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Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft, built an illegal fortune smuggling marijuana, and eventually channeled it into a Fortune 500 gaming company with its own massively successful online RPG, T'Rain. The line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidentally triggers a virtual war for dominance — and Richard is caught at the center of something far more dangerous than any in-game conflict.

Finn Harris is a brilliant retired engineer still mourning the death of his wife Rachael — a loss tied to the company he helped build. With little left to live for, his daughter pushes him into Awaken Online, a new virtual reality game developed by his former employer. Inside, Finn discovers a school for mages where students duel to the death and faculty maim novices without hesitation. Guided — and manipulated — by a fire deity, Finn must learn to fight, reclaim his purpose, and find a path to redemption before his time runs out.

Renie Sulaweyo, a teacher in near-future South Africa, realizes something is terribly wrong on the network. Children — including her own brother Stephen — have logged into the net and cannot escape. Every clue points toward a mysterious golden city called Otherland, but every investigator who gets close ends up dead.

Barliona is a virtual world packed with monsters, battles, and millions of players seeking things they cannot find in real life — magic, dragons, and unforgettable combat. Players now choose to spend months inside without going home. The only rule was that no player could feel actual pain. But there is an exception: criminals are sent to Barliona to serve their sentences, locked in virtual mines, experiencing the game not as entertainment but as survival.

Marcus and his friends escape a stagnant society by diving into a revolutionary virtual reality game — but from the moment he logs in, Marcus finds himself separated from his group and thrown into a remote village under attack by goblins. Forced into battle, he rallies the beleaguered villagers and drives off the invaders. With the village in ruins, the survivors turn to Marcus for help rebuilding. Quickly realizing this game is unlike anything he has played before, he is swept up into a whirlwind of adventure as he struggles to defend his new home — and discovers that marauding goblins are the least of his problems.

Michael is a gamer who spends almost more time on the VirtNet than in the real world — a total-immersion virtual reality that's equal parts playground and addiction. But when reports emerge of a hacker holding players hostage inside the VirtNet, leaving victims brain-dead, the government comes looking for someone who can fight back. They've been watching Michael. But going off-grid means venturing into back alleys of the system human eyes have never seen — and risking the line between game and reality blurring forever.

For allegedly average high-schooler Leonard Dunning, the rhetorical question of how you'd react to finding yourself in a world running on tropes and clichés became uncomfortably real. He woke up on a strangely pristine island country in the middle of the Atlantic — without memories, surrounded by countless characterless placeholders, with a classic harem protagonist and his love interests for friends. As he investigates the rules governing the world and works to sabotage the harem tropes, his outside-context knowledge, unique abilities, and talent for causing trouble draw the attention of the world's nebulous narrative.

The Rasmussem Corporation creates virtual reality games that plug directly into the brain — no keyboard, no monitor, just pure immersion. But the technology comes with catastrophic risks when things go wrong, and for some players the game becomes deadly serious. From brain-hacked dungeon crawls where a crashed game means real-world death, to a medieval fantasy where a girl must win or die for real, the Rasmussem universe explores what happens when the line between virtual and reality collapses.

The Game is a virtual reality simulation played by over a billion children around the world. The best players are celebrities, adored and worshipped by countless fans. Zack is a superstar among players. His final play may change the world forever — setting in motion consequences that ripple across both Earth and the world of Tygon, where billions watch breathlessly as lives are put in jeopardy based on decisions made by children inside the Game.

October, 2042. An extinction-level asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. World governments are preparing deep-earth bunkers for a lucky few, but Jack Mitchel, a thirty-two-year-old EMT, isn't among the winners. His only chance: permanently upload his mind into Viridian Gate Online, a brand-new ultra-immersive fantasy VRMMORPG. The transition kills his body, one in six die in the process, and even if Jack beats the odds he'll face vicious monsters, domineering AIs, and cutthroat players. When Jack stumbles upon a secret conspiracy to transform V.G.O. into a new feudal dark age, the deadly creatures in the dungeons become the least of his concerns.

The universe was a vast, empty, dark, and uncaring place — until life happened and changed it forever, even if only a teeny-tiny bit. Perspective, as it turns out, is everything. Magh'rathlak the Observer is an unfathomable cosmic being from beyond the veil of reality. Average as far as reality-warping entities go, it still struggles to keep things in perspective. To narrow its maddening vastness, it decides to compress its entire being into a single corporeal form. Magh'rathlak had never tried such a feat, but that wasn't about to stop it. After all — how hard could being human possibly be?

A new phenomenon — the perma effect — has swept Earth: some players' minds permanently merge with their online games, leaving their bodies comatose. The terminally ill, the disabled, and those who simply want to escape have begun choosing it willingly. Once a seasoned gamer and now a terminal cancer patient, Max takes this last chance to preserve his life and identity. He dives into AlterWorld — a sword-and-sorcery MMORPG — alongside trusted friends and the woman he loves, seeking the immortality that the real world will never give him.

For over thirty years, Dominion of Blades has been the hottest online role-playing game in the world. But after an epidemic of real-life fatalities linked to the immersion technology, public use has been banned and the game shut down. Jonah wakes to find himself in-game, level one, with no memory of how he arrived and no way to eject. With only two companions, trapped in a world that once hosted millions, Jonah must battle his way across a treacherous landscape — fighting virtual monsters, all-too-real pain, and a very human enemy in a desperate bid to survive.

Simon saved his best friend Kat from the clutches of the Company and their high-tech VR experience, Otherworld — but at a steep price. Now Simon, Kat, and their friend Busara are on the run, hunted for what they know about the Company's dark secrets and the real-life consequences of playing Otherworld. Heading to New Mexico to find a tech genius who might be the only person who can help them expose the truth, they race against time as the line between reality and fantasy threatens to disappear forever.

Seamus, facing life in prison, is offered a deal by the Department of Justice: sign away his legal rights and test long-term immersion in Alpha World, a VRMMO. Inside, he becomes Alburet, a Summoner who befriends players and NPCs alike while navigating quests, guilds, and an unexpected life far richer than anything he knew outside. As the game's testing phases evolve and Alburet's circle grows — including deeper bonds with the women in his life — the complications of both his in-game and real-world existences mount.

What do you get when you cross nanomachines controlled by a volatile AI with a bleeding-edge military-grade cybernetic implant and a gutter rat out to prove everyone wrong? A forced experimental drug treatment at an early age has saddled David with an immense burden. His mother's death has left him adrift and unsure of his direction. So he does what any teenager with no more cares left to give does — chips in some mil-spec chrome and looks for a quick way to earn edds, all the while learning to utilize the nanotechnology forced on him as a child. Corpo or Edgerunner? Why not both? And why not the best of both while we're at it?

Aiden lives in Wonderwind, the world's biggest VRMMO. He dropped out of college, ditched real life, and invested everything into a career as a cold, calculated virtual assassin targeting the richest players in the top-500 leaderboard — every kill executed to perfection. Until his headset glitches mid-mission. One lag spike later, rent's due and his landlord is about to kick him to the curb. Aiden realizes his next job might be his last. He logs into a high-level area severely underleveled with trash gear, prepared for one final assassination — and then he didn't expect to fall for his target.

Eli Winters was never interested in playing The Shattered World — thanks to his deadbeat father Makaroth, the game's number one player. But when his best friend convinces him to try it out, a heat-of-the-moment bet presents a chance for retribution: become more powerful than his dad, win the bet, and force him to delete his character. The problem: Eli is six months behind at level 1, with top players already past level 100. Through hard work and trial and error, he discovers a unique skill that massively boosts his experience gains — with one catch. He cannot deal any damage whatsoever. In a game where killing is the fastest way to level up, he'll need to get very creative.

Thea has always dreamed of joining the United Human Federation marine corps, ever since she was saved by one of their soldiers as a child growing up in the Undercity of Lumiosia. Getting there from a mid-world means earning credits, and her years spent repairing arcade machines and mastering their simulators have given her a head start. On the eve of the monthly ladder reset, a brand-new challenge appears from nowhere — one that changes the course of her life forever. Set against a galaxy-wide war, the story follows how a unique System interacts with each faction in the conflict, with each side receiving a distinct system-trait that fundamentally changes how war is waged.