Living in a Knoxville sober house, Demon works only part-time at Walmart because his orphan benefits cover house fees, and he fills his time with meetings, housemates, and long hours at the library. He meets Lyra, a tattooed, flirtatious librarian, but avoids romance because recovery counselors warn him off new entanglements.

Lyra helps Demon study for and approach the GED, and she also teaches him computer basics: email, scanning, and uploading his drawings. With his head clear again, Demon resumes cartooning and reconnects creatively with Tommy, trading sketches by email and producing sober, efficient work that makes Pinkie want to renew their superhero strip.

Demon and Tommy decide not to renew because both are moving forward. Tommy falls in love with Sophie, quits, moves to Allentown, and marries into a new family life. Meanwhile Demon outgrows the “Red Neck” style and, guided by Lyra’s introductions to adult comics and online publishing, builds his own website under the name Demon Copperhead.

Demon posts new work: “Neckbones,” retelling local tragedies through skeleton narrators, and “The Incapables,” a bitter, sad strip about addicted teens trying to survive and keep house. The internet slowly brings him a small following and paid subscriptions, and Demon frames his art as pushing back against the forces that shaped his life. He stays connected to Angus (miserable among wealthy college peers), Maggot (now working at PetSmart and dating), and his longtime supporters Annie and Mr. Armstrong (Lewis), who loudly praise his work online.

Everything shifts when Tommy calls at 3 a.m. insisting Demon should make a graphic novel explaining why “land people” like them are demeaned: a long economic and political war to push self-sufficient communities off their ground and into wage labor. Tommy feeds Demon historical examples, and Demon begins drawing the project, eventually naming it High Ground, attracting an intense niche audience and an email from a New York publisher asking for material.

Annie, now heavily pregnant, urges an in-person meeting to help assemble a proposal, which means Demon would need to travel back toward Lee County. Though Demon has earned freedom in sober living—car, no curfew, weekends away—he feels terrified that home will “obliterate” him. Dr. Andresen assigns Demon to write and journal through his fears, and Demon recognizes that reclaiming his story may require going back to the beginning: his own first chapter.