Closed Past Natalia, Luke, Tear, and Guy flee Baticul and reunite with Jade and the others. They travel to Belken to try to find a way stop the fallen lands from sinking into the Qliphoth. There, they learn that the liquefaction is being caused by vibrations from Auldrant's core, caused by the use of the "Planet Storm" energy distribution system. As the system cannot be shut down without rendering fonic arts and fon machines useless, they find a text that describes away to stop the vibrations. While in Belken, Guy meets with Van, revealing that Guy was once Van's master. He asks Van to stop with his plan, but Van refuses and Guy dismisses him as his servant. Leaving the Belken researchers to work on the machine, they take a measuring device and travel to the cathedral in Daath to find another a standing Sephiroth tree that they can go to measure. They meet Anise's mother, but are attacked by Arietta and her two ligers. During the battle, Ion runs over to protect a child from one of the liger's blasts, but Anise's mother takes the blast instead to protect him. She's only mildly wounded, but the battle causes Guy to remember his families death, revealing the reason behind his fear of women: he was protected from the attacking soldiers by his dying sister and maids covering his body with their own. Ion reads the closed scored, revealing that the replica Luke was not part of the original score, and that they can find a tree in Tataroo Valley. As they travel to the core, Anise chases a rare butterfly and nearly falls off a cliff, but Guy saves her only realizing after that he had touched a female. When the group reaches the Sephiroth tree, they find the passage ring has stopped. Tear walks around the path circling the tree and it suddenly restarts. As Guy gets the measurements, Luke checks on Tear who is on kneeling on the ground seemingly in pain.