Chapter 252: Ice Age

Mu Sicheng was almost shocked, he couldn't accept this kind of biochemical monster at all!

Tang Er fought still more calmly, "So do we go straight in now? Or should we call Mu Ke and the others first to report the situation?"

"The phone was out of order when it landed." Bai Liu turned on the satellite phone to call Tang Er, and it said the signal was bad and could not be dialed.

Tang Er hit wrinkled eyebrows.

All the way here, no matter how bad the weather this satellite phone signal is not damaged, can talk, how come once arrived at this Taishan station here began to ......

"This should be an important spot for the game." Bai Liu raises his chin, signaling everyone to get on the plane, "Grab your guns, we're driving straight in."

Tang Er hit the airplane to taxi forward, to Taishan station tentative signaling that this side of the people to land, not a moment Taishan station also signaling, flashing a few times, indicating that this side of the people to meet the landing.

"Something in the Taishan station can communicate with us in this high-tech way ...... " Mu Sicheng was looking at everything now, suspiciously raising his elbow to Bai Liu, "It should be a human being, right? "

"Perhaps the group of monsters are very capable of learning and have learned this level of communication, specifically to trick us humans into landing there?" Bai Liu said salaciously.

Mu Sicheng rubbed the goosebumps on his arms and shut up honestly - he'd realized there was no way to pull what he wanted to hear out of Bai Liu's mouth.

This one likes to scare him!

Tang Er looked down as he flew directly over the Taishan station and saw someone on the ground waving a red flag indicating that it was OK to land here, he turned his head to look at Bai Liu and, with his permission, began to maneuver the plane down.

The airplane's paddles stopped spinning steadily, and the sled-style landing gear jammed into the landing grooves of the snow.

In the snow and wind, Bai Liu They could see the general attire of the man waving the red flag through the helicopter's clear side door.

The man, wearing an orange penguin-style ski suit, stabilized by snow poles stuck in the ground in the high-intensity wind, most of his face hidden under a thick woolen hat, waved his hands in the direction of the helicopter as if he was happy to see Bai Liu and the others.

This kind of delight made Mu Sicheng couldn't help but shiver and shrink behind Bai Liu's shoulder, "Shit, is he a monster or a human being ah ......"

"Just go down and see." Bai Liu said, and without a pause at all, pushed open the door of the helicopter and reversed over to jump down.

The man behind him tried to step forward to catch Bai Liu, but was waved away by Tang Er, who jumped down from the other end, alertly, "I'll do it, thanks."

The man disliked his hat upwards, revealing a frozen red face, and as soon as he opened his mouth, he spoke fluent Mandarin, the man was so excited that he was close to tears, and as he spoke, he bounced, "I'm a stranded member of the Taishan Observatory, you're the people from outside right! This is where you first landed right? OMG! This is the first time in a year that I've seen people from my country other than the Observatory here, and you guys definitely haven't been [parasitized]! You guys are definitely human!"

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

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

As he walked to the entrance of the Tarzan station, several members of the Observatory, also in penguin suits, stood there in a straight posture, with a gun at their feet, as if they were 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 looked obviously from the country - but soon the "sentries" were wary again. But soon, the "sentries" became alert again and put their guns to their heads.

The man leading them over explained excitedly to these sentries, "I'm Fang Xiaoxiao, the meteorology grad student who just went out to meet the plane, they're coming from outside the South Pole, can I take them in?"

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

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

With that, he opened his mouth idiomatically, and the sentry put on gloves and carefully used a cotton swab to scratch a small piece of mucous membrane from Fang Xiaoxiao's mouth and put it into a small test tube.

The sentries produced three new swabs and signaled Bai Liu that they should open their mouths.

Bai Liu immovably held down Mu Sicheng, who wanted to raise his gun, and obediently removed his hat, stepped forward and opened 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 Er fought and had their mucous membranes removed.

Fang Xiaoxiao said to them, "We'll send it for testing later, it's very quick, if there's no problem, we'll be able to go in in ten minutes, please wait a little longer."

Bai Liu smoothly and gently brought up, "What's going on here that you guys are so alert?"

Fang Xiaoxiao sighed, "It's going to be a year and a half ago in August, I'm not really sure about the specifics, it was right around the time of the Polar's summer shift."

"Summer shift?" Bai Liu asked.

Fang Xiaoxiao explains, "The crews on the Polar Observatory side basically do one round a year because the weather in Antarctica is so extreme, and there are four months of polar night in the cold winter from April to October."

"Spending four months in the dark is very mentally damaging, and it's very easy for people to go insane and develop T3 syndrome, so the crews that winter in Antarctica basically leave by the following summer, and that's when the icebreakers come over with a new batch of crews to hand them over."

"But we've been here for three winters now." Fang Xiaoxiao smiled bitterly, "Originally our group of Observatory members were supposed to be rotated out the summer before last, but no one ever came 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, unsure of where to begin.

Bai Liu expressed his appreciation at the right time, "You guys are pretty good, you've managed to make it this far on a year's worth of supplies."

Fang Xiaoxiao fell into a rare silence as he closed his eyes, tears seeping from the corners of his eyes.

The faces of the two sentries next to them also stared quite a bit, but then they patted Fang Xiaoxiao's shoulder as if they couldn't bear it, "--it's all about survival."

The results of the cells came back in due course at this time, and everyone's cellular activity was within normal limits.

Fang Xiaoxiao breathed a sigh of relief and cheerfully led Bai Liu inside with them, "I'll show you to your quarters here, you must have had a long trek from the outside, get some rest and a good night's sleep first."

Bai Liu sensed that Fang Xiaoxiao was treating them as if they were summer team members who had come from the outside to rotate with them, but instead of breaking it down, he pretended to know nothing and asked, "Why didn't you contact the outside world when you were stuck here?"

"Because we can't get in touch." Speaking of this, Fang Xiaoxiao's smile became more and more bitter, "We've been trapped here for a year and a half, and we've made all kinds of attempts to ask for help from the outside world, such as the Internet, such as satellite phones, but the Internet has long been gone, and it seems that the outside world's receiving station is also out of order, and has not been responding, and we've been waiting for a year and a half and we've not waited for the outside world's receiving station to call us back. "

"We've even taken the risk of sending biplanes and helicopters out directly, but as soon as the planes flew out of Antarctica's range, the radar detection was interfered with by the magnetic field, and they all ended up crashing on the glaciers."

Fang Xiaoxiao shook his head and muttered with his eyes glazed over, "If you guys don't come again, there might not be any way for us to integrate into the 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 stick in Bai Liu ear whispered: "This npc is so miserable ah, looks like it should have been trapped in the Antarctic, do not know that the outside is also the case of global cooling, he said the outside world receiving station of the people are estimated to have been frozen to death! ......"

In the case of global cooling, it is very difficult for people trapped in the Polar Circle, an extremely cold environment, to have a sense of what is happening, because the climate is already extreme, survival is difficult, and it is difficult to contact the outside world, so Fang Xiaoxiao and the people at Taishan Station most likely think that something is wrong with the communication equipment, and have not thought in the direction of the Ice Age yet.

And Bai Liu wasn't going to tell this npc, who looked fragile inside, for the time being, that the outside world he was talking about had long since become an icy wasteland, just like Antarctica.

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

Bai Liu's eyes slid unobtrusively over Fang Xiaoxiao's open jacket pocket-he saw two vials of medication inside, which happened to be one of those drugs Mu Ke had talked to him about, anti-severe mania and depression.

"One year's worth of supplies and you guys took it to two and a half years, how did you do it?" Bai Liu brought up the subject with great interest.

"There are solar energy reserves on this side of Extreme Low from Extreme Day, some conservation of daily supply is barely enough, as for fuel ......"

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

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

Fang Xiaoxiao pursed his lips, an agony against moral principles surfaced on his face, "As you know, in the early days when humans explored Antarctica, they would hunt these penguins and seals without sufficient food and grease ...... "

"So you eat penguins and seals?" Mu Sicheng doesn't really understand Fang Xiaoxiao's pain, but he probably understands that these Antarctic researchers probably have a lot of respect 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 ......"

Fang Xiaoxiao couldn't help but feel a jolt as she heard Mu Sicheng say the word [food], her face turning green and white.

"No, he didn't eat penguins and seals." Bai Liu said faintly, "In the early Antarctic expeditions, penguins and seals were not used as the main ingredient to be used because of their rich grease, but were used as firewood to burn for use."

Bai Liu looked up at Fang Xiaoxiao : "If I'm not mistaken, you are hunting seals and penguins in large numbers, not for food, but to refine the fuel to run the entire Observatory, otherwise you'd freeze to death, right?"

Fang Xiaoxiao bit his lower lip and gave a very soft hmmm, and there were tears flashing in his eyes, "The oil purified from animals cannot be used directly for fuel, but after some technological modifications, it can be simply burned for power supply ......"

"...... But at the moment, the Observatory is not short of food, nor fuel." Fang Xiaoxiao's eyes erupted with a burst of survivalist light as he stepped forward and clutched Bai Liu's hand in a death grip, "The supplies we're most lacking are medications! We're short of psychiatric drugs! Everyone is suffering from severe T3 syndrome, they can't control their emotions and behavior, they can't tell reality from fantasy, they're all going crazy!"

Bai Liu looked at him nonchalantly, his tone calm as ever, "So your food doesn't come from these seals and penguins, so where does it come from?"

Fang Xiaoxiao looked at Bai Liu's face without a trace of emotional ups and downs, and as if her hands were stung by a bee, she retracted her hands in a panic, her eyes dodging and her breath coming in short gasps.

"I'm guessing that all your food is frozen in the ice crevices out there, right?" Bai Liu said nonchalantly.

"After you conducted various experiments on these biochemical monsters that had differentiated into humans, you were going to throw them away as waste products, but the scarcity of food made you determined to reuse the waste products, so you put them outside in a natural [refrigerator] and stored them."

Bai Liu's voice was soft, as if he were speaking an inconsequential conclusion, "Your food is people, right?"

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