first and foremost, un-skew and scan the QR code in the image, which will read "read the end of my days"
the filename of the image is named "mydays". open up with notepad and find some trailing data at the end of the file
use brainfuck to decode the text after "IEND"
the resulting output will give v.gd/xGi4Dn, which will lead to an imgur link
un-distort the QR code and scan it, which will scan to gather.rar
gather.rar contains two files: do.png and ordermethenconvert.txt. let's focus on the latter first
the text file contains five long hex strings. as the filename suggests, it tells you to order them first
the first six characters in each hex string correspond to a background color in levels 2-6
the order will correspond to the order used in the image (top to bottom).
for the first step of the image, you will need to generate QR codes from the words in each level's URL.
sometime later after the puzzle's release, a comment was added to this level's source code, indicating the specific QR code generator that players needed to use due to ambiguity. the four extra pixels show the correct format that you need to use, indicating that you need to use low error correction setting to get the right QR codes.
the next step is to XOR (or take the difference) each of the QR codes with the hex codes. the hex strings can be remade into a 21x21 binary image which can be used for XOR. an example is shown below with one of the hex strings:
take the difference with the QR code generated with "financial" and scan:
0g0r0b000
repeat this with the other 5 hex strings, and then you will have all 5 strings needed for the next step:
0g0r0b000
000rb0g00
0000b0rg0
0b00g000r
0000r0g0b
final step involves extracting the answer. hinted by the length of 9 characters in each string, take the answers of each level and correspond letters using the positions of "r", "g", and "b":
