Chapter 251: Ice Age

After Bai Liu came out, he gave the experiment diary to Mu Ke.

Joint experiment data reports, a series of textual materials searched by the Observatory, and basic textbooks rummaged by Mu Ke from the cabin of one of the Observatory's graduate students, all of which he was required to read with comprehension in order to read the other materials.

Bai Liu asks, "About how long will it take you to read it?"

Looking at the thick pile of books and various professional materials in front of him, which is about the same as letting Mu Ke re-learn and specialize in a subject, he made an estimate and gave a serious answer: "It will take about three or four days."

Bai Liu nodded understandingly, "How much food is left in this observatory?"

Mu Ke replied, "After removing the expired and spoiled food, there are still about 70 kilograms of food, and based on a person's consumption of about one kilogram of food a day, it can probably last for about fifteen days."

"Then we won't be able to wait for you to finish translating before we leave." Bai Liu thought for a moment, and simply made a decision, "It's impossible to take a snowmobile, the speed is too slow, Taishan station is more than a thousand kilometers away from here, and the average speed of snowmobiles is only thirty to forty kilometers per hour, so we can't make a round trip without thirty-odd days of travel, and the food and fuel can't stand up to the consumption, so we have to get on a helicopter to go there."

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

"I know." Bai Liu lightly looked at Tang Er to fight, "Don't forget that our game identity is set to be a group of [avid explorers], we are not going to pursue a more secure way of traveling, especially since this way is more likely to drain us to death."

Tang Er thrashes and stops talking - his approach, thinking as an Observatory officer rather than an explorer, is indeed more realistic, but this is a game.

The game doesn't need to conform to reality.

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

No one answered.

Bai Liu methodically ordered, "Mu Sicheng haul food and fuel to the plane, Tang Er overhaul the helicopter and snowmobile, Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi prepare food for a week at the station and stockpile it near the living quarters, a week's worth of food is on the snowmobile, and if we're not back in a week you drive to the nearest other observation station and remember to keep your guns in the car and cabin. If we're not back in a week, you'll drive to the nearest other station, and remember to keep your guns in the car and in the cabin."

Speaking here, Bai Liu paused and reminded, "There's a monster in the basement that was killed by Captain Tang, and although it's currently in [DEAD] status, there are usually more anomalies in high-risk locations like the lab, so just in case, I've put two barrels of fuel in the basement, so once there's any anomalies you guys can throw it down and light it up directly and drive away. ......"

"We'll have satellite phones on the helicopters to contact us back in time for anything."

Bai Liu shook the satellite phone in his hand, "But according to the usual design in the game, ninety-five percent of the probability that our phone will be lost, so all the next plan according to the different situations before and after we lost the connection to plot separately ...... "

An hour later.

Bai Liu, wearing a heavy cold suit, wrapped in a down liner, waist and knee pads, and a pair of spiked shoes that allow him to walk and climb on ice, leaned over the edge of the helicopter and waved at Liu Jiayi and Mu Ke below, closing the helicopter's outer door.

Tang Er hits the driver's seat to adjust the data on the dashboard, and the backseat is piled high with food parcels.

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

The paddles spun up into the air with a loud noise, and Bai Liu withdrew his outward probing gaze, moved his cold, stiff fingers, and exhaled a breath of frosty white air.

"Wear dark-colored goggles." Tang Er hit the front seat and reminded, "Prevent snow blindness, and the body if any place appears to be cold to the point of no sensation, be sure to cover the warmth in a timely manner, otherwise the cold for a long time the formation of blood clots in the bloodstream will lead to limb stiffness, and have to amputate the limb to save it."

Mu Sicheng was so cold that he winced madly, his voice trembled as he exited the room, his hands rubbing desperately against each other, "No, didn't you bring Liu Jiayi's antidote? Can't it cure this kind of frostbite?"

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

"That's fine." Bai Liu casts a sidelong glance at Mu Sicheng, "But the antidote won't take effect until you're cold enough for your vitals to drop - and by that time you'll probably have frozen to unconsciousness."

"......" Mu Sicheng cried with tears in his eyes, "I fucking hate Antarctica!"

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

Tang Er hit the early foresight of replacing the helicopter's landing gear with sled-type ones, where the risk of takeoffs and landings would be lower.

But the biggest risk issue with helicopter landings and takeoffs is not in the landing gear, or even the wind, but in the ice - it's the ice crevasses that are the biggest threat to helicopter landings and takeoffs.

If the helicopter had docked on an ice crevasse, there would have been a high risk of a plane crash, but oddly enough, Bai Liu was fortunate that the ice they docked on both times was free of ice crevasses, and they successfully approached the vicinity of the Taishan station within half a day.

Bai Liu requested a third landing when he was still a dozen kilometers away from the Taishan station - this time there was still no ice crack, even when Bai Liu went down to check it out himself, walking around casually, and found no ice cracks.

Although Tang Er had told Bai Liu that the ice cracks on the ice surface were not so common that he could just walk around and step into them, there was one factor he had forgotten to take into consideration - that is, this was a game, and Bai Liu was the player with a lucky value of 0 within this game.

Ice Rift should just be everywhere for a player with his setting to be normal.

But from the time Bai Liu entered the game until now, he hasn't met him once.

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

That made him narrow his eyes, "There's someone in the Tarzan station."

"Is that why you decided to land here?" Tang Er hit sideways to Bai Liu, asking for his next instructions, "Should we go straight in or?"

"Instead of going straight in, look for any ice cracks around here, especially in the places I've walked through." Bai Liu turns to look at the ground, the color of the snow refracting darkly in his eyes through his goggles, "--Captain Tang, if there were originally ice crevasses in these places, is there any way to make those ice crevasses disappear?"

Tang Er 打一怔："人为的话，可以填雪进去，然后在上面浇水让冰面凝实，但工作量太大了，填一条20米深度不宽的冰裂隙都要几个小时，这么冷的天气在外面待几个小时很可能会冻死人，还有狂风的影响，所以根本没有人这样做 ......"

"What if the things that are filling these ice cracks aren't afraid of the cold at all?" Bai Liu asked back nonchalantly as he crouched down on one foot and reached out to flex his fingers on the ice, "I remember we brought sensors that can detect images hundreds or thousands of meters below this ice, right?"

Mu Sicheng and Tang Er fought to bring down the helicopter's hydraulic hammers and sensors, placing them several hundred meters around the helicopter's landing site, following the instructions Mu Ke had translated for them.

With a slight "beep" of the sensor, the sensed image on the instrument's visible dial is like a CT that reveals a cross-section of the ice surface layer by layer, getting deeper and deeper.

When the image on the cross-section reached a certain position, it seemed to have detected something strange, different from rock and ice, and gave out a sharp alarm of measurement anomalies, and then the next image that came back made Mu Sicheng suck in a breath of cold air, and his whole body became even colder.

On the image appeared a variety of scattered humanoid silhouettes, they struggled under the ice in strange and twisted postures, limbs broken and bent back, head and neck crooked and flat, waist and stomach looked like a hundred and eighty-degree twist, like a frog that had been cut open for experiments, cut off the spine and turned over and nailed to a wooden board.

It was as if these people were useless experimental waste after some horrific experiment had been conducted, thrown into the Ice Rift and buried with snow - the Ice Rift was their experimental dumping ground and graveyard.

Even if the sensors don't return a clear image of their faces, Mu Sicheng can imagine the pain and agony they must be feeling.

There were a few "humanoid frogs" in relatively good shape, probably still alive when they were thrown into the ice crevasse, and the silhouettes showed that they were still desperately trying to climb up the ice, with their arms and legs in a very hard climbing position.

But before he could climb up, he froze to death in the ice when he was still about fifteen meters away.

This reminded Mu Sicheng again of the ghost story Tang Er had called him to tell him, and he couldn't help but cover himself tightly with his shirt, leaning a little closer to Bai Liu, who had an unperturbed expression next to him, "...... Do you think this is a member of the Taishan Observatory? "

"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 match up." Bai Liu nodded at the oddly shaped black figures, "There are already over a hundred of them here alone, more than the entire Taishan Station."

Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng, "And there are still people in the Taishan station now, so there are two possibilities--"

"One is that there exists here, as in the Edmund Observatory, some scientist with a gun and a strong sense of suspicion who, because he felt that the others were mentally unbalanced and aggressively difficult to control, disposed of everyone else in the Observatory, as well as those who came to the Tarzan Station for help later, and dumped them here afterward."

Mu Sicheng gulped and nervously followed up with, "And, what's another possibility?"

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

Mu Sicheng couldn't help but ask, "But with more than a hundred corpses here, didn't you say it was more than the total number of people at Taishan Station? What are those extra ones then?"

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

"?!" Mu Sicheng was shocked, and after two seconds of hesitation, he reacted creepily, "You mean these monsters can turn into people?!"

Bai Liu said, "It seems that the monsters we are going to face this time not only have a strong ability to learn to differentiate and adapt to the environment, but also the cunningness to disguise themselves as human beings for deceiving and capturing prey, and at the same time, they also have a certain tendency to win over the fittest and kill each other ......"

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