"Mu Ke, you and Liu Jiayi go to the infirmary on the second floor to see if there are any relevant medical records to find out why this group of people took such a large amount of drugs."

Bai Liu's eyes were deep: "These people should have been mentally healthy when they arrived in Antarctica. We need to find out what made them insane."

Mu Ke nodded and led Liu Jiayi down. Before leaving, Bai Liu threw two guns and three or four boxes of bullets to them: "Be careful."

Mu Ke took the gun and bullets steadily, loaded them skillfully and put them at his side.

Liu Jiayi found it a bit difficult to use because although the rifle had been improved, it was still too long. She had to raise her arm to hold it, but the posture still looked good.

After going through so many dungeons, almost all of them can now use guns. Although their accuracy is not as good as that of Tang Erda, the sharpshooter, they can at least reach the level of a master of shooting games.

Even Liu Jiayi can skillfully use automatic or semi-automatic rifles, but due to height restrictions and strong recoil, she uses this type of rifle less frequently, but it is not unusable.

But there is no choice now. In this icy and snowy environment, it is better to use the dungeon supplies first rather than wasting your energy on skills.

Bai Liu led Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda, took their guns, and followed Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi downstairs. They were going to check the basement under the helicopter hangar outside the observation station.

The two teams separated on the second floor.

Bai Liu walked to the front door and saw that the door was covered with frost again within just one hour. There was a foamy white condensation hanging on the lock handle, but it felt cold and hard when he shook his hand.

It's too cold here. The extremely low temperature and hurricane winds cause the snow to solidify very quickly, and it feels almost like ice when held.

Bai Liu moved his eyes to the wind speed meter hanging next to the door. The meter fed back the temperature and wind speed outside the window:

[-55.8℃, wind speed 119 km/h, wind force 12, level 1 hurricane, no going out]

Mu Sicheng grew up in the south and had never experienced such severe cold. Realizing that he was in an environment of minus fifty degrees Celsius made him feel even colder. He felt uncomfortable all over, as if the cold wind had penetrated every corner of his bones, making him shiver.

Although he had no idea about low temperatures, he was more familiar with typhoons. Mu Sicheng looked at the Category 1 hurricane and exclaimed, "Damn?! Is the wind so strong?! This is along the coast, and trees weighing dozens of kilograms can be blown up..."

Tang Erda also frowned: "We can't fly a helicopter in this extreme weather. The wind will force it to land and cause an accident. If we want to go out and look for other observation stations, we have to drive a snowmobile."

Bai Liu didn't comment on the weather, he calmly opened the door.

A fierce wind blew in, and there was no light at all outside the door. All that could be seen was the thick snow that blocked out the faint light in the distant sky, making it pitch dark as far as the eye could see.

The door was shaking in the wind. A thick layer of snow had piled up at the door, reaching as high as a person's knee. The wind blowing inside was so strong that Tang Er couldn't help but raise his hands to cover his eyes, and was blown back for a distance.

"Put on your goggles and snowshoes!" Tang Erda had to raise his voice in order to make others hear him in the strong wind, "Hold the safety rope around your waist, don't get blown away! Also pay attention to the ice cracks under your feet! Don't fall into them!"

The wind speed in Antarctica can reach up to 35 meters per second, which is enough to blow away objects as heavy as ten Tang Erda, but this is not the most terrifying thing here.

The scariest thing here is the ice cracks. No one who has survived in Antarctica will not be afraid of them.

The Antarctic ice surface is not completely flat. As the temperature changes, the ice melts and reshapes, creating many cracks more than 100 meters deep between the ice surfaces. Snowfall will cover these cracks, making them invisible to the naked eye and difficult to detect.

This naturally means that it is very easy for people to walk on ice or snow and fall if they are not careful.

Tang Erda remembered that he had heard a story before coming here. It said that a member of a Japanese observation station went out to inspect equipment. When he came back, a strong wind blew and he disappeared.

Four days later, the observation station staff found the team member in a shallow ice crevasse less than three meters away from the gate.

The missing team member had been frozen to death. His face was covered in frost and he looked up at the exit of the ice crack with resentful eyes. His ten fingers were fractured and turned outward, and the gaps between his nails were all frozen. There was blood and wounds from scratching. His front teeth were half broken from biting, and his mouth was full of blood. There was some blood foam from human skin sticking to the ice.

The snow covering the cracks was not thick, so the team member should have been able to push it away and climb out. The team member realized this, and he desperately used his hands and teeth to bite through the deep snow.

He could have escaped successfully.

But in those two days, in order to search for the missing team member, the observation station members went out very frequently, and used snowmobiles to run over the crack several times. Such intensive outings quickly compacted the snow on the ice crack.

This team member watched as these people, under the banner of saving him, turned his only way of survival into a cold door of death, and then trapped and froze to death here.

From then on, the Japanese observation station often encountered equipment malfunctions on nights when blizzards came, and several team members who went out to repair the equipment said that on the way back, when they passed by the ice crack, they could hear someone below calling for help and laughing maliciously and resentfully.

The team members who were still frightened said that they could hear the frantic scratching of fingernails and the gnawing of teeth beneath the snow, and felt that in the next second something inside would break through the ice and come to grab them with a resentful smile.

After losing several more maintenance personnel, Japan chose to use a different observation post as its base camp.

Tang Erda doubted the authenticity of this story because the observation station would routinely check whether there were any ice cracks in the surrounding area, but it was also through this story that he remembered the ice cracks.

So when Bai Liu said he was going out, in order to remind this group of people to be careful, Tang Erda also told this story to Mu Sicheng and Bai Liu.

After listening to this, Mu Sicheng said: Damn, why don’t I not go, you two go.

Bai Liu refuted it calmly.

The three people walked forward and backward, holding the safety ropes around their waists, staggering towards the helicopter hangar in the hurricane. Fortunately, the helicopter hangar was not far away and they arrived there quickly. Tang Erda opened the hinged door and the three people entered the basement one by one.

Mu Sicheng shook off the snow on his body, his teeth chattering: "Damn, the weather has changed so quickly! It wasn't this windy when I came here before!"

"If you had stayed a little longer, when the wind came, you wouldn't have anything on you, not even a satellite phone or a safety rope." Bai Liu glanced at Mu Sicheng casually, "...you might have been blown away by the wind and trapped in an ice crack somewhere..."

Mu Sicheng: "..."

Grass.

"But this is a game pool, I can still quit the game!" Mu Sicheng retorted harshly.

"That's not necessarily true. You didn't act so hastily in this dungeon." Tang Erda followed Bai Liu's gaze and said sternly, "The deepest ice crack here is 100 meters, and the lowest temperature can reach -89 degrees. It will freeze you unconscious in 15 seconds. You may be frozen to death before you even think about quitting the game."

Mu Sicheng: "..."

Grass!!!!

What the hell is this game!!

The basement that Bai Liu and the others entered has two floors.

The top layer is for some light experiments. There aren't too many things on it, and it doesn't need to be too clean. Some sensors, hydraulic hammers and the like are piled on this layer. There are also two large jars of pickled cabbage and radishes in the corner.

Tang Erda lifted the cover and took a look, and a sour and foul stench rose to the sky.

Mu Sicheng's nose moved uncomfortably - the extremely low smell was very pure, everything was frozen, so this pungent smell was the first time he smelled it since coming to this copy.

"It smells like my grandma's failed attempt at making sauerkraut and it went rotten." Mu Sicheng gulped and fanned his nose with his hands.

Tang Erda put down the tarp and looked at Bai Liu with a complicated expression: "This pickled cabbage is made in Chinese style. The people at Edmund Observatory probably don't know how to make it, so it failed and it stinks."

"But who gave them the idea to store food this way?" Bai Liu thought thoughtfully. "It seems that the relationship between Taishan Station and Edmund Observatory is not as rigid as we thought."

Otherwise, the people at Taishan Station would not be so friendly in instructing each other on how to make sauerkraut. Such private interactions between parents are obviously the sustenance of close relationships.

Bai Liu walked around the vat several times, looking thoughtful, as if he was looking for something.

Mu Sicheng couldn't help but ask, "It's just two jars of pickled cabbage, what are you looking at?"

"Looking for the production date." Bai Liu replied calmly.

"?" Mu Sicheng was a little confused. "Who makes pickled cabbage and writes the production date? This thing can be made casually..."

His words stopped abruptly when Bai Liu squatted beside the jar and wiped a black mud stain on the lower left corner with his hand.

On the lower left corner of the kimchi jar, there is a laboratory label with the following written neatly: [10/8, 12.14kg radish]

It was as if it was marking some experiment that was about to take place.

Mu Sicheng was shocked: "How do you know they put a production date on it?!"

Bai Liu stood up slowly: "This is a laboratory. Edmund is a scientist. He doesn't know how to make sauerkraut. So he put these two jars of sauerkraut here for only one purpose - to do experiments and record the fermentation process of the sauerkraut."

"According to Dr. Edmund's strict attitude towards experiments, he would definitely make some basic records on this kind of thing."

He raised his eyes and smiled: "For example, the date."

Tang Erda was already squatting under another jar of pickled cabbage. He carefully wiped the old jar with his fingertips and found another label in the same position.

"The date of placement here is also August 10th." Tang Erda looked up at Bai Liu, but he soon felt something was wrong and frowned. "The plane crashed here on August 7th. The fax from Taishan Station suggesting that Edmund Station had stolen the body was sent on August 8th, but this Edmund——"

"——On August 10th, I prepared two jars of pickled cabbage. Don't you think it's strange?" Bai Liu asked softly.

Tang Er frowned, he couldn't understand why.

But Bai Liu had no intention of answering his question. Instead, he continued walking forward towards the zipper door leading to the second underground floor.

There was also a sliding door between the first underground floor and the second underground floor. This door had obviously been frozen, but Mu Sicheng had already chiseled it open when he came down before. Bai Liu brushed off the ice chips on it with his hands, pulled it open and walked down.

The moment he opened it, Bai Liu understood why Mu Sicheng took the information and ran away.

A thick, eerie, and foul stench that almost overturned the human soul rushed out, accompanied by substantial dust and light smoke that spread in the air.

As the heating was restored, the ice on the top of the second underground floor melted, and turbid liquid dripped down like stalactites. The liquid flooded the ground, immersing the ground in a layer of dark gray muddy water. On the surface of the muddy water, there were many glass slides of unknown creatures and some plastic sealing materials floating on the surface.

All in all, it doesn't look like a pleasant scene.

Seeing Bai Liu was about to go down without saying anything, Mu Sicheng anxiously reminded him, "There's water down there! There are rubber boots and rubber gloves next to the stairs! Change into them before you go down!"

Bai Liu changed into rubber boots, pulled down and secured the rubber gloves, picked up a plastic file bag to cover his head, and walked into the second underground floor with one foot deep and one foot shallow.

After coming down, the strange stench became stronger, like the fishy smell of some fish that had just been caught from the deep ocean, slippery and sticky, like a sea snake, swimming around the white willows in the dark and dusty air.

The water on the ground was barely above the soles of his shoes. Bai Liu's movements created swaying waves. He bent down and picked up the glass slides and some documents floating on the water.

The names of the biological slices were written on the glass slides. Bai Liu vaguely recognized some of them as killer whales, small warm whales, and several different species of penguins.

The slides floating on the water are basically fat and skin slides of these polar animals, and most of the floating data also record the research results of these animals.

In the center of the basement is a large and heavy desk with four microscopes on it, an overturned slide box in the middle, and two small test tube racks.

There are several rows of small test tubes neatly arranged in the test tube rack. The surface of the cell fixative inside is slightly frozen and is now slowly melting as the temperature recovers. The biological tissues floating inside appear a peculiar pink color after being stained.

During the heating process, the edges of the meat tissue began to turn black and grow strangely, and some of the tissues in the small test tubes even began to wriggle slightly, as if they were coming to life.

Bai Liu glanced at the labels on the lids of the test tubes, which all read: [Mixed culture of penguins (killer whales, etc.) + unknown organisms X free cells].

And amid the blackening, writhing mass of flesh, there was a piece of tissue suspended quietly, motionless, the bright red of a freshly cut section of that creature before and after thawing.

Bai Liu felt that he could even see the capillaries on the slices oozing blood and dissipating it in the fixative.

He walked over and used two fingers to pick up the small test tube from the test tube rack. On the top cover of the test tube rack was a label that was completely different from the other test tubes. It read - [Unknown Creature: X].

The moment this small test tube was taken out, the tissues in the other small test tubes seemed to be invaded. Sharp steam spurted out of the test tube mouths in an instant, and the formaldehyde liquid inside was evaporated completely in an instant.

These small pieces of flesh began to rapidly differentiate and grow in some unknown direction, crawling out of the test tube and sticking to each other. In the blink of an eye, they grew into a basketball-sized, sticky black ball covered with tentacles.

This ball of flesh has the smooth skin of a penguin and a killer whale, the sharp teeth of a carnivore, and fleshy wings on both sides covered with new tentacles that are growing like a pulse.

These tentacles seemed to be united with each other, entangled with each other, and sank into the body of this fleshy ball, and soon differentiated into a new organization - a pair of webbed feet like fish tails.

The meat ball screamed and rushed towards Bai Liu with its tentacles waving. Tang Er, who was standing at the entrance of the stairs, quickly leaned back and leaned on the stairs for leverage. He swung his hand to lift the rifle at his waist to his shoulder, put it close to Bai Liu's face, aimed, and shot.

“Bang!”

After two clean and sharp shots, the meatball lay motionless in the mud.

Tang Erda put down his rifle, panting slightly, and reminded solemnly: "I triggered the monster book. This should be one of the monsters in this copy, called Unknown Creature x Polluted Body. This is very likely a biochemical pollution copy. Be careful not to touch the pollution source."

"Okay." Bai Liu replied meekly, and hid the small test tube in his waist bag.

He leaned over the contaminated corpse, half squatted down and continued to look for information in the laboratory. Finally, Bai Liu found what he wanted in a locked safe - he asked Tang Erda to directly use a gun to break the lock of the box.

It contains the experimental diary sorted by time.

After getting it, Bai Liu came out of the underground laboratory, closed the door, and followed Mu Sicheng, who was unwilling to go down even if he died, upstairs.

Behind them, the creatures that were beaten to death by Tang Er began to transform and merge like asphalt, quickly reassembling from a pile of non-human-looking things, slowly becoming more like a person, with a face, facial features, and limbs all appearing on its body.

It was as if it was adjusting its appearance and body, repeating three appearances over and over again. Sometimes it had a slightly stronger human body, sometimes it had an elegant and clean appearance, and sometimes it had the shape of monkey headphones on its head. Occasionally, the eyes that emerged from its "asphalt" were full of pure curiosity.

Finally, it seemed to have decided what it wanted to become. In the mud, it gradually shed its snake-like black shell, and its slender white hands and feet roughly emerged from the shell.

A naked Bai Liu stumbled and knelt in the mud. He opened his pure eyes and uttered a high-pitched cry from his throat, like a whale calling its companions.

On the copies of the documents scattered on the water that Bai Liu had not taken away, there were scribbled words:

[——After the whale tissue was cultured with the cells of the unknown organism X, it showed plant-like reorganization and regeneration, and the degree of differentiation regressed to the lowest level, and it could be induced to differentiate again...]

[Cells have the high intelligence of individuals, and the differentiated "basketball-tentacle-shaped lower organisms" (hereinafter referred to as basketballs) show the differentiation of all biological categories, including humans, birds, fish, and even ferns and ancient microorganisms...]

[Whale cells begin to play a leading role, develop whale habits, grow a layer of smooth epidermal tissue to wrap the "basketball", and the cell differentiation gradually tends to be normal. After a week of differentiation, the cells gradually die...]

[Before death, it showed whale habits and began to shed its skin. After shedding its skin... My God! It was reborn! It showed learning! It began to control its own differentiation direction... Oh my God! After shedding its skin many times, it began to differentiate in the direction of humans!!]

[——No, I have to stop the experiment. This is an immoral and filthy creation. It will pollute the human gene group! ]

The author has something to say:

The design of this monster is based on the Shoggoth in the Cthulhu mythology, a kind of slime that has a strong learning ability and can imitate its master~

In order to please its master (who can be understood as the evil god of the Ancient Ones), the Shoggoths transformed into human form (the Shoggoths thought this might be the form the Ancient Ones liked, a bit like a pet) so that the Ancient Ones could play with them. Although it seems quite sanctimonious in the Cthulhu mythology, and that's not what it means, my mind is full of... cough cough

My gay friend: People can't, at least they shouldn't