Chapter 250: Ice Age

" Muke, you and Liu Jiayi go to the infirmary on the first floor and find out if there are any relevant medical records to see why this group of people are ingesting drugs in such large quantities."

Bai Liu's eyes were deep: "These people should have been of sound mind when they arrived in Antarctica, we need to find out exactly what made them mentally unbalanced."

Muke nodded and led Liu Jiayi down, before he left Bai Liu threw them two guns and three or four boxes of ammunition: "Be careful."

Muke steadily took the gun and the bullets, which he expertly loaded and stuck to his side.

Liu Jiayi is a bit of a handful to use, and although it has been modified, it is still too long and you have to lift your arm to hold it, but it looks like it has the posture.

After all the trials and tribulations, they are now almost all good with guns, not as good as Tang Erda, the marksman, but at least as good as a master marksman.

Even Liu Jiayi is proficient with automatic or semi-automatic firearms, although she uses them sparingly because of their height and powerful recoil, although they are not impossible to use.

But now there was no choice. In this freezing weather, it was better to use the supplies first than to use up one's energy and skills.

Bai Liu led Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda, grabbed their guns, and followed Muke and Liu Jiayi downstairs as they prepared to check out the basement under the helicopter hangar outside the observatory.

The two teams parted on the first floor.

Bai Liu walks up to the front door and sees that it has frosted over again in the space of an hour, with a foamy white conglomerate hanging from the lock handle and a cold, hard texture in his hand.

It is so cold here that the extremely low temperatures and hurricane winds make the shaped snow solidify so quickly that it is not much different from ice in the hand.

Bai Liu moves his gaze to the wind gauge hanging next to the door, which gives the temperature and wind speed outside the window.

[-55.8°C, wind speed 119 kmh, force 12, category 1 hurricane, no going out]

Mu Sicheng, who grew up in the south, had never experienced such bitter cold and the realisation that he was in -50 degrees made him feel even colder, uncomfortable all over his body, as if a cold breeze had been whipped into his bones, sending a chill through him.

But although he had no idea about low temperatures, he was more familiar with typhoons, and Mu Sicheng looked at the category 1 hurricane and said, "Shit? Is it that windy? This is on the coast, tens of kilograms of trees can be blown up ......"

Tang Erda also wrinkled her nose: "You can't fly a helicopter in this extreme weather, you'll get blown into the wind and have an accident, and if you want to go out and find another observation post, you'll have to drive a snowmobile."

Bai Liu didn't comment on the weather as he calmly pushed the door open.

The wind howled and swept in, and there was no light outside the door, only a dense snow that obscured the shimmering light far above, darkening the view as far as the eye could see.

The door was rattling with the wind, a thick layer of snow had built up in the doorway, reaching knee-high, and the wind was blowing in with such force that Tang Erda could not help but raise her hand to cover her eyes and be blown backwards some distance.

"Put on your goggles and sledges!" In the gale Tang Erda had to raise his voice so that the others could hear him and yelled, "Keep your safety lines around your waist and don't get blown off! Watch out for the ice cracks under your feet too! Don't fall in!"

The Antarctic winds can reach speeds of up to 35 metres per second, enough to blow away objects as heavy as ten Tang Erda, but that's not the scariest thing here.

The scariest thing here is the ice crevasse, and no one who has survived in Antarctica would be unafraid of this.

The Antarctic ice is not completely flat, and as the weather temperature changes, the process of melting and reshaping the ice creates many crevasses between the ice and the surface that are over a hundred metres deep, and snowfall covers these crevasses, making them visually invisible and difficult to spot.

This naturally means that it is easy for people to walk on ice or snow and, if they are not careful, to step off and fall.

Tang Erda remembered a story he had heard before when he was over here about a Japanese observer who went out to overhaul equipment and on his way back there was a strong gust of wind and he disappeared

Four days later, the observatory crew found the team member in a shallow ice crevice less than three metres from the entrance.

The missing team member had been frozen alive, his face frosty with snow, his eyes open with resentment as he stared up at the exit of the ice crevice, his ten fingers fractured and turned out, his nails all frozen, scratching out blood and wounds, his incisors half broken from gnawing, his mouth full of blood, the ice stained with some sticky foam of human skin and blood.

And the snow that covered the ice crevice was not thick enough to reasonably be broken free and then climbed out by this team member, who realised this and desperately clawed and gnawed his way through the deep snow cover with his teeth.

It would have been possible for him to have managed to escape.

But on those two days, the members of the Observatory went out particularly heavily in search of the missing team member, and on several occasions snowmobiles were used to run over the crevasse, and this intensive outing soon compacted the snow on the ice crevasse.

And this member of the team watched as these men, under the banner of saving him, turned his only door to life into a cold, dead one, and then trapped and froze to death.

Since then, the Japanese observatory has often had equipment breakdowns on nights when a snowstorm was approaching, and the few members of the team who went out for maintenance said that on their way back, passing the ice crevasse, they could hear people below them viciously, spitefully pleading for help and hissing.

Some of the team members with palpitations said they could hear the frantic scratching of nails and the gnawing sound of teeth clicking beneath the snow, and felt that the next thing inside would be scratching through the ice, grinning spitefully as it came to take him in.

After several more missing overhaul crews, Japan opted for a different observation post as a base camp.

Tang Erda has doubts about the veracity of this story, as the Observatory checks daily for ice crevasses around the area, but it is also through this story that the ice crevasses are remembered.

So when Bai Liu said he was going out, Tang Erda also told the story to Mu Sicheng and Bai Liu in order to alert the group.

After hearing this, Mu Sicheng said: "Fuck it, I don't want to go, you two should go.

It was calmly dismissed by Bai Liu.

The three men staggered in the hurricane, pulling the safety rope around their waists in front and behind them, towards the helicopter hangar, which, fortunately, was not far away and was soon reached. Tang Erda pulled open the flap door and the three men entered the basement in turn.

Mu Sicheng shakes the snow from his body, his teeth chattering: "Damn, the weather has changed so quickly, it wasn't this windy when I was here before!"

"If you stay a little longer, when this wind comes, you don't have anything on you, not a single satellite phone safety rope." Bai Liu looked askance at Mu Sicheng, "...... Maybe the wind will blow you away and you'll get stuck in an ice crevice somewhere ......"

Mu Sicheng: "......"

Grass.

"But this is a game pool, and I can still quit the game!" Mu Sicheng spoke back with a stern, hard voice.

"That's not necessarily true, going out like you did before would never work in this copy." Tang Erda followed with a strong (fearful) tone at Bai Liu's gaze, "The deepest ice chasm here is a hundred meters, and the lowest temperature can reach -89 degrees, fifteen seconds can make you freeze to dull consciousness, and you may not even think about still being able to exit the game before you are frozen to death."

Mu Sicheng: "......"

Grass !!!!

What the hell kind of game is this!!!

The basement that Bai Liu entered had two levels.

The upper floor was for some light experimentation, not much was put in it and it didn't need to be too clean, some sensors, hydraulic hammers and such mean were stacked on this floor and two large vats of pickled cabbage and radishes were placed in the corner.

Tang Erda lifted the cover to take a look, and a foul stench of acidity rose to the sky.

Mu Sicheng's nose twitched uncomfortably - the very low smell was pure, everything was frozen, so this irritating smell was the first he had smelt since coming to this copy.

"It smells like my grandmother's rotten sauerkraut after she failed to make it." Mu Sicheng fights dry heaves and fans his hand in front of his nose.

Tang Erda put down the cover cloth and he looked at Bai Liu with a complicated expression: "This sauerkraut is done Chinese style and the people at Edmond's Observatory shouldn't know how to do it, so it failed to be done and stinks."

"But they would have been guided by someone to think of storing food like that." Bai Liu pondered, "- it seems that the relationship between Tarzan Station and Edmond Observatory is not as rigid as we thought."

Otherwise the people of Tarzan Station would not have instructed each other so kindly on how to make sauerkraut, and such parental intercourse is clearly the anchor of intimacy.

Bai Liu walked around the tank a few times, he looked pensive and seemed to be looking for something.

Mu Sicheng couldn't resist asking, "It's just two vats of sauerkraut, what are you looking at?"

"Looking for a production date." Bai Liu replies blandly.

"?" Mu Sicheng was a bit confused, "Who makes sauerkraut and writes the date it was made? It's a random thing ......"

His words ended abruptly when Bai Liu crouched down by the tank and wiped his hand over a dark muddy spot in the lower left corner.

In the bottom left corner of this pickle jar, a lab label is posted, which neatly states: [10/8, 12.14kg radish].

It was as if they were marking some upcoming experiment.

Mu Sicheng was shocked: "How did you know they had a production date posted?!"

Bai Liu gets up slowly: "This is a laboratory, Edmond is a scientist, he doesn't know how to make sauerkraut, so he put these two vats of sauerkraut here for one purpose - and that is to do an experiment to document the process of fermenting this sauerkraut. "

"And in keeping with this Dr Edmond's rigorous approach to experimentation, he was bound to make some basic notes on such things."

He raised his eyes and smiled, "Like the date."

Tang Erda had already crouched under another sauerkraut vat, carefully rubbing his fingertips around the old one and finding another label in the same place.

"The date of placement here is also August 10th." Tang Erda tilted his head to Bai Liu, but he quickly felt something was wrong and frowned, "The date the plane fell and crashed over here is August 7th, the fax from Tarzan station suggesting Edmond station stole the body parts was sent on August 8th, but this Edmond-- "

"- Does it seem strange to actually toss two vats of sauerkraut on the 10th of August?" Bai Liu asks softly and rhetorically.

Tang Erda's brow was furrowed and he couldn't figure out why.

But Bai Liu didn't mean to answer his doubts either, and continued on towards the sliding doors leading to the second basement level.

Between the first and second basement levels is also a sliding door, which is also apparently frozen, but which Mu Sicheng had cut open when he came down earlier.

The moment he opened it, Bai Liu understood why Mu Sicheng had taken the information and run away.

A thick, strange stench, almost overturning the sky, rushed out, accompanied by a substantial dust and light smoke that poured through the air.

As the heating was restored, the ice prisms at the top of the second basement melted, dripping like stalactites and dropping a murky liquid that flooded the floor, submerging it in a layer of dark grey mud and water, on the surface of which floated a number of slides of unknown creatures and some plastic sealing material.

All in all it doesn't look like a pleasant scene.

Mu Sicheng saw Bai Liu going down without saying a word and warned urgently: "There's water down there! There are rubber boots and gloves by the stairs! Get changed before you go down!"

Bai Liu changed into his rubber boots, pulled down to secure his rubber gloves, grabbed a plastic file bag to shield his head, and walked deep into the second basement.

After descending, the eerie stench intensified, like the fishy odour of some fish freshly salvaged from the depths of the ocean, slippery, slimy, like a sea serpent swimming around Bai Liu in the obscure, dusty air.

The water on the floor is shallow enough to reach the soles of his shoes, and Bai Liu moves with a ripple of water as he bends down to pick up the slides and some materials floating on the surface.

Bai Liu vaguely recognises a few as killer whales, lesser theropods, and several different species of penguin.

The slides floating on the surface are essentially fat and epidermal pressings of these polar animals, and most of the floating material also documents the results of research on these animals.

In the centre of the basement is a wide, heavy writing desk with four microscopes, a box of knocked-over slides in the middle, and two small test tube racks.

In the test tube racks are neatly arranged rows of small test tubes, the surface of the cell fixing solution is slightly frozen and is now slowly melting as the temperature returns, the floating biological tissue inside taking on a peculiar pink colour after being stained.

As it warmed up, the edges of the fleshy tissue began to grow strangely dark, and even some of the tissue in the small test tubes began to wriggle slightly, feeling as if it were coming to life.

Bai Liu scanned the labels attached to the lids of these tubes, all of which read: [Penguin (killer whale, etc.) + unknown organism X free cell mix culture].

And in a pile of flesh that was turning black and writhing, there was a quietly suspended piece of tissue that was unmoving, before and after thawing, and it was that bright red of the freshly cut surface of the creature.

Bai Liu thought he could even see the capillaries on the slices oozing blood and dissipating into the fixative.

He walked over and used two fingers to clip the small test tube out of the test tube rack, which had a label attached to the top lid that was very different from the others and read - [Unknown Creature: X].

The moment this small test tube was removed, the tissue inside the other small test tubes seemed to be violated and the mouth of the test tube instantly erupted with sharp vapours, and the formaldehyde liquid inside was instantly evaporated.

These little pieces of flesh began to divide and grow in some unknown direction, crawling out of the test tube and sticking together, growing in the blink of an eye into a basketball-sized, tentacle-covered, slimy black ball of flesh.

This ball of flesh has the smooth skin of a penguin or killer whale, a mouthful of sharp carnivore teeth, and tumbling newborn tentacles all over the fleshy wings on either side, growing in pulsating bursts.

The tentacles, as if uniting with each other and twisting around each other, sink into the body of this ball of flesh and soon diverge into new tissue - a pair of fishtail-like webbed feet.

The ball of flesh screamed hideously and flung its tentacles towards Bai Liu. Tang Erda, standing at the entrance to the stairs, leaned back as quickly as she could, leaned against the steps to lend a hand, threw up her waist rifle and raised it to her shoulder, put it to her face, aimed and fired.

"Bang Bang!"

Two clean shots and the meatball lay motionless in the muddy water.

Tang Erda lowered her rifle, her breath slightly panting, and solemnly reminded, "I triggered the monster book, this should be one of the monsters in this copy, called Unknown Creature x Contaminant, this is most likely a biochemically contaminated copy, be careful not to run into the contaminant source."

"Okay." Bai Liu returned meekly, backhanding the small test tube in her hand and hiding it in her fanny pack.

Bai Liu finally found what he was looking for in a locked safe - he had Tang Erda break the lock on it with her gun.

Inside is a chronological diary of experiments.

After getting it, Bai Liu emerged from the underground laboratory door, closed it and followed Mu Sicheng, who was reluctant to go down.

Behind them, the pile of creatures that Tang Erda had "killed" began to morph and fuse like asphalt, rapidly reassembling from a pile of non-human looking things, slowly becoming more like a human being, face, features, limbs all appearing on its body.

It is as if it is adjusting its appearance and body, constantly reappearing in three different ways, at one moment with a slightly more robust human body, at another with an elegant and clean look, at another with the shape of a monkey's headphones on its head, and occasionally with eyes that emerge from the "asphalt" in pure curiosity.

Eventually it seemed to decide what it wanted to become, and gradually shed the snake-like black shell of its body in the muddy water, its thin white arms and legs bursting rudely out of the shell.

A naked Bai Liu stumbles to his knees in the muddy water, his eyes open with pure clarity and a high-frequency whale-like cry for a companion in his throat.

Scattered across the water and not taken away by Bai Liu, the photocopies are cluttered with the following inscriptions.

[- Cetacean tissues after mixed suspension culture of unknown organism X cells exhibit plant-like recombinant regenerative properties with minimal regression of differentiation, which can be induced to redifferentiate ......]

[Cells possess high levels of intelligence for individual species, and the differentiated "basketball tentacle-like lower organisms" (later referred to as basketballs) exhibit differentiation across biological categories, including humans, birds, fish, and even ferns and ancient microbes ......]

[Whale cells begin to play a dominant role, producing whale fish habit, growing a smooth layer of epidermal tissue wrapped around the "basketball", cell differentiation gradually tends to normal, differentiation of a week after the cells gradually die ......]

[Whale habit emerges before death, starts molting, after molting ...... my god! It was reborn! It shows a learning nature! It begins to control the direction of its differentiation ...... Oh my god! It started to differentiate in the direction of humans after multiple molts!!!]

[- No, I have to stop the experiment, it's an ethically unacceptable filth, it'll contaminate the human genome!