Using the abilities gifted by the Nucleus, Scyth turns his clanmates and noncitizen friends undead.
The undead are immune to weather debuffs, which allows Scyth to quickly level up his character in the desert. There he learns a new ability—
Plague Fury. With its help, Scyth reaches a place of power where he can begin to build a temple of the Sleeping Gods. The noncitizen builders help him build a temple in the Lakharian Desert dedicated to Tiamat, one of the five Sleeping Gods. According to Behemoth, she is the only one that can remove Scyth’s curse of the Destroying Plague.
A day before the temple is finished, Scyth captures the beast-god Apophis, the White Snake. He does this to keep his promise to the first priest to Apophis, Yemi, leader of the dark African clan Yoruba. They try to kill Scyth, tearing his heart out, but in vain. Scyth kills them all. After reviving, Yemi, who is also a Threat, shouts to him that he and his clan will be ready to fight on Scyth’s side as soon as he says the word.
Seeing the incarnation of the Sleeping Gods through Crag’s eyes, Nergal the Radiant, the god of light, declares a holy crusade to destroy Tiamat’s temple. The god promises full immunity from the heat of the Lakharian Desert to all his crusaders.
DisgardiunTs developer company Snowstorm throws its yearly Distival, a kind of Comic Con for all the games fans. Anyone can visit it, but there is a separate private event for a chosen few.
The Awoken, as winners of the Junior Arena, visit Distival in Dubai. There, Alex walks into his hotel room only to find Kiran Jackson, a director of Snowstorm, already in it. He tries to convince Alex to forget the Sleeping Gods and pursue the storyline of the new game faction—the undead. Kiran suggests involving the cultists of Morena in the event, to scale it up.
According to Kiran, all the game gods of Dis are just AIs limited by the Faith resource. The more followers, the more Faith, and this generates competition among the AIs. As for the Sleepers—they’re particularly powerful AIs loaded into the game’s kernel just in a critical mass of errors builds up. Then the Sleeping Gods ‘wake up’ and reload the world, destroying everything within it.
At Distival, Alex meets twenty-two-year-old Piper, member of the Modus clan’s junior wing. The girl takes him to seventy-year-old Sergei Polotsky, former oligarch whose money was used to found Modus. His game nickname was Pecheneg. The old man tells his tale, claiming that it was he who financed Modus from his business, but he was later kicked out by Otto Hinterleaf, now the clan’s leader. Polotsky also said Scyth was under close observation; Modus was certain he was the Threat. Now the clan is afraid of scaring Alex away and doesn’t want the other preventers to learn of him. Polotsky lost almost all his life savings in Modus. Taipan, Pecheneg’s clan, survives thanks to a captured vein of Corrupted Adamantite.
At Distival, Mogwai, the number one player in the world, declares that he is returning to the game and founding a clan called Elite alongside his friend Criterror.
By now, Alex is in need of a lot of money. His parents have failed a project and have to pay a fine. Hairo Morales, a security services officer from the Excommunicado clan, has been blackmailing him. He needs to buy a game capsule for Gyula so he can build the Stronghold of the Destroying Plague. Big Po has deduced that Scyth is the Threat and demands money and an imitation to the Awoken.
After Distival, Alex gives an interview to Ian Mitchell, a journalist in similarly dire straits. In exchange, he gets a large sum of money and agrees to an ongoing collaboration with Mitchell.
Using an achievement reward, he increases his reputation with the Goblin League and gains access to Kinema, the capital of Bakabba. There he puts up for auction two top legendary armor items and sells them for over ten million gold. That means he can solve his parents’ problems and buy the copper bar for a million gold from Hairo Morales, the blackmailer threatening to reveal the identity of the Threat among the Awoken. Scyth leaves a note saying he wants to discuss the possibility of working together with Hairo.
In Kinema, Scyth visits the temple of Fortune, Goddess of Luck. She is one of the Old Gods, but has made a place among the New. Fortune wants help to return her former influence. And that means she needs Spheres of Serendipity— orbs containing the unspent luck of sentient beings. After death, the luck goes to the New Gods responsible for death, or to the demons of the Inferno. Fortune considers this unfair. Now Scyth sees Spheres of Serendipity on corpses and can pick them up.
In the Lakharian Desert, Scyth encounters Ervigot the Ravager, giving him a chance to level up his resilience and unarmed combat.
An explorer, Kitty from the Dangerous Game Hunters, shows up in the desert as if from nowhere and tells Scyth where to find the cultists of Morena.
On Shad’Erung, continent of the dark ones, Scyth finds the cultists and asks them to set up a meeting with Morena, the goddess of death among the Old Gods. She recognizes the divine marks on him and says she remembers the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague by another name—Reaper, the Old God. In ancient times, Morena and Reaper walked hand-in-hand, but when the New Gods appeared, they lost followers, which meant they lost power too. Morena summons all her adepts to help Scyth.
She gives him Reapers Scythes, a divine weapon that can level up by devouring the souls of the enemies it kills.
Scyth also summons the Yoruba clan, the snake worshipers whose leader, the mage Yemi, promised Scyth that he would answer a call to arms.
To use the Yoruba for sabotage, Scyth decides to become a scribe. He learns the craft and quickly levels it
