Wilderness Survival (9)
72 hours have passed and the extreme cold has quietly arrived.
Part of the magma that was still surging the previous moment suddenly solidified into rock, and the surface was covered with a thick layer of ice; part of it turned into a winding glacier, with many ice spikes piercing the ice walls on both sides.
In the camp where the Thorn Flower people were stationed, the hot air that was still steaming in the previous second condensed into frost in the air and fell down like a sudden snow.
"What's going on?"
Wrapped in a bubble, the white air Crystal exhaled quickly turned into tiny ice crystals before her eyes. She was so cold that her teeth kept chattering and she couldn't even utter a complete sentence.
[Extreme Cold Phase Begins]
Cold electronic music filled the entire venue.
[Inappropriate methods of keeping warm will be prohibited during this stage. Please make reasonable use of the resources in your resource pack.]
Yuzhu's earrings were covered with frost. Ah She curled up, trying hard to resist sleep and completed the armoring - but it had no effect in keeping out the cold. Yuzhu felt that her whole body was frozen and painful.
The cold wind howled, stirring up fine snow. Without the protection of their bubbles, the three people from the three academies looked even more miserable, their hair and eyebrows covered in frost, making them look like three snowmen.
"What do you mean... Is the Phantom Beast Armor also considered an 'illegal way to keep warm'?" Belle said angrily.
"It seems so." Yuzhu curled up and searched for supplies, "Let's distribute the heating agent first."
Upon hearing this, Shuijing went over to help. "Is that how virtual competitions work? Just changing a few parameters can make your skills completely ineffective."
Linyin looked at the undulating ice fields in the distance.
Of the supplies seized previously, there was only less than three hours' worth of heating agent left, so they had to collect it again.
It was unrealistic to continue advancing slowly as before, waiting for someone to enter the resource point range and then be notified by the system. According to Iberia's confession, of the remaining teams, only Mithril, Rust Dream, and Black Swamp were not with them. The remaining teams had already been eliminated by them.
Given the current level of team dispersion, it is unrealistic to automatically trigger the reporting point after waiting for other teams to search for supplies.
"Let's disband the team." Lin Yin's voice was clearly heard by everyone in the cold wind.
"Let's split up now." She opened the holographic map and drew several diverging routes. "Yuzhu, Shuijing, you take Cappadocia to the east, Belle and Izumo will take the west, and the rest of you follow me north."
"Mond, Tracy, Keith, Su Lian, the four of you follow me." Lin Yin called out their names.
"And you," she finally looked at Fei Rui, who was standing at the end, and said in a cold tone, "You have to follow me too."
She paused, "I'm worried about you."
Fei Rui knew what she meant, but he deliberately misinterpreted it to mean something else, "It doesn't hurt anymore, don't worry about me." He covered his chest and slowly walked to Lin Yin. Black roses emerged from all around, entwining into a black mass, blocking the biting cold wind for the two of them.
Linyin took a deep breath and acquiesced to his actions, "If there is no problem, let's do it." With a command, everyone began to distribute supplies.
"Take us with you."
Not far away, a familiar male voice came from behind the thick ice fog.
The ice fog gradually dissipated, and the figures of five people from another team gradually became clear.
The leader had short, light blonde hair and smiled gently at Rinne, "What a coincidence."
Linyin stopped what she was doing, "What a coincidence."
Aisen led the team to catch up with the three major colleges. He originally wanted to secretly help Thorn Flower, but seeing that Thorn Flower was too brave, he quietly stayed aside and observed, so that Thorn Flower would not misunderstand that they were here to steal points.
But now, Rinne and the others are about to break up the team, so they have to show up.
Eisen pressed his earring to calm a restless creature. Then, smiling, he waved the holographic map on his wrist. "Want to go together? I happen to have the locations of three resource points right here."
Linyin raised an eyebrow: "Conditions?"
"I told you, let's go together."
Aisen stood in the icy mist, his silver-white uniform outlining his slender figure. He casually brushed aside his light-blonde hair, revealing his icy blue eyes. Ice crystals dancing in the air landed on his tall nose, quickly melting away with his warm breath. "We agreed to see you in the finals."
Rinyin snorted, "This isn't even the finals yet."
"We can also have a strategic collaboration," Eisen shrugged. "We can then decide who's the winner in the end."
He extended his right hand. "How's it going?"
Linyin stared at him for two seconds, then held his hand: "I have nothing to lose, of course."
Their hands touched and then separated. Fei Rui narrowed her eyes and the black rose silently wrapped around his wrist.
"I disagree."
To everyone's surprise, it was the usually silent Su Lian who spoke. The mammoth extended its trunk and flicked it in the air twice, trying to give its owner some momentum to speak.
"The addition of five Mithril people will cause too many unstable factors for us." Su Lian said, breathing slightly.
Linyin nodded slightly.
Indeed. This left her and Su Lian as the only two people she could absolutely trust. Fei Rui… She actually had a feeling that even if Su Lian betrayed her, Fei Rui wouldn't necessarily hurt her. But such an illusory feeling wasn't reliable. So, of the eleven members of the team, nine were of unknown reliability.
"Or, you can split up your team too." Linyin glanced at Cappadocia and Izumo. If strangers were introduced into their team composition, there might be big problems, so Mithril had no choice but to split up another team and redistribute the personnel.
Aisen looked at Linyin with a smile: "Okay. I only have one request——"
"We two have to be on the same team."
"puff."
Mond, who was eavesdropping with his ears perked up, couldn't help but blurt out, "Fuck, Eisen, you're really a complete bootlicker." But Eisen simply ignored him.
"How about this? We split into two teams. No problem." His icy blue eyes were bottomless. "I'll join you, and these three—" He finally swallowed the word "idiot" and pointed at the three people from the three major colleges. "Leave them to our people."
"You want to exchange one person for the three of them?" Linyin looked him up and down suspiciously. What on earth was this guy trying to do?
"Isn't that enough?"
boom.
A loud noise suddenly came from the glacier not far away. Aisen's earrings disappeared at some point. A giant wolf with glittering silver-blue fur stood in the air. The pressure of the heavenly-level mythical beast swept over like a tsunami.
Mond was directly affected by the pressure and fell to his knees. The others transformed into armor to resist the pressure from nowhere.
Rinyin smiled.
It was a somewhat fanatical, excited smile of someone who had met a worthy opponent.
"I promise." She whispered, "You should save your energy."
The next second, her black hair seemed to be blown up by an invisible storm.
A golden wave of boundless Qi erupted from her, forcibly carving a massive hole in the pressure field created by Aisen. Beneath her feet, the thick ice crumbled, cracks spreading. She stood at the center of the storm, her eyes ablaze with almost violent excitement.
The kitten's eyes shone brightly, and it opened its mouth to spit out a giant transparent bubble. The moment the bubble touched the golden innate energy, it expanded rapidly, enveloping everyone within, a rainbow of light swirling around its surface.
Aisen breathed a sigh of relief and tried to call back the Star Wolf King. However, the giant silver-blue wolf beast ignored him completely, staring greedily at the true energy surrounding Linyin.
Saliva dripped from between the fangs, corroding small pits on the ice surface.
“Meow——”
The kitten howled for the first time in a long time as a warning.
The giant wolf quickly wilted like a balloon pricked by a needle, but still looked at Linyin reluctantly.
"There's something wrong with it... but I can't tell what it is. Anyway, be careful." Koneko passed the message to Rin.
[But I won't let it hurt you!]
Rinyin scratched its chin, "Okay, kittens are the best."
…
Two hours after the team dismantled, the temperature had reached -80 degrees Celsius, visibility was getting worse, and the heating agent was about to run out.
Eisen held the only phantom searchlight, and the light blue halo maintained visibility of about fifty meters for the team - they opened so many resource points, but only got one.
Linyin's infinite true energy allows her to see very far, but now the way ahead is unclear, and the ability of the phantom beast armor and bubbles to keep warm has been sealed. She must save every bit of true energy to fight against the severe cold after the heating agent is exhausted.
However, although the kitten's bubble has lost its heat insulation function, it is still very practical for keeping out wind and snow.
The kitten was tapping Fei Rui's calf with its tail with an unhappy look on its face, asking him to stop trying to please him by using the rose wall to block the wind - this was the job of the cat boss.
Aisen, who joined the team, glanced at Fei Rui and smiled playfully.
"Changed." His tone was a little frivolous, like a different person. "It's normal for an excellent woman to change her partner, but—"
He deliberately dragged out his tone and looked Fei Rui up and down: "To be fair, you are still a little bit inferior to Song Baiyue."
Fei Rui's eyes flickered slightly, and black mist silently spread beneath the ice beneath her feet. He still had an elegant smile on his face, but his eyes had turned cold. "Really? Do you want to give it a try?"
Su Lian remained silent all the way.
He had observed Linyin for so long that he could recognize every subtle reaction of hers.
Her feelings towards Eisen were the excitement of meeting a rare opponent and the fighting spirit of meeting a worthy opponent.
But she was full of subconscious avoidance and forced indifference towards Fei Rui.
Why?
Su Lian clenched her fists. He had always been by Lin Yin's side, and he knew her habits best, but after Song Baiyue left, along came Fei Rui...
He lowered his head, his eyes dark.
Seeing this, Aisen leaned closer to Rinyin and continued to fan the flames with his most elegant bubbling voice: "That boy in your team who has no sense of presence seems to be very unhappy."
"The closer you are to the point you marked, the worse the environment becomes... Do you really know nothing about this?" Lin Yin didn't follow his topic and looked into his eyes. She didn't know if it was an illusion, but his ice-blue eyes looked a bit like an animal at this moment.
"If it were so easy to get, I wouldn't have sought 'strategic cooperation' from you, right?" Eisen grinned, revealing all eight of his teeth.
"Then why didn't you tell me in advance?" Su Lian was a little annoyed as she was wrapped by the mammoth's trunk.
Linyin looked at Aisen's somewhat unfamiliar look and smiled.
"A honey trap, huh?"
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