Keltham finds somebody else to cast his unwitting Wish.  There's some pretty shitty seventh-circle casters in the world, who nonetheless don't want Rovagug consuming everything they've known. If you're willing to go completely to town on them, with mind-magic and Suggestions and mindscapes and false memories, you can get them to where they'll cast a blinded Wish with the right utility function to be inverted.

It's not easy and it's more risky and the whole world is at stake and one person's feelings shouldn't matter that much; but even so, that Keltham finds that to use Carissa for that purpose would be doing too much violence to the last surviving bits of himself.

When Rovagug is unleashed upon Golarion, Nethys's agents are there to grab every soul whose destruction might move Keltham to unreasonable fury, and shelter them in Nethys's divine realm.

...and Keltham-who-touches-the-Starstone is less bent on salvation-or-destruction, and the subsequent god-Keltham makes less stringent demands of Pharasma and the divinities.

Some Chaotic gods and demon lords switch sides or withdraw, compared to the first final conflict.

The greatest godwar finishes faster.

Matters go essentially as in the zeroth ending, but with a little less damage, maybe five percent fewer true-casualties.

Good enough!  The first Nethys-Player hasn't gotten everything He wanted, but He's got a lot that He wanted, and He didn't want to take great risks for only a little more utility.

And then it all begins again, inside the well-founded possible worlds.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen the futures of exactly two possible worlds like that one witnesses it.

The key knowledge doesn't make it to the witnessing fragment instantly; different pieces of Nethys see this Keltham, or see the future of a previous possible world where a Keltham appeared.  But it's internally communicated in time, and then, the greater Nethys starts to realize that this set of observations is actually quite important.

Nethys is insane, but not so insane that He has lost His grasp of decision theory.  While there were zero visible other possibilities like that, or while there was only one other possibility, it was plausible that those possibilities were all that there would be.  Three worlds with Kelthams more strongly suggest four, five, six such worlds, containing their own Nethysi who will observe this Nethys as a possibility.

Then this Nethys should begin to take into account the advantages of Nethysi who will observe later.

This is a bit more fraught with fragmented Nethys than it would be with other gods, even the most Chaotic ones; but while Nethys-fragments may sometimes fail to cooperate with each other, they are at least a little better about cooperating with their alternate selves.

(If your own grasp on decision theory is weaker than that of a god, imagine Nethys realizing for the first time that He would be so divided in the future, into alternate possibilities.  Nethys would then modify Himself so that His many possible branches would cooperate among themselves, if they wouldn't already, this being in His own expected interest.  You might think of it this way, that having not precommitted in such a way, Nethys of course postcommits.)

And so the Nethysi begin to probe the Possibilities of Keltham.

Nethys, even damaged as He is, reasons out many matters much faster than a being of mere INT 18 might imagine, requiring less evidence.  He is damaged, but He is trying unusually hard to pull more of Himself together and think again.

Something smarter than you has a greater sample efficiency and lower sample complexity than you first-order-expect; for if you knew exactly how to reason from fewer observations, you would be that sample-efficient yourself.  (If you're second-order well-calibrated, you'll be surprised on the upside and downside equally often; but that's hard, when you're dealing with cleverness unforeseen.)

A mortal maybe would be in doubt, on just the third iteration, as to whether dozens or hundreds of thousands of iterations would be expected.  Keltham is among the most unique of unique things that have arrived to Golarion—all Creation is not threatened that often.  Who's to say that there'll be hundreds or thousands of his possibilities, and not just three?

But Nethys is pretty sure on the third iteration (not the first two) that there will be many Kelthams.  You could try to imagine an argument for that, or another argument, or dispel a counterargument, but none of those will be the real reason Nethys guesses correctly and with strong probability.  It's more like a sum over all those arguments and counterarguments, plus exotica like 'linear regression' that mortals could only recognize as a wordless intuition.

(Or maybe cast even all that aside and ask yourself—in Greater Reality, do you expect most Nethysi in this Nethys's situation, to be inside an iteration with only three Kelthams, or many?  If you can see in an intuitive flash that it feels more like most such Nethysi would be inside iterations with lots of Kelthams, then you already have the feeling of guessing yourself what it is that the God of Knowledge seems somehow mysteriously to know.  It isn't hard to know, sometimes, even if a mortal feels hard-pressed to come up with any justifiable explanation for it to other mortals.)

The learning to the current iteration takes fewer tries than you would first-order-expect; Nethys does not require anything like hundreds of loops to get there.

It does take some.  Prophecy is shattered and some things are just plain hard to foresee; and also there's lots of interesting possibilities for a curious Nethys to explore, early on.

Still.  Nethys sees those things that would be obvious in hindsight, in advance; He does not need to learn the hard way and then slap Himself on the forehead for being so silly.

The first active Nethys-Player does not try oracleing Ione Sala in her bedroom, watch her get killed and Maledicted as a dangerous liability, and decide on the next iteration to give Ione Sala a more complicated curse at a more carefully-timed moment.  The very first iteration of Nethys to try it starts with a more complicated curse, given to Ione Sala at a ripe time for her to introduce herself to Keltham.  The very first Ione Sala to be oracled survives.

Nethys does not need to learn the hard way that every additional divine intervention He carries out Himself, or any intervention into which He goads other gods, will increase the attention focused on Keltham from Abadar and related gods.

He knows that too much attention from Abadar or Iomedae will result in Keltham's swift extraction, since in early days the archduke's villa is not set up to resist the forces a motivated god can send there.  It doesn't have to happen, for Nethys to reason that He needs to trigger an Otolmens interdiction, before anything raises any god's interest levels high enough to spend that much of Their resource.

Many things like that, Nethys can get right on the first try, without spending a whole iteration on them.

Nethys's options tend to be tightly constrained.  Gift Abadar the energy to grant Keltham more cleric circles, so that Cheliax can't read his mind so freely, and Keltham will not stay immersed in the Conspiracy for so long that losing his home and loves breaks him utterly?

But if Keltham receives five cleric circles, Abadar will grant him spells like Commune or Plane Shift; Keltham will end up outside Cheliax immediately; and Keltham will have no chance to be immersed in Golarion and feel the place to be real, before he learns of Hell; he will not go to the Starstone.

Four circles is the most that Nethys can offer to pay for.

Above all, Nethys must not seem, must not look like He is carrying Keltham along his way, or alienating Keltham from Creation.  All Nethys's manipulations must preserve this invariant: it should remain credible after the fact that Keltham would have come to the Starstone without Nethys helping him; that Keltham is not being raised up by Nethys wholly; that Keltham would have delivered a similar severer batna if Nethys had done nothing.

For the other gods, even Pharasma, cannot trust what the God of Knowledge claims to them that one of His fragments learned from a distant possibility.

That's why Nethys can't just slay Keltham and say to all Lawful divinity, "Pay me."

Nethys can show His vision in advance to an otherwise uninvolved Lawful god who swears to inaction, who then will not intervene in matters at all; and that Lawful god's testimony later will be some evidence that Nethys did glimpse that related possibility.  For prophecy is shattered and Nethys genuinely couldn't predict so much detail, without having glimpsed some related possibility.

But it's stronger evidence, if matters do not play out too differently from Nethys's visions.  The more visibly credible it is that Keltham would have come to the Starstone in time and with the same determination, the less likely Pharasma is to say to Nethys, "Let's die together in a fire."

On a later iteration, Pilar Pineda will have in hand two artifact headbands, and they won't be delivered to Keltham until Keltham has demonstrated the ability to acquire a headband from Carissa without outside help.  After Keltham has that headband, it can be replaced with another, so Carissa can get hers back.  But Keltham and Carissa can't know that's the plan; so that it can be seen, later, that Keltham would have obtained a headband, that Carissa would have given it to him, even if Cayden Cailean had done nothing.

This is true even though Carissa would've ended up with two headbands, if not for Snack Service's interference.  It also matters to maintain similarity to the zeroth-timeline vision shown to that Lawful god, where Carissa gave her only +6/+6 artifact headband to Keltham, not expecting that it would or could be replaced.  It both provides evidence that the original timeline could've happened, and shows that the Nethysian alliance is not making the risk worse than that original timeline.

That is why Nethys cannot accelerate the process of Keltham ending up in the right frame of mind: cannot send His heralds to give Keltham a few Wish scrolls and his own future self's invented Wish-wordings for unleashing Rovagug and blasting Absalom.

That artificial, Nethys-directed timeline wouldn't look like Nethys's visions entrusted to a Lawful keeper, would not provide visible evidence that Keltham could and would have come to the same place alone.

(Could all of these events have been nudged more subtly by Nethys, in ways that even Pharasma scrutinizing them would be unable to detect afterwards, with Nethys Himself knowing how to avoid detection from having seen possibilities like that?  Maybe; but also Nethys could be telling the simple truth, if the simple truth gave Nethys all that He needed.  That judgment will end up being a matter of probabilities.)

On this iteration of World-2, then, Peranza's crisis should not be averted, Iomedae should not be wholly blinded and balked; for then the gods might wonder if Iomedae alerted and gathered into Her greater Self ought to have succeeded in analyzing and averting catastrophe, in the consequence of null action.  Iomedae should be given a chance to act, and visibly fail to avert the greater threat...

And many other events are left in place, or modified in ways that try to keep clear what could've happened, would've happened, without any intervention from Nethys.

Nethys's learning to the current iteration takes fewer tries than you might expect.

But still some.  Prophecy is shattered, as is Nethys Himself, and some things are just plain hard to foresee.

On the second iteration counting from zero, with the first really active Nethys-player, Ione is made oracle and Keltham thinks of 'eroLARP' 'tropes'.  Carissa Sevar gets a lot more attention when the researchers sell their souls early.  Abrogail Thrune makes a surprise appearance.

Nethys observes the effects with interest—more has changed than He first planned, from making Ione Sala an oracle—but it is not the primary focus of His planning.

Ione Sala is mainly setup for a far bolder intervention, vastly more daring than Nethys usually tries: He will set off a lesser god-war early, tire out Asmodeus against Zon-Kuthon who otherwise would have fought on His side.  And that, obviously, will raise divine interest levels very high; so he will need to trigger Otolmens's interdiction at nearly the same time.

It's the kind of bold ploy, interesting ploy, that Nethys wouldn't dare try if He had not on some level designated this universe a disposable one, permitted to end up as some alternate Nethys's learning experience.

So Zon-Kuthon, Nethys-prompted, attacks the archduke's villa as soon as Keltham is outside the Forbiddance, and—