Rhine didn’t stop watching the dome’s broadcasts.
Not because he trusted them.
Because propaganda was still information—just bent into a shape that served someone else.
Today’s headline came down like a decree:
“Districts One through Five are special zones.”
The anchor’s face remained calm. Her words did not.
“Only Awakened personnel may enter Districts One through Five. These districts are the core of the New Star Defense Line. They contain the sun-correction arrays and the Revelation Sanctums.”
A montage rolled: towering pylons, radiant barriers, and five massive cathedral-like structures standing like knives against the sky.
Rhine’s eyes sharpened.
Revelation Sanctums.
He’d come to New Star to find out why this world’s players had stolen the Cinnabar Cup from the Endless Sea. If there was a place to hide something that reeked of divinity and ritual, it would be in a “sanctum” the government refused to let ordinary people near.
He was already reaching for the World Ladder interface in his mind—just a short hop within the same world—when the broadcast shifted.
“Before we proceed,” the anchor said, “we will honor the martyrs.”
The projection zoomed in on one of the sanctums.
A pale stone wall.
Clean lines.
Banners bearing the ringed-planet emblem.
Something that didn’t belong.
Carved into the stone, deep and deliberate, was writing from the Endless Sea.
One stark word:
BLOOD.
Rhine went cold.
That script didn’t exist in this world’s culture.
It wasn’t a font. It wasn’t decoration.
It was a fingerprint.
Someone from the Endless Sea had left it here… or something was deliberately trying to make sure he saw it.
The anchor continued, voice softening into practiced grief.
“And now, the memorial grounds.”
The camera swept down to a marble stone half-buried in ash—so familiar Rhine felt his stomach drop.
Life above all.
In gratitude to the martyrs who fell for the New Star Defense Line.
—New Star United Government
But the shot kept widening.
Behind the stone was a cemetery. Not a small one. Thousands of graves in perfect rows, stretching across a hillside like a military formation.
Rhine’s mind snapped back to last night.
Outside the dome, in the wasteland, he’d searched with his own eyes and his psionic sense. He had found one stone—one—and nothing else.
No cemetery.
No hill of graves.
No sanctum looming over it.
Either the broadcast was showing a different place…
…or District 12 was being fed a manufactured reality.
Rhine let the applause wash over him without moving his hands.
He could argue with lies spoken on a screen.
But lies that rewrote what people believed they’d seen?
Those were a different kind of weapon.
And New Star was pointing it inward.