This manual explains what was found under the Department, what each thing you hold is for, and how it is meant to be played. Fields in gray remain sealed until deployment. Nothing in this document alters the world above ground.
World 1.0 does not change. It cannot. The game above ground ends exactly as written: when the population reaches 69, the treasury splits evenly and instantly among the survivors, and their artworks animate. Every rule that has governed the game since the first epoch governs it until the last. Nothing in this manual amends, patches, or reinterprets the original contract.
What this manual describes is a second world that opens underneath the first — read from its state, never writing to it. A border, not a revision.
The Department taxed the living and burned the delinquent, and it never told either of them why. As the population collapses toward 69, the Department's revenue starves it. It is dying. Beneath it, a land registry was recovered: fully platted, intact, waiting.
When the world above ends, the world below opens. Every asset the first game left behind has a role in the second — assigned not by charity, but by the record. Everything you paid, survived, executed, and solved is on-chain, and the Subnet reads all of it. Nothing anyone did was wasted. It was all canon.
The Subnet is a map: thirteen sectors containing sixty-nine districts. Districts are not equal — they differ in yield, machine capacity, terrain, and traits that reveal only on first occupation. Twelve sectors carry the old names of the fiscal dead: Arrears, The Gray Ledger, Withholding, Audit Plains, Escheat, Probate, The Shredding Fields, Garnish, Remittance, Intestate, Perdition Row, The Clerical Wastes.
The thirteenth is called The Warren. The survey teams sent into it have not reported back. It remains partially inaccessible, and it is where the rabbits went.
The full survey plat is published separately: the cadastral survey. Each sector is bound to one of the thirteen Seals (§06). When a Seal breaks, its apocalypse strikes hardest in its own sector.
Every living Citizen now faces a decision the first game never offered. You may hold your ground and take the treasury when the population reaches 69, exactly as promised — or you may emigrate: renounce your claim on the treasury and descend, becoming a founding Governor of a district in the Subnet, with standing over that district's future.
A LIVING CITIZEN
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+---------+---------+
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REMAIN EMIGRATE
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hold the line renounce the
to population 69 treasury claim
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TREASURY SHARE GOVERNORSHIP
paid instantly, of one district,
evenly, as claimed while
written chairs remain
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artwork animates artwork transforms
(survivor state) (governor state)
Both doors end in a permanent, transformed artwork. The two terminal states are different, earned by opposite virtues — endurance or ambition — and neither is the lesser. Which one is the true grail is an argument this manual declines to settle.
Which means: the final emigrant ends the world. Whoever claims the last remaining governorship is the one whose transaction brings the population to 69, triggers the payout to every survivor, and closes the Department forever. The first game will end by a player's hand, in a single block, with a name attached.
The treasury is the certain thing and it grows more certain the longer others leave. The governorships are the uncertain thing and they only shrink — by every emigration, and by every audit. Waiting is a position. So is moving first: the earliest emigrants choose their land while the patient inherit a richer split.
There is no correct door. There is only the door you can defend having chosen.
For the entire life of the first game, the deceased were recorded as losses. The registry amends the record: Evaders are the population, the labor, and the army of the Subnet. They were never out of the game. They were early to the next one.
Evaders stake to districts to occupy them. Occupation produces Scrip — the Department's dead currency, mintable only by the dead, spendable only inside the world that issued it. Scrip is not a token. It cannot leave. It exists to be spent: on raids against other districts, on fortifications, on activating machines, on the business of holding land.
OCCUPY a district ──> produce SCRIP ──> spend on RAIDS / DEFENSE ^ | | v +──────── hold, expand, or take ──────── TERRITORY
Coalitions beat whales — by construction. Per-district stakes are capped per wallet, and control weight scales sub-linearly with units from a single holder. A hundred Evaders in one hand are worth far less than a hundred Evaders in twenty-five. The Subnet is built to be held by crowds.
One rule is absolute and worth stating in red: an Evader can lose ground, but an Evader can never be burned, bricked, or made dead weight again. These holders already died once. The Subnet does not kill them twice.
Your unit is cheap and your class is enormous, which means your power is organizational. Find a crowd or build one. Choose land you can actually hold — good districts invite raids, and an undefended prize is someone else's Scrip. Court the machine-holders early (§05); a district with machines out-produces one without, and there are not enough machines to go around.
The wilds — districts no Governor claims — will be poorer and freer. Some of you will prefer that. That is also a strategy.
The Proxies are the Subnet's infrastructure. Each district carries a small number of machine slots — and there are only 696 machines against a map that wants them everywhere. A placed Proxy multiplies what its district produces, hardens what it defends, or opens what is otherwise closed. Certain machines — the ones that took part in the old puzzles — carry a mark, and the mark carries weight, including in places only they can open.
Scarcity is the entire strategy. Six thousand soldiers, sixty-nine districts, six hundred ninety-six machines: the arithmetic makes every Proxy holder a courted party. Armies will come to you.
Do not rush placement. Placement is a negotiation, and your leverage is highest while armies are still choosing land. Entertain suitors. Extract terms. A machine in the right coalition's district is a seat at that district's table.
Each of the thirteen Apocalypse editions is a Seal, bound to one sector of the map. Behind each Seal is one event that will alter the world — and each fires once, ever. Thirteen ruptures. That is the entire supply of doom.
No hand breaks a Seal alone. Invoking one requires a congregation: holders of that edition choosing, together, to burn their copies toward a threshold within a proposal window. Per-wallet contributions toward the threshold are capped — a whale may feed the fire, but cannot light it alone. If the congregation fails to gather, the Seal holds, and the proposal rests.
When a Seal breaks: the burned copies are gone forever, on-chain, in numbers — the most dramatic moments of the second world will be funded by the immolation of the art itself. The copies that survive transform into a Broken Seal state: rarer than before, relics held by those who witnessed the event and refused to feed it. Both choices are memorialized. Neither is wrong.
Your edition is a doomsday cult that has not yet met. Meet. The holders of each Seal share one once-in-a-world decision, and the arguments over when — or whether ever — begin now, not when the proposal opens. Know, too, what you are holding either way: feed the fire and you are part of an event; abstain and you hold a relic of it. There is no exit from mattering.
A wallet holding all thirteen editions together holds the office of Archon. The office is verified continuously, not by snapshot: break the set for a block and the office is gone with it. It returns when the set does.
The Archon's privilege is proposal of the unspeakable: no Seal's charging window opens without an Archon's hand on the fuse. Every apocalypse in the history of this world will be remembered as proposed-by. Further privileges of the office exist and are chosen once, at ascension — ███ ████ ██ ███████.
The office rewards custody, which means the set itself is the strategy: assembled sets become very hard to justify breaking, and unassembled ones become worth completing. If you hold twelve, you already know what the thirteenth costs. So does everyone selling one.
The first world was closed: a fixed treasury, ground down to 69. The second is open. New participants — Migrants — will enter the Subnet in seasonal cohorts, settle in districts, and act. Districts levy their activity. What flows into a district concerns its Governor and its staked occupiers; the exact plumbing of those flows is ██████ ███████ — sealed pending final structuring, and the game stands whole without it.
The world runs in seasons: the map shifts at its edges, cohorts open, outcomes settle, and the Seals wake. At most a small number of Seal proposals may open per season — which places the last possible rupture years away, and every one of them countable. An infinite game, with a scripted doom that everyone can watch approach.
There is also an Endowment: an open, on-chain fund that any wallet may feed, governed by holders across every class, directed at the game's own commons — prizes, relief, acquisition, and the builders who make its tools. It belongs to no one, which is how it can be fed by anyone.
This world announces order, never calendars. Each stage opens when its condition is met, and no sooner.
Attention is the only advantage. Nobody is told anything. Everything is on the chain or in the documents, equal for everyone, and the players who read harder will simply do better — above ground, this was always true, and below ground it is policy.
Crowds hold; whales visit. Every structural choice in the Subnet favors coordination over capital. Bring friends or make them.
Every audit burns a throne. From this document forward, each Citizen who slips above ground destroys a governorship below it. Watch the audits differently now.
Nothing is wasted, and nothing is over. The first game had winners. The second has operators. Engines don't win. Engines run.