all,

I've been lurking in the background this time around but have worked through some of the same paths that have already been posted on here. At any rate, I tend to like to facilitate rubber duck debugging on here by producing summaries of what we know when we're stuck, so here goes:

* There are 15 QR codes. They appear to be text adventure room descriptions. Speculation is that they will be clues to other rooms in the text game. Many of them correspond to components of the Porto Alchemica (which I suspect will be important later). There is a reference to Mechanica Mathematica that doesn't seem to lead anywhere.

* One QR is a URL to a text adventure game that wants a keypad entry. Other items in the game don't seem relevant at this point (shirt, shoes, jacket, etc). A small amount of interaction is possible but we are pretty much stuck in a cell with a keypad.

* The QR codes have three different patterns of 4 or 6 gold dots around them. It's not clear what, if anything, this means.

* The tan squares make a non-compliant Aztec code (specifically, it is missing targeting pixels in the upper right of the interior square). Some attempts have been made to use the Aztec decoding algorithm by hand since the upper left portion of the code is all that should matter (the rest is CRC), but it didn't lead to a meaningful outcome. That said, Aztec decoding is voodoo magic so someone else might have better luck.

* Each Aztec pixel has a triangle and an orange dot. There are 26 unique combinations of dots + triangles (9*3 - 1 combo which never used), which seems to imply a basic alphabetical substitution cipher.
** Straightforward mappings combining dots and triangles (e.g., upper left dot + upper left triangle position == A, etc) don't cause anything to jump out for any of several 'normal' orderings of dots and triangles. If this is the mapping I would strongly suggest that the bottom right triangle is T-Z since that triangle is missing a dot in the bottom right position. Performing this mapping results in poor frequency analysis results. My suspicion is that a mapping like this is correct and that we need to understand which letters we need to extract from the grid, and in which order. "The journey inward begins here" may imply reading inwards, and the use of a 2 layer Aztec code might imply in a counterclockwise spiral.
** Other approaches to substitute letters have been promising but have gotten nowhere. Pigpen does not map well. The phone keypad is an interesting approach and results in slightly nicer frequency analysis but you can only do it if you do things like arbitrarily throw out Q and Z, and we haven't had any hints to try to map this to anything having to do with a phone. Also, I find it very hard to ignore the fact that there are 26 combinations of dot + triangle, which keeps me not wanting to jump away from a more straightforward substitution approach.

* Brown/green areas outside the Aztec code area. Unclear if they mean anything or are just art. (There was a LOT of 'just art' in earlier OP games.)

* The image is hosted on an image zoom service. Component image files do not have any EXIF clues. Neither does the map that you can download from the text adventure game.

* In the past there have been two things in the first puzzle step - proof of prize in the form of a public bitcoin address, and a hint leading to the next step. So it's useful to keep in mind that at any point we might encounter both, and that may be leading to confusion now.