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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: bchen3
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“…Fuck. Isn’t the developer completely insane?”
At my involuntary curse, the gazes of two people reading books nearby fixed on me.
While I had been buried in the library, training had ended, and these were two mage users who had come to the library.
Since it was a Korean curse, I wasn’t sure how it translated to the Japanese side, but it probably wasn’t interpreted positively.
I bowed my head apologetically to them and sighed looking at the pile of books.
‘As much attention as they paid to the details, I thought this method might not work… but this is a bit extreme.’
The reason I unconsciously blurted out a curse wasn’t because I encountered some unusual fetish that wasn’t easily respectable.
Books.
Recording media using various materials from bamboo strips, papyrus, fabric, leather, to paper had rapidly disappeared over the past 10 years, but they could be said to have accompanied recorded human history.
Therefore, since games mix reality and fantasy in imitation, books commonly appeared either as mere background or as suitable objects for progressing quests.
Even in an era where virtual reality had become mainstream, PCs were still used, though not as gloriously as in the past, and PC games still had their demand.
In such PC games, objects like books and letters weren’t actually very detailed.
When clicking on objects with books or letters written on them, regardless of their apparent thickness, just a window would pop up with a few short lines of text.
But books in virtual reality games were a bit different.
That was because, unlike PC devices, virtual reality games provided highly immersive and experiential experiences.
Though the transition process varied from HMD (Head Mounted Display) era to BCI (Brain Computer Interface), current virtual reality games provided a sense of presence as if things were right before your eyes.
In such games, if you opened a fantasy-looking book of 500 pages, 1,000 pages, or more, and found just a few lines or one or two pages with everything else blank, it would severely break immersion.
As a result, some games in the early BCI stage completely removed elements that required a lot of effort for mere background or meaningless objects.
And some gaming companies that paid more attention would fill spaces with scanned real books or AI-written books.
‘And games that showed such craftsmanship in such details for immersion, despite the hassle, often had interesting devices in place.’
Easter eggs. Or hidden pieces in the case of Korean games.
Developers who filled game virtual libraries with books for immersion’s sake alone, despite having little practical use, were generally nerds who loved their games too much.
And such nerdy developers never missed a chance to play interesting tricks when they could.
Among numerous dummy books, one book hiding a secret.
And events that unfold while solving that book’s secret.
A really common cliché, but fantasy nerds can’t resist this.
Actually, among virtual reality games that put effort into libraries, many had hints hidden in the library.
Hidden dungeons, hidden recipes, or methods to obtain hidden skills or items among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of virtual books.
This meant there were quite a few cases where such hints were hidden throughout.
Of course, there were also useless hidden histories and hidden stories.
For the average Korean gamer, hidden stories were useless Easter eggs that didn’t help with spec improvement at all.
‘The method of analysis is relatively simple.’
Though a bit troublesome, finding hidden books was simple.
First filter by plausible-sounding names, then check if the book contains a basic worldview and feels like it was written by a person.
Of course, there were perverted developers who put secret codes in cookbooks and such, but if there were such things, it would be better to just give up cleanly.
Books directly scanned from reality?
You could tell quickly because proper nouns not in the game would pop up everywhere.
Usually they just filled space plausibly, so even in a fantasy world, American or European place names would appear randomly.
With AI mass-produced books too, strange points were easily noticeable since they weren’t checked in detail.
Skip all the strange-looking books, and just look for ones that seem to earnestly explain their crafted settings.
It was a bit tedious repetitive work, but anyway time wasn’t that valuable at this tutorial stage.
If there really was an Easter egg, that would be lucky, and if not, it wasn’t much of a loss.
‘I thought it was a winner from the start.’
「Lenoa: The Forgotten Magic Kingdom.」It was a book with a plausible title.
When I asked the elf librarian, they said it was a somewhat prominent magic kingdom that fell during the Second War something something with foreign gods blah blah.
The place names matched with this world.
Plus the setting of a fallen kingdom with some apparent story.
Whether early or late, main story or side story, wasn’t it a common setting perfect for something like ‘hidden royal family dungeon’?
It meant it was a rice-soup-like setting that developers and players could easily and comfortably understand.
Moreover, reading the beginning parts, it strongly felt like it was written by a person, or at least AI-written with human editing.
I felt it was important and read it all but.
‘…It was just a history book.’
It even said that 10 years ago, an archaeologist named Alteit excavated Lenoa ruins buried in the desert. Meaning Elysium’s Schliemann had already dug everything up.
Though I couldn’t be certain, it didn’t feel like it would even serve as a preview for late-game dungeons, let alone contain Easter eggs.
Still, there were other books about Lenoa like 「Lenoa: The Mysterious Desert Kingdom」「Treasures of Lenoa」so I had some hope, but they were also just historical accounts.
‘They even matched up historical events and chronologies…’
This was discovered through cross-verification.
Not just books filling space, but the contents written inside matched with each other.
Moreover, the authors and writing styles of the books were all slightly different.
It was like different authors interpreting Egyptian history in their own way.
Not just Lenoa, but other history books were the same.
The books in this library weren’t simply game props, but were detailing the world’s background setting.
An obsession with detail bordering on madness.
Thanks to this, it felt like studying another country’s history.
Even just in the E and D sections I was allowed access to, there seemed to be well over thousands of such books at a glance.
Though not that large compared to a real library, if each book here had different authors and contents but all explained one worldview.
‘Crazy bastard.’
It meant they had put this game’s entire worldview into a library location that didn’t even seem to have high user traffic.
At this level, you can only admire it.
Honestly, while J-RPGs weren’t really my taste, and I was honestly angry enough to kill someone for being forcibly dragged here and forced to participate in this dangerous game.
‘With this level of effort.’
For a game with this much dedication put into it, it made me want to just go along with it.
If they put this much effort from the beginning, it was true that I was looking forward to seeing the quality of the middle and late game.
If it weren’t a matter of life and death, I might have enjoyed it as a gamer too.
“…Anyway, I should give up on finding Easter eggs in this library.”
I sighed looking at the pile of books beside me.
Even if there really were Easter eggs among these many books, with each book being this dense, it wouldn’t be easy to find.
It meant having to look through all those enormous numbers of books… it wasn’t an amount I could look through before leaving here in 2 weeks.
Actually, given the library’s classical atmosphere, it felt like there could be one or two.
Still, it would be a loss to spend unlimited time as a resource on something that might or might not exist, and even if it did exist, might or might not be useful to me.
It was more irritating that EXP increased by just a tiny bit, as if this counted as some kind of training too.
‘…Still, since they seem to have put effort into the setting, it might be good to know the basic worldview.’
Since there’s no internet search here, we can’t look things up whenever unknown things come up in conversation.
It would be a shame to miss important plot points because we didn’t notice them.
‘…Is this what I gained?’
Actually, there wasn’t much to say I gained.
I had only grasped their existence.
「Keltain, the Lost City of Gold」「Barus, the Sky City」「Uadan, the Underwater City」「Tomb of Borjigin」.
These were definitely treated as legends rather than history.
Things likely to appear as dungeons later.
I memorized their approximate locations too.
However, perhaps wanting to authenticate that human history existed even in places invaded by foreign gods, the sky city Barus and underwater city Uadan were in the western region of the Elysium continent currently occupied by foreign gods.
Meaning even if they were hidden dungeons, they were end-game dungeons.
From comparing past maps, the legendary golden city Keltain was in the Great Forest, while the Tomb of Borjigin was in a desert region called Carchemish, which was part of the Atep Kingdom that supposedly succeeded Lenoa and the Hidant Kingdom famous for making quality weapons.
‘Let’s just remember it for now.’
Maybe visit once if it overlaps with growth progression later.
‘Then next…’
I turned my attention from the pile of books stacked with history books explaining this game’s world setting to another direction.
「Characteristics of Dungeons」「Recommended Skills for Swordsmen」「Adventurer’s Guild Recommended Useful Skills Top 100 – Continental Calendar Year 3712 Edition」「Priest’s Prayer」「Skill Trends – Continental Calendar Year 3703 Edition」and so on.
If even the history books that were mere setting play had this much completeness, these kinds of help guides and tips must be quite detailed too.
Of course, skill compositions and items recommended in help guides were rarely actually useful in practice, but it would be better than knowing nothing.
But still…
“…I’ll look at them tomorrow.”
The other mage users who had been reading books had all disappeared at some point.
After reading books for nearly 10 hours straight, I was too tired.
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I love his detailed analysis of the game through a pro gamers lens.