifts the mood: Qin Zheng plucks a 'star' from the water's reflection, places it in her palm as a poetic excuse to hold her hand, and then pulls her in and kisses her.