One week after the poetry software began execution, the gods successfully extinguished the sun, reducing the sun count to zero. But the cessation of nuclear fission inside the sun caused the star’s outer layer to lose support, and it quickly collapsed into a new star that illuminated the darkness once more. However, this sun’s luminosity was a hundred times greater than before; smoke rose from the grass and trees on the surface of the Devouring Empire. The new star was once again extinguished, but a while later it burst alight again. So it went on, lighting only to be extinguished, extinguishing only to light once more, as if the sun were a cat with nine lives, struggling stubbornly. But the gods were highly practiced at killing stars. They patiently extinguished the new star again and again, until its matter had, as much as possible, fused into the heavier elements needed in the construction of the storage device. Only after the eleventh star dimmed was the sun snuffed out for good.

At this point, the ultimate poetry composition had run for three Earth months. Long before then, during the appearance of the third new star, other suns had appeared in space. These suns rose and fell in succession throughout space, brightening and dimming. At one point, there were nine new suns in the sky. They were releases of energy as the gods dismantled the planets. With the star-sized sun diminishing in brightness later on, people could no longer tell the suns apart.

The dismantlement of the Devouring Empire commenced the fifth week after the start of the poetry composition. Before it, Li Bai had made a suggestion to the Empire: The gods could jump all the dinosaurs to a world on the other side of the Milky Way. The civilization there was much less advanced than the gods’, its members being unable to convert themselves into pure energy, but still much more advanced than the Devourers’ civilization. There, the dinosaurs would be raised as a form of livestock and live happy lives with all their needs taken care of. But the dinosaurs would rather break than bend, and angrily refused this suggestion.

Next, Li Bai made another request: that humanity be allowed to return to their mother planet. To be sure, Earth had been dismantled, and most of it went toward the storage device. But the gods saved a small amount of matter to construct a hollow Earth, about the same size as the original, but with only a hundredth of its mass. To say that the hollow Earth was Earth hollowed-out would be incorrect, because the layer of brittle rock that originally covered the Earth could hardly be used to make the spherical shell. The shell material was perhaps taken from the Earth’s core. In addition, razor-thin but extremely strong reinforcing hoops crisscrossed the shell, like lines of latitude and longitude, made from the neutronium produced in the collapse of the sun.