Short Recap

Dhane, our fledgling protagonist, dies by an ambitious Truck-kun looking to score points and wakes up in Olindale, a heaven for gamers and nerds and everything in between. Gameus, the god of games, welcomes the new transcendents and offers them ancient, magical relics (AKA smartphones).

(It is dangerous to go alone! Take this.)

This world is like a video game with classes, stats, and skills. To choose a class, one must follow a divinity, which appear as animals. Gameus gives the new transcendents a choice of who to follow, but Dhane loses that choice when an unknown insect chooses him instead.

He’s thrown into the Wilds, where he meets Knock and Desley—Cobalins, like goblins, but cooler. They take him to see the Mother of Shadows, a ruby and silver spider that grants him the Arachnomancer class. He is to be the balance between Light and Shadow, and he’s just so excited to be an arachnophobe right now...

Dhane works to blend in with those of Light in Ceratree City. He parties up with Devron and Aaliyah and meets a pretty girl named Penny. All goes well until Devron betrays him to the priests of Light, called the Reditai—or their Shadow-hunting sect, called the Veritai. They arrest Dhane under suspicion of being of Shadow.

He’s tested, poked, and prodded until they prove their suspicions by forcing him to Return at a cemetery of Shadow. The cat’s out of the bag. That didn’t take long… Dhane promotes himself to King of Shadows as a way to stave off his eventual sacrifice to the Changed Reditai—priests of Light that sold their souls for power—and, really, digs the hole deeper for himself. Good job.

The arena fills with people excited to see the King of Shadows killed for their entertainment. Challenger Sarah, a beautiful yet cold-hearted vampire—with a schoolgirl crush on him—leads him to the arena. Along the way, he finds that Desley and all of Dedu Tedu have been captured and turned into slaves.

He wants to help them, but he’s powerless.

In the arena, the Celestial Royal—the King of Light himself—challenges the King of Shadows, proving once and for all that pretending to be a king was incredibly stupid. There is no way Dhane can win against a real king who shows himself quite capable of the title.

Dhane uses the help of Aditi, a girl from the Player Killers guild, to die and Return immediately below the arena. Since there’s no escape, he hopes to at least destroy the cemetery of Shadow that keeps the Cobalins trapped here.

Devron finds Dhane in an attempt to save him, but Dhane’s committed to helping the Cobalins. Tom, an unappreciated, low-level guard, helps Dhane (for the promise of dark-side cookies or a dominatrix) by delaying the Royal Guards.

Dhane races to the cemetery of Shadow only to find it guarded by Challenger Terry, a toxic alpha male who likes reading erotica. They beat on each other for a while, exchanging words and stuff. Dhane destroys the cemetery with a well-placed Exploding Spider. And Challenger Terry dies by the hand of Knock, who used an illusion of a naked girl to distract the man. Well played, sir.

Lucky for Dhane and company, Knock has a Targeted Waypoint and a Village Seed, items from Mahai. Dhane uses the waypoint to get him, Devron, and the Cobalins out before the Royal Guards can stop them.

The waypoint latches onto a northern section of Terralacoos, the next zone over. With the cemetery of Shadow destroyed, Dhane realizes that at this location, if a cemetery existed, the Cobalins would Return here. As such, he uses the Village Seed to start a new village: Dedu Tedu Novus.

Those of Light promptly declare war on the new village. And Gameus appears to help poor little Dhane out by giving him a book on magical symbols. Nothing bad could possibly come of this. The end.