Chapter Summaries

Hal discovered signs that his resurrection was incomplete and sought help from Green Lantern Headquarters, while Carol asked Victor to investigate the Mother Box’s role. Tests confirmed Hal’s body and Green Lantern energy were affected, but Sinestro said a permanent cure might require returning to Earth.

• Hal found dark-red patches and sunken muscle on his body, suspected they were signs of livor mortis, and hurried to seek help at Green Lantern Headquarters.
• Carol met Victor and explained Bruce’s conclusion that Hal had not been fully resurrected; Victor suspected the Mother Box failed to fuse with Hal and said he would ask his father for answers.
• At Green Lantern Headquarters, Hal received Carol’s message and considered Victor’s different resurrection, in which the Mother Box had fused with his body.
• Sinestro tested Hal and confirmed that his physical condition had disrupted the circulation of his Green Lantern energy.
• Sinestro told Hal that willpower could ease his symptoms, but that he might need to return to Earth for a complete cure.

Victor and Bruce traced Silas Stone’s unexplained drive to the cemetery, where they discovered that Victor’s mother’s grave had been disturbed and her remains were missing. Using clues from the Mother Box, Victor found Silas near the likely location of the Red Room in Florida.

• Victor learned that Silas had taken leave and used surveillance footage to trace his father’s route away from home.
• Victor called Bruce for help, and Bruce’s surveillance network revealed that Silas had driven toward Victor’s mother’s grave.
• At the cemetery, Bruce noticed the disturbed soil, and Victor uncovered the empty coffin.
• Victor and Bruce suspected Silas had gone to the Red Room, and Victor used the Mother Box’s memories to help locate it.
• Victor searched the mountains in Florida and spotted Silas near a familiar car.

Victor discovered that his mother had returned to life in Dr. Stone’s laboratory, and agreed to help keep her resurrection secret while she regained strength. Bruce uncovered signs of an unknown threat and received a call from Damian, who asked him to come find him.

• Dr. Stone convinced Victor to message Bruce that everything was fine, then showed him his living mother in a cultivation tank.
• Dr. Stone said Victor’s mother had contacted him on Christmas Eve and asked him to save her, and he asked Victor to secretly charge the nutrient solution and keep the Justice League away.
• Bruce noticed Victor’s signal disappear and grew suspicious of Ron’s unusual trip to Mars City’s east side.
• Bruce and Schiller identified strange energy readings from a phone that kept ringing after Bruce unplugged it.
• Bruce answered the call and heard Damian ask which Christmas it was since he died, then tell Bruce to come find him.
• Bruce decided to go meet Damian despite Schiller warning that the resurrection might be a trap.

Bruce confronted the resurrected Damian, who rejected Bruce’s offer to start a new life and vowed to seek revenge on Joker. As Bruce and Schiller investigated a mysterious Dark Force targeting the Justice League, Martian Hunter Ron reunited with his resurrected wife and daughter.

• Bruce found Damian at the cemetery chapel and learned that Damian had awakened in his coffin and climbed out on his own.
• Bruce explained that Damian could not reclaim his old identity and offered him a place as his adopted son, but Damian chose to hunt Joker for revenge.
• Bruce returned to Wayne Manor and told Schiller that Joker no longer existed because Bruce had abandoned being Batman.
• Bruce asked Schiller to monitor the Justice League for signs of the Dark Force while he searched for its source.
• Ron returned home on Mars and reunited with his resurrected wife and daughter, who had no clear memories of their deaths.

Barry returned to his childhood home and found two people claiming to be his resurrected parents, but he refused to believe them and suspected they were impostors. Hal helped convince the police they might be Martians, and the pair were taken into custody for investigation.

• Barry went to the Allen family's old home after the property manager reported a possible break-in and found a man claiming to be his father.
• Barry's mother appeared and said she and his father had awakened in the cemetery, but Barry rejected their claim and explained why he believed his real parents would never frighten him by returning this way.
• Barry brought Hal to the house and asked him to remove the supposed impostors, but Hal found they appeared to be ordinary humans.
• When police arrived, Hal claimed the pair might be Martians disguised as the dead Allen couple, and an older officer recognized Barry and confirmed the couple were impostors.
• Police reinforcements arrested the two claimants and took Barry and Hal in for questioning.

Barry learned that the people posing as his parents had disturbed their graves, while he and Hal discussed why Hal could not simply undo his resurrection. Arthur proposed using Ron’s telepathy to investigate the returned Martians, but the team found Ron had already encountered his supposedly dead wife and daughter and restrained them.

• A police officer told Barry that his parents’ graves had been opened and their remains were missing, and Barry went with Hal to inspect the cemetery.
• Barry warned Hal that changing the future by dying again could make things worse, so Hal needed to stay alive while they investigated his resurrection.
• Arthur suggested that Ron use his telepathy to uncover the truth about the people pretending to be Barry’s parents, but the team discovered Ron was missing.
• Barry, Hal, and Arthur found Ron at his former home, where Ron revealed that he had sensed his daughter’s psychic signal and found his wife and daughter alive.
• Ron said he had suppressed his family’s psychic powers and put them into comas because he believed they were illusions, choosing his duty over the chance to live in a comforting dream.

Ron and Arthur discovered that people they had lost had apparently been resurrected, while Clark dealt with captured impostors and recruited Kryptonians to find others like them. Ron warned Clark that Dr. O'Dell might also have returned with evidence that could expose Bruce's plan.

• Ron rejected his counterfeit wife and daughter, sent them to Mars prison, and went with Barry to investigate Dr. O'Dell's laboratory.
• Ron found traces of recent activity in the laboratory and feared Dr. O'Dell could expose Bruce's plan using his research and data.
• Clark learned that two Kryptonians had been captured in Metropolis, recognized them as former restaurant workers, and recruited them to locate other Kryptonians.
• Clark brought the Kryptonians to Schiller and asked him to give them suitable identities.
• Ron arrived with Barry and told Clark and Schiller that Dr. O'Dell might have been resurrected and must be found before he ruined Bruce's plan.

Schiller explained that Darkseid had brought the Reaper to attack the Multiverse, using resurrected loved ones to divide the Justice League and prepare a lifeless passage through their universe. The chapter left the heroes committed to resisting the plan and helping one another withstand the emotional danger of the returned dead.

• Ron told Clark how Barry's supposed parents had been exposed and arrested as Martians, and Clark realized Bruce's invasion plan had helped prevent the impostors from infiltrating society.
• Clark pressed Schiller to reveal the danger, and Schiller warned that knowledge itself might let the enemy find them.
• Schiller said Darkseid had enlisted the Reaper, a being from the Realm of Lifelessness who could manipulate life and death and intended to erase the universe to open a passage.
• Schiller explained that the Reaper's scheme was meant to exploit resurrected relatives and drive the heroes into conflict, but their bonds and Bruce's preparations had thwarted it so far.
• Schiller told Clark to continue leading the anti-Martian response and deal with Dr. O'Dell, while the other heroes helped their companions resist becoming consumed by false familial affection.

Ron, Barry, and the others checked on Hal and Arthur after learning that the returned dead might be part of a scheme to destroy life. They found Hal had seen through his impostor, then discovered Arthur’s mother was alive at the bottom of the Trench, leaving Arthur face-to-face with her.

• Ron assessed Victor and Diana as vulnerable to the impostors, while Schiller said Batman had already reunited with Damian.
• Ron and Barry found Hal with an impostor posing as his father, and Hal revealed he had kept control of the situation before sending the man into his Green Lantern ring.
• Arthur told the group that his mother had never returned, so they considered whether she had survived her exile to the Trench.
• Hal suggested Arthur’s mother might have been imprisoned rather than killed, and Arthur agreed to investigate while warning that her return could threaten Atlantis’s stability.
• Arthur and the others descended to the bottom of the Trench and found a lighthouse, where Arthur saw a woman who appeared to be his mother.

Arthur reunited with his mother in the trench, learned more about the Mother Box and Atlan’s tomb, and stayed behind to guard her. Meanwhile, Hal realized Victor was hiding something, and Victor rushed off after learning that Barry and Ron’s resurrected relatives had returned from their graves.

• Arthur reunited with his mother, who refused to leave the trench or return to Atlantis and warned him that Orm had inherited his father’s cruelty.
• Hal asked Arthur’s mother about the Mother Box, and she explained that its three apparent cubes were different faces of a single object and directed them to Atlan’s true tomb for Atlantis’s oldest secrets.
• Arthur stayed behind to guard the trench while Hal, Barry, and Ron split up to find Victor and Diana before the Black Hand could escalate his plan.
• Victor returned and Hal told him how the League had handled the impostors, making Victor realize Hal had noticed something was wrong.
• After Hal confirmed that Barry and Ron’s relatives had crawled out of their graves and returned home, Victor hurried away to attend to something.

Victor learned that Dr. Stone had captured the person who emerged from Eleanor’s grave because he believed she was an impostor, not his resurrected wife. Meanwhile, Barry and Ron found Amazon under martial law, where the Queen suspected Diana had stolen the Mother Box to revive Steve.

• Victor inspected Eleanor’s coffin and found signs that someone had pushed the lid open from inside.
• Victor confronted Dr. Stone, who explained that surveillance showed an Eleanor lookalike entering the old house, so he subdued and brought her to his experimental base.
• Victor accepted that the woman in the cultivation tank might not be his mother and asked Dr. Stone to share any progress toward a true resurrection.
• Dr. Stone warned Victor to control the Mother Box and not let it control him, and Victor glimpsed Diana near a scene of flames.
• Barry and Ron forced their way into Amazon and told the Queen that relatives of Justice League members had returned from the dead.
• The Queen accused them of encouraging Diana to steal the Mother Box and said Diana may have wanted to revive her former lover, Steve.

Diana tried to use the Mother Box at the Temple of Hephaestus to resurrect fallen Amazon warriors, but Victor absorbed its power and the warriors returned to life. Victor sent Diana, the warriors, and Steve through a portal to Amazon before Zeus arrived, while Hal accused the gods of setting a trap.

• The Amazon queen told Ron that Diana might be driven to desperate action by Steve's resurrection, and Ron learned she had stolen the Mother Box.
• Victor arrived and revealed that Diana had taken the Mother Box to the Temple of Hephaestus, where its power required immense thermal energy to activate.
• Victor found Diana attempting to resurrect fallen Amazon warriors and tried to persuade her that resurrection was impossible.
• The Mother Box erupted, struck Victor, and disappeared into his chest as the temple was destroyed and the Amazon warriors rose from the dead.
• Victor opened a portal to Amazon and sent Diana, the revived warriors, and Steve through it before Zeus arrived.
• Hal saw that Diana and Steve were gone and accused Zeus and Hera of luring the Justice League into a trap.

Diana sought a way to resurrect her fallen Amazon sisters, but Bruce opposed the idea and warned her against pursuing it. She asked Schiller for help getting around Bruce, and Schiller questioned why she had come to him for that.

• In the Batcave, Bruce and Schiller watched Diana return to Amazon through a golden portal, and Diana cried when Steve woke.
• Bruce recalled Diana telling him she wanted to resurrect her fallen sisters, and he warned her not to try anything foolish or manipulate Victor.
• Diana reflected on her sisters’ deaths and called Schiller to meet her at a café.
• Diana explained her plan to Schiller, who said Bruce likely had important reasons for opposing resurrection.
• Diana asked Schiller to find another way around Bruce, and Schiller replied that coming to him was taking the long way around.

Diana stole an Amazon Mother Box and tried to use it to revive her sisters and Steve, while Bruce’s plan turned the resurrection into a pretext for confronting Mount Olympus. The plan succeeded, and Bruce prepared to use the manufactured dispute to approach the gods later.

• Diana learned from Schiller that Victor had used intense heat to activate a Mother Box, then stole the one from the Amazon queen’s treasury.
• Diana traveled to Greece to reach the Temple of Hephaestus, brought the unconscious Steve there, and returned to retrieve the bodies of the Amazon Warriors.
• Diana activated the Mother Box, and its resonance with the one inside Victor revived the Amazon Warriors and Steve as Victor and the others arrived.
• Victor sent everyone back to Amazon through a sonic boom channel, while Hal blamed Mount Olympus for the explosion at the Temple of Hephaestus.
• Hal and Victor warned Zeus and Hera that Batman would come after them if Mount Olympus caused trouble.
• Bruce revealed that he had engineered Diana’s actions with Schiller and Dr. Stone so Victor could absorb the Mother Box and the League could gain a pretext to approach Mount Olympus.

Bruce used the Mount Olympus crisis to secure the Mother Box and gain leverage over the gods, while Arthur entrusted him with another dangerous cube. Meanwhile, Schiller and Clark investigated Dr. O'Dell's allies and resolved to bait them into revealing themselves.

• Bruce justified a future move against Mount Olympus as restoring the Justice League's honor, while the Amazon queen regained her warriors and Victor gained access to her Mother Box.
• Arthur gave Bruce a cube Atlantis could not safely protect, and Bruce offered a $100 billion ocean-protection investment to address Arthur's concerns.
• Schiller returned to the Presidential Palace and told Clark that people connected to Dr. O'Dell's laboratory were retrieving equipment and heading toward the East Coast.
• Schiller and Clark reasoned that Dr. O'Dell's allies wanted stronger evidence to discredit the Martian invasion and undermine Clark's presidency.
• Clark asked Schiller to draw the conspirators out, and Schiller agreed to set a trap.

Diana learned that the Serpent of Phryne had been stolen from the Metropolis Museum and was pulled into the investigation. The thieves had also taken every document about it, leaving Diana suspicious that the records, rather than the fake mural, were their real target.

• Diana returned to work in Metropolis after leaving the resurrected Steve in the Amazon queen’s prison.
• Diana rushed to the Metropolis Museum when her superior told her the Serpent of Phryne had been stolen.
• Diana called Schiller, who claimed he had only just heard about the theft and could not investigate.
• Diana examined the scene and reasoned that the robbers had disabled the Museum’s power to move the massive mural without being recorded.
• Diana argued that the thieves might have used a method other than smashing the mural, since investigators had found no signs of machinery.
• A staff member reported that the thieves had also removed every file and document related to the Serpent of Phryne, making Diana suspect the records were their true target.

Diana discovered that the Metropolis Museum thieves had removed The Serpent of Phryne through a window and suspected they wanted to use its forged history to discredit the government’s account of the Martian invasion. After Britain blamed a counterfeit for the artifact’s mysterious journey, new evidence suggested the mural on loan to the Metropolis Museum was fake too, leaving the museum facing accusations of switching it.

• Diana spotted signs that the thieves had removed and replaced a window pane, and police traced their likely route through the courtyard.
• Diana called Bruce, who suggested the theft might target the mural’s alien-related information rather than its monetary value.
• Diana warned the curator that thieves could expose The Serpent of Phryne as a forgery and use that claim to portray the Martian invasion as a government conspiracy.
• News reports revealed the mural had traveled from the United States to Britain and back, prompting the royal family to claim the transported artifact was a counterfeit.
• Museum staff learned that the British Museum’s loaned Serpent of Phryne appeared to be fake, while the British Museum publicly distanced itself from the Metropolis Museum.

After a dark-web video exposed that the stolen “The Serpent of Phryne” was fake, Diana became the chief suspect in the artifact swap. She set out to find the thieves and clear her name, tracing the email that revealed the video while planning to investigate the escape route with Victor and Bruce.

• Diana saw the dark-web video and learned that the thieves had smashed a concrete counterfeit of “The Serpent of Phryne” before police had disclosed how it was stolen.
• The Metropolis Museum staff came under suspicion, and Diana realized the mural’s weight and her superhuman abilities made her the most likely scapegoat.
• Diana promised the director she would find the culprits within three days, or surrender herself to the police.
• Diana flew to the Daily Planet, where the editor-in-chief told her that an anonymous encrypted email had supplied the dark-web address.
• Diana asked Victor to trace the email, then planned to use Bruce’s surveillance network to investigate the thieves’ escape route.

Diana investigated the theft of the Museum artifact, finding that a professional crew had carried it away in a black pickup while a coordinated rumor campaign accused her of swapping it. Bruce and Victor uncovered leads pointing toward a larger conspiracy, and Diana continued searching for the pickup’s destination.

• Diana asked Bruce to review unofficial surveillance footage and questioned people near the Museum, where a witness recalled seeing a black pickup.
• Diana visited the pickup’s reported parking spot and refused a suited man’s request to talk, then learned that online rumors were accusing her of replacing the artifact.
• Bruce sent surveillance footage showing how the thieves used a makeshift track and leverage to load the mural onto the pickup.
• Diana concluded that the thieves’ precise, confident methods suggested powerful backers and that finding them might not clear her name.
• Victor traced an email address to the National Security Agency, though he suspected it was a frame-up, and Diana asked him to keep investigating.
• Diana reviewed Bruce’s additional surveillance footage to trace where the black pickup had gone.

Diana traced the stolen Serpent of Phryne to an elaborate scheme and learned that the former Mayor had arranged the theft to expose the artifact as a fake. As the Mayor blamed the government for forging it, Diana realized Schiller’s repeated use of the artifact had been designed to help Clark and began guessing at the purpose of this latest plot.

• Diana tracked the robbers’ vehicles through Metropolis, found evidence of their routes, and recognized that the chaotic trail was meant to stall her investigation until her three-day deadline expired.
• Diana accepted the callers’ invitation and went to a riverside mansion, where the former Mayor admitted that he had sent people to steal The Serpent of Phryne.
• The Mayor said the artifact was fake and offered to testify that Diana had not swapped it, then argued that the government had forged it to promote belief in aliens and intensify Cold War fears.
• Diana realized the Mayor’s theory was correct and connected the artifact’s earlier appearances to Schiller’s efforts to help Superman gain power and public support.
• Diana concluded that the latest scheme must also remove an obstacle to Clark’s policies and anticipated what the Mayor was about to reveal.