Great, you made it past the first puzzle, and you are on to success.html. Time to read the instructions again. Note: Not all puzzles have instructions. In fact, most don't. The Bad Trail was purposely made easy so that people would think they were progressing through the stage, while they were really progressing farther away from it :)
Congratulations on making it past the first part. Now, to get to the next part, you must prove that you have a keen sense of replacing one thing with another. Good luck.
Hrm, didn't we just do that? Well, this time there are numbers, so it's different. Let's take a look at what we've got.
49 36 25 144 49 484 1 __ __ __ 225 625 64 289 49
484 289 144 625 196 4 289 361 1.
Very interesting. Now, looking at the numbers, there's something strangely familiar about them... they're all squares! So, figuring out some square roots, we get:
7 6 5 12 7 22 1 __ __ __ 15 25 8 17 7
22 17 12 25 14 2 17 19 1.
Now it's as easy as substituting letters for numbers, right?
Yep, looks good to me. Of course, now is a good time to start ROTating the text. You can try that, but it probably won't get you far. However, think back to when a friend or relative used to bring over those puzzle books with the crosswords, word searches, and CRYPTOGRAMS! If you want to go through it, it's a pretty simple cryptogram, but the decoded answer ends up being:
And, as the old addage goes, the blanks must be P E G. Try peg.html, I think you'll be pleasantly pleased. :) Then, move onto the next part of the tutorial.