Din and the others enter the hidden camp and realize it was once an ordinary encampment, but every living thing inside has been grotesquely transformed. Trees, tents, firepits, grass, and especially the dead all appear remade into impossible mixtures of flesh, bone, plants, and other organic matter. The sight overwhelms the wardens, with Tangis nearly vomiting and Sabudara praying for protection, but Din forces himself to study the scene instead of recoiling from it.

By examining the warped remains, Din concludes this is the place where the disaster happened. He reasons from the details that the victims had been eating fish and roasting meat when the event struck, and he estimates that nearly forty people died there. Because many of the bodies seem frozen with raised arms and turned away from the middle of the clearing, Din infers that some sudden force or blast erupted from the camp’s center and drove everyone outward as they tried to flee.

At the clearing’s center, Din spots a complex apparatus made of stacked ceramic pots, glass, and many brass pipes. Malo recognizes it as fermentation equipment like the kind made in Yarrowdale, which leads Din to suspect that the device caused the transmutation, much as an explosive device would cause physical destruction. Din then notices a separate gap in the enclosing growth, proving someone else entered the camp after the catastrophe, and he suspects that person approached the apparatus and left something behind for Din’s group to find.

Although Tangis warns that qudaydin kani can leave behind dangerous contagion even after the initial transmutation ends, Din decides that moving farther in is worth the risk because they are already exposed. With Malo helping him see clearly, Din approaches enough to inspect a hide sign set before the device. On it he finds a careful grid of twenty-five coded symbols and, above them, a line written in the same handwriting as the note from the bank: “And all the world a savage garden, mindless and raging.” Din memorizes the symbols for Ana to decipher later, and Malo resolves that the entire site must be burned.