It seems the meaning keeps changing

but I already knew that

It was just that vampires always felt like a side-quest to me, even if I knew the only way to have sustainable long term physical life has to be via that route.

Maybe it's just that vampires are actually poltergeists with a high level of physical interaction. That the new Earth and its humans will take time to develop. Why else would I get registered as having a completely new incarnation there, elsewhere, while at the same time told it will indeed still take 600 - 800 years to fix up the remains of this society, during which I'd have to stay around. 

Maybe that other timeline will just be very hivemind for a long time, and anyone in there is mostly in an ethereal state, where learning about the world isn't so easy, but a gradual process of descent into the physical from the ethereal and collective plane of thinking and feeling, which the new humans are in currently.