Chapter 250: Ice Age

"Mu Ke , you and Liu Jiayi go to the infirmary on the second floor to find out if there are any relevant medical records to find out why this group of people are ingesting large amounts of drugs like this."

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

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

Mu Ke took the gun and bullets steadily, and loaded it skillfully against his side.

Liu Jiayi was a bit reluctant to use the rifle, because even though it had been improved, it was still too long, and you had to lift your arm to hold it, but you could still see the posture.

After experiencing the sharpening of so many copies, almost all of them could use guns now, although the accuracy wasn't as good as Tang Er hitting this sharpshooter/handler, they could at least reach the level of a master of the shooting game.

Even Liu Jiayi is proficient with automatic and semi-automatic handguns, but she uses these rifles sparingly because of their height and strong recoil, though they are not impossible to use.

But now there is no choice, in this kind of freezing weather, rather than using up one's physical strength to use skills, it is definitely better to use the copy supplies first.

Bai Liu led Mu Sicheng and Tang Er to fight, grabbed their guns, and followed Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi down the stairs as they prepared to go to the basement under the helicopter hangar outside the observatory.

The two teams separated on the second floor.

When Bai Liu arrived at the front door, he saw that the door's perimeter had been covered with snow and frost in just an hour, and that the lock handle was covered with a fluffy white condensation like foam, which was cold and hard when you held it in your hand.

It's so cold here, the extremely low temperatures and the hurricane winds have caused the molded snow to solidify so quickly that it's not much different from ice when you hold it.

Bai Liu moved his gaze to the wind gauge hanging next to the door, which fed back the temperature and wind speed outside the window:

[-55.8 degrees Celsius, wind speed 119 kilometers per hour, wind force 12, category 1 hurricane, no going out]

Mu Sicheng grew up in the south and had never experienced such cold, and realizing he was in a -50 degree cold environment made him feel even colder, uncomfortable, as if his bones were being drilled into the cold wind, whooshing and chilling.

However, although he had no concept of low temperatures, he was still familiar with typhoons, Mu Sicheng looked at that Category 1 hurricane and staggered, "Shit? Is it that windy? This is on the coast, tens of kilograms of trees can be blown and pulled up ......"

Tang Er Fight also wrinkled his brow, "You can't fly a helicopter in this extreme weather, you'll wind up in a forced landing and have an accident, and you'll have to drive a snowmobile if you're going to go out and look for other observation stations."

Bai Liu did not comment on the weather as he calmly pushed open the door.

The wind whistled and rolled in, and not a speck of light could be seen beyond the door, only the intense color of the snow blocking out the shimmering light of the distant sky and darkening it as far as the eye could see.

The door was rattled by the wind, a thick layer of snow had been piled up in front of the door, directly up to one's knees, and the wind blowing inward was so strong that Tang Er hit couldn't help but raise his hand to shield his eyes from the wind, which caused him to be pushed backward and panned some distance.

"Put on your goggles and sled shoes!" In the howling wind Tang Er Fight had to yell at a higher volume so the others could hear him, "Hold the safety rope around your waist and don't get blown away! Watch out for the cracks in the ice under your feet, too! Don't fall in!"

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

The scariest thing here is ice crevasses, and no one who has survived Antarctica would be afraid of that.

The Antarctic ice surface is not completely flat, as the weather temperature changes, the process of melting and reshaping the ice surface, the ice surface and the ice surface between the many cracks will be produced up to more than 100 meters deep, and the snowfall will be covered in these cracks, so that these cracks are visually invisible and difficult to be found.

This naturally means that a person could easily be walking on ice or snow and step off and fall if they are not paying attention.

Tang Er hit remembers a story he heard before he came here about a Japanese observatory member who went out to overhaul his equipment, and on his way back there was a strong gust of wind, and he disappeared.

Four days later, the observatory station crew found the team member in a shallow ice crevasse less than three meters from the doorway.

The missing team member had been frozen alive, his face full of snow and frost, full of resentment, his eyes open and looking up at the exit of the ice chasm, ten fingers fractured and turned out, the nail crevices were full of frozen, scratched out blood and wounds, his incisors were half broken from gnawing, his mouth was full of blood, and the ice was stained with some sticky down human skin and blood froth.

And the snow that covered those ice crevices was not thick enough to be reasonably broken off and climbed out by this crew member, who realized this and desperately clawed and gnawed his way through the deep snow cover with his teeth.

It would have been possible for him to successfully escape.

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

And this team member watched as these people, in the name of saving him, lived to turn his only door to survival into a cold, dead door, and then trapped and froze to death.

Ever since then, that Japanese observatory has often had equipment failures on nights when a snowstorm is approaching, and a couple of the crew members who went out to overhaul it, said that on the way back, passing through that ice crevasse, they could hear people down there viciously, spitefully, begging for help and hissing and laughing.

A distraught team member said he could hear the sound of fingernails scratching madly and teeth clicking and gnawing underneath the snow, and felt that the next second something inside would scratch through the ice, grinning spitefully as it came to grab him in.

After the disappearance of several more overhaul crews, Japan chose to switch to a different observatory as a base camp.

Tang Er hit doubts about the veracity of this story, as the observatory would routinely verify that there were no ice crevasses around, but also remembered the ice crevasses through this story.

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

Mu Sicheng said after hearing this, "Grass, why don't I not go, you two go.

It was calmly dismissed by Bai Liu.

The three men pulled the safety ropes around their waists in front and back and staggered through the hurricane towards the helicopter hangar, which fortunately wasn't far and was soon reached, Tang Er hit the unplugged flap door and the three men entered the basement in turn.

Mu Sicheng wildly shook the snow on his body, his teeth chattering, "Damn, this weather has become too fast, it wasn't this windy when I came over here before!"

"If you stay a little longer, wait until this wind comes, you have nothing on you, satellite phone safety rope none." Bai Liu lightly cast a sidelong glance at Mu Sicheng, "...... Maybe we'll be blown away by the wind and trapped in an ice crevice somewhere ......"

Mu Sicheng: "......"

Grass.

"But this is a game pool, and I can still quit the game!" Mu Sicheng colorfully and stiffly retorted.

"That's not necessarily true, going out as hastily as you did before will never work in this copy." Tang Er hit in Bai Liu's eyes signaled to follow the strong (fear) tone (scared), "The deepest ice crevasse here is one hundred meters, the lowest temperature can go to -89 degrees, fifteen seconds can make the freezing to make your consciousness drowsy, may not even wait for you to think of still being able to exit the game, you'll be frozen to death."

Mu Sicheng: "......"

Grass ！！！！

What the hell kind of game is this!

Bai Liu The basement they entered has 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 the like meant to be stacked on this floor, with two large vats of pickled cabbage and radishes in the corners.

Tang Er hit lifted the cover cloth to take a look, an acidic stench rises up to the sky.

Mu Sicheng's nose twitched less uncomfortably - the odor of the very low was pure, everything frozen, so this irritating smell was the first time he'd smelled it since he'd come to this copy.

"It smells like my grandmother's rotting after failing to make sauerkraut." Mu Sicheng snorted with dry heaves and slapped his hand in front of his nose.

Tang Er hit put down the cover cloth, he looked at Bai Liu with a complicated expression : "This sauerkraut is a Chinese style, the people in the Edmund Observatory shouldn't be able to do it, so it fails to do it, it stinks."

"But they should have listened to whoever instructed them to think of storing food this way." Bai Liu was thoughtful, "-it seems the relationship between Tarzan Station and Edmund Observatory is not as rigid as we thought."

Otherwise the people at Tarzan Station wouldn't have been so friendly in instructing each other how to make sauerkraut, and such paternalistic socializing is clearly a send-up of intimacy.

Bai Liu walks around the tank a few times, he looks pensive and seems to be looking for something.

Mu Sicheng didn't hold back from asking, "It's just two vats of sauerkraut, what are you looking at?"

"Looking for a production date." Bai Liu replied faintly.

"?" Mu Sicheng was a bit confused, "Who makes sauerkraut and writes the date it was made? It's not like they just make it ......"

His words came to an abrupt end after Bai Liu crouched over the tank and wiped his hand over a dark, muddy spot in the lower left corner.

In the lower left corner of this kimchi jar, a lab label is posted that reads, in regular letters, [10/8, 12.14kg radish].

It's like marking some upcoming experiment.

Mu Sicheng is shocked, "How do you know they posted the production date?!"

Bai Liu rose slowly, "This is a laboratory, Edmund is a scientist, he can't make sauerkraut, so he put these two vats of sauerkraut here for one purpose - and that's to do experiments to document the process of fermenting this sauerkraut."

"And according to this Dr. Edmund's rigorous approach to experimentation, he is bound to make some basic notes on this kind of stuff."

He looked up and smiled, "Like a date."

Tang Er hit had already crouched under another sauerkraut vat, and he carefully rubbed the stale vat around with his fingertips, finding another label in the same spot.

"The date of placement here is also August 10th." Tang Er hit tilted his head to look at Bai Liu, but he quickly felt something was wrong and frowned, "The date the plane fell over here and crashed was August 7th, and that fax from Taishan Station suggesting that Edmund Station had stolen the body parts was sent on August 8th, but this Edmund-- "

"--It's actually on August 10th, tossing two vats of sauerkraut, isn't that strange?" Bai Liu asked softly and rhetorically.

Tang Er hit the frown, he could not figure out why.

But Bai Liu didn't mean to answer his query either, but continued onward, heading for the sliding button door that led to the second basement level.

Between the first floor and the second basement was also a sliding door, which was also apparently frozen, but had been chiseled open when Mu Sicheng had come down earlier, and Bai Liu brushed the ice shavings off of it with his hand, pulling it open and heading downward.

The moment he opened it, Bai Liu understood why Mu Sicheng took the information and ran away.

A rich, eerie stench that almost overturned one's ceiling rushed out, accompanied by dust and light smoke that was as solid as substance puffed out in the air.

As the heating resumed, the ice prisms at the top of the second basement level melted, dripping down like stalactites in a murky liquid that flooded the ground and submerged it in a layer of dark gray muddy water, on the surface of which floated the slides of many unknown creatures and some plasticized materials.

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

Mu Sicheng saw that Bai Liu was about to go down without saying a word and warned anxiously, "There is water down there! There are rubber boots and gloves beside the stairs! Change them before you go down!"

Bai Liu changed into rubber boots, pulled down to secure the rubber gloves, casually took a plastic filing bag to block his head, and walked deep into the second basement.

After coming down, that strange stench became even stronger, like the fishy smell of some deep-sea fish that has just been salvaged, slippery, sticky, like a sea serpent, swimming around Bai Liu in the dark, dusty air.

The water on the ground was shallow enough to cover the soles of his shoes, and Bai Liu, moving with a bobbing wave of water, bent down to pick up a slide and some materials floating on the surface.

The names of the organisms on the slides are recorded, and Bai Liu vaguely recognizes a few of them as killer whales, minke whales, and a few penguins of different species.

The slides floating on the water are basically fat and epidermal pressings of these polar animals, and most of the information floating around also documents the results of research on these animals.

In the center of the basement was a wide, heavy writing desk with four microscopes, a knocked-over slide box in the center, and two small test tube racks.

There were several rows of small test tubes neatly stacked in the test tube racks, the surface of the cell fixative inside was slightly frozen, now slowly melting as the temperature returned, the biological tissue floating inside took on a strange pinkish color after being stained.

During the warming process, the edges of the meat tissue began to darken and grow strangely, and even some of the tissue in the small test tubes began to wriggle slightly, feeling as if they were coming to life.

Bai Liu swept a glance at the labels affixed to the caps of these test tubes, which all read: [Penguin (killer whale, etc.) + Unknown Organism X Free Cell Mixed Culture].

And in a pile of blackening and writhing flesh, there was a piece of tissue quietly suspended motionless, and before and after thawing, it was the bright red color of that creature's freshly cut surface.

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

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

The moment this small test tube was removed, the tissues inside the other small test tubes appeared as if they were violated, and the mouth of the test tube instantly erupted with sharp vapors, and the formaldehyde liquid inside was evaporated cleanly in a moment.

These small pieces of meat began to rapidly differentiate and grow in some unknown direction, crawling out of the test tube and sticking to each other, but in the blink of an eye it grew into a basketball-sized, tentacle-covered, slimy black ball of meat.

This meatball had the smooth skin of a penguin or an orca, a mouthful of sharp carnivore teeth, and fleshy wings on either side dotted with flopping newborn tentacles that grew in pulsating bursts.

As if united with each other, these tentacles wrapped around each other and plunged into the body of this ball of flesh, quickly differentiating into a new tissue - a pair of fishtail-like webbed feet.

The meatball screamed hideously, flung its tentacles and lunged towards Bai Liu, Tang Er, standing at the stairway, quickly leaned back his body, leaned on the steps to lend strength, flung his hand and lifted the rifle at his waist to his shoulder, pressed it to his face, took aim, and fired.

"Bang Bang!"

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

Tang Er hit put down his rifle, his breath panting slightly, Zheng reminded, "I triggered the monster book, this should be one of the monsters of this copy, called Unknown Creature x Pollutant, this is most likely a biochemical contamination copy, be careful, don't run into the source of contamination."

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

He possessed himself to step over the body of this contaminant, half crouched down and continued to search for information in this lab, finally, Bai Liu found what he wanted in a locked safe - he let Tang Er hit directly with his gun to collapse the lock of this box.

Inside is a chronological diary of experiments.

After getting it, Bai Liu came out of the underground lab door, closed it, and followed Mu Sicheng, who was dead set on going down.

Behind them, the pile of creatures that Tang Er had beaten to death began to morph and merge like asphalt, rapidly reassembling itself from a pile of non-human-looking things, slowly becoming more like a human being, with its face, features, and limbs all appearing on its body.

It was as if it were adjusting its appearance and body, constantly repeating three appearances, at one time a slightly more robust human body, at another time elegant and clean-looking, at another time the shape of a monkey's earphone appeared on its head, and occasionally its eyes emerged from the "asphalt" in pure curiosity.

Eventually it seemed to decide what it was going to become, and gradually shed the black shell of its body, which was like a snake's molt, in the muddy water, and its thin white arms and legs burrowed rudely out of the shell.

A naked Bai Liu stumbled to his knees in the muddy water, his eyes wide open and a high-frequency, whale-like call to his companion emanating from his throat.

Scattered across the water, the photocopied materials not taken away by Bai Liu are written in a messy manner:

[- Whale tissues from mixed culture of unknown organism X cells exhibit plant-like recombinant regenerative properties with minimal regression of differentiation and can be induced to redifferentiate ......]

The cells possessed a high degree of individual intelligence, and the differentiated "basketball tentacle-like lower organisms" (henceforth referred to as basketballs) exhibited differentiation across the full range of organisms, including humans, birds, fish, and even ferns and archaeal microorganisms. ......]

[Whale cells begin to play a dominant role in the production of cetacean habits, the growth of a layer of smooth epidermal tissue wrapped around the "basketball", the cell differentiation gradually normalized, the differentiation of the cells after a week of gradual cell death ...... ]

[Whale-like habits appear before death, it begins to molt, and after molting ...... My God! It was reborn! It shows learnability! It's starting to control the direction of its differentiation ...... Jesus! It begins to differentiate in the direction of humans after multiple molts!!!]

[-No, I have to terminate the experiment, it's an ethically unacceptable creation of filth, it'll contaminate the human gene pool!