Summary of Previous Books
Earth, 2074. After World War III, a single world government rules the planet—the UN.
The planet’s population now exceeds twenty billion, at least a third of which are noncitizens, people declared useless to the community, which means they have no rights to the benefits of civilization. Citizenship is divided into categories; from A with the highest status, the social elite, to L—the lowest.
At the recommendation of the UN Department of Education, every teenager between ages fourteen and sixteen must spend at least one hour per day in Disgardium. This is considered an essential part of a well-rounded education to give teenagers the social skills they need and prepare them for adult life.
The student Alex Sheppard takes the in-game nickname Scyth. After making his character wrong and having trouble leveling up, he quickly loses interest in the game. For over a year, he just spends his mandatory hours in the sandbox, sitting on a bench outside the tavern.
His parents are planning to divorce, which will lower their citizenship class and income, and they won’t be able to pay for Alex’s education to fulfill his dream of becoming a space guide. The colonization of Mars has begun, and plans are in the works to correct Venus’ orbit.
Half a year before school ends, Alex is forced to start playing Disgardium for real to earn enough for his studies.
To maintain balance, the game’s developer company Snowstorm initially introduced the policy of ’Threats’ to knock out imbalanced players. Any player-threat identified by an artifact of the True Flame can be thrown out of the game permanently with the help of a simple ritual. The eliminator receives rewards based on the Threat’s potential, and the Threat is also rewarded: the higher its level, the greater the compensation, but the harder it is to defeat. If the Threat’s status reaches extreme highs, it can be tough to eliminate. This means that the eliminators (or ‘preventers,’ as they call themselves) gain more by eliminating Threats before they power up.
The Threats themselves need to hide and level up. Their reward after elimination comes not from their potential, but from their current status level, where A is the highest and Z is the lowest.
Scyth becomes a Threat with potential A after a series of unlikely events converge. The NPC Patrick O’Gradv (the first human whose consciousness was successfully transferred to the game) curses him, and another NPC, a lich dungeon boss, turns out to be under the control of the real-life noncitizen player Clayton, who contacts Alex. Clayton was the pilot of an interstellar cargo shuttle before he crashed and lost his citizenship. Seeing Scyth’s stubbornness as he dies over and over without giving up, he surrenders, letting Scyth kill him.
Scyth gets Mark of the Destroying Plague from killing the final boss of the instance. The Mark lets him withstand any damage without dying. Alongside Patrick’s curse, this allows Scyth to reach uninhabitable territory in the Mire, slumbering place of the dying avatar of the Sleeping God Behemoth, one of five ancient gods.
Scyth makes friends with the ‘Dementors’—his classmates Ed ‘Crawler’ Rodriguez, Hung ‘Bomber’ Lee, Melissa ’Tissa’ Schafer and Malik leader of Axiom, the top clan in the Tristad sandbox. They create their own clan—the Awoken.
The Awoken achieves victory in the yearly Junior Arena. To do that, they have to build a temple dedicated to the Sleeping Gods on the deserted island of Kharinza. They are aided by noncitizens from Cali Bottom, who Scyth met when he stood up for the miner Manny. The builder Gyula is among them. After erecting a temple, he begins to build the Awoken clan fort.
Having achieved victory in the Arena, Scyth and his friends draw the attention of recruiters from the Alliance of Preventers, ten of the strongest clans in Disgardium.
After their victory in the Arena, the school bans the Awoken from playing for eight weeks, which makes Scyth fail a quest from the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague. In his absence, the Destroying Plague finds a new emissary—Big Po. When Scyth returns to the game, Big Po opens a portal for the Destroying Plague to capture Tristad. With the help of his friends, Scyth fights off the undead assault and eliminates the Threat Big Po.
They’re joined by Crag the warrior, aka Tobias Asser, a former unsuccessful ganker turned chosen one of Nergal the Radiant. Crag’s status as a Threat is revealed, and he is forced to hide not only in the game, but in real life too.
Tobias asks Scyth for help, and Scyth accepts him into the ranks of the Awoken.
Scyth and Crag leave the sandbox together. In Darant, the preventers check all newcomers that arrive, and Crag is identified as a
Threat. Scyth manages to save his clanmate from the Modus clan castle and delivers him to the distant island of Kharinza, where the Awoken have built a fort.
Fearing the preventers’ pursuit in the real world, the Awoken discuss a future haven. Manny and Gyula suggest buying three floors of a new apartment building in Cali Bottom and hiding out there.
By using the Portal Key he got for eliminating Big Po the Threat, Scyth finds himself in the Treasury of the First Mage. There he acquires allies—the treasury guardians Flaygray the satyr, Nega the succubus, Ripta the raptor and Anf the insectoid.
With their help, Scyth, Crag, Crawler and Bomber try to repel an attack from the lich Shazz, an emissary of the Destroying Plague, but in the end are defeated. Behemoth’s temple is destroyed, and Scyth is turned undead.
Led by the Shazz the lich, he goes to a dungeon on Holdest, the lair of the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague, and gets a quest: to build a Stronghold of the Destroying Plague in the Lakharian Desert. The Nucleus also asks that he find the cult of Morena, the goddess of death, and recruit her.
The Nucleus makes puppets of its legates, but Behemoth, who Scyth took with him, protects his consciousness. The god himself stays behind in the lair,
