Player 1

Chapter 9 Level 1(7)
At that time, the society was in violent turmoil, and most people in the world were looking forward to a refuge away from reality. At this time, "Oasis" was born.It's also cheap, legal, and non-addictive (it's medically proven).Afterwards, the ongoing energy crisis brought more people into the Oasis.Because civilians could not afford sky-high gas prices to travel by plane or car, "Oasis" became the cheapest way for them to travel.The era of abundant and cheap energy is over, and unrest is spreading like a virus.Every day there are more reasons for people to seek solace in Halliday and Moreau's fictional utopia.

Anyone who wanted to set up shop in Oasis had to pay rent or buy virtual land (what Moreau jokingly called "surreal real estate") from GSS.With this in mind, the company has specially designed a number of virtual commercial areas to rent or sell.Various shopping malls as big as castles were established in an instant, and small shops spread all over the planet as quickly as a fast shot.Never before has a city been built so easily.

In addition to the billions of dollars it makes selling malls that don't even exist, Oasis makes a ton of money selling virtual items and vehicles. "Oasis" has become an integral part of life, and people are more than willing to spend real money to buy virtual items in it: clothes, furniture, houses, shuttle machines, magic swords and Gatlings.These things are nothing more than a bunch of 1s and 0s in the oasis server, but they are also status symbols.Several items can be purchased for just a few oasis points, but considering they cost zero, it's not hard to see why Halliday can make a lot of money.Even in the throes of a recession, Americans are happy to keep up their best traditions: spending.

"Oasis" quickly became the most used software on the Internet, and "Oasis" and the Internet gradually became synonymous.This "Oasis", a free game with incredibly simple operations, has become the master of the virtual world.

Billions of people around the world work and play on oases every day.Some people meet in it, get married, and they don't even have to meet each other.The boundaries between people and their roles start to disappear.

This is the dawn of a new era, the era in which everyone spends their time in the same computer game.

0006
The last class was a painful Latin lesson.

Most students learn a foreign language that they may later use, such as Chinese, Hindi, or Spanish.I chose Latin because Halliday also learned Latin.In the early adventure games, he occasionally used some Latin words or phrases.But unfortunately, even in this oasis of limitless possibilities, my Latin teacher, Yuan Ke, couldn't make her classes come alive.My mind wandered as she began to review a series of verbs that I had already memorized by heart.

The system does not allow students to arbitrarily log in to programs and databases during class, which prevents students from secretly watching movies, playing games or chatting.But when I was a sophomore in high school, I discovered a loophole in the school library, so that when I was bored in class (like now), I could look at any book in the library—including the Anola Almanac—and read A few favorite passages to pass the time.

The yearbook has been my bible for the past five years.Like most books these days, it's only available electronically.However, because the stacked building often has power outages, and I want to read it anytime, anywhere, I repaired a discarded laser printer and printed it out.I put the yearbook in a binder and put it in my backpack so I can study it until I know every word in it.

The yearbook contains thousands of books, TV shows, movies, songs, comics, and games that are Halliday's treasures, most of which are at least 40 years old.Oasis provides their download links for free.

Even if I encounter a resource that I want but is not free, I can use Bulletstorm-it is a P2P software shared by hunters all over the world-to download it.

I always keep my feet on the ground when I do research.For the past five years, I've read article after article and novel on Hunter's Recommended List.Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, Neal Stephenson, Richard K. Morgan, Stephen King, Orson Scott Carter, Terry Pratchett, Best , Bradbury, Haldeman, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Stirling, Mocock, Scalzi, Zelazny [43].I've read every book by every author Halliday likes.

And I never rest on my laurels.

I watched every movie he mentioned in the yearbook, as long as Halliday liked it, such as "War Games", "Devil Busters", "Genius Strikes Back", "Goodbye Life", "Rookie Comeback", I will watch it again and again , until every mirror operation is thoroughly familiar.

But what I value most are what Halliday calls the "sacred trilogy": Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Baoqibing". (Halliday once said it would be nice if Raiders of the Lost Ark only got to three and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t exist. I like the idea.)
I also made a note of his favorite directors.Cameron, Gilliam[44], Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Quentin, and, of course, Kevin Smith.

As for John Hughes' youth film, I spent three months researching it, and I can even memorize the wonderful dialogue in the play.

Survival of the fittest, survival of the fittest.

I dare say I've learned all the basics.

I study Monty Python, not just Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but every one of their films, records, books and BBC programmes. (Including those two episodes for German TV.)
I am down to earth.

I go into every detail.

But I suspect I'm overdoing it.

Maybe I'm, really, starting to get a little weird.

I've seen every episode of The Strongest American Hero, Commando Wolf, Mr. Dragon, Knight Rider, and Sesame Street[45].

"The Simpsons"?
I know Springfield better than my own city[46].

"Star Trek"?
Oh, I've done my homework, whether it's TV or film. "Original Series", "Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine", and even the names of every crew member on "Endeavour" I know by heart.

Morning animation every Saturday in the 80s?
Damn it, I can tell you what each character looks like in "The Variety Lion" and "Transformers".

"The Lost Continent", "Sandar the Warrior of the Earth", "Heman the Cosmic Giant", "School of Rock" and "Special Forces", I can tell one, two, three, four of the plots of each episode. In order to remember them, I Once sleepless nights.

Who is my friend who sees the truth in adversity?Puff the magic dragon. [47]
Japan?Did I say Japan?
That's right, my work on Japanese anime and movies is no less than that on American dramas. "Godzilla", "Gamera", "Space Battleship Yamato", "Space Monster", "Gundam Zeta", "Speed ​​Racer".

I'm not a half person.

I give it my all.

I figured out all the tricks of a Bill Hicks comedy.

music?Well, there are so many types and quantities of music, it took me a lot of time.

There was a whole decade of the 80s, and Halliday's taste wasn't definitive.He listens to everything, so I have to too.Pop, Rock, New Wave, Punk, Heavy Metal.From "Police" to "Quick Eyeball" to "Crash" [48], I accept it all.

I listened to all of Tomorrow's Superstars in two weeks.Degenerate bands took a bit longer.

I watched a lot of videos of cute girls singing 80s guitar music on You Tube.It's not technically part of my research, but I'm not naturally immune to cute girls playing guitar.

Of course, you also need to memorize the lyrics when listening to songs.Van Halen, Bon Jovi, VC Leopard, Pink Floyd, I've memorized them verbatim, even though some of the lyrics are cheesy indeed.

I never stop.

In order to win the game, I often tossed until midnight, and I was exhausted before I went to bed.

Speaking of which, do you know "Midnight Oil"?That Australian band.Do you know their single "Burning Earth"?That was a hit in 1987.

I'm hopelessly addicted to it, but I don't regret it.Even if the grades are a mess, I don't care.

I even flipped through every comic in Halliday's collection.

Yes, no one can match me.

Especially in games.

This is where my talent lies.

I have dexterous hands[49].

I'm like the ace player in "Challenge Yourself" [50].

I downloaded every game in the yearbook, from Ultima and Akarabeth to Space Escape.After mastering one game, I set my sights on the next one.

You'd be surprised how much time people have when they do serious research.Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, there is plenty of time for you to squander.

I study every platform and genre of games.Classic arcade, home computer, host, handheld, text adventure, No.1 shooter, third-person role-playing.The eight-bit, sixteen-bit and 32-bit machines of the last century.The harder the game, the more I enjoy it.In the game day after day, year after year, I gradually discovered my talent in this.I can master most action games in just a few hours, and role-playing games are even easier.I never use a guide, nor do I need cheat codes.All I need are my hands.And the arcade is my home game. When I play a reaction-dependent game like "Contra", I feel like a flying eagle or a shark walking through the sea.It was the first time I felt my instincts, my own gifts.

My first real clue didn't come to mind when thinking about old movies, comics, or games though, it was instead due to researching the history of tabletop role-playing games.

On the first page of the Annora Almanac is the quatrain that Halliday recited in the invitation:

Three keys correspond to three secret doors
Virtue will be tested here
Only those who ride the wind and waves and overcome all difficulties

In order to reach the other shore and gain a lot of wealth
At first glance, this appears to be the only direct mention of the game in the yearbook.However, among the articles and diaries about pop culture, I discovered a secret.By then, Halliday had been dead for a year.

There is a series of letters scattered throughout the yearbook.These ink dot-like, barely legible small characters have been deliberately hollowed out.I was flipping through the printed yearbook at the time, so at first I thought it was just the paper or an antique printer.But when I read the same chapter on the Internet, I found these dots again, and they are exactly the same and accurate.If you zoom them in, they're actually surprisingly sharp.

Halliday must have put these words here on purpose.

I found 110 such words in the whole book, and then connected them in the order of appearance, and then, the truth appeared: they were actually a paragraph.I was almost ecstatic when I wrote them into the Grail Journal.

Though the tomb is filled with terror,
The Brass Key is also inside.

But it's not that simple,
You still need to learn more.

This is a prerequisite for obtaining the key,
This is the first priority to reach the top of the points.

Doubtless other hunters have found this passage, but they will not tell others.After I found it for a while (probably six months), a big mouth found it too.His name was Steven Penderjas, a freshman at MIT.He hopes to gain fame by sharing his "discovery" with the media.Even though the idiot knew nothing about Halliday, the news broadcast followed him for a whole month.Later, the practice of reporting to the media as soon as there was a clue was jokingly called "publishing a Pandjas".

After this text became known to the world, hunters jokingly called it "Sixlines".For nearly four years, the world has known the poem, though no one seems to have really understood its meaning, and the Brass Key remains missing.

I know that Halliday often used similar puzzles in his early adventure games, and every one of them fits well with that game.So I made another entry in the Holy Grail Diary to decipher it line by line.

Though the tomb is filled with terror,
The Brass Key is also inside.

There's something clever about this statement, and it's worth a closer look.At first glance it seemed to say that the key was hidden in some tomb, a tomb full of horrors.However, in the process of doing research before, I learned that there was a supplement to "Dungeons and Dragons" released in 1978, and its name was "Tomb of Horror", so the moment I saw the title, I knew Halliday meant something else.Halliday and Morrow played Dungeons & Dragons and several other board games like Unbounded, Champions, Auto Wars, and Rules Master all through middle school.

Expansion packs like "Tomb of Terror" are also called "mods" by players.The booklet that comes with the supplement contains all the maps needed for the mod and details of each room in the dungeon.This is a dungeon occupied by a large number of undead creatures.Players can carry out adventure tours under the guidance, description and encouragement of the host [51].

After learning more about the rules of these early role-playing games, I found that these Dungeons and Dragons mods were the prototype for the quests in Oasis today.And the character in Dungeons and Dragons is just like my character in Oasis.In some respects, these early role-playing games were a virtual reality simulation system, just before the popularity of computer games.In those days, if you wanted to get away from the real world and live another life or adventure in another world, you had to use your brain, pen and paper, dice, and a few mod books.The moment I learned that, my opinion of the game and of Halliday changed instantly.Since then, I've come to see the quest as an elaborate Dungeons & Dragons mod story.And Halliday is obviously the host or dungeon master, although he can only control the game from the grave now.In an old online disk, I found this 67-year-old Tomb of Terror.While researching it, I came to my own conclusion: somewhere in the Oasis, Halliday rebuilt the Tomb of Terror and hid the Brass Key inside.

I spent the next few hours researching the mod and taking note of all the maps and rooms, hoping to find out where it is one day.But here's the problem: The poem doesn't give specific information on where Halliday hid it.The only clue seems to be "you still have more to learn."

I repeated these sentences in my head over and over until I was so frustrated I wanted to howl out loud.Learn more.Yes, ok, great, but, what more do I have to learn?
There are thousands of worlds in Oasis, and Halliday could recreate Tomb of Terror in any one of them.Even if I had the energy, it would take me a lifetime to search for them one by one.

There is a planet called Gygax in the second sector, which seems to be the most worth searching.Because its code was written by Halliday himself and named after Gary Gigax.Gygax is the father of "Dungeons and Dragons", and the "Tomb of Horrors" module is also from his handwriting.According to Hunter Wiki (which is equivalent to the hunter's wiki), the entire planet Jigax is full of replica "Dungeons and Dragons" mods, but the Tomb of Terror is not on it, and other planets with similar themes are also nowhere to be found.Hunters have scoured every inch of these planets, and if the tomb existed, it would have been discovered long ago.

(End of this chapter)