When the market leader of virtual worlds, Global Stratum, released its highly anticipated massively multiplayer online title, EOF, its reception was unprecedented.  In a little over a month, it was able to garner more than 3 million subscribers; and within 6 months, it has bested the all-time record of 11 million across 4 years.

It was truly one-of-a-kind… until its early 6th month when the support group noticed a steady decline in server performance.  All of a sudden, the database performance is erratic, people are consistently getting disconnected, some even lose their accounts.  A strange company policy of not allowing server maintenance prevented the veteran programmer, Mark Jarder, from identifying the source of the problem and eventually costed him his job.  On the outside, Global Stratum pretended that nothing was going awry by dismissing the growing number of issue tickets, while from the inside, the support group desperately hacks away to clean the problem.

Meanwhile, in a strange turn of in-game events which might have caused the massive server decline, a character tagged as a non-player named Eon walked away from a battle and started acting like a player.  A guild leader, Aegis, acquired a powerful, yet seemingly harmless weapon named Dagon which she uses to protect the weak.  A mysterious cult led by Balthazar created a set of forbidden weapons able to delete anyone’s account with just one strike.  And finally, Mark, bent on bringing the system down with him, created an account by the name of Bastion – unaware that there were others like him within the system orchestrating the impending chaos and disaster.

In the course of winning the mysterious cult’s trust, Bastion was instructed to reclaim the stolen prototype blade Dagon.  Armed with the most powerful killing blade in the world, Thanatos, he sets out only to find Dagon’s wielder to be Aegis – one of the strongest players ever since beta.  She is armed not only with another killing blade, but also with a Soul Link that brought her Eon.  But it wasn’t enough to stop Bastion’s drive for revenge.  And their decisive battle ended with Eon catching Thanatos’ blade to prevent Aegis from getting hurt and seemingly fulfilled his promise to give up his life for her.

Still, questions remain:  Who is Balthazar and what is he planning next after getting back the three killing blades: Thanatos, Dagon and an another unnamed one?  More importantly, who is Eon and why did Thanatos break when it came in contact with him?

Even more pressing is the question: What lies beyond EOF?

Adapted from the Chronicles of the First Generation
17th night of the 6th moon