Kyo took off his gaming helmet and returned to the real world.
In the real world, he was just a very ordinary unemployed young man.
As for why he was so strong in the game world.
Kyo felt that this kind of thing really came down to talent.
In full-dive games, since players personally participated in battle inside the game.
Basically, players who played this type of game all year round could really learn a thing or two in reality.
Kyo had learned so much that he had already grown tired of it, because of all the high-intensity PVP battles in online games during his early years.
"So... what should I do today?"
Kyo slumped on the sofa in a lazy sprawl and scrolled through messages on his phone.
Now he had once again fallen into an extreme state of game burnout.
Kyo remembered Carl's final hint, took out his phone, and began searching on a video site using the keywords Oath and hidden gameplay.
Because Oath's launch hype was indeed explosive, he quickly found a whole pile of related videos.
After all the reward content in Oath had been farmed clean, the game became too boring, and players were making their own fun in this game out of pure misery.
Putting aside strange claims like chairs can actually be sat on, there were also things like race tests to see which character ran the fastest.
Using ice-attribute characters to freeze the lake surface and see whether they could run from one side of the lake to the other.
Using characters with flight abilities to challenge how far they could fly from the highest point on the map, and so on.
Kyo only saw a group of players driven mad by the boredom of the game's content drought.
"How am I supposed to endure the remaining twenty-plus days..."
The twenty-plus days Kyo mentioned referred to the time until Oath's Version 1.1 update.
To be honest... Kyo really liked the world of Oath.
That feeling of freely exploring a single-player open world, not needing to scheme against other players, and leisurely searching for rewards.
He really wanted to keep playing in the world of Oath.
But Oath just happened to stop letting him play. There was no content left for him to play!
If he wanted to continue playing new content, he could only wait until the Version 1.1 update more than twenty days later.
"...If only there were a time machine. Or I could just sleep straight until the day Version 1.1 updates?"
This kind of thought from Kyo was very common among most mobile game players who had just encountered a game they really liked.
Just as Kyo was about to be driven mad by this dull and boring content drought.
He finally came across a video that made his eyes light up and made him sit up to watch.
"The Real Hidden Gameplay You Might Have Missed in Oath! Oath Cards Gameplay Video, Unlock Guide Included!"
Uploader, MiMiMio.
At first glance, Kyo thought this video might just be some gimmick.
But after watching only ten minutes, he could confirm that even if Oath Cards were taken out of this game as an independent game, it would still be a very interesting card game.
Along with that, Kyo was angered by Mio's several embarrassing moves in the gameplay video.
Things like randomly buying Relic items, recklessly raising the stakes only to run into a boss she could not beat at all and die on the spot. Those blood-pressure-spiking moments made people want to jump into the video, drag her off the card table, and play it themselves.
Kyo no longer cared about eating his group-buy meal. He directly launched Oath!
He rushed to the underground laboratory at the fastest speed and, following Mio's tutorial, directly kicked open the door to Carl's room.
"Welcome..." Seeing how eager Kyo was, Carl decided to skip the nonsense.
Carl pulled out the joker from a deck of playing cards and said to Kyo.
"Let the duel begin."
Kyo was not much of a talker either. After Carl directly started a round of Oath Cards for him, he threw himself straight into his first Oath Cards duel.
Then... Kyo discovered that he really had found a time machine!
Even this strongest player in Oath became immersed in the addictive experience of Oath Cards.
After Carl swallowed several Sacred Contract Stones and raised his data volume to over two thousand, he could support Kyo, Mio, and several other players playing Oath Cards twenty-four hours a day.
Kyo also regained the feeling from back then. Aside from eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom, the first thing he wanted to do after opening his eyes every morning.
Was to open that game as fast as possible, then play it like crazy with that sense of immersion and thrill.
Just like that, Kyo spent a full six days in Oath Cards without sleeping or resting.
During these six days, whenever he logged into Oath, aside from doing daily missions, all the remaining time was spent playing cards.
During this time, Kyo tried every style in Oath Cards. The most basic flushes, straights, pairs, high cards, and other pure card-playing styles.
There were also more advanced styles like stealing cards, stuffing junk into the opponent's deck, using various negative effects, and even not playing cards at all, directly using Relic effects to beat people up.
Even though Carl had already designed the styles in Oath Cards to be as varied as possible, at its core, it was still a playing-card matching game.
The game's upper limit was still a little too low. Finally, on the morning of the last day, after Kyo used one final bizarre style to clear the highest difficulty of Oath Cards.
All the content in Oath Cards had been played clean by Kyo. He had reached the end.
Just as Carl was hesitating over whether to update some new styles or make an entirely new game for Kyo to experience...
Something happened on Mio's side again.
Carl could only switch his attention and place his main focus on the worldline on Mio's side.
"Damn Oath officials! Do they really need to be this petty?!"
Mio had naturally cleared Oath Cards these past few days as well, so she had been recommending Oath Cards everywhere during this time.
Originally, Mio's recommendation process had gone quite smoothly, and the view count of her gameplay video had also been steadily increasing.
Recently, the number of players who came to Carl to play cards had also broken past one hundred.
But for some reason, Oath's official side suddenly contacted the video site today, took down Mio's gameplay video, and kicked Mio out of the official game group.
Along with that, Oath's official community also completely banned all discussion of anything related to Oath Cards.
"Isn't this a mini-game mode they made themselves? Why are they not even letting people mention it?"
Mio had originally been happily watching her view count grow every day, and was even thinking that she might be able to become a part-time gaming content creator in the future.
In the end, Oath's official side banned it just like that, without giving any reason at all.
"Miss Player, I said before... Oath Cards itself has nothing to do with the game Oath. I only chose this name for convenience."
"This is a game I personally made. It has nothing to do with Oath's official side," Carl somewhat helplessly reminded Mio again about his relationship with Oath's official side.
"Then... then... then they still don't need to ban players from experiencing the game you made, right?" Mio still did not understand what Oath's official side was doing.
In Mio's eyes, Oath Cards had truly saved the lives of content-drought players like them.
The game officials should be thanking Carl!
Without consuming any resources themselves, interesting gameplay content had automatically grown out of the game community.
If Mio were part of Oath's official side, she would absolutely promote the Oath Cards mode heavily.
She would even make a special event to let all players across the server experience such an interesting mini-game.
In the end, Oath's official side was great. Not only did they not promote it, they even banned all the content.
Because Carl had played far too many games and had seen far too many god-tier disaster game operations, he remained very calm.
"You can't use ordinary people's thinking to guess what game operations are thinking. Mobile game operations, no... across all game operations, there are far too many legendary weirdos."
"Sometimes you don't even know what they're thinking. They make so many foolish decisions, then after being overwhelmingly cursed out by players, they come out and pretend to listen while apologizing."
"As for those who fake an apology and then refuse to change afterward, there are countless examples."
Although Carl said this, after briefly thinking for two or three seconds, he still quickly guessed what Oath's official side was trying to do.
Then Carl directly told Mio his opinion.
"I think the reason they banned Oath Cards is because they don't want veteran players like you to continue occupying Oath's server bandwidth."
Carl's guess was most likely true, because Oath's client was cloud gaming only.
That meant all the data in Oath was calculated through the cloud and would not be downloaded locally to the player.
After all, with the realism of the Elysium engine, if players really had to download the Oath client, it would probably be measured in tens of thousands of gigabytes, or if using a more niche term, yottabytes.
No personal computer in the real world could carry that terrifying amount of data.
This caused Oath's server bandwidth to actually be a very precious resource.
Most likely, Oath's official side's largest expense was renting Elysium's servers.
So...
"You veteran players who have already cleared all the game content, still refuse to log off, do not spend money, and play cards here every day wasting game bandwidth are the least valuable existences to Oath."
"To put it simply... you veteran players have already become the biggest obstacle to Oath's development." Carl's words made Mio so angry that she nearly turned red with rage.
(To be continued.)