The helicopter stumbled across the vast white snowfield and had to make emergency landings twice due to strong winds.
By the time Tang Erda and his group arrived at Edmund Observation Post, it was almost the early morning of the third day.
The helicopter landed a few kilometers away from Edmund Observation Station.
Now the wind and snow have stopped. Looking from a distance, Edmund Observation Post is buried under thick snow, but strangely, the snow at the entrance has been cleared, revealing an open space underneath, and the door is also half open.
Tang Erda knew something was wrong as soon as he saw the situation: "There's someone inside."
"Shit!" Mu Sicheng rubbed his arms, his face darkening, "Could it be that our copies are still in there?"
Bai Liu squatted in front of the trapdoor opening in the basement next to the helicopter hangar.
A pungent smell of cold ashes and acid corrosion poured out of the trapdoor in the basement.
The snow on the trapdoor had been cleared and it was wide open. The two barrels of gasoline that Bai Liu had placed next to the door before he left were gone. Instead, the basement was pitch black, with some heat bubbling out.
From Bai Liu's perspective, the walls were covered with coal ash left over from incomplete combustion of the fuel, and liquid and snow were dripping down the steps, indicating that the fuel had only just been burned and had not yet frozen.
Liu Jiayi also noticed the anomaly here. She squatted next to Bai Liu and said, "It seems that after we left, the clones burned the monsters in the basement and poured strong acid to corrode them."
But as she was talking, her eyes swept over the layer of liquid on the basement floor, and she frowned in confusion, "But before I left, Mu Ke and I sorted out the supplies of Edmund Observatory, and I remember there wasn't so much acid stored here."
Chemical reagents such as strong acids are scarce resources even in scientific research stations. Before Liu Jiayi left, she basically emptied the acid in the Edmund Observatory.
Even so, she still had to be very careful and calculating in order to barely deal with those monsters and escape successfully.
Liu Jiayi lay down, took out a piece of metal and caught two drops of acid dripping from the steps.
The metal surface was quickly corroded, and gas was coming out with a hissing sound. She frowned and said, "This guy is just pouring buckets of acid into the basement. Where does he get so much acid?"
The man who was cleaning the basement used strong acid quite casually, spreading it all over the walls and stairs. There was a sense of wastefulness in his use, as if he had no sense of cherishing strong acid, a resource that was hard to come by and extremely scarce in the dungeon.
"Then there is only one possibility." Bai Liu's eyes fell on the slowly freezing acid.
Liu Jiayi reacted suddenly: "Someone who has played this game brought acid in himself - Spade has been here?!"
At this moment, Mu Sicheng screamed in shock from the second floor of the observation station: "Fuck! What's going on?!"
Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi looked at each other, then they took out their weapons and walked towards the door.
After they entered the observation post and went up to the second floor, Liu Jiayi walked cautiously in front of Bai Liu, dragging his gun with him: "What's wrong?"
Mu Sicheng turned around, his face pale and blue, and pointed in the direction of the restaurant with a shaking finger. His voice was also trembling, and he seemed to be frightened: "...You guys, take a look for yourselves..."
Bai Liu looked past Mu Sicheng and towards the restaurant behind him, then raised his eyebrows slightly.
He understood why Mu Sicheng had such an expression.
The chairs in the restaurant were kicked away roughly, and the broken tables, chairs and benches were piled up in the four corners of the room, leaving a large open space in the middle of the restaurant.
This piece of open space was smashed by something unknown, leaving a hole with a nearly square outline.
The hole directly penetrates the floor of the second floor, and the scene on the first floor can be seen through this hole on the floor of the second-floor restaurant.
On the edge of the cave entrance, there was a circle of bloody handprints left by people struggling hard, densely covering the floor - it can be seen that a group of people had been clinging to the edge of the cave entrance, trying hard to climb out.
On the first floor, right below the depression opposite the cave entrance, is a huge glass water tank that seems to have been moved down from the roof. It is now filled with concentrated acid that is so viscous that it can hardly flow. At this moment, the concentrated acid is bubbling as it reacts.
And this glass jar, like a garbage dump, is filled with all kinds of carbonized, charred, and fragmented "corpses".
Most of these corpses have not yet fully reacted and are wriggling in the concentrated acid. Their skin and flesh are constantly emitting strange, bubbling, sizzling sounds as they are corroded. "They" keep slapping their hands hard on the acid pool, occasionally shaking off their half-dissolved eyeballs.
What made Mu Sicheng scream was the appearance of these corpses.
The people who handled these corpses were a bit rough and not very careful. A considerable number of the faces of the corpses were not completely burnt by the fuel, and "their" appearance could be clearly seen.
——These corpses have the faces of Bai Liu, Mu Sicheng, Tang Erda, Liu Jiayi, and Mu Ke.
Such a group of charred corpses with their own faces struggled so painfully in the sticky acid, and the acid corroded their skin, muscles and bones in every way.
Even though we know that these things are not humans but monsters, we can't help but feel creepy and empathize with them.
Mu Sicheng took two steps back, distanced himself from the blood-stained hole, swallowed nervously, and spoke in a hoarse voice: "...Someone killed all of Edmund's monsters who turned into us."
"And it's very fast." Tang Erda half-crouched at the edge of the cave entrance. He touched the remaining blood stains with two fingers, raised his head and added solemnly, "The blood hasn't completely coagulated yet."
Bai Liu's gaze shifted from the bloodstains to Mu Ke's face: "I remember you said that these monsters that transformed into us have special skills?"
"Yes." Mu Ke also looked shocked, his pupils slightly contracted, and he froze for a second or two as if unable to think, before he began to answer Bai Liu's question, "We had a conflict with these monsters before we left, and were almost held captive by them."
"But they are not as strong as us. I think it may be because they are not yet mature. Their abilities are only about half of ours." Liu Jiayi took over the conversation. She looked towards the first floor with a cold expression and exhaled slowly.
"But Edmund, there is not just one of us standing here, but a group of us are fighting."
"——He was able to quickly control a group of monsters with abilities similar to ours in a short period of time. He also used a whip to break the floor to create this acid pool and threw the bodies into it to dispose of it."
Liu Jiayi's face looked so ugly for the first time: "Heitao's ability... is too strong. He is stronger than last year."
"We can't defeat him even in a team battle. What should we do next?" She looked up at Bai Liu for instructions.
Bai Liu bent his knees and squatted on one leg at the edge of the cave. He stared at the Bai Lius who were gradually submerging and disappearing in the acid pool below with an unclear expression for a while.
After these charred corpses with their own faces turned into bones, and then into bubble particles and some shapeless remains, Bai Liu stood up, retracted his gaze, and turned to look at the others:
"Search the entire observation post to find out why Spade is here."
Half an hour later, a group of people gathered on the first floor again.
Mu Ke, who is good at memorizing and searching maps, was the first to report his findings:
"Many places have been searched. They must be looking for something, but the search was very brief. It didn't seem like they were looking for textual materials or small objects."
"So far, we haven't found anything that Spade has taken away, so he probably hasn't found what he was looking for yet."
"He didn't touch the scattered rifles and bullets on the fourth floor." Tang Erda added, "The situation is almost the same as when we left."
Bai Liu sat at the table. He pulled out a piece of paper and summarized the information on it. He calmly concluded: "First of all, we can be sure of one thing. Spade repeatedly entered this game to find something, and this thing is very likely related to the main plot of the game."
"Spade and I logged into Edmund Observatory together at the beginning, but he did not search here at that time. Instead, he left here directly and went outside. From this point, we can judge that Spade felt that Edmund Observatory did not have what he was looking for at that time."
Bai Liu paused for a moment while writing on the paper: "But now he is back again."
Liu Jiayi soon realized why: "Heitao didn't find it outside, so he decided to go back to Edmund Observatory to try his luck. As a result, he happened to encounter our remaining copies here, so he killed them and searched again, but still couldn't find it, so he left."
Bai Liu half-closed his eyes, and drew with the tip of his pen, as if thinking: "The key question now is, what is Spade looking for by repeatedly entering the game?"
"The main storyline of this game is global warming. Spade might be looking for something related to global warming." Mu Ke pondered and asked, "Is it possible that the final boss is Edmund? According to the general design of the game, as long as you defeat the final boss, you can pass the level and achieve the [normal end]."
"I don't think that with Spade's ability, he wouldn't even reach the [normal end] after entering the game so many times." Bai Liu denied.
He paused twice with the tip of his pen on the paper, and then wrote the word "corpse block".
Bai Liu raised his eyes and said, "I think what Hei Tao is looking for is probably the particle weather device transformed from the [corpse block]. He should be taking the [true end] route, which is to eliminate the possibility of global cooling again from the root."
"Given Edmund's style, he most likely placed particle weather devices at the six hundred locations where he believed Antarctica was influencing the world's climate."
Mu Ke was puzzled. "But these 600 locations are marked on the map. If Hei Tao wants to find them, he can just follow the map. There is no need to look for them at the Edmund Observatory. The Edmund Observatory does not have any particle meteorological equipment."
Bai Liu wrote [600], [Experimental sample preservation] on the paper, and then put a question mark next to it.
He opened his eyelids and looked at Mu Ke: "That means that what Hei Tao wants to find is not the corpse in these six hundred particle devices, but the corpse outside these six hundred particle devices."
Mu Ke softly repeated Bai Liu's words: "The corpses outside these six hundred particle devices..."
He seemed to realize something, and slightly narrowed his eyes and looked at Bai Liu: "It's because Edmund hasn't done the experiment yet, turning it into a corpse of a particle device, right!"
"Edmund is an experienced scientific researcher," Bai Liu reminded calmly, "He won't consume all the experimental materials at once. He usually keeps a portion as samples. This sample should be what Hei Tao wants to find."
"Look through the experimental report. Which of the body parts that Edmund obtained earlier was the one that was left untouched?"
Mu Ke quickly lowered his head and began to read. His fingertips slid along the lines of obscure report records, finally stopping on a certain word.
“Found it!”
"The three parts of the body that Edmond obtained earlier included the left hand, the hind ankle, and a whole heart with arterial and venous tributaries preserved."
Mu Ke raised his head with a little excitement and spoke quickly: "I can only find the experimental records of the left hand and the hind ankle, but there is no record of any experimental records about this heart - Edmund may have kept this heart as a sample reserve!"
Bai Liu put on gloves and a hat and opened the door. "This dirty heart should be what Hei Tao is looking for. It is also the key to the [true end] of this game. Let's go."
The wind and snow covered Bai Liu's dark and deep eyes, and enveloped his quiet voice as it faded away in the dusk.
"——If we want to win against Spades, we must find this heart before Spades destroy it."
The tide rises and falls on the snow-covered coast, and on the ground inside is a mixture of brown soil and white snow, on which sits an old wooden house.
This is a log cabin that looks quite old. The peeling paint on the door frame and the railings leaves leprosy-like spots on the exterior of the cabin. The roof is piled on the shaky and rotten load-bearing wall and fixed with horizontal wooden boards.
There is a sign in front of the door that looks like a tourist attraction sign, with "Scott Cabin" written on top and "Built in 1912" written below.
This ancient wooden house, which is a hundred years old and has become a cultural relic and a tourist attraction, is emitting warm firelight, as if someone is resting and warming himself by the fire inside.
Following the firelight shining on the snow, I walked into the cabin. A fire was burning under the fireplace, and an old man with squinting eyes was sitting on a wooden bench next to it.
He wore a pair of faded gold-decorated glasses and hummed a tuneless song softly, clapping his feet. His hands, feet, and back were all hunched over, and he seemed to have endured a lot of torture.
The firelight shone on his old, wrinkled face, casting a shadow swaying on the wall.
Hei Tao walked out of the dark shadows. He stood straight at the edge of the firelight, holding a long whip in his hand. Snow that had not yet melted was hanging on his long eyelashes and hair.
Spade looked at the old man and said in a clear and slow voice: "Edmund."
The old man then slightly opened one eye and looked over. He seemed a little helpless, but also felt amused: "You are here again, young man. You seem to like coming here very much."
Edmund smiled amiably, "You have killed me many times, just for that heart you could never find?"
"That's important to you?"
Spade spoke, but his answer was irrelevant: "You shouldn't remember that I killed you."
Edmund took off his glasses, looked at Spade, and smiled softly: "Because I am just an evil NPC in the game. Every time this copy should be refreshed and restarted with your departure, and I forget everything, right?"
Spade nodded.
Edmund smiled and said, "Maybe I have lived too long and done things too cruelly, so God refuses to forgive me and lets me remember everything I have done. I do remember that you have killed me many times. You are the person who appears most often in this game. I almost want to be friends with you."
His eyes lingered on Spade's dripping whip for a moment in a teasing manner: "Of course it would be better if you didn't use the whip to strangle me as soon as you entered the game - the process of suffocation is always painful. If you are willing to let me choose the way to die, I prefer to be burned to death."
Spade agreed without hesitation: "Okay."
Edmund then burst into laughter: "My child, I believe you really can't understand other people's jokes."
"Your teammates have always been troubled by you, right? The guy called [God-Rebellious Judge] was so distressed that he couldn't help but vent his troubles to an NPC like me, saying that he didn't know what to do with you."
Edmund looked at Spade jokingly: "He looks so sad that he's about to cry. It's really interesting and troublesome to have a friend like you."
Spade does not comment on other people's definitions of him. He always speaks and acts directly: "Are you still unwilling to tell me where your heart is this time?"
The firelight was reflected in Edmund's eyes. An old man like him should have a pair of cloudy eyes, but Edmund's eyes were still pure and flawless, as clean as the snow that fell under the Antarctic ice surface 30,000 years ago, with a light blue color almost like the ice surface.
"No, my child." Edmund's expression became distant and he shook his head. "You can kill me again, but I will never tell you where I hide my heart."
"That is my original sin, and only God knows where it is hidden."
Spade pressed his lips into a straight line. He was obviously dissatisfied with the result. A slight depression emerged from the small movement of him scratching the whip with his nails.
Edmund looked at Spade, with that kind of insightful smile on his face: "This time you also found all 600 of my particle devices. I rarely see players who can find all of them without being frozen to death. You are amazing."
"But one device is ineffective." Spade looked at Edmund, "The device under Ice Dome A does not have particles for corpses. I cannot collect 600 corpses."
"But you've already won the game, haven't you?" Edmund shook his head and raised his finger to emphasize, "Your friend, the god of rebellion told me that you only care about winning or losing. You've already got what you wanted, so why don't you let my secret remain a secret forever?"
Edmund looked at Spade with a smile on his face. His light blue eyes, like broken ice, shone with the dim light of the campfire. "Why are you so obsessed with a heart that doesn't belong to you? This is not romantic."
Spade paused for a moment - it seemed that he didn't know the exact answer to this question either.
"Intuition - I must destroy this heart and all the corpses."
Spade raised his eyes and said, "Everyone has his own destiny. I can see that this dirty heart's destiny is connected to mine, and I should destroy it."
"Neither it nor I should exist in this world."
The smile on Edmund's face gradually faded, and he murmured to himself: "You are destroying yourself, child..."
"Hmm." Spade answered calmly, and then asked, "What is the original sin you want to hide?"
There was no trace of a smile on Edmund's face, and he finally showed some of the old age that was typical of his age.
He held his forehead and sighed deeply, his expression and movements unable to conceal his fatigue and trance: "My original sin is something that I never realized I should repent for from the beginning to the end."
"I hate the things that persecute me, I hate the students who betray me, and I pity the friends I admire." Edmund took a deep, deep breath and slowly exhaled from his nose like smoking. He looked far away through the fire at his feet. "I have never done anything right, and I repent for it, but there is one thing that makes me realize that my ugliness is far more than that."
Edmund's hands on the edge of the chair began to tremble. He closed his eyes, tears falling into the groove-like wrinkles, and his voice was hoarse and hoarse: "--Those are the corpses."
"Those weren't just corpses, they were disassembled parts of a living creature. He had consciousness, feelings, emotions, and he knew what terrible things I was doing to him."
Edmund opened his eyes. His clear eyes finally became cloudy at this moment. He choked and said, "——And it was only when I saw that beating heart that I realized what I had done."
"I'm killing a living person."
Edmund turned around and looked at Spade. He seemed to have aged to the point of death in an instant:
"The plot of the game you're talking about is probably my fate. I'm being led by an invisible god into the abyss of self-destruction, forming a paradise-like cycle for the entertainment of others. I thought I could escape from this terrible game."
"But after escaping, I found that I was just in a bigger cycle of fate. I would always be a toy in the hands of the gods who set my fate. Humans will always destroy themselves in all world lines because of uncontrolled desires. This is our fate given by God - he wants to see this."
Tears welled up in Edmund's eyes. "We all deserve to be punished for the cruelty bestowed upon us by fate, but I know that in the eyes of the invisible god, the unjust punishment I inflicted out of anger is nothing more than a part of fate that he has calculated."
"Everything I do is just... a game."
Spade looked at him calmly: "But you can decide how you die this time."
"I will burn you to death if I wish, and this will be no game for you or for me."
Edmund smiled through his tears: "I know."
"This is... the victory you want, and the destiny I want."
——————
the other end.
Bai Liu was patrolling the ground in a helicopter. They had passed three points marked on the map - one of the six hundred points.
But the results were not satisfactory.
The buoys on the sea surface had all been taken out and destroyed, so Bai Liu and his team didn't need to sink down to look for them. The remains of the instruments were placed directly on the edge of the coast, and the metal box was also thrown into the instrument. The particles inside had been completely destroyed.
The particle devices on the ground were tied to weather balloons and released into the sky.
Bai Liu and his friends had already seen several punctured balloons buried in the snow on the ground - the situation was similar to that on the coast, and the particles in the metal box were also destroyed.
The further you get toward these mapped locations, the worse the situation becomes.
When he saw the hollowed-out device next to Dome A, Bai Liu gave the order to stop: "Black Spade should have found all the six hundred devices. Edmund should not have hidden his heart in these six hundred points."
"Where would he hide his heart?" Mu Ke shouted in the wind, to make sure Bai Liu could hear what he said. "These 600 locations already include all the places that have special meaning to Edmund. Dome A, the South Pole, Tarzan Station, and Scott's Cabin are all included. Is it possible that he could hide his heart somewhere else?"
"Yes." Bai Liu turned to look at Mu Ke, "Do you remember what the main quest of this dungeon is?"
Mu Ke nodded: "Global warming."
"If global cooling is Edmund's punishment for everyone, including himself, after his desires got out of control, then global warming is an opportunity for him to change." Bai Liu's breath was filled with white frost.
While talking, Tang Erda maneuvered the helicopter to land steadily at a new location.
Bai Liu stepped down from the helicopter that Tang Er had safely landed and arrived at an empty snowy field.
This is a completely new place, with no footprints or traces left. No equipment has ever been placed here, and there is no sign that anyone has ever visited. It is far away from all observation posts and does not even have its own geographical name.
It seems like a strange place with no special features.
This is the place Bai Liu chose for Tang Erda to land.
Mu Ke trotted after Bai Liu, breathing rapidly: "Bai Liu, do you think this is where Edmund hid his heart?"
He was almost about to ask why you thought it was here, but due to Mu Ke's blind trust in Bai Liu, he thought he should dig first.
But someone asked, Mu Sicheng turned around and looked around, and asked Bai Liu in confusion: "Why did Edmund hide his heart here? I don't even know where this place is, and I haven't seen this place in Edmund's faxes or experimental reports."
Bai Liu put on anti-friction gloves and began to help Tang Erda move the equipment for digging and exploring the ice surface.
Mu Sicheng stepped forward to take over, looking at Bai Liu with curious eyes.
Bai Liu leaned over and took down a stack of experimental reports from the back seat of the helicopter, and handed them to Mu Sicheng: "Read and explain - I just said that global cooling is Edmund's punishment on humans in anger, but before that, global warming was also a punishment, and it was a punishment that humans brought upon themselves."
Mu Sicheng couldn't help but sigh: "What did I do wrong? Why am I being punished whether I'm cold or hot?"
Bai Liu smiled and said, "Yes, this is a Christian concept that teaches us that we are born with original sin and that living is a process of atonement. If we view the whole process as Edmund's attempt to atone for the sins of mankind, it will be much clearer."
"He thought that the others were guilty, so he punished them. He thought that Tarzan Station was innocent, but this kind of innocence was also a sin in a guilty environment because it would lead to bullying. So Edmund decided to sharpen Tarzan Station and let them survive as humans on the "Noah's Ark."
"Edmund knew very well that what he did was wrong and guilty, and his own redemption process -" Bai Liu's eyes were deep, "- was to hide the heart that he had never touched, and to protect the first innocent person that he was forced to kill under the oppression of various circumstances."
"He preserved his heart in order to preserve experimental samples and in order to preserve his own original sin."
Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng and said, "Where do you think a man like Edmund would keep his original sin?"
Mu Si shook his head honestly.
Bai Liu smiled: "Of course it was the day when he made up his mind to start carrying out his crime and it took effect."
Mu Sicheng had a question mark in his eyes: "What day is this?"
"August 10th, the day he started pickling sauerkraut for the people at Taishan Station." Bai Liu looked at the empty space in front of him and smiled, "And this place is the coldest place in Antarctica on August 10th, according to Edmund's 33-year temperature record."
"There's no better place to store a beating heart."
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