“Mu Ke, you and Liu Jiayi go to the infirmary on the second floor and see if there are any relevant medical records. Find out why these people needed to take such large quantities of medication.”

Bai Liu’s eyes were dark. “These people should have been mentally sound when they first arrived in Antarctica. We need to find out exactly what caused them to lose their sanity.”

Mu Ke nodded and led Liu Jiayi downstairs. Before they left, Bai Liu tossed them two rifles and three or four boxes of ammunition.

“Be careful.”

Mu Ke caught the guns and ammunition steadily, chambered a round with practiced ease, and kept the weapon close at his side.

Liu Jiayi had a harder time using hers. Although the rifles had been modified, they were still too long for her. She had to raise her arm high just to grip it properly, but her posture was correct.

After being tempered through so many instances, almost all of them knew how to use guns now. Although their accuracy could not compare to a professional marksman like Tang Erda, they had at least reached the level of a master in shooting games.

Even Liu Jiayi could skillfully use automatic and semi-automatic handguns. She simply used rifles like these less often because of her height and the powerful recoil. It was not that she could not use them.

And right now, there was no room to be picky. In this world of ice and snow, it was obviously better to use the instance’s resources first rather than consume their own physical strength and skills.

Bai Liu took Mu Shicheng and Tang Erda, picked up their guns, and followed Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi downstairs. They were preparing to leave the observation station and check the basement beneath the helicopter hangar.

The two groups separated on the second floor.

When Bai Liu reached the main entrance, he saw that in just one short hour, frost had once again covered the area around the door. The lock handle was coated in fluffy white condensation that looked as soft as foam, yet when he gripped it, it felt cold and hard.

It was far too cold here. The extreme low temperature and the hurricane-force winds caused the newly formed snow to solidify rapidly. Holding it felt no different from holding ice.

Bai Liu shifted his gaze to the anemometer hanging beside the door. The meter displayed the outdoor temperature and wind speed:

[-55.8°C, Wind Speed 119 km/h, Wind Force 12, Category 1 Hurricane, Outing Forbidden]

Mu Shicheng had grown up in the south and had never experienced such bitter cold. Once he realized he was in an environment of minus fifty degrees, he felt even colder. His whole body became uncomfortable, as if cold wind were drilling through the cracks in his bones and whistling inside him.

However, while he had no concept of extreme low temperatures, he was very familiar with typhoons. Mu Shicheng clicked his tongue at the words Category 1 Hurricane.

“Holy crap?! The wind is that strong?! Back on the coast, even trees weighing dozens of kilograms would get uprooted...”

Tang Erda also frowned. “You can’t fly a helicopter in extreme weather like this. The wind would force it to land or cause an accident. If we want to go out and look for other observation stations, we’ll have to drive a snowmobile.”

Bai Liu made no comment on the weather. He calmly pushed the door open.

A howling gale surged in.

There was not a trace of light outside. All they could see was the fierce whiteness of the snow blocking the faint light on the distant horizon, turning everything in sight as dark as night.

The door rattled violently in the wind. A thick layer of snow had already piled up outside the entrance, reaching knee height. The force of the wind blowing inward was so strong that even Tang Erda could not help raising his hand to shield his eyes as he was pushed back a short distance.

“Put on your goggles and snowshoes!” Tang Erda had to raise his voice and roar over the screaming wind so the others could hear him. “Tie the safety ropes around your waists! Don’t get blown away! Also, watch for ice crevasses under your feet! Don’t fall in!”

Antarctic wind speeds could reach thirty-five meters per second, enough to blow away an object ten times Tang Erda’s weight.

But that was not the most terrifying thing here.

The most terrifying thing here was the ice crevasses. No one who had ever survived in Antarctica could fail to fear them.

The Antarctic ice surface was not perfectly flat. As temperatures changed and the ice melted, reshaped, and froze again, countless crevasses more than a hundred meters deep formed between the ice sheets. Falling snow then covered these crevasses, making them invisible to the naked eye and extremely difficult to detect.

This naturally meant that people walking across the ice and snow could easily step into empty space and fall if they were not careful.

Tang Erda remembered hearing a story before coming here. It was said that a member of a Japanese observation station once went out to repair equipment. On his way back, a sudden gust of wind blew past, and the man disappeared.

Four days later, the other members of the station found him in a shallow ice crevasse less than three meters from the door.

The missing member had already frozen to death. Frost covered his face, and his eyes stared upward at the exit of the crevasse, full of resentment. All ten of his fingers were fractured and bent outward. His fingernails were filled with frozen blood and wounds from scratching. His front teeth were half broken from biting, his mouth was full of blood, and bits of torn skin and bloody foam were stuck to the ice.

The snow covering that ice crevasse had not been very thick. Logically speaking, the man should have been able to dig through the snow and climb out.

He had realized this as well. He had desperately scratched at the packed snow with his hands and bitten at it with his teeth.

Originally, he could have escaped.

But during those few days, in order to find the missing member, the people at the observation station went out unusually often. They even drove snowmobiles over that crevasse several times. Such frequent movement quickly compressed the snow over the crevasse until it was packed solid.

And so that man watched as those people, under the banner of saving him, turned his only door to survival into a cold door of death, leaving him trapped inside until he froze to death.

From then on, that Japanese observation station often suffered equipment failures on stormy nights. The few members who went out to repair them said that on their way back, whenever they passed that ice crevasse, they could hear someone below screaming for help, the voice filled with malice and resentment.

The members who remained at the station said they could hear the sound of frantic scratching and the kacha kacha sound of teeth gnawing beneath the snow layer. It felt as though the thing inside would claw through the ice in the very next second and drag them in with a resentful wail.

After several more repairmen went missing, the Japanese chose to move their base to a different observation station.

Tang Erda doubted the authenticity of the story, because observation stations regularly checked the surrounding area for crevasses. But because of that story, he remembered ice crevasses very clearly.

So when Bai Liu said they were going out, Tang Erda told the story to Mu Shicheng and Bai Liu as a warning to be careful.

After hearing it, Mu Shicheng said, “Damn. How about I don’t go, and you two go instead?”

Bai Liu calmly overruled him.

The three of them staggered through the hurricane toward the helicopter hangar, the safety ropes around their waists pulled taut. Fortunately, the hangar was not far, and they arrived quickly. Tang Erda pulled open the double door, and the three of them entered the basement one after another.

Mu Shicheng vigorously shook the snow off his body, his teeth chattering.

“Damn it, this weather changed way too fast. It wasn’t this windy when I came here earlier!”

“If you had stayed a little longer until the wind picked up, you wouldn’t have had anything on you—no satellite phone, no safety rope.” Bai Liu gave Mu Shicheng a faint sidelong glance. “Who knows. You might already have been blown away and trapped in some ice crevasse somewhere.”

Mu Shicheng: “...”

Damn.

“But this is a game pool. I can still exit the game!” Mu Shicheng argued back with feigned confidence.

“That’s not necessarily true. Going out as carelessly as you did before is absolutely forbidden in this instance.” Following Bai Liu’s gaze, Tang Erda immediately emphasized—or rather, threatened—him. “The deepest ice crevasses here are more than a hundred meters deep, and the lowest temperature can reach -89 degrees. It only takes fifteen seconds for the cold to make you lose consciousness. You might freeze to death before you even realize you can exit the game.”

Mu Shicheng: “...”

DAMN!!!!

What kind of ghost game was this?!

The basement Bai Liu and the others entered had two floors.

The upper floor was used for light experiments. It did not contain many things, nor did it need to be especially clean. Sensors, hydraulic hammers, and similar equipment were piled up on this floor. In the corner were also two large vats of pickled cabbage and radishes.

Tang Erda lifted the lid to take a look, and a sour, rotten stench shot straight to the heavens.

Mu Shicheng’s nose prickled with discomfort, and he rubbed it. The air at extremely low temperatures was very pure because everything was frozen, so this pungent odor was the first strong smell he had encountered since entering the instance.

“It smells like the time my grandma failed at making sauerkraut and it went rotten.” Mu Shicheng gagged, waving a hand furiously in front of his nose.

Tang Erda lowered the lid and looked at Bai Liu with a complicated expression. “This sauerkraut was made in the Chinese style. The people at Edmund Observation Station shouldn’t know how to make it, so they failed and it went bad.”

“But someone must have guided them for them to think of preserving food this way.” Bai Liu looked thoughtful. “It seems the relationship between Taishan Station and Edmund Observation Station wasn’t as tense as we imagined.”

Otherwise, the people from Taishan Station would not have so kindly taught the other side how to make sauerkraut. This kind of domestic social exchange was clearly a sign of a close relationship.

Bai Liu walked around the vats several times, his expression contemplative, as if he were looking for something.

Mu Shicheng could not help asking, “It’s just two vats of sauerkraut. What are you looking for?”

“The production date,” Bai Liu answered calmly.

“?” Mu Shicheng was a little dazed. “Who writes a production date on sauerkraut? People just make it whenever they—”

His words stopped abruptly.

Bai Liu had crouched beside the vat and wiped a dark smudge from the lower left corner with his hand.

On the lower left corner of the pickling vat was a laboratory label. Written neatly on it was:

[10/8, 12.14kg radish]

It looked exactly like a label marking the start of an experiment.

Mu Shicheng was shocked. “How did you know they’d put a production date?!”

Bai Liu slowly stood up. “This is a laboratory, and Edmund is a scientist. He didn’t know how to make sauerkraut, so he would have had only one purpose for placing these two vats here: to conduct an experiment and record the fermentation process.”

“And judging from Dr. Edmund’s rigorous attitude toward experiments, he would definitely make some basic records on these things.”

He looked up with a faint smile.

“For example, the date.”

Tang Erda had already crouched beside the other sauerkraut vat. He carefully wiped the old vat with his finger and found another label in the same position.

“The placement date here is also August 10th.” Tang Erda looked up at Bai Liu, but soon felt something was wrong and frowned. “The date the plane crashed here was August 7th. The fax from Taishan Station implying that Edmund Station had stolen the corpse fragments was sent on August 8th. But Edmund—”

“—was actually still messing around with two vats of sauerkraut on August 10th. Isn’t that strange?” Bai Liu asked softly in return.

Tang Erda’s brows were locked tight. He could not figure out why.

But Bai Liu had no intention of clearing up his confusion. Instead, he continued walking toward the trapdoor leading to the second basement floor.

Between the first and second basement floors, there was another trapdoor. This door had clearly been frozen shut, but Mu Shicheng had already hacked it open when he came down earlier. Bai Liu brushed aside the ice shavings with his hand, pulled the door open, and went down.

The instant it opened, Bai Liu understood why Mu Shicheng had grabbed the data and run.

A dense, bizarre stench that nearly flipped one’s skull over surged out, accompanied by visible dust and pale smoke dispersing through the air.

As the heating was restored, the icicles on the ceiling of the second basement floor melted, dripping murky liquid like stalactites. The liquid flooded the floor, submerging it beneath a layer of dark gray, muddy water. On the surface floated many slides of unknown organisms and some plastic-sealed documents.

In short, it was not a pleasant sight.

Seeing Bai Liu about to go down without a second thought, Mu Shicheng hurriedly reminded him, “There’s water down there! There are rubber boots and gloves beside the stairs! Put them on before you go!”

Bai Liu changed into the rubber boots, pulled the rubber gloves tight, casually picked up a plastic file bag to shield his head, and waded into the second basement floor.

Once he was below, the strange stench grew even stronger. It was like the briny reek of creatures from the deep sea that had just been hauled up—greasy, heavy, and thick, like a sea snake coiling around Bai Liu in the dim, dust-filled air.

The water on the floor was shallow, just covering the soles of his shoes. Bai Liu’s steps stirred wavering ripples as he bent down to pick up the slides and documents floating on the water.

The slides recorded the names of biological sections. Bai Liu vaguely recognized several of them: orcas, minke whales, and several different species of penguins.

Most of the slides floating on the water contained fat and skin smears from these polar creatures, while the floating documents mostly recorded the research results related to them.

At the center of the basement stood a wide, heavy desk. Four microscopes sat on top of it, along with an overturned box of slides in the middle and two small test tube racks.

Small test tubes were arranged neatly in rows on the racks. The surface of the cell fixative inside them had frozen slightly and was now slowly melting as the temperature recovered. The biological tissue floating inside appeared a peculiar shade of pink after staining.

During the warming process, the edges of the tissue began to blacken and grow in a strange way. Some of the tissue in the small test tubes even began to wriggle faintly, as if it were about to come alive.

Bai Liu glanced at the labels on the caps of these test tubes. They all read:

[Penguin / Orca, etc. + Unknown Organism X Dissociated Cell Mixed Culture]

Among the mass of blackening, twitching flesh, there was one piece of tissue floating quietly without the slightest movement. Before and after thawing, it maintained the fresh red color of a newly cut biological section.

Bai Liu felt that he could even see capillaries in the section seeping blood, which slowly dispersed into the fixative.

He walked over and plucked the small test tube from the rack with two fingers. A label entirely different from the others was pasted on its cap. It read—

[Unknown Organism: X]

The instant he removed that small test tube, the tissues in the other tubes reacted as if something had violated them. Sharp jets of steam erupted from the mouths of the tubes, and the formaldehyde solution inside evaporated dry in an instant.

The small chunks of flesh began rapidly differentiating and growing in an unknown direction. They crawled out of the test tubes and stuck together. In the blink of an eye, they had grown into a slimy black ball of flesh the size of a basketball, covered in tentacles.

The ball of flesh had the smooth skin of penguins and orcas, a carnivore’s mouth full of sharp teeth, and fleshy wings on either side covered in churning newborn tentacles. The tentacles pulsed like a heartbeat as they grew.

Those tentacles seemed to merge and twist together, sinking into the body of the meatball before quickly differentiating into a new structure—a pair of webbed feet like a fish’s tail.

The meatball let out a hideous shriek and swung its tentacles, lunging toward Bai Liu.

Standing at the top of the stairs, Tang Erda reacted quickly. He leaned back against the steps for support, swung the rifle from his waist to his shoulder, aimed down the sights, and fired.

Bang! Bang!

Two crisp, clean shots.

The meatball collapsed motionless into the muddy water.

Tang Erda lowered his rifle, his breathing slightly uneven, and solemnly warned, “I triggered the Monster Book. This should be one of the monsters in this instance. It’s called ‘Unknown Organism X Contaminant.’ This is very likely a biochemical contamination instance. Be careful. Don’t touch the source of contamination.”

“Alright,” Bai Liu replied obediently, flipping his hand over to hide the small test tube in his waist bag.

He bent down, stepped over the contaminant’s corpse, and crouched to continue searching for information in the laboratory. Finally, inside a locked safe, Bai Liu found what he wanted—after having Tang Erda shoot the lock off the box.

Inside were experimental journals sorted by date.

After obtaining them, Bai Liu left the basement laboratory. Once he closed the door, he followed Mu Shicheng, who had been deathly unwilling to go down, back upstairs.

Behind them, the mass of biological matter that Tang Erda had “killed” began to deform and fuse like asphalt. It rapidly reassembled from a heap of inhuman matter, slowly becoming more and more like a person. A face, features, and limbs appeared on its body.

It seemed to be adjusting its appearance and body, constantly cycling through three different forms: at one moment, it had a slightly more robust human body; at another, an elegant, clean-looking face; occasionally, the shape of monkey headphones appeared on its head. The eyes that surfaced from the asphalt-like mass from time to time were filled with pure curiosity.

At last, it seemed to decide what it wanted to become. In the muddy water, it gradually shed its black, snakeskin-like outer shell. Slender white limbs roughly pushed their way out of the shell.

A completely naked Bai Liu stumbled forward and knelt in the muddy water. “He” stared out with a pair of pure eyes, and from his throat came a high-frequency cry like a whale calling to its companions.

On the photocopied materials scattered across the water, which Bai Liu had not taken, several lines were written messily:

[After mixed suspension culture with Unknown Organism X cells, whale tissue exhibits plant-like regenerative reorganization. The degree of differentiation regresses to a minimum, allowing induced re-differentiation...]

[The cells possess a high level of intelligence comparable to that of an individual organism. The “basketball-shaped tentacled lower organism” differentiated from them, hereafter referred to as “Basketball,” displays the capacity to differentiate into all biological categories, including humans, birds, fish, and even ferns and ancient microorganisms...]

[Whale cells begin to take dominance, producing whale-like habits and growing a layer of smooth epidermal tissue over “Basketball.” Cell differentiation gradually tends toward normal, and the cells gradually die one week after differentiation...]

[Whale habits appear before death. It begins to molt. After molting... my God! It has been reborn! It is showing signs of learning! It is beginning to control the direction of its own differentiation... Heavens! After multiple molts, it has begun differentiating toward a human form!!]

[No. I must terminate the experiment. This is a profane creation that ethics cannot tolerate. It will contaminate the human gene pool!]

—

Author’s Note:

The design of this monster was inspired by Shoggoths from the Cthulhu Mythos, a type of slime creature with extremely strong learning abilities that can even imitate its master.

Shoggoths can also transform into human forms to please their masters, who can be understood as the Great Old Ones or Evil Gods. The Shoggoth thinks this might be the form the Great Old Ones like, a little like a pet, for the Great Old Ones to play with. Although in Cthulhu Mythos stories this looks quite SAN-dropping, that is not what it means. My head is just full of... cough, cough.

My bestie: Humans cannot. At the very least, they should not.