Chapter 251: The Ice Age

Bai Liu gave Muke his diary when he came out.

The Joint Experiment Data Report, a series of texts searched by the Observatory, and a basic textbook Muke retrieved from the cabin of one of the Observatory's graduate students, all of which he needed to understand to read in order to understand the rest of the material.

Bai Liu asked, "How long will it take you to finish it?"

Looking at the thick pile of books and the various specialist materials in front of him, which was tantamount to asking Muke to study a subject all over again, he took stock and replied seriously, "It will take about three or four days."

Bai Liu nodded knowingly, "How much food is left at this observatory?"

Muke replied, "After the expired and spoiled ones, there are still about 70 kilograms of food left, which is about fifteen days of food consumption for one person at about one kilogram a day."

"Then we'll have to leave before you've finished translating." Bai Liu thought for a moment, and simply decided, "It's not possible to take a snowmobile, the speed is too slow, the Tarzan station is more than a thousand kilometres away, the average speed of a snowmobile is only thirty to forty kilometres per hour, to make a round trip it's not possible to get down without thirty odd days, the food and fuel can't withstand the consumption, it's better to go by helicopter."

Tang Erda frowned: "But if it's a helicopter flying hard, it's easy to get into trouble in this weather."

"I know." Bai Liu gave Tang Erda a faint look, "Don't forget that our game identity is set to be a group of [avid explorers], and we're not going to pursue a safer way to travel, especially one that's more likely to wear us out."

Tang Erda paused and stopped talking - his approach was more realistic as an observer, not an explorer, but this was a game.

The game does not need to be realistic.

Bai Liu looked around the room, "Any other objections?"

No one answered.

Bai Liu ordered methodically, " Mu Sicheng hauled food and fuel to the plane, Tang Erda repaired the helicopter and snowmobile, Muke and Liu Jiayi prepared a week's worth of food for the observation post and stocked it near the cabin, a week's worth of food in the snowmobile, and if we weren't back in a week, you drove to the nearest other observation post. If we are not back within a week, you will drive to the nearest other observation post and remember to keep your guns in the car and in the cabin."

The first thing you need to do is to get out of here. Escape ......"

"We'll bring a satellite phone on the helicopter and contact us back in time if anything happens."

Bai Liu shook the satellite phone in his hand, "But by the game's usual design, there's a ninety-five percent chance that our phone will be lost, so all the plans that follow will be plotted separately according to the different scenarios before and after we're lost ...... "

One hour later.

Bai Liu, dressed in a thick winter suit, a down liner, waist and knee pads and a pair of spiked shoes for walking and climbing on the ice, leans over the edge of the helicopter and waves to Liu Jiayi and Muke below, closing the outer door of the helicopter.

Tang Erda sits in the driver's seat debugging the data on the dashboard, with food parcels piled high on the back seat.

Mu Sicheng had difficulty stretching his limbs in the middle of this pile of packages and had to use his firearm to make a small space for himself.

The paddle spins up into the air with a loud noise and Bai Liu withdraws his prying eyes, moves his cold, stiff fingers and exhales a frosty white breath.

"Put on dark goggles." Tang Erda warns from the front seat, "to prevent snow blindness, and also if any part of your body appears to be cold to the point of unconsciousness, make sure you cover it up in time to keep it warm, otherwise the formation of blood clots in the blood over time can lead to stiff limbs that have to be amputated to be saved."

Mu Sicheng was so cold that he was wobbling madly, and his voice was shaky as he spoke, rubbing his hands together desperately: "No. Didn't I bring Liu Jiayi's antidote? Can't you cure this frostbite?"

Liu Jiayi filled a bottle of antidote for each of the three of them.

"Yes, you can." Bai Liu looked askance at Mu Sicheng, "but only if you're cold enough to drop in vitality for the antidote to take effect - by which time you'll probably be frozen into unconsciousness."

"......" Mu Sicheng wanted to cry, "I fucking hate Antarctica!"

The plane had to make two forced landings in the middle of a blanket of snow because the wind was too strong.

Tang Erda had the foresight to replace the helicopter's landing gear with a sled type, where the risk of landing and taking off would be lower.

But the biggest problem with helicopter landings and take-offs is not on the landing gear, or even in the wind, but on the ice - it is the ice crevasses that are the biggest threat to helicopter landings and take-offs.

If the helicopter had stopped on an ice crevasse there would have been a high risk of fatalities, but bizarrely Bai Liu was lucky enough to have no ice crevasses on either of their stops and they were able to get close to Tarzan Station in half a day.

Bai Liu requested a third landing with a dozen kilometres to go - this time there were still no ice crevasses, even after Bai Liu himself went down to check them out and walked around randomly, but no ice crevasses were found.

Although Tang Erda had told Bai Liu that ice crevasses on the ice weren't so common that he could just walk in them, there was one factor he forgot to consider - that this was a game and Bai Liu was the player with a 0 luck value in this game.

It's only normal that an ice rift should just be everywhere for players set up like him.

But since Bai Liu entered the game, he has not met him once.

Bai Liu tilted his head and, with the aid of binoculars, he could see a Tarzan station perched far above the shimmering horizon of the snowfields, and he could faintly see lights coming through the windows of the observatory and light smoke and heat rising from the few chimneys on the roof.

This made him narrow his eyes, "There's someone in Tarzan Station."

"Is that why you decided to land here?" Tang Erda looked sideways at Bai Liu and asked for his next instructions, "Should we just go in or?"

"No go straight in, look for any ice crevices around here, especially where I've been walking." Bai Liu turned his head to look at the ground, the colour of the snow reflecting darkly in his eyes through his goggles, "- Captain Tang, if there were ice crevices in these areas originally, is there any way to make them disappear? "

Tang Erda was stunned: "If it was man-made, we could fill it with snow and then pour water on top to solidify the ice, but the workload is so great that it would take hours to fill a 20-metre deep crack in the ice, and staying out in such cold weather for a few hours would probably freeze people to death, and there's also the effect of the gale, so no one is doing it at all ......"

"What if what's filling these ice cracks isn't afraid of the cold at all?" Bai Liu asked nonchalantly and rhetorically, crouching down on one foot and flexing his fingers on the ice with his hand outstretched, "I remember we brought sensors that can detect images hundreds or thousands of metres below this ice, right?"

Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda took the hydraulic hammer and sensors off the helicopter and placed them several hundred metres around the helicopter's landing site, following the instructions Muke had translated for them.

With the slight beeping of the sensor, the image is returned as a CT-like image of the cross-section of the ice surface on the visual dial of the instrument, getting deeper and deeper.

The image on the cross-section reached a point where, as if it had detected something strange and different from rock and ice, it emitted a sharp alarm of measurement anomalies, and then the next image that came back took a cold breath and chilled Mu Sicheng's body even further.

Various scattered human silhouettes appear on the image, struggling beneath the ice in oddly twisted positions, limbs broken and bent back, heads and necks crooked and flattened, waists and bellies looking even more twisted at a hundred and eighty degrees, like frogs that have been cut open for experimentation, their spines severed and flipped over and nailed to a wooden board.

These people were thrown into the ice chasm and buried in snow as if they had been subjected to some horrific experiment followed by useless experimental waste - the ice chasm was their experimental waste ground and graveyard.

Even if the sensors can't send back a clear image of their faces, Mu Sicheng can imagine their agonised expressions.

There are several 'humanoid frogs' in relatively good shape, most likely still alive when they were thrown into the ice crevice, and the silhouette shows that they are still trying to climb upwards, with their arms and legs in a very hard climbing position.

But before they could climb up, they were frozen to death in the ice when they were still about fifteen metres from the surface.

This reminded Mu Sicheng of the ghost story Tang Erda had told him again, and he couldn't help but cover himself tightly with his shirt and lean a little closer to Bai Liu, who had an unruffled expression next to him: "...... Do you think this is the Tai Shan Observatory crew? "

"Can't be sure." Bai Liu's eyes rested on the dashboard, "It may or may not be there."

Mu Sicheng asks, "What does ...... mean?"

"The numbers don't add up." Bai Liu nodded at the oddly shaped black figures, "There are already over a hundred of them here alone, more than in the whole of Tarzan Station."

Bai Liu looks at Mu Sicheng for a moment: "And there are still people in the Taishan station, so there are two possibilities -"

"One is that here, as at Edmond Observatory, there was some scientist with a gun and a strong suspicion who, because he felt that the others were mentally unbalanced and aggressive and difficult to control, disposed of all the others at the Observatory, and later those who came to Tarzan Station for help, and then dumped them here. "

Mu Sicheng gulped and nervously pursued the question, "And, what about the other possibility?"

Bai Liu moved his eyes back to the dashboard, "There is also the possibility that all the people in Tarzan Station died, that some monster left them here after conducting brutal exploration experiments on them, and that these monsters are still occupying and running Tarzan Station."

Mu Sicheng couldn't resist asking, "But with over a hundred bodies here, didn't you say there were more than the total number of people at Tarzan Station? And what are those extra ones?"

Bai Liu replied glibly, "The monsters themselves, of course."

"?!" Mu Sicheng was startled and after a two second hesitation he reacted creepily, "You mean these monsters can turn into people?!"

Bai Liu said, "It seems that the monster we are facing this time not only has a strong ability to learn to differentiate, adapt to its environment, and the cunning to disguise itself as a human to use to deceive and capture its prey, but also has a certain tendency to be superior and kill each other ......"

He smiled up with interest, "Wow, that sounds almost like an evolved version of humanity."