Chapter 252: The Ice Age

Mu Sicheng is almost dumbfounded, he can't take this kind of biohazard at all!

Tang Erda remained calm: "Shall we go straight in now? Or should we call Muke and the others first?"

"The phone was out of order by the time it landed." Bai Liu turned on the satellite phone to show Tang Erda that it showed a poor signal and could not be dialed.

Tang Erda wrinkles her brow.

All the way here, no matter how bad the weather is, the signal of this satellite phone is always intact and can be talked to, why does it start to ...... as soon as it reaches the Taishan station?

"This should be an important spot in the game." Bai Liu raised his chin, gesturing for everyone to get on the plane, "Get your guns, we'll drive straight in."

Tang Erda took off and glided forward, giving a tentative signal to Taishan Station that someone was coming in for landing, and shortly afterwards Taishan Station also gave a signal, flashing a few times to indicate that someone was coming in for landing.

"Something in Tarzan Station can communicate with us in this high tech way ...... " Mu Sicheng now sees nothing right, raising his hand suspiciously to elbow Bai Liu, "I think it's a person? "

"Perhaps the monsters are so good at learning that they have learned to communicate at this level, specifically to trick us humans into landing there?" Bai Liu said nonchalantly.

Mu Sicheng rubbed the goose bumps on his arms and shut up honestly - he had realised there was no way to get the words he wanted to hear out of Bai Liu's mouth.

This one just likes to scare him!!!

Tang Erda looked down as he flew above the station and saw someone on the ground waving a red flag to indicate that it was ready for landing, he turned his head to Bai Liu and, with Bai Liu's permission, began to steer the aircraft down.

The aircraft's paddles are firmly parked and rotating, the sled-style landing gear jammed into the snowy landing grooves.

In the wind and snow, Bai Liu and his team could see the general attire of the man waving the red flag through the transparent side door of the helicopter.

The man, dressed in an orange penguin ski suit, stabilised in the high winds by sticking his poles in the ground, most of his face hidden under a thick woolen hat, waved his hands in the direction of the helicopter, seemingly happy to see Bai Liu.

This delight made Mu Sicheng shiver and shrink behind Bai Liu's shoulder, "Shit, is he a monster or a human being ......"

"We'll see if we can get down there." Bai Liu said, pushing open the door of the helicopter without a pause and reversing himself over to jump down.

The man behind him tried to step forward to catch Bai Liu, but Tang Erda, who had jumped down from the other end, waved him off alertly: "I'll do it, thanks."

The man disliked his hat upwards to reveal a frozen red face, and when he opened his mouth, he spoke fluent Mandarin. The man was so excited he was on the verge of tears, bouncing as he spoke: "I'm a stranded man from the Taishan Observatory, you're from outside, aren't you! This is where you first landed, right? Oh my God! This is the first time in a year that I've seen anyone from my homeland here other than the observatory, and you definitely haven't been [parasitized]! You must be human!"

"Get in!" The man hurriedly led Bai Liu and the others inside, looking back around warily as he went, gun in hand and aiming everywhere.

Bai Liu and Tang Erda glanced at each other without making a sound, and the group followed the somewhat nervous team member inside.

As they walked up to the entrance of Tarzan station, several members of the observation post, also dressed in penguin uniforms, stood there in an erect posture, with a gun standing at their feet, as if on sentry duty.

The 'sentries' examined Bai Liu and the others coldly, relaxing slightly at the sight of their faces - Bai Liu and the others were clearly domestic looking - but soon the 'sentries' were on their guard again, holding their guns to their heads. "soon became alert again and held their guns to their heads.

The man who led them over excitedly explained to the sentries, "I'm Fang Xiaoxiao, the meteorology graduate student who just went out to pick up the plane, they're coming from outside the Antarctic, can I take them in?"

Unfazed, these sentries said coldly, "They, including you, will need to be tested for cellular activity before they can enter the station after they leave."

Fang Xiaoxiao smiled apologetically at Bai Liu and the others, "You may not be aware that something is going on here in Antarctica when you first arrive, we have to observe cell activity every time we go out before we can enter the station, this is to protect the safety of the people on the station."

The sentry put on his gloves and carefully scraped a small piece of mucous membrane from Fang Xiaoxiao's mouth with a cotton swab and placed it in a small test tube.

The sentries took out three new swabs and gestured to Bai Liu to open their mouths.

Bai Liu unobtrusively holds down Mu Sicheng, who is trying to raise his gun, and obediently removes his hat, steps forward and opens his mouth slightly, allowing the other man to scrape a piece of the mucous membrane from the left side of his mouth.

Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda were also taken for their mucous membranes.

Fang Xiaoxiao said to them, "We'll send it off for testing later, it'll be quick, if it's OK we'll be in in ten minutes, please wait a bit longer."

Bai Liu mentioned calmly, "What's going on here that you're so wary?"

Fang Xiaoxiao sighed, "It was another year and a half ago in August, I'm not really sure exactly, it was right around the summer shift at the poles."

"Summer shift?" Bai Liu asks.

Fang Xiaoxiao explains, "The crew on this side of the polar observatory basically does one round a year because the Antarctic weather is so extreme and there are four months of polar nights in the cold winter from April to October."

"Four months in the dark is very mentally damaging and can easily cause people to go insane and develop T3 syndrome, so the crew who winter in Antarctica basically leave by the following summer, when the icebreaker comes over with a new batch of crew to hand over."

"But we've been here for three winters now." Fang Xiaoxiao smiled bitterly, "We were supposed to be rotated out of this observatory crew the summer before last, but no one ever came over to hand over, and we were supposed to be running out of food ......"

As he spoke, he stopped abruptly, as if he had touched on some unspeakable subject that left the young graduate student with a lump in his throat, not knowing where to go from here.

Bai Liu expressed his appreciation at the right time: "You guys are great to have survived on a year's worth of supplies."

Fang Xiaoxiao fell into a rare silence, his eyes closed and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.

The two sentries next to him also looked a lot more grave, but then they patted Fang Xiaoxiao's shoulder as if they couldn't bear it: "- it's all about survival."

The results of the cell tests came back at this time in due course and all had cellular activity within the normal range.

Fang Xiaoxiao was relieved and happily led Bai Liu and the others inside: "I'll show you to your accommodation here, you must have had a long trek from outside, take a rest and get a good night's sleep first."

Bai Liu sensed that Fang Xiaoxiao had mistaken them for the Xia Team Ji members who had come from outside to rotate with them, but instead of pointing this out, he acted as if he knew nothing and asked rhetorically, "You're stuck here, why don't you contact the outside world?"

"Because we can't get through." Speaking of this, Fang Xiaoxiao's smile grew more and more bitter, "We have been trapped here for a year and a half, making all sorts of attempts to call for help from the outside world, such as the internet, such as satellite phones, but the internet has long since gone, and the outside receiving station seems to be having problems, there has been no response, we have been waiting for a year and a half, and we have not waited for the outside receiving station to call us back. "

"We've even taken the risk of sending biplane military aircraft and helicopters out directly, but as soon as the aircraft flew out of range of Antarctica, the radar detection was jammed by the magnetic field and they all ended up crashing on the glaciers."

Fang Xiaoxiao shook his head and muttered with straightened eyes, "If you guys don't come again, maybe we really won't be able to integrate into human society anymore and everyone will go crazy in the polar night ......"

Mu Sicheng look Fang Xiaoxiao expression sad, look trance, can not help but paste in Bai Liu ear whispered: "this npc so miserable ah, look like should have been trapped in the Antarctic, still do not know that outside is also the global cold situation, he said the outside world receiving station people are estimated to have been frozen to death ......"

In a situation where the world is getting colder, it is difficult for people trapped in the polar circle, an extremely cold environment, to have any sense of what is going on, because the climate here is already extreme and survival is difficult, and it is difficult to communicate with the outside world, so it is likely that Fang Xiaoxiao and the people at Taishan Station thought something was wrong with the communication equipment and had not yet thought in the direction of an ice age.

And Bai Liu was not prepared to tell the fragile-looking NPC at heart for the moment that the outside world he was talking about had long since become an icy wasteland like the Antarctic.

After all, this NPC doesn't seem to be able to handle the news at the moment.

Bai Liu's eyes inadvertently glanced over Fang Xiaoxiao's open jacket pocket - he saw two small vials of medication inside, which happened to be one of the drugs Muke had told him about, for severe mania and depression.

"How did you manage to get two and a half years of supplies out of one year?" Bai Liu brought up the subject with great interest.

"There are solar reserves on the very low side for extreme daylight, some savings in daily energy supply is barely enough, as for fuel ......"

Fang Xiaoxiao covered his forehead and let out a long, uncomfortable breath: "I know it's in the Antarctic Convention that you can't do anything to the wildlife here, but for the whole of last year the krill population here grew so fast that it almost turned the offshore waters of the Ross Sea orange in October last year. "

"The penguins, seals, whales and a host of other polar animals here feed on krill, and the abundance of food has allowed these animals to reproduce at an unnaturally fast rate, with numbers doubling in just one year, and all of these animals are extremely rich in grease ......"

Fang Xiaoxiao pursed his lips, a pained look that went against his moral principles surfaced on his face, "As you know, early human expeditions to Antarctica hunted these penguins and seals without adequate food and grease ...... "

"So you eat penguins and seals?" Mu Sicheng doesn't understand Fang Xiaoxiao's pain, but he probably understands the respect these researching Antarctic researchers probably have for these animals.

Mu Sicheng patted Fang Xiaoxiao's shoulder with sympathetic eyes, "You have to survive, it's normal to eat animals when there is no food ......"

When Fang Xiaoxiao heard Mu Sicheng say the word [food], she couldn't help but feel a jolt in her body and her face turned blue and white.

"No, he didn't eat penguins and seals," Bai Liu says lightly. Bai Liu said lightly, "In the early Antarctic expeditions, penguins and seals were not used as a main ingredient because of their rich oils, but were used as firewood to burn."

Bai Liu looked up at Fang Xiaoxiao: "If I am correct, you are hunting seals and penguins in large numbers, not for food, but to refine the fuel to run the entire observatory, otherwise you would have frozen to death, right?"

Fang Xiaoxiao bit his lower lip and mewled very softly, tears glistening in his eyes, "The oil purified from animals cannot be used directly for fuel, but with some technological modifications, it can be simply burned to supply electricity ......"

"...... But there is no shortage of food or fuel at the Observatory at the moment." Fang Xiaoxiao's eyes exploded with a burst of survival light and he stepped forward, clutching Bai Liu's hand in a death grip, "The supplies we are most short of are medicines! We are short of psychiatric medication! Everyone is suffering from T3 syndrome, they can't control their emotions and behaviour, they can't tell reality from fantasy, they're going crazy!"

Bai Liu looked at him nonchalantly, his tone still calm: "So you don't get your food from these seals and penguins, where does it come from?"

Fang Xiaoxiao looked at Bai Liu's emotionless face and, as if stung by a bee, withdrew her hands in a panic, her eyes dodging and her breath catching.

"I guess all your food is frozen in the ice crevice outside, isn't it?" Bai Liu said nonchalantly.

"After you performed various experiments on these bio-monsters that had differentiated into humans, you were going to throw them away as discards, but the lack of food made you determined to reuse the discards and stored them outside in a natural [refrigerator]."

Bai Liu's voice was soft, as if he were saying an inconsequential conclusion, "Your food is human, isn't it?"

Fang Xiaoxiao screamed with red eyes, "They're monsters, they're animals, they're not people!!!"