Chapter 247: The Ice Age

With these words, Spades closed the door and by the time Bai Liu opened it again, he had disappeared into the snow.

...... This is probably meant to be a fair fight with him?

Bai Liu raises an eyebrow, closes the door, squeezes his frozen fingertips, gathers up his rashers, and turns to see Tang Erda and the others.

Tang Erda, also dressed in a heavy rash jacket, exhales a puff of white air as she opens her mouth, "- the power is off in the house, we need to have the insulation system turned on, or we'll all freeze to death."

"Do you know how to overhaul it?" Bai Liu asks.

Tang Erda nodded: "I've trained in similar extreme conditions and I can use all the basic equipment, but I have to go outside to check it out, and it's so windy here that I need someone to hold my safety rope, otherwise I'll get blown away by the wind."

"I'll follow you." Mu Sicheng dryly draped himself in protective clothing.

The two men moved quickly to tighten their safety ropes around their waists, opened the door to the room and, after a few hard moves in the wind and snow that raged so hard they could barely close the door, headed outside.

Shortly afterwards, Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda returned with their safety ropes and Bai Liu, who was guarding the door, immediately closed the door.

Mu Sicheng's teeth chattered as he tried to remove the safety rope from the hook next to the door, but his hands were too cold to do so, and it was Muke who helped him to do so.

"It's ...... so nasty cold!" Mu Sicheng was so cold that his feet were jumping and he was huffing and puffing into his hands, trying to warm himself up.

Bai Liu noticed that Mu Sicheng had simply gone outside, and in less than ten minutes, his hands were already frozen red and purple, and his knuckles could not be bent, they looked like a gangrenous piece of flesh.

It was only when the light bulbs came back on in the room, in turn, that Bai Liu could really see where they were.

In front of us is a very narrow and low ventilation tunnel, the walls are made of sturdy assembly shed panels, a material normally used to build temporary accommodation on construction sites, with bright incandescent light bulbs hanging overhead, and the windows on either side of the walls are sealed around the perimeter, so that through the half-frozen windows you can see the snowstorm that is constantly howling outside.

At the end of the airway, a sign is pinned on a crooked wall and reads: "Edmund South Pole Station".

Bai Liu looked at the sign for a few seconds, and he looked down and opened his system panel, on which was a sliver of notifications he hadn't checked yet.

[System Alert: Welcome players to the game Ice Age]

[System Alert: Player has obtained the main game quest - Global Warming]

[Game Background Tip: A year ago, a sudden and never-ending snowstorm swept across the globe from Antarctica, accompanied by lower temperatures, shifting ocean currents, and thickening cloud cover, among other meteorological issues, and everywhere began to freeze over ......]

[...... The Antarctic ice cap seems to have turned into a pervasive disease that is beginning to spread around the world, with meteorologists claiming that we have been forced into another major ice age since the fourth ice age by some force majeure, with unsuspecting humans dying in large numbers due to food shortages and excessive cold weather... ...]

[Then all scientific research on the Antarctic is forced to stop, and you, an explorer with insider information, are told that it's all connected to a shady scientific research campaign on the Antarctic, and you, keen to explore, gather your team and, with funding from the United Antarctic Glacier Company, travel to the Antarctic to discover the cold secrets beneath the layers of ice].

[You arrive at the South Pole by plane, but get lost in a blizzard. In an emergency, you find this abandoned observatory in the snow and force your way in to escape the blizzard].

[- Please remember, players, that you are a great explorer! Please be brave enough to explore and discover to find out the truth and make the globe warm again!

[Current progress on main quest: 0%]

[Player's current location: Edmond Antarctic Polar Observatory Scientific Research Station]

By this time Mu Sicheng had also finished reading the introduction to the game and couldn't resist saying, "What is this? Isn't the real world going through global warming? What the hell is an ice age?"

Liu Jiayi, who is more sensitive to the temperature than Bai Liu, a child, found all sorts of clothes to wrap herself up like a ball as soon as she entered the game.

She read through this game description and wrinkled her brow as she warned, " Bai Liu, the game pool simulates a league, in the game pool our shop trading system is closed and we can't buy any items from the shop, if this is the background, food and warm clothing are the first things we need to address."

"Otherwise we won't be able to stay for more than a few days before we have to take it all in and voluntarily quit from this game."

Bai Liu couldn't agree more with Liu Jiayi as he nodded and gave the order, " Muke to search the warehouse for food stocks, Tang Erda and Mu Sicheng to overhaul the building and base our expedition on it, Jiayi and I to go to the control room to see if there is a black box or a diary to record what happened here a year ago. What happened here a year ago."

"Good ok got it!"

After the men had been ordered to disperse, Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi searched for the base's control room - luckily it was not particularly large and they soon found it.

Unfortunately the door to the control room was open and it was filled with snow, which is now slowly melting under the blowing of the restored warm air system.

Liu Jiayi rubbed his hands together as he looked at the frosty and snowy console and sighed in old age: "Looks like the black box will have to wait for Tang Erda and the others to come and see if they can overhaul it."

Bai Liu half-crouched down, he put on his gloves and took a chisel and started pounding away at the cracks in the drawers - they were also sealed solid with frozen ice, which had to be cleared out before the drawers could be opened.

The ice was not so thickly frozen in these areas that Bai Liu chiselled it twice before the whole thing fell off.

Bai Liu pulls open the stumbling and shaking drawer, which is not covered in accumulated dust, but rather in a light layer of condensed snow, which, when brushed away, reveals a number of black notebooks.

Bai Liu's common sense dictates that in horror games, such books are usually used to give the plot, which means that there must be a diary or something in it.

But the moment he turned it over, it was fixed.

Liu Jiayi, who was looking through other drawers, saw Bai Liu holding a book still, and curiously poked his head over: "This book has something at first glance, why don't you say something? ......"

The moment Liu Jiayi saw the contents of Bai Liu's book, she too paused subtly.

The book is neat and flowing, all in English print.

And Bai Liu as a social animal, although in doing horror games will encounter a lot of English reading, but that is relatively simple, and read this kind of large, dense, but also mixed with a lot of professional vocabulary of the English research diary ......

Bai Liu closed the book with a straight face: "Show it to Muke later, I can't read it."

Also unreadable Liu Jiayi: "......"

Although sensibly she knew that it was a normal thing for Bai Liu to not be able to read, after all intelligence and language skills are not the same thing, but why did she find it so strange ......

The Edmond Observatory is not large and has four floors.

The ground floor is the reserve area, fuel food fresh water and outfitting are stored in different stores on this floor, wrapped in layers of plastic sheeting, and the two helicopter hangars are exposed outdoors and simply sheltered by a shed.

The first floor is the living area with a sauna, dining room, office area and a few computers that have been there for who knows how long.

The third and fourth floors are all dormitories, or living quarters, and are very cramped, with less than five square metres crammed hard into two bunk beds, a shrinking warmth in the crush.

Judging from the dormitories and accommodation, the entire base must have held around eighty to a hundred people, and it should have been quite crowded with the usual occupants, but now the place was empty and there was an eerie sense of bustle.

Liu Jiayi's gaze swept over the frozen noodles on the table, the half-cut, mouldy potatoes on the counter, and the gas switch that had been turned up to high heat.

"The people here should have left in a hurry." She jumped to conclusions.

Bai Liu comes around the corner from the third floor, finely correcting Liu Jiayi's theory: "- or tied up and walked in a hurry."

Liu Jiayi looks up.

Bai Liu waved a pair of pants and socks in his hand, "I found them by the bed in the dormitory, I don't think anyone would panic and run outdoors without even wearing them in this cold weather."

Liu Jiayi questioned, "Is it possible that these people were frightened by something and ran away without even wearing clothes?"

"Not likely." Muke, who had finished checking the warehouse, came up the corner staircase from the ground floor and looked over at Liu Jiayi, "I just went to see their showroom. The Edmond Observatory is staffed by professional mountaineers, firefighters, and fairly trained scientific researchers, who have received a lot of glory and have been tested in all sorts of extreme scenarios. It's hard to scare them all like that."

Muke said, glancing at the food that was only half moved.

"They should know very well that running out of here without taking anything is no different from getting killed."

Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda came down from the rooftop on the fourth floor, where they had just gone to overhaul the radio set-up.

Mu Sicheng was so cold that his cheeks turned blue, and when he came down, he found a dormitory and huddled under the blanket and started shivering like crazy.

Tang Erda looked a little better, but when he removed his gloves, Bai Liu saw that a bloody patch of skin had been glued to the palm of his hand, and the bloody wound was exposed to the air, but not a drop of blood had escaped.

Because it was so cold, the blood clotted.

Tang Erda noticed Bai Liu's gaze and explained, "The set-up table was too cold and there was no way to adjust the tight equipment through my gloves, so I took them off and touched it -"

"- and then a piece of skin glued off by the metal on top?" Bai Liu took up the second half of the sentence.

Liu Jiayi took the antidote spray and sprayed it on Tang Erda's hand. The wound slowly healed, but Mu Sicheng, who was cold and dying on the bed, did not get better and looked more out than in.

The antidote heals the wound, but not the cold.

"I saw the weather thermometer outside." Tang Erda shook his recovered hand as he gazed up at Bai Liu with stony eyes, "--Fifty degrees below zero, this extreme weather can't stay long, we'll freeze to death soon, we need to exit quickly- - "The Game ......

By this time Muke, who was looking at the black leather book Bai Liu had handed him, turned blue for a moment and interrupted Tang Erda with a shudder: "- this Edmond Observatory studies the body parts sent to it by the Bureau of Heresy."

Tang Erda's heart jumped and she denied it without thinking: "No way, the Heresy Authority's stuff is regulated by convention and is not to be used by any country for economic, military, cultural or political research, the only purpose of the Heresy Authority's research is for internment!"

"With the men from Zone 3 meeting them over here and the five Zone 1 escorts, there's no way they're going to let anyone else come in and work on Heretic Authority stuff!"

Muke exhaled a long breath, the vapour frosting his eyes with an unreadable expression, and his voice was soft.

"What if I told you that the plane carrying the corpse heretics crashed on arrival at the South Pole and the five escorts on board died violently on the spot?"