Chapter 13: Contact

He would submit the list through the proper channels and wait for them to respond. If things went well, they would contact him to fix the critical severity bugs.

He knew and hoped that no one apart from him would be able to fix them since these were the world's top companies. They could afford the best of the best, so if they couldn't, then no one should be able to do so.

Even if they didn't contact him, he would still earn several thousand, if not up to a million dollars from this, and if they contacted him, things would be even better.

Taking his time, Richard reviewed the vulnerabilities within today's target, just as he had done for the past three days. It was another top-ranking company that had spread itself across the entire globe.

Ding!

"Is it?" Richard asked in excitement.

"Dear Richard. Your por… Mtcheew." Richard hissed after reading the new email.

It had been three days since he sent the list to the first company; they should have encountered problems by now.

He knew that the website had said the waiting period was variable depending on how complex the task was, but they should have confirmed the low severity ones by now.

The maximum wait time was about a month, but for Richard, whose food for the next day was uncertain, it felt like forever.

Ding!

A new email arrived, and Richard immediately ran to check it. Thankfully, it was a reply. He wasn't hiding anything, so they had access to his email and even a picture of him since that was what he used for his profile picture. The goal was to be recognized.

<<20/1,000,000>>

"Well, it's working," Richard thought as he opened the message.

It was just as he had expected: the company wanted a solution to some of the high-severity bugs and the critical-severity ones.

A normal person would have thought the critical severity bugs were just a scam, but if all the other ones were actual bugs, then even the densest among them would consider them true.

"... If possible, we would like a Zoom meeting with you tomorrow or whenever you are free. Yes!!" He had done it—they recognized him, which meant that he would be paid handsomely. It also meant no more 'groceries' and 'floating berries'.

"But… a video call? Identity confirmation or something?" Richard asked himself but still shrugged it off.

It didn't matter much to him even if they decided to fly him over to their headquarters. All it would do is add more people to the list of recognition.

"Come to think of it, have I made a video today?" Richard thought before quickly grabbing a clean shirt.

Closing his door to prevent any interruption from the outside, he turned on the most expensive thing he had bought since he began schooling. It was a solar generator—expensive but worth it, considering that it could power all of his gadgets for almost a week without dying.

It was a true lifesaver. With it turned on, the entire room suddenly lit up, revealing his poor decorative tastes and a section of the room that was well-kept.

A table could be seen there and a fancy office chair which he had taken from his family home on his way to school. On the table was a set of electric lamps for lighting that were focused entirely on the table, along with a very expensive webcam.

Richard didn't hesitate or even think about it before he took his laptop and immediately set himself behind the desk. Seconds later, he could be seen doing what looked like breathing exercises for some reason.

"Ready!" he declared to himself before tapping a button on his laptop.

"Good day everyone. I am sorry for starting the livestream late. Today is day 12 of building Oasis from the movie *Ready Player One*," Richard said.

Yes, this was his best way of gaining recognition. Programmers are often viewed as smart people, regardless of their actual intelligence. Intellect and wisdom are two different things that people tend to mistake for each other, but programmers are generally seen as smart.

Hence, he chose the programming path to gain recognition; it was much easier, and depending on the project, you could distinguish yourself among many.

He chose the difficult task of creating the fictional open-world virtual reality massively multiplayer online game known as Oasis for that very reason. Creating an open-world game was as difficult as it could get.

There was a reason why Rockstar Studios spent billions of dollars on new technology just to create their GTA games.

Then there was virtual reality; truthfully, this part could be said to be the easiest part of creating Oasis. Companies had already invested billions of dollars to create rudimentary bases that could be used.

Of course, he wasn't using those; he was creating everything from scratch—well, the people didn't know he was doing so.

Then there was MMO; creating one wasn't difficult, but creating one as massive as Oasis was. The livestream continued for a few hours into the night, with him explaining the lines of code he wrote and answering questions from the few viewers he had.

At the end of the day, another two people were added to the list. With how slow things were going, Richard realized just how difficult this requirement would be to complete.

As for the task of creating Oasis, it was truthfully easy for him, just ridiculously expensive and time-consuming if he did it the normal way. If he created the game with his new programming language, it would only take about three hours of coding but would still be very expensive because he would need servers to carry the load.

"Come to think of it, I need servers as well," Richard realized.

He could create the code on his laptop; it wasn't an issue, but running it would be an issue. Thinking about it for a while, Richard thought it better to create his servers rather than buy one.

Both were expensive, but creating his own would allow him more freedom than using pre-made ones. Of course, this wasn't just about building his servers; he wanted to create the server from scratch.