Short Recap

Eight years before Dhane becomes the Arachnomancer, Sarah dies in a library and wakes up in a fantasy world. She’s a huge book nerd, so this is kind of exciting. Woot! Except for her fairy guide—Apology Thirteen—apologizing for Sarah’s apparent ugliness.

Gameus—the god of games—buys a hundred souls to participate in a contest of three challenges. Win, and you get to enter heaven. Lose? He’ll cash in on that money-back guarantee and return you to the Primordial Sea of Souls.

The first challenge is a short contest of survival: kill monsters, get loot, and survive the night. Simple stuff. Or it would have been simple if Tod hadn’t abandoned her and Virgil hadn’t betrayed her.

She’s dumped into a deep crack in the world and manages to survive by using a ring that negates fall damage. Down here, she meets Sangviteus—the Bat divinity who is self-conscious—and becomes his first official follower. Unbeknownst to her, this also makes her a vampire.

The second challenge requires contestants to escape the Mad Queen’s realm. It is here that Sarah meets Niko, a young Asian woman with the Thief class. They become fast friends and fight in the queen’s challenge rooms to earn a currency called ID.

The Mad Queen gives Sarah a tip to read the Terms of Service for a clue on how to escape. She finds the exploit, which requires a lot of ID and enough people to simultaneously open the four challenge-room gates. Unfortunately, among the recent recruits is Virgil. He turns the others against her and takes over.

Niko convinces Sarah to stay, and they proceed to use the exploit only for Virgil to betray them at the last moment, trapping them in the Mad Queen’s realm. With only three hours, Niko tells Sarah to challenge the queen’s beast, Teddy, and gives her a legendary ring with the Flash Step skill.

Niko removes Gameus’s curse and fades away.

Sarah attempts to get armor but is caught by the Queen’s Guards and thrown into the Pit of Despair. She helps the people there escape and distracts the guards by racing her horse to the black pool of corruption at the center of the realm. By entering it, she triggers an event to fight Teddy.

Down to the last few minutes, she uses Flash Step to get beyond Teddy, where the exit is. However, her progress is barred by an invisible wall, and her timer runs out.

The Mad Queen makes a deal with Sarah. She can go and get her revenge on Virgil, but she has to come back. Sarah agrees and enters the last challenge. It’s a massive circular arena with multiple biomes. The audience is full of gods on floating platforms.

Sarah fights her way to the center, losing her fairy in the process. Near the end, she finds Virgil and nearly loses to another trap. But this time, she uses her mount to break the trap, freeing her to throw him over the cliffside. He clings to her and tells her that the queen made him do it. But Sarah doesn’t care. She gets her revenge.

Revenge is not sweet. It makes her feel terrible. But she decides to win the contest for Olette’s sake. Gameus congratulates the winners, and then learns that the queen has claimed parts of their souls. Olette changes her wish to save Sarah, and Gameus tears a piece of her soul off.

Sarah enters Olindale and learns that Niko was turned into a fairy. She will teach the fairies how to read.

Gameus and Adus created the contest to attack the Mad Queen’s realm, which is a parasitic heaven. They trigger the curse they had placed on the contestants to spread in her realm. The Mad Queen, however, planned for this to happen. She sits at her thrown, scratching the head of a crow. “And so it begins…”