Chapter 261: Ice Age

The helicopter stumbled over the long white snowfields and had to make two forced landings due to gusty winds.

By the time Tang Er fought his party arrived at the Edmund Observatory, it was close to the early morning of the third day.

The helicopter landed a few kilometers from the Edmond Observatory.

Now that the blizzard had ceased, the Edmund Observatory was buried in a thick blanket of snow as far as the eye could see, but strangely enough, the field in front of the door had been cleared of snow, revealing a clearing underneath, and the door was half-open.

Tang Er hit the situation and knew something was wrong: "Someone's in there."

"Shit!" Mu Sicheng rubbed his arm, grimacing, "It can't be that group of our clones are still in there, can it?"

Bai Liu was crouched in front of the flap door of the basement opening next to the helicopter hangar.

A pungent odor of cold ash and corroded strong acid poured out of the basement's trapdoor.

The snow has been cleared from the trapdoor, which is wide open, and next to the door, the two barrels of gasoline that were placed there before Bai Liu's departure have disappeared. Instead, the inside of the basement is dark, and a little bit of hot air is gushing out.

From Bai Liu's point of view, the walls were covered with soot left over from the incomplete burning of the fuel oil, and liquid and snow were dripping down the steps, which appeared to have only been burned for a short time and hadn't yet had time to freeze.

Liu Jiayi also noticed the abnormality here, she crouched down next to Bai Liu: "It seems that after we left, the clones burned the monsters in the basement, and poured strong acid to corrode them."

But as she spoke, her eyes swept over the layer of liquid that had accumulated on the basement floor, and she wrinkled her brow in puzzlement, "But I cleared the supplies of the Edmund Observatory with Mu Ke before I left, and I don't recall there being this much stockpiled acid here."

Strong acid is a scarce chemical reagent even on a scientific research station, and Liu Jiayi basically emptied the Edmund Observatory of acid before he left.

Even so, she had to be careful and calculating in order to deal with the monsters and escape.

Liu Jiayi crouched down and took out a piece of metal to catch two drops of acid dripping down the steps.

The metal surface was quickly corroded, nuisance gassing, and she frowned, "This guy is totally dumping acid into the basement in buckets, where did he get that much acid?"

The person who cleaned up the basement used strong acid quite casually, spreading it all over the walls and steps, with a sense of wastefulness, as if he didn't have any sense of appreciation for such hard-won and scarce resources as strong acid in the copy.

"Then there's only one possibility." Bai Liu's eyes fell on the slowly freezing acid.

Liu Jiayi snapped, "There was a guy who played this game and brought his own acid in - Spades was here?!"

At that moment, a shriek came from Mu Sicheng on the second floor of the observatory, "Grass! What's going on here?!"

Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi looked at each other and the two of them took out their weapons and headed for the door.

After they entered the Observatory and went up to the second floor, Liu Jiayi alertly dragged his gun in front of Bai Liu: "What's going on?"

Mu Sicheng looked back, his face green and white, his shaking hand pointing in the direction of the restaurant, and his voice trembling, seemingly terrified, "...... you guys, see for yourselves ...... "

Bai Liu looks past Mu Sicheng to the restaurant behind him, then raises an eyebrow slightly.

He understood why Mu Sicheng had such an expression.

The seats in the dining room were roughly kicked out of the way, and broken tables, chairs, and benches were stacked in loose piles in the four corners of the room, freeing up a large open space in the center of the dining room.

And the clearing had been smashed out by something unknown, a hole with an outline approximating a square.

The hole goes right through the floor of the second floor, and you can see the scene on the first floor through this hole in the floor of the second floor restaurant.

A ring of bloody handprints left by people struggling to get up was densely spread across the floor - you could tell that at one point a group of people had been picking at the edges of the hole, trying to work their way up.

On the first floor, directly underneath the recessed opening to the cave was a huge glass tank of water that appeared to have been carried down from the roof and was now filled with concentrated acid so viscous that it barely flowed, which was currently gurgling and bubbling in response to the reaction.

The glass tank was filled with all kinds of carbonized, charred and fragmented "corpses" as if they were garbage.

Most of these corpses had not yet fully reacted, and were writhing in a bloody mess in the concentrated acid, with strange, corroded bubbling noises emanating from their skin and flesh, and "they" were constantly slapping their palms on the pool of acid, occasionally shaking off their half-dissolved eyeballs.

What alarmed Mu Sicheng was the appearance of the bodies.

The people who handled these corpses were a bit rough, not very attentive, and quite a few of them still had faces that were not completely charred by the fuel, so you could clearly see what "they" looked like.

--These bodies have the faces of Bai Liu, Mu Sicheng, Tang Er, Liu Jiayi, and Mu Ke.

Such a group of charred corpses with their own faces struggling so painfully in the viscous, thick acid, skin, muscle, and bone being eroded by the acid in a pervasive way.

Even if you know that these things are not human, but monsters, it's hard not to empathize with the creepiness.

Mu Sicheng took two steps back and distanced himself from the bloodstained hole, gulped nervously, and opened his mouth with a voice that was hoarse as hell, "...... Someone killed all of these monsters that have turned into us here at Edmund Station."

"And it's fast." Tang Er hit half crouched at the edge of the cave entrance, he touched those residual blood stains with two fingers, looked up with a grimace and added, "The blood hasn't all coagulated yet."

Bai Liu's eyes moved from those blood stains to Mu Ke's face, "I remember you said that these monsters that turned into us have skills?"

"Yes." Mu Ke also looked shocked, his pupils were in a state of slight contraction, as if he was unable to think for a second or two before he began to answer Bai Liu's question, "We had a confrontation with these monsters before we left, and we were almost held hostage by them."

"But they're not as strong as us, I think it might be because they're still immaturely developed, and their abilities feel like they're only about one-half of ours." Liu Jiayi took over, she looked towards the first floor with a condensed expression and let out a slow breath.

"But there's not just one [us] here at Edmund's Station, there's a bunch of [us] mixing it up."

"-he took such a group of monsters with roughly similar abilities to ours and quickly contained them in a short period of time, and made this acid pool by smashing through the floor with a whip, and threw the bodies in to dispose of them."

Liu Jiayi face for the first time so ugly: "Spades ability ...... is too strong, he is stronger than last year."

"We can't win against him even in a group battle, what's next?" She tilted her head invitingly to Bai Liu.

Bai Liu crouched down on one foot with his knees bent at the edge of the cave entrance, staring uncertainly at the gradually drowning and dissipating [Bai Liu] in the acid pool below for a moment.

After the charred corpses with their own faces had turned to bone and then to bubbling particles and some shapeless remains, Bai Liu stood up as he withdrew his gaze and turned to look at the others:

"Search the entire Observatory for the reason Spades is here."

Half an hour later, a group of people once again gathered on the first floor.

Mu Ke, who is good at memorizing and searching maps, reports his findings first:

"A lot of places were searched, supposedly looking for something, but the search was abbreviated, not like they were looking for text-based information or small objects."

"Spades hasn't been found to have taken anything with him so far, so what he's looking for shouldn't have been found yet."

"He didn't touch the rifles and bullets scattered around the fourth floor either." Tang Er hit added, "Pretty much the same situation as when we left."

Bai Liu sat beside the desktop, he drew out a piece of paper and summarized the information on it, summarizing in a calm tone, "First of all, we can be sure of one thing now, Spades repeatedly enters this game to look for an object, and this object is most likely related to the game's main line."

"Spades was initially logged in with me at the Edmund Observatory, but instead of searching the place at that time, he just left it and went outside, and we can tell from that - at that time Spades didn't think there was anything he was looking for at the Edmund Observatory. "

Bai Liu paused on the paper with the tip of his pen, "But now he's back."

Liu Jiayi quickly realized why, "Spades didn't find any out there either, so decided to come back to Edmund's Observatory to take a chance, and happened to run into the replicants we had left here, so killed them, searched again, but still didn't find any, and left."

Bai Liu's eyes were half-lidded, and the tip of his pen drew little by little as if he were thinking: "The key to the question now is, what exactly is Spades looking for when he repeatedly enters the game?"

"The main quest of this game is global warming, and Spades is looking for something possibly related to global warming." Mu Ke pondered and then suggested, "Is it possible that the bottom boss is Edmund? According to the general design of the game, as long as you beat the bottom boss, you can pass the level and reach the [NORMAL END]."

"I don't think that with Spades' ability, he would have even failed to reach [Normal End] after entering the game so many times." Bai Liu denied.

The tip of his pen paused twice on the surface of the paper before writing down the words [Corpse Piece].

Bai Liu raised his eyes, "I think what Spades is looking for may be a particle weather device transformed from [corpse], he should go for the [TRUE END] line to eliminate the possibility of global cooling again from the root."

"In keeping with Edmund's style of doing things, it's very likely that he put particle weather devices on those six hundred locations where he felt the South Pole affected the world's climate."

Mu Ke was puzzled: "But the six hundred locations were marked on a map, so if Spades wanted to find them, he could have just followed the map, there was no need to rummage through the Edmund Observatory - which did not house any particle weather devices. "

Bai Liu wrote down [600], [Experimental Sample Saved] on the paper and then put a question mark next to it.

He lifted his eyelids to look at Mu Ke: "That means that Spades is not looking for corpses in the six hundred particle devices, but corpses outside of the six hundred particle devices."

Mu Ke He repeated Bai Liu's words softly, "These six hundred corpses outside the particle device ......"

As if realizing something, he opened his eyes slightly and looked to Bai Liu : "It's Edmund who hasn't experimented with turning it into a particle device corpse, right!"

"Edmund is an experienced research scholar." Bai Liu faintly reminded, "He won't consume all the experimental materials at once, he usually keeps a portion as a sample, and this portion should be what Spades is looking for."

"If you look through the lab reports, which of the body parts Edmund got in the preliminaries were untouched?"

Mu Ke quickly looked down and flipped through it, his fingertips sliding down line after line of obscure report entries, finally settling on a certain word.

"Found it!"

"In the three parts of the body that Edmund got early on, it included the left hand, the back ankle, and an entire heart that retained arterial and venous blood vessels derived from it."

Mu Ke looked up slightly excitedly and spoke quickly, "I could only find records of experiments on the left hand and the back of the ankle, but nothing on this heart - Edmund may well have kept this heart as a sample reserve!"

Bai Liu put on his gloves and hat and pushed open the door, "This heart should be what Spades is looking for, and is the key to clearing this game's [TRUE END], let's go."

The wind and snow covered Bai Liu's dark, deep eyes, and his calm voice was carried away in the dusk of the night.

"--We're going to win Spades by finding this heart before Spades destroys it."

The tide rises and falls along the ice-strewn shore, and inward the ground is mottled with brown earth and snow, upon which sits a cabin of great age.

It was a rather old looking cabin, peeling paint on the door frames and floor rails left leper skin like spots on the cabin's exterior, and the roof was piled on top of rickety, rotting load bearing walls held in place by horizontally aligned boards.

In front of the entrance stood a sign like a tourist location indicator, which read [Scott's Cottage] above and [Built in 1912] below.

The warmth of a fire was emanating from the old wooden house, which was a hundred years old, already a cultural relic, and used as a tourist attraction, as if someone was resting and roasting inside.

Following the light of this fire spilling onto the snowy surface toward the cabin, the fire was roaring under the mantelpiece, and next to it sat a squinting old man on a wooden bench.

He wore a pair of faded gold pendant glasses, and hummed softly an out-of-tune song, his footboards tapping along with it, and his arms and legs and spine were hunched over in such a way that he seemed to have endured a lot of torture.

The firelight shone on his old, wrinkled face, reflecting the shadows as they swayed against the walls.

Out of the dark shadows stepped Spades, standing poised at the edge of the firelight's illumination, the long whip held in his hand, the snow that had not yet melted hanging from his long eyelashes and the tips of his hair.

Spades looked at the old man, his voice clear and slow, "Edmund."

The old man then opened one eye slightly to look over, he seemed a little bemused and amused, "There you go again young man, you seem to enjoy coming to my place."

Edmund smiled amiably, "You've killed me many times for that heart you can never find?"

"That's important to you?"

Spades opened his mouth, but it was in reply, "You shouldn't remember that I killed you."

Edmund removes his glasses and looks over at Spades, smiling softly, "Because I'm just an evil NPC in a game, and every time this copy is supposed to start over with a refresher as you guys leave, and I forget everything, right?"

Spades nods.

Edmund grinned, "Maybe I've lived too long and done too much cruelty, and so God refused to forgive me and make me remember everything I've done - I do remember you killing me so many times, and you're the most frequent person in this game that I almost want to be friends with you. "

His gaze lingered flirtatiously on Spades' dripping lash for a moment, "Of course it would be nice if you didn't strangle me with a whip as soon as you get into the game - choking is always painful, and I'd prefer to be burned to death if you'd give me a choice of death. "

Spades agreed without a second thought, "Yes."

Edmund then laughed out loud, "Boy, I believe you really don't understand people's jokes anymore."

"That group of your teammates have been taking you for a headache right? That guy called [Judge Against the Gods] has been so distressed that he couldn't help but pour out his troubles with me, an NPC, saying that he doesn't know what to do with you."

Edmund playfully scowls at Spades, "He looks so sad he's close to tears, it's a funny and troubling thing to have a friend like you."

Spades doesn't judge others' definitions of himself, and he's always been one-dimensional: "You still won't tell me where the heart is this time?"

Edmund's eyes reflected the light of the fire, and it seemed that any old man like him should have cloudy eyes, but Edmund's eyes remained pure and unblemished, as clean as the snow that had fallen under the Antarctic ice 30,000 years ago, and glowing with a light blue color that was almost icy.

"I can't, my boy." Edmund's expression became distant as he shook his head, "You can kill me again, but I will never tell you where I hid the heart."

"That's my original sin, and only God knows where it's hidden."

Spades pursed his lips into a straight line, he was visibly dissatisfied with the result, and there was a very shallow depression that surfaced from the small movement of his nails as he snapped his whip.

Edmund looked over at Spades, that same insightful friendly smile still on his face, "You found all six hundred of my particle devices this time as well, it's rare that I've seen a player be able to find all of them without freezing to death, you're amazing."

"But one device is ineffective." Spades looked at Edmund, "The device underneath Ice Dome A doesn't hold the corpse particles, and I can't gather all six hundred of them."

"But you've already won this game, haven't you?" Edmund bobbed his head fervently, holding up a finger for emphasis, "Your friend, the Adversary, tells me that you only care about winning and losing, and you've got what you want, so why not let my secret remain just a secret forever?"

Edmund looked at Spades, a smile at the corner of his mouth and a dim campfire glow in his crushed ice light blue eyes, "Why are you so fixated on a heart that isn't yours? It's not romantic."

Spades pauses briefly - it seems he doesn't know the exact answer to that question either.

"Intuition - I have to destroy the heart and all the body parts."

Spades looks up, "Everyone has their own set destiny, and I can see that this heart's destiny is linked to me, and should be destroyed by me."

"Neither it nor I should exist in this world."

The smirk on Edmund's face faded as he muttered, "You're self-destructing, kid ......"

"Uh-huh." Spades replies calmly, then asks, "What's the original sin you're trying to hide?"

Not a hint of a smile came to Edmund's face as he finally showed a bit of the old age that belonged to his age.

He held his forehead and sighed long and hard, unable to hide the tired trance in his features and movements, "My original sin was the one thing I didn't realize from the beginning to the end that I should repent for."

"I resented the things that persecuted me, hated the students who betrayed me, and pitied the friends I aspired to." Edmund took a deep, deep breath and exhaled slowly through his nose as if smoking, his eyes looking far away through the fire at his feet, "I have not done a single thing right, and I repent for it, but one thing has made me realize that I am far uglier than that."

Edmund's hands on the edge of the chair trembled, and he closed his eyes, tears falling into furrowed wrinkles, his voice hard and hoarse, "--that's the body parts."

"That's not a body part, that's a disintegrated limb of a living creature who is conscious, who feels, who has emotions, who knows what an ugly thing I'm doing to him."

Edmund opened his eyes, his clear eyes finally clouded at the moment, and choked out, "--and I didn't realize what I'd done to myself until I saw that beating heart."

"I'm abusing a living person."

Edmund turns his head over to look at Spades, who seems to have aged to the point of dying in a flash:

"The plot of the game you speak of is perhaps my destiny, a destiny by which I am pulled by the threads of the unseen gods towards the abyss of self-destruction, forming a paradisiacal cycle that feeds the playful amusement of the others who come and go, a horrific game from which I thought I could escape on my own."

"But after escaping, I realized that I was merely in a larger cycle of destiny again, always just a toy in the hands of the gods who enacted my destiny, and that mankind will always be in all world-lines headed for self-destruction through out-of-control desires, and that this is the destiny that we have been given by the gods - and he wants to see this."

Tears wavered in Edmund's eyes, "All of us deserve to be punished for the cruelty we have been given by fate, but I know that in the eyes of that unseen god, the undue punishment I have inflicted out of my anger is but a piece of the destiny he has calculated."

"All I did was ...... play."

Spades looked at him without waves, "But you get to decide how you die this time."

"I'll burn you to death as I wish, and that's no game to you, or to me."

Edmund smiled away with tears in his eyes, "I know."

"This is ...... the victory you want, and the destiny I want."

------

The other end.

Bai Liu rode the helicopter over the ground, and they had passed three points marked on the map - one of those six hundred locations.

But none of the results were satisfactory.

The buoys on the surface had been hollowed out and destroyed, and they didn't even need Bai Liu to sink down to find them; the wreckage of the instrument lay directly on the edge of the shore, and the metal box had been casually tossed inside the instrument, the particles inside having been destroyed cleanly.

The particle devices on the ground were released into the sky tied to weather balloons.

Bai Liu They had already seen several punctured balloons on the ground buried in the snow - in much the same condition as on the coast - and the particles in the metal boxes had been destroyed.

The further you go towards these locations marked on the map, the worse it gets.

Upon seeing the hollowed out device next to Ice Dome A, Bai Liu gave the termination order, "All six hundred devices should have been searched by Spades already, and Edmund shouldn't have hidden his heart in those six hundred spots."

"And where would he hide the heart?" Mu Ke yelled into the howling wind so he could make sure Bai Liu could hear him over the wind, "Those six hundred locations already include all the locations of special significance to Edmund, Ice Dome A, the South Pole, Tarzan Station, and Scott's Hut are all in there, is there any chance he could have hidden the heart anywhere else?"

"There is." Bai Liu turned to Mu Ke, "Remember what the main quest of this copy is?"

Mu Ke nods, "Global warming."

"If global cooling is Edmund's punishment for everyone, including himself, when his desires get out of control, global warming is an opportunity for him to transform." Bai Liu Breathes in white frost.

As they talk, Tang Er fights and maneuvers the helicopter to a steady landing in a new location.

Bai Liu stepped out of the helicopter, which had been steadily landed by Tang Er, onto an open snowfield.

It was a brand new, untouched site that had left no footprints or traces of any kind, where no devices had been placed and there was no sign of anyone visiting, far away from all the observatories, and not even with a geographical name that was uniquely its own.

It's a strange, featureless location any way you look at it.

This is the spot Bai Liu chose for Tang Er to land.

Mu Ke jogged to keep up with Bai Liu, breathing heavily, "Bai Liu, do you think this is where Edmund hid his heart?"

He was almost about to ask why you think it would be here, but in the way of Mu Ke's always blind trust in Bai Liu, he figured he'd dig in first.

But someone asked, Mu Sicheng turned around and asked Bai Liu, "Why would Edmund hide his heart here? I don't even know where this is, and I haven't seen this place in Edmund's faxes or lab reports."

Bai Liu puts on his anti-friction gloves and starts to help Tang Er carry the equipment for digging out the ice.

Mu Sicheng stepped forward to take over, looking at Bai Liu with inquisitive eyes.

Bai Liu leaned over and took a stack of lab reports from the back seat of the helicopter, handing them to Mu Sicheng: "Explain as you read them-as I said, global cooling is Edmund's punishment for mankind in his anger, but before that, global warming was also a punishment, and mankind's punishment that was self-inflicted."

Mu Sicheng couldn't help but exclaim, "What have I done wrong, why am I being punished when it gets cold or hot?"

Bai Liu laughed a little, "Yes, it's a Christian idea called life is born with original sin and living is the process of atonement, and it's much clearer if you think of the whole process as Edmund wanting mankind to atone for their sins."

"He felt that the others were guilty, so he punished them, and he felt that Tarzan Station was innocent, but this innocence was a sin in a guilty environment because it invited bullying, and so Edmund resolved to sharpen Tarzan Station so that they would survive as human beings on Noah's Ark." "

"Edmund knew deep down that he was wrong and guilty for doing what he did, and his own process of atonement--" Bai Liu's eyes deepened, "-- was to hide that heart he himself hadn't touched. -is to hide the heart that he himself hadn't touched, to protect the first innocent person he was forced to brutalize under the suppression of various circumstances."

"He saved the heart partly to preserve the experimental samples, and partly to preserve his own [original sin]."

Bai Liu looked to Mu Sicheng : "Where do you think someone like Edmund would keep his original sin?"

Mu Sicheng shook his head honestly.

Bai Liu smiled, "Of course it was the day he made up his mind to start committing his crimes and it took effect."

Mu Sicheng had a question mark in his eyes, "This day, which day is it again?"

"August 10th, the day he started pickling sauerkraut for the people of Tarzan Station." Bai Liu looked to the clearing in front of him and hooked his lips in a smile, "And this spot, in Edmund's cumulative thirty-three years of temperature records, was the coldest spot in Antarctica on August 10th."

"There's no better place to store a beating heart."