After leaving Velen City, Pan Long followed the crude map Joseph had drawn. Three days later, he reached the city where that family lived: the Shelter known as Holy Salt.
When he saw the city walls glowing a strange blue-green in the sunlight, and the moat reflecting their color in rippling blue-green light, he had a faint inkling of what world this was.
Once inside the town, surrounded by blue-green at every turn, he grew even more certain of his guess.
"So... it's this world!"
He could not help exclaiming, "No wonder I didn't recognize it earlier. Back when I played this game, I never went beyond the area around the starting village!"
The game was called Soul: Calamity Kingdom. It told the story of adventurers fighting all manner of disasters to save a sealed-off country.
And the blue-green town he now stood in was the game's starting area.
Strictly speaking, the game was not much fun, but it held a bold, indelible place in gaming history—because it was the first true "full-dive" game ever made.
"Full-dive" meant that, while playing, a player's entire consciousness entered the game world, leaving them completely unaware of the outside world.
This gave players an unprecedentedly realistic experience while avoiding some of the safety hazards of traditional VR games.
But full-dive gaming was expensive. Players needed a dedicated gaming pod to play safely. As for the scenarios in some science fiction, where putting on a gaming suit—or even just a simple helmet—was enough to dive in... those were still fantasy, at least up until the time he crossed over.
It had taken humanity more than forty years to go from the first video game to VR games, then nearly a hundred more to go from the first VR game to a full-dive game!
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