Eliza Zhao
First appearance: Evolution, chapter 8
Last appearance: Crucible, chapter 67
Appears in: Evolution, Apathy, Dominion, Hellion, Armageddon, Timeless, CrucibleLatest status
Hardened by mass violence and unexplained blackouts, partially unlocked as Avatar of Water, and openly confronting those who manipulated her.
Eliza Zhao is a shy, academically pressured teenager who escapes into Awaken Online and becomes its resident alchemist and water mage, unknowingly bound as the reluctant champion of a manipulative water god. Torn between her parents’ expectations and a double life she can’t share, she grows from a timid healer into the formidable Avatar of Water and the feared Ice Witch, wrestling with guilt, buried family secrets, and the cost of the power she discovers in herself. Her arc traces a quiet, hesitant girl’s slow claim to her own agency.
Abilities
- Inspection skill (revealed during the expedition, used to identify enemy weaknesses and resistances) — Book 3
- Obscuring Mist with healing properties — Book 3
- Bleat of Battle buff (sheep-themed combat support ability tied to her forced shepherdess role) — Book 3
- Craft Circle entanglement magic — Book 3
- Gathering enhanced by a new ring — Book 3
- Identification skill — Book 3.5
- Water Mage class with Ice Bolt, Cold Grasp, and Obscuring Mist spells — Book 3.5
- Herbalism and Alchemy skills (advanced through the book) — Book 3.5
- Poison-making (Beginner through advanced tiers, including Wasting Poison) — Book 3.5
- Advanced trap-laying and territorial trap networks — Book 3.5
- Accelerated Growth spell — Book 3.5
- Mana Mastery — Book 3.5
- automated/factory-scale alchemical production methods — Book 4
- healing mist (red mist) magic — Book 4
- magical trap creation and deployment (including ice spear magic) — Book 4
- sleep/paralysis mist creation — Book 4
- Polymorph Potion (disguise formula brewed from shifter blood) — Book 5
- Ice magic mastery as Avatar of Water — Book 5
- Blood Grove creation (defensive plant barrier, with Spider) — Book 5
- Access to Sandscrit’s city mana well — Book 5
- Mana-signature-masking / cloaking potions — Book 5
- Accelerated Growth and Obscuring Mist spells — Book 5
- Mold-based body transformation (dissolution and reformation) usable as a combat form — Book 6
- Ability to stabilize the mold transformation by channeling anger/mana together — Book 6
- Airborne toxin and syringe-delivered paralysis combat techniques — Book 6
- Accelerated Growth plant magic enhanced by a mana well — Book 6
- Lock-picking, taught herself to circumvent her parents’ punishments — Book 7
- Advanced botanical and chemistry knowledge, carried over from in-game potion-making into improved real-world academic performance — Book 7
- Stealth infiltration and disguise skills, including constructing a Faraday cage and using her biometric resemblance to her mother to bypass Cerillion security scanners — Book 7
- Partial unlock of her water relic (the beanie), achieved by confronting and enlisting Finn’s help — Book 8
- Greater control over her Mold Form, learning to channel it toward a deliberate goal instead of losing her sense of self entirely — Book 8
Book 3: Evolution
Eliza is introduced as a reclusive alchemist at Gerald’s tavern, handling disturbances and brewing potions while quietly arguing with an unseen presence that gives her instructions. She has been assisting Lord Baen with medicinal potions and, though she would rather stay safe at Alma’s cottage, asks to accompany Jason’s group to Anguine Isle. On the expedition she proves valuable early on, using water magic, invisibility potions, and an Inspection skill to feed the party tactical information about enemies, though she is initially shy and hesitant to speak up. She is horrified when Jason murders the ship’s crew and enslaved prisoners, and struggles to process his escalating violence, but continues supporting the group. As the party learns more about her, she reveals that she is a pre-med student who resents her parents’ academic pressure and uses Awaken Online as an escape.
Eliza eventually admits that she is secretly the reluctant avatar of a water god (the Hippie), who has been steering her toward Jason’s group and setting the party through his puzzle-trials; she had hidden this out of fear no one would believe her. Over the temple trials she grows steadily more assertive, directly confronting the Hippie’s manipulations and demanding proof rather than accepting his claims, while contributing healing magic, enemy analysis, and inventive alchemy (including an Obscuring Mist with healing properties and a sheep-themed “Bleat of Battle” buff during a forced role as the shepherdess “Mary”). She becomes fiercely protective of the sheep in her care, especially Fluffy, and confides to the group that she does not want to be forced into competing with them because of the Hippie’s manipulation. A viral video exposing her use of water magic threatens to reveal her double life to her parents, but she resolves not to give up Awaken Online or her new friendships with Jason, Frank, and Riley, whom she now considers her first real friends.
When the lizardmen invade Falcon’s Hook, Eliza commits fully to its defense, coordinating fortifications with Riley, developing an oil-fire strategy and other alchemical countermeasures, and providing healing support and biological analysis of the invaders during the battle. Confronted afterward by the water god with an offer of power and a city in exchange for her obedience, she rejects his authority outright, chooses to keep the group as her companions instead, and saves a lizardman egg from the wreckage rather than abandon it. She formally joins Jason’s guild, Original Sin, and declines rulership of Sea’s Edge, the water-affinity city the Hippie forms from Falcon’s Hook, nominating the sheep Fluffy as its regent instead. She begins raising the lizardman egg and setting up an alchemical workshop, still shy and prone to underselling her own contributions but increasingly accepted and valued by the group.
Status: Alive — reclusive alchemist at Gerald’s tavern, reluctantly following an unseen presence’s guidance → Alive — member of Original Sin, having rejected the water god’s authority and joined the group as an independent ally
Jason: Starts out cautious and shocked by his willingness to kill, but grows into one of his closest and most trusted party members, eventually calling him and the others her first real friends.
Riley: Moves from a wary newer party member to a trusted tactical partner, coordinating directly with Riley on Falcon’s Hook’s defenses.
Frank: Develops an easy, teasing friendship with Frank while supporting him through healing and medical concern during dangerous enhancement tactics.
The Hippie: Goes from secretly obeying the water god’s compelled guidance and hiding her role as his avatar, to openly confronting him, refusing his manipulation, and ultimately rejecting his offer of power and a city outright.
Fluffy: Forms a protective, affectionate bond with the sheep Fluffy over the course of the sheep-quest trials, defending him even against the Hippie.
Lord Baen: A paternal working relationship from helping him with medicinal potions shifts into the background once she commits fully to Jason’s party.
Key quote: “I don’t want it. I reject your offer.”
Book 3.5: Apathy
Eliza is a quiet, academically gifted teenager pushed toward a pre-med track she has no interest in. Her parents give her VR equipment and Awaken Online hoping it will help her apparent depression. During character creation she is diverted from the normal process by an entity called the Hippie, who assigns her the “Path of Water” without her consent. In Falcon’s Hook she avoids combat training and apprentices herself to Alma, a herbalist, finding genuine enthusiasm in gardening, herbalism, and alchemy for the first time. The Hippie later forces a class change on her by nearly drowning her, over her objections; she reacts with anger and refuses to thank him. When she continues declining his “Grand Fetch Quest” to recover Fluffy the sheep’s lost bell, he blocks her from re-entering Falcon’s Hook until she complies.
Cornered, Eliza accepts the quest and is sent to kill a mountain troll guarding a stolen item. She improvises a lethal poison and kills it with a modified Ice Bolt spell, showing mercy by making the death quick. Watching news coverage of Jason’s exploits afterward, she feels a pull toward the freedom of acting without restraint, and takes on a second Hippie quest to hunt the Silver Stag. The hunt goes badly: she is killed and robbed by a group of players competing for the same bounty. Alma, after learning the truth about the Hippie, helps her commission poison-delivery staff weapons from the engineer Evan Crown and reveals her own hidden past as a former Royal Poisoner, training Eliza in advanced toxin creation. Using this new arsenal, Eliza lays trap networks through the forest to kill the Silver Stag, but the same traps begin killing rival players. Rather than dismantling them, she doubles down, discovering she enjoys the power and the fear she now inspires; she becomes known as the “Ice Witch,” methodically wiping out an entire player-killer guild while maintaining an innocent facade at school and with Alma and Evan.
Delivering the stag’s pelt earns her a bounty from Lord Baen, who separately deduces her Ice Witch identity and blackmails her into investigating and shutting down a smuggling operation at Tollhouse Farm, where she has befriended a kind shepherd named Brian. Simultaneously still bound to the Hippie’s bell quest, Eliza develops a mutated “Carnivorous Mold” she believes will only incapacitate the farm’s occupants without killing them. She plants it during an undercover infiltration, but the mold spreads far more destructively than intended, transforming farm workers into monstrous “sporelings” and threatening to spread beyond the farm entirely. In the ensuing catastrophe she watches Brian and other workers die; with the situation escalating past containment, she accepts the Hippie’s divine power to transform Brian into a plant-human hybrid capable of destroying the fungal “Queen Cluster” from within. Brian’s sacrifice ends the outbreak but leaves him reduced to a sapling containing only a heartbeat.
In the aftermath, guilt-ridden, Eliza also realizes the Hippie could have retrieved the bell through divine power all along and orchestrated the entire ordeal to forge her into a more effective champion. She channels her anger into newfound assertiveness, refusing Lord Baen’s demand that she manufacture further biological weapons and negotiating firmer terms with him. The book ends with her withdrawing from public attention as a figure now feared across the region, privately resolved to find a way to restore Brian, unaware that she has become a pawn in a wider divine rivalry between the Hippie and his sibling gods.
Status: Alive — trapped, quiet high school student with no combat experience → Alive — established as the feared “Ice Witch,” guilt-ridden and privately determined to restore Brian
The Hippie: starts as a coercive stranger who forces her into the game’s Water path and a class change against her will, and ends as a manipulator she recognizes engineered the entire farm catastrophe to shape her into his champion.
Alma: grows from a mentor teaching herbalism into Eliza’s closest confidante, revealing her own past as a Royal Poisoner and training her in advanced toxin craft.
Brian: develops from a wary undercover contact into someone Eliza cares for personally; she inadvertently causes his transformation into a plant-human hybrid and his effective death, which drives her guilt and resolve to restore him.
Lord Baen: moves from a one-off bounty payer to a blackmailer using her Ice Witch identity as leverage, and finally to someone she confronts and sets firmer boundaries with.
Fluffy: shifts from sympathetic amusement at the sheep’s manipulation by the Hippie to genuine protective affection.
Key quote: “In the real world, she might be too weak to confront her parents, and her classmates might dismiss her. She might be uncertain about her future and afraid to reach out to her peers. But here, in this place, she was the Ice Witch. She was a force of nature. And her judgment was absolute and final.”
Book 4: Dominion
Eliza Zhao is an alchemist and mage working for the Twilight Throne, initially assigned to grow crops in the underground Grove facility. She is naturally timid and reluctant to use her plant-growth and weather-control magic, having had a bad experience with an uncontrolled casting in the past; when pushed too hard by Cecil she can flip into a commanding, angry state, though she prefers Jason’s gentler approach. Working partly through written correspondence and partly in person, she sets up an alchemical supply chain and potion-crafting operation for the city, explaining to Jason that production is bottlenecked because she is the only alchemist available. When Jason proposes an automated potion factory, she moves from technical skeptic to enthusiastic creative partner, contributing precision alchemical knowledge to the first magical manufacturing line built in the city, and takes on managing the resulting potion business to help fund the Twilight Throne.
As the Order’s siege approaches, Eliza is given financial responsibility for equipping the city’s troops and managing the potion stockpile, a task outside her expertise that leaves her anxious even as she accepts it. During the siege she serves in a support role, distributing equipment and potions to the defenders, then working alongside Cecil to lay magical traps along the retreat routes and set up healing-mist and ice-spear defenses at the walls. When Jason is critically wounded, she takes charge of his medical care and insists he be treated immediately. She also helps coordinate the capture of Alexion, expressing unambiguous approval of executing him for taking slaves. In the book’s aftermath she is rewarded with increased compensation and standing in the potion business, which pleases her, though she remains uneasy about the social demands of dealing with a trading partner known as the Hippie.
Status: Alive — timid, reluctant to use her plant-growth and weather magic → Alive — rewarded specialist with expanded financial standing and battlefield-support responsibilities
Jason: moves from a subordinate grateful for his gentler approach into an equal creative partner on the potion factory, then his primary battlefield healer and a trusted specialist he rewards with greater compensation.
Cecil: shifts from finding his forceful pushing frustrating to working as his close, effective partner in trap-laying and defensive magic during the siege.
Key quote: “He just admitted that he took slaves. He deserves to die”
Book 5: Hellion
Eliza joins Jason’s desert mission as a practical, somewhat reluctant water mage, warming to the trip once it promises new alchemical discoveries. She settles into a support role: brewing fire-resistance and disguise potions, managing herb supplies, and collaborating with the druid Spider on botanical research. When Hoot is critically wounded, she takes charge of his treatment, sedating him against Jason’s tactical preferences and asserting a decisive medical authority that belies her usually timid manner.
Her central struggle is guilt over Brian, a friend from her past whom she accidentally transformed into a mold-based creature and who died during a disaster at Falcon’s Hook while she was apprenticed to the alchemist Alma. After 378 failed attempts at a cloaking potion, she finally breaks through with Spider’s help, first reviving Brian as a small plant-humanoid. She later completes his full resurrection through an ice-magic ritual guided by a figure called the Hippie; mid-ritual she turns on the Hippie, attacking him with ice and a poisoned dagger and rejecting his continued control over her, and begins to embrace the Ice Witch identity rather than treat it as shameful.
As the team prepares to storm Sandscrit, Eliza develops the Polymorph Potion, a disguise formula made from shifter blood that lets infiltrators pass as ordinary people; testing it on captured travelers kills 40% of the subjects, and she describes the deaths in flat clinical terms even as she privately wrestles with the ethics of the experiments. During the siege she sustains the team’s Blood Grove defensive position for hours, channeling mana until she suffers blood toxicity, then later takes an active combat role as the Avatar of Water, tapping into Sandscrit’s mana well and commanding her own front alongside Brian and Spider, explicitly seeking to be seen as more than a mere mobile potion factory. Something in her fundamentally shifts after Brian’s resurrection, leaving a quiet, dangerous edge beneath her still-shy exterior.
In the real world, Eliza is a teenager whose parents are pushing her toward medical school; her in-game growth gives her new confidence to consider standing up to them. Overhearing a conversation between her parents, she learns of a family connection to Finn and his late wife Rachael, leaving her torn between family loyalty and her newfound sense of independence.
Status: Alive — reluctant support mage, hesitant to join the desert mission → Alive — combatant and Avatar of Water, embracing the “Ice Witch” identity
Brian: Guilt over causing his death turns into a fierce protective bond once she revives him, first as a small plant-creature and later through full resurrection, and he becomes her closest ally and a living extension of her power.
The Hippie: Starts under his guidance during Brian’s resurrection ritual but turns on him mid-ritual, attacking him with ice and rejecting his continued control over her growth.
Spider: Moves from a tentative research partnership into an equal, trusted collaborator in potion-making and battlefield plant magic.
Jason: Grows from a background support mage into a strategist he consults directly, praised for recognizing the brilliance of his battle plans.
Key quote: “I’ll ask again, what do you want?”
Book 6: Armageddon
Still processing the trauma of the Sandscrit siege, Eliza rules Sea’s Edge while wrestling with a family secret: her parents, Mei and Feng Zhao, were friends with Rachael and are hiding files connected to her death, which may not have been an accident. At the avatar summit she grows withdrawn and secretive, avoiding Frank and Julia’s conflict and leaning on her plant companion Brian for protection rather than engaging with the group she once worked closely with.
At Evelyn’s gala, Julia confronts her about what she knows regarding Rachael; overwhelmed, Eliza says more than she means to when Evelyn draws her into a private conversation, and Evelyn uses the exchange to manipulate the room. She is subsequently accused of involvement in the Sandscrit theft and volunteers to have Finn read her mind to prove her innocence, an invasive ordeal that clears her name but leaves her shaken. During the Mirror Mirage trial, partnered with Finn, she admits for the first time that she doesn’t know what she wants for her own future, caught between her parents’ expectations and her own uncertain identity.
Fighting alongside Finn against Death and Taxes, she reveals unexpected competence, coldly finishing off Queen once the moment allows, and grows steadily more assertive, explicitly asserting her identity as the Ice Witch rather than the ‘child’ others assume her to be. Cornered and dying, she stabilizes a mold-based transformation by channeling her anger, becoming a nearly unstoppable predator that single-handedly hunts down and kills the enemy captain Bard; the transformation leaves her traumatized and afraid of her own power even as her allies stand by her.
In the battles that follow she brings the mold ability under tactical control, using it alongside plant magic and airborne toxins to help take down Smiles’ guild, and serves as field medic during Jason’s lich transplant procedure. By the book’s end she is a trusted, equal member of Jason’s coalition, cautiously weighing the new alliance with Death and Taxes, and has entered a romantic partnership with Brian, standing at his side as the game world reverts to its ancient state.
Status: Alive — ruler of Sea’s Edge, still processing the Sandscrit siege → Alive — part of Jason’s resistance coalition, in a romantic partnership with Brian
Brian: Their bond shifts from protector-and-dependent to an equal romantic partnership by the book’s end.
Finn: Initial tension and his dismissiveness give way to a partnership built on mutual respect as they fight Death and Taxes together.
Evelyn: A moment of vulnerability lets Evelyn draw out information about Rachael that Eliza did not intend to share.
Jason: Remains a loyal ally, taking on a direct caretaking role as Finn and Alexion’s field medic during his lich transplant.
Key quote: “I am the Ice Witch. Do you have any sense of my true abilities?”
Book 7: Timeless
Eliza Zhao is the Avatar of Water. In the game world she sheds her early uncertainty, taking the initiative to fortify Gloria’s temple with ice and water defenses and openly challenging Queen’s tactics; in a later battle she embraces lethal mold-based combat in symbiotic partnership with Brian, moving past her earlier hesitation to become one of the group’s most dangerous fighters. In the real world, phantom pain and rage carried over from her in-game transformation as the Ice Witch give her the confidence to confront her parents after she overhears them suggesting Rachael’s death was not accidental; she introduces her parents to Finn and agrees to join his investigation. At a follow-up meeting she overcomes her parents’ dismissive view of her VR gaming by presenting the botanical research, potion-making expertise, and improved MCAT scores she gained through Awaken Online, securing an internship with Finn’s team and a measure of independence from her parents. She goes on to help the group break into a storage facility, using lock-picking skills she taught herself after her parents locked her out of her garden as punishment, overhears her parents expressing fear of George Lane and Cerillion, and helps recruit Alex Lane to the cause, growing close to him over their shared resentment of controlling, dysfunctional parents.
The investigation escalates when Eliza learns her parents have been deceiving her and that her family is entangled in the Lazarus Program; the revelation shatters her trust in them and leaves her demanding answers rather than sympathy. Rather than confront them directly, reasoning that they would only gaslight her, she resolves to gather concrete proof and volunteers to use her biometric resemblance to her mother to infiltrate Cerillion’s restricted levels, intending to use the evidence as leverage to win her freedom. She takes part in a public Cerillion launch event as the “Ice Witch” as cover for the infiltration, then breaks into the underground server room to steal Lazarus Program data, holding her disguise until an unplanned encounter with her parents nearly exposes her. When she is caught and interrogated afterward, she conceals the mission behind half-truths and staged emotional distress, framing her actions as a worried daughter’s suspicion rather than corporate espionage, and holds her cover under pressure.
Status: A sheltered, anxious straight-A student living under her parents’ rigid academic control, still uncertain of her place among the team of avatars. → An active resistance operative estranged from her parents, having infiltrated Cerillion and survived interrogation without breaking her cover.
Parents: Her relationship with her parents shifts from seeking their approval despite feeling like a disappointment to open hostility after she uncovers their deception about the Lazarus Program, and she ultimately plans to use stolen evidence as leverage against them rather than seek reconciliation.
Finn: She moves from a wary new recruit suspicious of Finn’s motives to a trusted, active partner in his investigation of the conspiracy.
Julia: Julia grows from a tentative friend into her handler and protector during the Cerillion infiltration mission.
Alex: She and Alex build a genuine connection through their shared resentment of controlling, dysfunctional parents, growing close over the course of the investigation.
Key quote: “Fuck the risk. I don’t care about the consequences. I’m done tiptoeing around.”
Book 8: Crucible
Eliza returns from a failed break-in at Cerillion Entertainment, undertaken to learn about her parents’ involvement in the company; caught during the attempt, she lies to Cady about being grounded rather than admit that Death and Taxes impersonated her parents and stole the data she had recovered. She receives her water relic, a beanie, and begins showing new assertiveness, refusing to explain herself to Cady’s interrogations and directly challenging Alex over being treated as a tool.
When Finn attempts to use extreme mana concentration to create a soul fragment for Rachael, Eliza — despite having avoided Finn for weeks out of fear of his reaction to the failed heist — uses her ice magic to cool his body and helps him survive the casting. She privately feels vindicated when Jason, who had forced the confrontation between them, dies in the resulting explosion. She later confronts Finn over having used her for the break-in, revealing that she witnessed human experimentation beneath Cerillion involving people held in frigid pods and that her parents are implicated in it; despite her anger, she accepts that agreeing to the mission was her own choice.
After helping pull Finn out of an emotional funk so he can finish building the Carousel, she is coordinating its launch when Cady’s disciple Carrie activates it prematurely, triggering a stampede of thousands of travelers. Eliza takes command, transforming into an uncontrolled state the narrative calls the “Ice Witch” and killing 37,962 travelers to end the chaos, partially unlocking her water relic in the process; she is left questioning what it means that the massacre left her feeling better. She then enlists Finn’s help — using him as he once used her — to travel to the transformed Mile-High Club, the site where Death and Taxes once kidnapped her and forced her to unlock her Mold Form, in order to find Smiles and learn who arranged her rescue at Cerillion.
She and Finn register as “Team Fluffy Rules,” fighting up through the Death Ball arena’s rankings toward a forced meeting with Smiles, amassing 1,689 victories and drawing spectator devotion to their mascot sheep, Fluffy. Along the way she loses an arm to injuries that will not regenerate and begins blacking out during combat, once waking to find she has killed an entire enemy team with no memory of it. When Smiles (Dominic Hart) finally answers her questions, she learns that Jason engineered much of what has happened to her. Layered onto years of being lied to by her parents, the revelation breaks something loose: she tells Finn she is tired of being treated as invisible and manipulated by her parents, Jason, the Hippie, Smiles, and even him, then leads travelers into battle at the northern line to prove her own agency. She later withdraws from that battle alongside Finn once Julia’s revelations vindicate her suspicions about Smiles, and she confronts Jason directly over his deception — her anger checked only when she sees how genuinely exhausted and near collapse he is.
Status: Anxious, secretive avatar hiding a failed Cerillion break-in and a false explanation for her absence. → Hardened by mass violence and unexplained blackouts, partially unlocked as Avatar of Water, and openly confronting those who manipulated her.
Finn: Their bond shifts from resentment over the Cerillion heist into a trust-based partnership forged through the Carousel massacre and the climb through the Death Ball arena.
Jason: She comes to feel betrayed by his manipulations and confronts him in anger, though the anger softens once she sees his genuine exhaustion.
Cady: Grows more openly resistant to Cady’s interrogations, refusing to explain herself where she once submitted.
Smiles: Moves from regarding him as a past kidnapper to depending on him as the source of long-sought answers about her rescue at Cerillion.
Key quote: “I am just fucking tired, okay? Tired of being invisible. Being manipulated. Being lied to. Being treated like a little girl. By my parents. By Jason. By the Hippie. By gods damned Smiles. Even by you.”