Bai Liu handed the diary to Mu Ke when he came out.
Along with it were the Joint Experiment Data Report—a series of documents retrieved by the Observatory—and a basic textbook Mu Ke had taken from the cabin of one of the Observatory's graduate students. He needed to read all of them to understand the rest of the materials.
Bai Liu asked, "How long will it take you to finish?"
Looking at the thick stack of books and specialized materials in front of him—which was practically asking him to relearn an entire subject—Mu Ke counted carefully and replied seriously, "About three or four days."
Bai Liu nodded knowingly. "How much food is left at this observatory?"
Mu Ke answered, "After discarding the expired and spoiled supplies, there are about seventy kilograms of food left. That's roughly fifteen days' worth for one person, assuming consumption of one kilogram per day."
"Then we'll have to leave before you finish translating." Bai Liu thought for a moment and made a decision. "We can't take a snowmobile. It's too slow. Tarzan Station is more than a thousand kilometers away, and the average speed of a snowmobile is only thirty to forty kilometers per hour. A round trip would take over thirty days. The food and fuel won't last that long. It's better to go by helicopter."
Tang Erda frowned. "But flying a helicopter in this weather is risky."
"I know." Bai Liu gave him a faint look. "Don't forget that our game identity is set as a group of avid explorers. We're not supposed to choose the safest method—especially not one that exhausts us."
Tang Erda paused and said nothing more. His instincts were those of an observer, someone grounded in realism—but this was a game.
The game did not need to be realistic.
Bai Liu looked around the room. "Any other objections?"
No one responded.
Bai Liu began giving orders in an orderly tone. "Mu Sicheng, haul the food and fuel to the helicopter. Tang Erda, repair the helicopter and the snowmobile. Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi, prepare a week's worth of food for the observation post and store it near the cabin. Then prepare another week's supply in the snowmobile. If we aren't back within a week, drive to the nearest observation post. Keep your guns in both the vehicle and the cabin."
"The first thing you must do is leave this place. Escape if—"
"We'll bring a satellite phone on the helicopter and contact you if anything happens."
Bai Liu shook the satellite phone in his hand. "But based on the game's usual design, there's a ninety-five percent chance we'll lose it. So we'll prepare separate contingency plans for scenarios both before and after the phone is lost."
One hour later.
Dressed in a thick winter suit, knee pads, and spiked boots for walking and climbing on ice, Bai Liu leaned over the side of the helicopter and waved to Liu Jiayi and Mu Ke below before closing the cabin door.
Tang Erda sat in the pilot's seat, adjusting the dashboard instruments. Food parcels were piled high in the back.
Mu Sicheng could barely stretch his limbs amid the mountain of supplies and had to use his firearm to carve out a small space for himself.
The rotor blades roared to life. Bai Liu withdrew his gaze, flexed his stiff, frozen fingers, and exhaled a plume of white breath.
"Put on dark goggles," Tang Erda warned from the front seat. "To prevent snow blindness. And if any part of your body starts to go numb from the cold, cover it immediately to keep it warm. Otherwise, blood clots can form over time, leading to stiffened limbs that may require amputation."
Mu Sicheng was shivering violently, his voice trembling as he rubbed his hands together. "Didn't I bring Liu Jiayi's antidote? Can't that treat frostbite?"
Liu Jiayi had prepared a bottle of antidote for each of the three of them.
"Yes, it can," Bai Liu said, glancing sideways at him. "But only after your vitality drops low enough for it to activate—by which time you'll probably already be frozen unconscious."
"…" Mu Sicheng nearly burst into tears. "I fucking hate Antarctica."
The helicopter was forced to make two emergency landings amid the endless snowfields due to strong winds.
Tang Erda had wisely replaced the helicopter's landing gear with sled-type skids to reduce the risks of landing and takeoff.
But the greatest danger to helicopter operations in Antarctica was not the landing gear or even the wind—it was ice crevasses.
If the helicopter had landed over a crevasse, the risk of fatalities would have been extremely high. Yet strangely, Bai Liu's team encountered none during either stop, allowing them to approach Tarzan Station within half a day.
With a dozen kilometers left to go, Bai Liu requested a third landing. Once again, no crevasses were found—even after Bai Liu personally disembarked and wandered around inspecting the area.
Tang Erda had mentioned that crevasses were not so common that one would simply stumble into them at random.
However, he had forgotten one crucial factor—
This was a game. And Bai Liu was a player with a luck value of zero.
It would only be natural for ice crevasses to be everywhere for a player with a setup like his.
Yet since entering the game, Bai Liu had not seen a single one.
Tilting his head, Bai Liu raised his binoculars. In the distance, Tarzan Station stood perched above the shimmering horizon of the snowfields. Through the lenses, he could faintly make out lights glowing in the observatory's windows and thin wisps of smoke rising from several chimneys on the roof.
His eyes narrowed. "There's someone at Tarzan Station."
"Is that why you chose to land here?" Tang Erda glanced sideways at him. "Should we head straight in, or—?"
"No. Don't go in yet. Check for ice crevasses around this area—especially where I've been walking." Bai Liu lowered his gaze to the snow, its pale surface reflecting darkly in his goggles. "Captain Tang, if there were crevasses here originally, is there any way to make them disappear?"
Tang Erda was startled. "If it were man-made, we could fill it with snow and pour water over it to refreeze the surface. But the workload would be enormous. Filling a twenty-meter-deep crevasse would take hours, and staying outside in this kind of cold for that long would freeze someone to death. Add the gale-force winds, and it's practically impossible. No one would bother doing it."
"What if whatever filled those crevasses isn't afraid of the cold at all?" Bai Liu asked mildly.
He crouched on one knee and pressed his gloved fingers against the ice. "We brought sensors that can scan hundreds—maybe even thousands—of meters beneath the surface, right?"
Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda unloaded the hydraulic hammer and the sensors from the helicopter. Following the instructions Mu Ke had translated, they placed the devices several hundred meters around the landing site.
With a faint beeping sound, the sensor began returning images—CT-like cross-sections of the ice—on the instrument's display. The scan extended deeper and deeper.
Then, as if detecting something unusual—something distinct from rock and ice—the device emitted a sharp heretic alarm.
The next image that appeared made Mu Sicheng draw in a cold breath, his body turning even colder.
Scattered human silhouettes appeared beneath the ice.
They were twisted in grotesque positions—limbs snapped and bent backward, heads crushed at unnatural angles, waists contorted almost one hundred and eighty degrees. They resembled frogs dissected for experiments, their spines severed and flipped open.
These people had been thrown into an ice crevasse and buried in snow, as though they were discarded experimental waste after some horrific procedure. The crevasse had become both their dumping ground and their graveyard.
Even though the sensor could not provide clear facial features, Mu Sicheng could easily imagine their agonized expressions.
A few of the "humanoid frogs" were in relatively intact positions. They had likely still been alive when they were thrown in. The silhouettes showed them struggling upward, arms and legs frozen in desperate climbing postures.
But before they could reach the surface, they had been frozen solid—less than fifteen meters from escape.
Tang Erda's ghost story came rushing back to Mu Sicheng. He instinctively hugged himself tighter and edged closer to Bai Liu, who remained completely calm.
"…Do you think these are the crew from Taishan Observatory?"
"Hard to say." Bai Liu's gaze remained fixed on the display. "Maybe. Maybe not."
"What do you mean?"
"The numbers don't add up." Bai Liu nodded toward the dark shapes on the screen. "There are already over a hundred bodies here. That's more than the total personnel at Tarzan Station."
He glanced at Mu Sicheng. "And there are still people inside the station. So there are two possibilities."
"One possibility is similar to what happened at Edmond Observatory—some armed scientist, paranoid and suspicious, decided the others were mentally unstable and uncontrollable. He eliminated the entire observatory staff, then disposed of anyone who later came to Tarzan Station seeking help. Afterward, he dumped all the bodies here."
Mu Sicheng swallowed hard. "And… the other possibility?"
Bai Liu shifted his gaze back to the dashboard.
"The other possibility is that everyone at Tarzan Station is already dead. Some kind of monster conducted brutal exploratory experiments on them, then discarded the bodies here. And now those monsters are still occupying and operating the station."
Mu Sicheng couldn't help asking, "But there are over a hundred bodies here. You said that's more than the total number of people at Tarzan Station. Where did the extra ones come from?"
Bai Liu answered lightly, "The monsters themselves, of course."
"???!!!" Mu Sicheng froze. After two seconds of stunned silence, he reacted in horror. "You mean the monsters can turn into people?!"
"It seems," Bai Liu said calmly, "that the creature we're dealing with this time not only possesses strong learning and adaptive abilities, and the cunning to disguise itself as human in order to deceive and capture prey, but may also have a tendency toward internal competition and mutual slaughter."
He lifted his eyes slightly, a hint of interest in his smile. "Wow. Sounds almost like an evolved version of humanity."