Chapter 256: Ice Age

Tarzan Observatory.

In the small space surrounded by four guns, Bai Liu's demeanor can be described as leisurely as he looks to Liu Jiayi: "Next you held the replicant Tang Er hostage and chose to come to the Taishan station to meet us, but decided to take a preemptive strike because you weren't sure if we were monsters or not?"

Bai Liu leaned back in his chair, lifted his eyelids, and spread his hands with a soft smile, "Now that you have us under control, what then? How do you decide to recognize us as monsters or your real teammates?"

Liu Jiayi's lips pursed into a thin straight line as she rotated her grip on the gun in her hand, the anachronistically large pair of gloves on her palm that Bai Liu had stripped off for her.

But the gloves had no residual body heat at all now, so cold that her fingertips were numb.

"I have a way of recognizing you and the monster." Liu Jiayi's breath brought out a white mist.

The little girl's gray eyes shot up to Bai Liu's cheeks through the hazy goggles with an intimidating harshness, but this harshness softened when Bai Liu's calm eyes met hers.

She couldn't seem to name that cruel solution, even though she'd used it successfully twice.

So Bai Liu kindly said it for him, "Monsters have a weakness, you can use this weakness to differentiate between us and them, when we were at the Edmund Observatory, you used fuel oil and poison to burn [Mu Sicheng] to death, and after determining that this was their weakness, you quickly used the same formula to hold [Tang Er] hostage. Fight]."

"[Tang Er Fight] is a monster that is afraid of these things, so it was held hostage just as you wanted." Bai Liu raised his eyes and looked straight at Liu Jiayi, "But [Bai Liu], I guess it wasn't because it was cunning that it was let go, right?"

Bai Liu said, while holding Liu Jiayi's gun with his gloved hand, pressed it against his heart, and stood up slowly and methodically.

He condescendingly pushed her back a few steps, and looked down on her as if in pity: "Jiayi, you can't do anything to [Bai Liu]."

Liu Jiayi did not have the means to test Bai Liu's authenticity in such a cruel way, so she let that [Bai Liu] go - even though she knew that there was a 99 percent chance that this [Bai Liu] was a monster.

But what if it isn't?

She didn't want to kill him, or use this method.

Mu Ke this thing is not to mention, to any monster with a Bai Liu face, this guy can move the knife to hurt the other a little skin, the first to cry out is his own.

Liu Jiayi's lips turned blue as she tilted her head back to meet Bai Liu's eyes for a dozen seconds, took a deep dry breath and put away her gun, pulling out the poison, "Yes, that's what you told me about the last one, so get lost, I'm going to identify the other two."

"There's no need to test, we're both real." Bai Liu smiles, "I'm sure I'm the real Bai Liu, so you're also the real Liu Jiayi."

Liu Jiayi looked up in shock, "How did you recognize it?!"

Bai Liu patted her on the head, "It's a controlled-control experiment, and we've already heard the observatory version."

Liu Jiayi frowned, "What experiment?"

Bai Liu told Fang Xiaoxiao about the experiments the monster had done on them, and then smiled with great interest:

"Don't you think it's similar to what we have now? Both are experiments in which one side of a group of people who know each other well goes their separate ways and leaves, then turns back halfway through, the other side stays put and waits to be rescued, and then both sides recognize each other as human or not?"

Bai Liu said this, Mu Sicheng touched his chin, put down his gun and thought deeply, "...... seems to be eh."

Then he was stunned, as if reacting furiously, and loudly retorted, "No, according to this experiment, there should also be someone who is real and someone who is fake on our side!"

"No, no, no." Bai Liu pushed down the alert Mu Sicheng lifting the gun aimed at Liu Jiayi's forehead again and explained with a smile, "This time it's an experiment where one side is all real and one side is all fake."

Mu Sicheng Clueless: "Why?!"

Liu Jiayi didn't resist rolling her eyes as she took the lead in putting away the poison, muttering a low, "Stupid, or a college student?"

Mu Ke, too, lowered his gun and leaned his head against the top bunk with a long, weary sigh of relief, his hands sliding down and drooping as he turned to Mu Sicheng and explained:

"If, as Bai Liu said, it's a social experiment with low repeatability, then it's common sense that experiments that have been done wouldn't be conducted a second time because they've already gotten the results of the experiment in Fang Xiaoxiao's kind of situation, and then Fang Xiaoxiao and their situation wouldn't be repeated a second time with us, and we'd have to play the another experimental role."

Bai Liu held up his finger, his smile deepening, "To put it simply, we are the control group for Fang Xiaoxiao's group of experiments, and according to this inference, one can then conclude - because we are real, the Mu Ke who came to find us must also be real! That conclusion."

Mu Sicheng listen to the eyes of the stars, eyes straight circle: "...... this all what and what ah, why can directly launch this conclusion ......"

Liu Jiayi squinted, gave Mu Sicheng a speechless look, turned around, yawned, lifted up the bottom bunk, took off the blood-stained coat, and tiredly curled up into a ball on the bottom bunk, shouting "I'm going to sleep.

Liu Jiayi closed his eyes after saying that, his hands scrunched up into a ball, clutching Bai Liu's pair of gloves tightly on his hands, just like a cub that has found its own right nest with great difficulty, breathing evenly and falling asleep very quickly.

Mu Ke half-blocked the bed and softened his voice as he explained, "We came all the way over here with Jiayi dealing with the monsters by relying on poisons, and even though she has a stamina restorer, she's a little kid after all, and she's still mentally exhausted."

Tang Er swept a glance at the blood splattered everywhere on Mu Ke's body, as well as the hard-to-disguise tired and weathered expression on the man's face, and knew that the man had also spent a lot of mental energy reading and processing the memorized information, and then later on forcing Liu Jiayi to lead him to kill his way out of a bunch of monsters.

"You rest too." Tang Er opened his mouth to comfort.

Mu Ke nodded and haughtily turned and undressed, climbing onto the top bunk still straightening the corners of the covers, but within a minute of lying down he was asleep and his hands were drooping off the side of the bed.

Tang Er beat a sigh and stepped forward to tuck Mu Ke's hand back in, "It seems that they really did go through a vicious battle to come over and deliver a letter to us, it's hard for them."

Mu Sicheng scratched his head and circled around Bai Liu, pointing at the two men on the bed and questioning in a low voice, "How in the world are you sure these two guys aren't monsters?!"

And did not burn, and did not use strong acid to pour, the only weaknesses that can distinguish between players and monsters one did not use, just a look to determine, Bai Liu What kind of medicine is this guy gourd selling!

Bai Liu smiles, "Are you really that curious?"

Mu Sicheng nodded furiously.

Bai Liu took out a piece of paper and a pen, placed them on a small desk in the center of the cabin, and began to explain to Mu Sicheng with a bowed body, "Do you still remember the experiment Fang Xiaoxiao told you about earlier?"

"Remember." Mu Sicheng wanted to rub the goosebumps on his arms at the thought of that experiment, "It was when a group of them let a couple of people escape out of the ice rift outside of Tarzan Station, and then these guys turned back to try and rescue them, only to literally run into a fake that one of the parties didn't recognize."

Bai Liu lowered his eyes, "What do you think the purpose of this experiment is?"

Mu Sicheng froze for a moment, then racked his brain and gave a tentative answer, "I think it's ...... trying to explore how humans in the same group recognize monsters from humans in extreme environments?"

He remembers Fang Xiaoxiao telling him so.

"That is to say, this is an experiment to explore how well humans within a group discriminate between like and unlike." Bai Liu wrote the four attached labeled letters [A1], [A2], [B1], and [B2] on the paper, then continued.

"Assuming we are monsters, A is the human group, A1 and A2 are the two teams in a group we forced to separate, B is the monster group, and [B1], [B2] are the monster simulations of the two dispersed groups of [A1], and [A2] as mirrored hybrid creatures."

Bai Liu listed the four letters in a 2×2 table, "Then there are four exploratory experiments to be conducted according to the purpose of our experiment, A1 meets B2, A2 meets B1, and these two are the experiments that Fang Xiaoxiao and the others have conducted."

"Since the human group A1 that conducted the experiment has memories of this discrimination experiment, and the human group A2 couldn't handle the results of the experiment and committed suicide, we can't conduct the experiment on them again, so we need a completely new human group that hasn't had contact with any other group to complete the remaining two experiments."

Bai Liu slowly looked up, raising his eyes to look directly at Mu Sicheng: "That is to say, A1 meets A2, B1 meets B2, these two control experiments - this is the experiment we conducted."

"That's why I say, if we're real, then Mu Ke must be real."

"Of course, from what we've seen so far, we can't rule out the possibility that we're all fakes, and I now suspect that the monsters' experiments involve a level of memory."

Though speaking of such a horrible speculation, Bai Liu's tone was incredibly flat, "But in the case of both sides being false, there is no difference between it and the truth as far as I'm concerned."

Mu Sicheng took two steps back, he looked creepily at the four experiments being listed by Bai Liu on the white paper, and couldn't help but feel a coldness seeping out from his bones.

The cold was colder than even the -55 degree snow they were walking in - it was the pure, brutal, cold of feeling like they had lost their emotional awareness and identity existence as human beings.

It was as if he was indistinguishable from any of the creatures of this world, just a pile of bones, connective tissue, and some fat encased in skin laid out in a solid order to be toyed with at the whim of something higher in existence than himself.

As humans do to other creatures, life is stripped of its value and purely materialized into meaningless symbols on paper - A1, A2, B1, B2.

Mu Sicheng's lips were trembling as he looked at Bai Liu in a state of uncertainty: "What if, we are fake?"

Bai Liu looked at him flatly, "Kill the real one, of course, and take its place."