After Bai Liu came out, he handed the experimental journals to Mu Ke.

The combined experimental data reports, the various written materials they had found throughout the observation station, and the basic textbooks Mu Ke had managed to scavenge from a graduate student’s room in the station—all of these required him to understand and read through them before the other materials could be deciphered.

Bai Liu asked, “Roughly how much time do you need to finish reading them?”

Looking at the thick stack of books and assorted professional materials in front of him, which was practically equivalent to asking him to specialize in an entirely new academic field, Mu Ke estimated for a moment and answered seriously, “Probably three or four days.”

Bai Liu nodded in understanding. “How much food is left in this observation station?”

Mu Ke replied, “Excluding the expired and spoiled items, there are about seventy kilograms of food left. Based on a consumption rate of about one kilogram per person per day, we can probably hold out for roughly fifteen days.”

“Then we can’t wait for you to finish translating everything before setting out.” Bai Liu thought for a moment and made a decisive judgment. “We can’t take the snowmobile either. It’s too slow. Mount Taishan Station is more than a thousand kilometers from here. The average speed of a snowmobile is only thirty to forty kilometers per hour. A round trip would take no less than thirty days. Neither the food nor the fuel can withstand that level of consumption. We have to take the helicopter.”

Tang Erda frowned. “But if we force the helicopter to fly in this kind of weather, something could easily go wrong.”

“I know.” Bai Liu looked at Tang Erda indifferently. “Don’t forget that our game identity setting is a group of [fanatical explorers]. We won’t choose a more stable method of transportation, especially when that method is more likely to wear us to death.”

Tang Erda paused and fell silent.

His approach had been from the perspective of an observation station employee rather than an explorer. It was indeed more realistic, but this was a game.

Games did not need to conform to reality.

Bai Liu looked around. “Any other objections?”

No one answered.

Bai Liu issued orders in an orderly manner. “Mu Shicheng, haul the food and fuel onto the aircraft. Tang Erda, inspect the helicopter and the snowmobile. Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi, prepare a one-week reserve of food and keep it near the observation station cabins, then put one week’s worth of food on the snowmobile. If we haven’t returned within a week, the two of you drive to the nearest other observation station. Remember to keep guns in both the vehicle and the cabin.”

At this point, Bai Liu paused and reminded them, “There is a monster in the basement that Captain Tang killed. Although it is currently in a [dead] state, laboratory-type high-risk areas usually have many abnormal situations. To be safe, I placed two barrels of fuel in the basement. If anything unusual happens, throw them down, ignite them, and then drive away.”

“We’ll take a satellite phone on the helicopter. If anything happens, give us feedback and contact us in time.”

Bai Liu shook the satellite phone in his hand.

“But according to the usual design of games, there is a ninety-five percent chance that our phone will lose signal. Therefore, all subsequent plans will be drafted separately according to the different situations before and after we lose contact.”

An hour later.

Wearing heavy cold-weather gear, wrapped in a down liner with waist and knee protectors, and wearing spiked shoes that could be used to walk and climb on ice, Bai Liu leaned against the edge of the helicopter and waved to Liu Jiayi and Mu Ke below. Then he closed the helicopter’s outer door.

Tang Erda sat in the pilot’s seat, adjusting the data on the instrument panel. The back seat was piled high with bundles of food.

Mu Shicheng struggled to stretch his limbs amid the pile of bundles, surviving in the gaps between them. He was forced to use a rifle to prop up a small space for himself.

The blades rotated and lifted them into the sky, producing a tremendous roar. Bai Liu withdrew his gaze from outside, moved his cold-stiffened fingers, and exhaled a breath of frosty white air.

“Put on dark goggles,” Tang Erda reminded them from the front seat. “To prevent snow blindness. Also, if any part of your body gets so cold that it loses sensation, you must warm it up immediately. Otherwise, if it stays cold for too long, blood clots will form in the vessels and lead to limb necrosis. At that point, only amputation would save it.”

Mu Shicheng was shivering uncontrollably from the cold. His voice trembled as he spoke, and his hands rubbed desperately together.

“No, didn’t we bring Liu Jiayi’s Life-Saving Remedy? Can’t it treat this kind of frostbite?”

Liu Jiayi had packed one bottle of Life-Saving Remedy for each of the three of them.

“Theoretically, it can.” Bai Liu glanced at Mu Shicheng. “But the Life-Saving Remedy only takes effect once you’re so cold that your health points start dropping. By then, you might already have frozen into a coma.”

“...” Mu Shicheng wanted to cry but had no tears. “I fucking hate Antarctica!”

The helicopter shuttled through the boundless white snow.

In the middle of the journey, they were forced to land twice because the wind was too strong.

Tang Erda had the foresight to replace the helicopter’s landing gear with a ski-type undercarriage, which lowered the risk of landing under these conditions.

However, the greatest risk during a helicopter landing was not the landing gear, nor even the wind.

It was the ice surface.

Ice crevasses were the greatest threat to a helicopter landing.

If the helicopter parked on top of an ice crevasse, the aircraft would very likely be destroyed, and everyone inside would die. But strangely enough, both times Bai Liu and the others landed, there happened to be no ice crevasses on the ice surface. They smoothly approached the vicinity of Mount Taishan Station within half a day.

When they were still a dozen kilometers away from Mount Taishan Station, Bai Liu requested a third landing.

This time, there were still no ice crevasses.

Even when Bai Liu personally went down to investigate and walked around at random, he did not find a single ice crevasse.

Although Tang Erda had told Bai Liu that ice crevasses on the ice surface were not so common that a person would fall into one just by walking around, there was one factor he had forgotten to consider.

This was a game.

And Bai Liu was a player with a luck value of 0 in this game.

For a player with his settings, it would only be normal for ice crevasses to be everywhere.

But from the moment Bai Liu entered the game until now, he had not encountered one even once.

Bai Liu looked up.

With the help of binoculars, he could see Mount Taishan Station sitting on the horizon of the snowfield in the distance, shimmering with faint light. He could vaguely see light coming through the station’s windows, as well as thin smoke and heat rising from the chimney on the roof.

This made him narrow his eyes.

“There are people in Mount Taishan Station.”

“Is that why you decided to land here?” Tang Erda turned to look at Bai Liu, waiting for his next instruction. “Are we going straight in, or...?”

“We’re not going straight in. Search the area first, especially the places I walked over. See whether there are any ice crevasses.” Bai Liu turned to look at the ground. Through his goggles, the reflected color of the snow shone darkly in his eyes. “Captain Tang, if these places originally had ice crevasses, is there any way to make them disappear?”

Tang Erda was stunned. “If it were done manually, you could fill them with snow and then pour water over the top to solidify the ice surface. But the workload would be enormous. Filling even a single ice crevasse twenty meters deep and not particularly wide would take several hours. Staying outside for several hours in this kind of cold would likely freeze someone to death. And with the strong wind on top of that, basically no one would do it...”

“What if the things filling these ice crevasses aren’t afraid of the cold at all?” Bai Liu asked unhurriedly in return.

He squatted down on one leg, reached out, curled his finger, and knocked on the ice surface.

“I remember we brought sensors capable of detecting images hundreds or even thousands of meters beneath the ice, right?”

Mu Shicheng and Tang Erda moved the hydraulic hammer and sensors down from the helicopter. Following the instructions Mu Ke had translated, they placed the sensors at points several hundred meters around the helicopter’s landing site.

With the faint beep-beep of the sensors measuring, the images they transmitted appeared on the instrument’s visual panel like a CT scan, showing cross-sections of the ice layer by layer, deeper and deeper.

When the cross-sectional image reached a certain point, it seemed to detect something strange—something distinct from rock and ice.

A sharp alarm rang out, signaling a measurement abnormality.

Then the graphic image that appeared made Mu Shicheng draw in a cold breath. His entire body seemed to grow even colder.

Scattered humanoid silhouettes appeared on the image.

They struggled beneath the ice in bizarre and distorted postures. Their limbs were broken and bent backward. Their heads and necks were twisted flat. Their waists and abdomens looked as though they had been turned one hundred and eighty degrees. They resembled frogs cut open for experiments, their spines severed, then flipped over and nailed to a wooden board.

It was as though these people were useless experimental waste after some horrific experiment, thrown into the ice crevasses and then buried under snow.

The ice crevasses were both their experimental waste site and their graveyard.

Even though the sensors could not transmit clear images of their specific faces, Mu Shicheng could fully imagine the expressions of unbearable pain they must have worn.

A few of the “humanoid frogs” still had relatively intact outlines. It was very likely they had still been alive when they were thrown into the ice crevasses. From their silhouettes, it could be seen that they had still been desperately trying to climb upward, their hands and feet locked in an extremely forceful climbing posture.

But before they could climb out, at a distance of about fifteen meters from the ice surface, they had frozen to death inside the ice layer.

This made Mu Shicheng think again of the ghost story Tang Erda had told him. He could not help wrapping his clothes tightly around himself and leaning a little closer to Bai Liu, whose expression remained calm beside him. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

“...Do you think these are members of Mount Taishan Observation Station?”

“We can’t be sure.” Bai Liu’s gaze remained on the instrument panel. “Maybe some are. Maybe some aren’t.”

Mu Shicheng asked, “...What do you mean?”

“The numbers don’t add up.” Bai Liu pointed at those strange black figures. “There are already more than a hundred silhouettes here, which exceeds the total number of people at Mount Taishan Station.”

Bai Liu looked at Mu Shicheng.

“And there are still people in the current Mount Taishan Station. So there are two possibilities.”

“One is that this place is the same as Edmund Observation Station. There is some scientist here who possesses firearms and has an extremely strong sense of suspicion. Because they felt that the others were mentally abnormal, aggressive, and difficult to control, they disposed of everyone else in the observation station, as well as those who later came to Mount Taishan Station for help, then dumped them here.”

Mu Shicheng swallowed and asked nervously, “And... what’s the other possibility?”

Bai Liu moved his gaze back to the instrument panel.

“The other possibility is that everyone in Mount Taishan Station is already dead. Some monsters conducted cruel exploratory experiments on them, then threw them here. And those monsters are now occupying and operating Mount Taishan Station.”

Mu Shicheng could not help asking, “But there are more than a hundred corpses here. Didn’t you say that’s more than the total number of people at Mount Taishan Station? Then what are the extras?”

Bai Liu answered lightly, “Naturally, they are the monsters themselves.”

“?!” Mu Shicheng was startled. After a two-second delay, his skin crawled as realization struck him. “You’re saying these monsters can turn into humans?!”

Bai Liu said, “It seems the monsters we’re facing this time not only possess strong learning, differentiation, and environmental adaptation abilities, but also the cunning to disguise themselves as humans in order to deceive and capture prey. At the same time, they seem to have a certain tendency toward survival of the fittest and cannibalism...”

He smiled with great interest.

“Wow. They sound just like an evolved version of humans.”