Leonid finds out that a hacker broke into a small development company and was attacked by its security forces.

In Deeptown, he encounters a colleague of his from the delivery company, who informs him that he has a letter from Roma to be delivered to the mythical Temple of Diver-in-the-Deep.

The only one who responds is Dick (AKA Crazy Tosser), security chief of the popular Deeptown game "Labyrinth of Death".

Dick believes that Leonid can still show the players a thing or two to promote the game as the legendary figure.

He also asks Vicka if she will allow her husband to go back into the "Labyrinth", then she explains the nature of their strained relationship — Leonid never went to the train station to meet her for the first time.

Apparently, that was the time he developed deep psychosis, although Vicka still insists that they still kissed while flying above Deeptown and that his advanced diver powers disappeared shortly after Jinx left.

Leonid returns to Chingiz's virtual apartment to find Maniac, Dick, and Mage (reclusive hacker who used to work for Vicka) already there.

The original "Labyrinth" was an evolved version of Doom, which had players fighting a resistance battle against an alien invasion.

The new "Labyrinth" is a sequel — after defeating the invaders, the humans send a retaliation force to the alien homeworld.

Realizing that it would take too long to reach the last level, Leonid confronts Maniac and asks him if he brought the Warlock virus with him.

Tosser finally reveals that, earlier that day, he sent an email to his superiors informing them of a security drill — an attempt to smuggle a virus into the game.

Leonid takes one of his team-mates on his shoulders and proceeds next (using his diver ability to exit the deep while he is climbing down).

The Emperor proves a tough enemy, and the rest of the team stay behind to hold him off to allow Leonid, Pat, and Nike to reach the throne room.

He then enters the door and finds himself facing a nightmare he kept seeing in his sleep for months — a chasm with two walls (fire and ice) and a string crossing it.

While he's waiting for the letter, a vehicle stops outside the Temple, and Man with no Face (AKA Dmitry Dibenko) gets out.

The files describe an attempt by Man with no Face to create "shadow consciousness" — a sort-of echo of a person who logs off from Deeptown.

Apparently, there was some success in allowing an avatar to exist and interact with Deeptown for a period of time after the user leaves.

The ramifications of this discovery are staggering — should Dibenko succeed, Deeptown will soon be populated with "ghosts" of real-life people.

Also, those "ghosts" will eventually achieve a form of AI, as evident by the Emperor in the "Labyrinth of Death" (his question "Who am I?"

He also sees that Vicka was not even trying to hide her identity from him (Victoria is a Roman name for the Greek goddess Nike).

Leonid goes to the apartment to find only Chingiz and Bastard waiting for him (Pat is doing homework in the real world).

While they are deciding on what to do with the files (Chingiz suggests physically destroying the hard-drive, just to be sure), the Dark Diver reappears and paralyzes the three with stun rounds.

Bastard rushes to his own virtual computer to log off, and Leonid leave the apartment and goes to his favorite bar/restaurant in Deeptown.

So, subconsciously, he altered the deep-program to have a built-in timer and removed diver ability to see programming holes.

Lukyanenko initially had no plans to continue the story from Labyrinth of Reflections but was asked to do so by readers of the first book.

[3] According to Lukyanenko, the 1998 first-person shooter computer game Unreal was important for the premise of the book.