Level 1,000,100,931, a quiet bit of jungle on the fringes of the dimension-city Zentropa, is dreaming in mist. It's depths are avoided by colonists, conquerors and protectors alike. In the great spinal column of interlocking spacetime that forms the megadungeonesque Splinter, it is easy for any place to go unexplored.

And besides: 1,000,100,931 is firmly believed to be haunted.

Curiously enough, this superstition is also popular Earthside, where a corporate autocracy has overtaken the last few inhabitable territories on the globe. With most other media restricted or banned, Earthside citizens have turned wholesale to a hyperviolent form of entertainment where criminals, dissenters, socila-climbers and career psychopaths enter the Splinter through a VR simulation. The simulation links their brain to that of a Splinter native, giving them partial control over it's actions, with a nasty catch that if it dies, so do they.

A century ago, these Players were simply directed to kill one another.

Now, there are storylines.

Fabs of an old EBC corp broadcast, Only Ashes and Dust, still reminisce about the thing made of chains and gnashing teeth that swarmed out of a temple on Level 1,000,100,931 and cancelled their program. In the past ten years, there have been petitions. there have been polls. And at last, EBC has agreed to send a team into the jungle for a post-mortem of the show that they loved. 

What this new team of Players will encounter is far more than just an impossible, hyperpredator, a cursed ziggurat and a tragedy a thousand years in the making.

What they will find on Level 1,000,100,931 has the potential to threaten everything they have known about the Splinter, and about their home.