After saying that, Spades closed the door. By the time Bai Liu opened it again, he had already vanished into the vast, boundless snow.

...Was that his way of saying he wanted a fair competition?

Bai Liu raised an eyebrow and closed the door. He pinched his numb fingertips, pulled his windbreaker tighter around himself, and turned to look at Tang Erda and the others.

Tang Erda was also wearing a thick windbreaker. When he spoke, his breath came out in white clouds. “—The power supply inside the building has been cut off. We need to repair the insulation system before we can turn it back on, otherwise we’ll all freeze to death.”

“Do you know how to fix it?” Bai Liu asked.

Tang Erda nodded. “I’ve trained in similar extreme environments. I know how to use the basic equipment. But to carry out the repairs, I’ll have to go outside and inspect it. The wind speed here is too high. Someone has to hold my safety rope, or I’ll be blown away.”

“I’ll go with you.” Mu Shicheng threw on a protective suit without hesitation.

The two of them moved quickly, fastening safety ropes around their waists before opening the door. After forcing their way into the snowstorm—so violent that it was almost impossible to close the door behind them—they headed outside.

Before long, Mu Shicheng and Tang Erda returned, pulling on the safety rope. Bai Liu, who had been guarding the door, immediately slammed it shut.

In that short period of time, the snow that had blown in through the crack of the door had already frozen into solid chunks clinging to the back of it. Mu Shicheng’s teeth chattered as he tried to unhook the safety rope from the hook beside the door. His hands were too cold, and after several failed attempts, Mu Ke eventually helped him remove it.

“Too... it’s too damn cold!” Mu Shicheng jumped up and down from the cold, breathing into his hands as he tried to warm them.

Bai Liu noticed that Mu Shicheng had only gone outside for a brief trip—less than ten minutes in total—yet his hands had already frozen into a purplish blue-red. His knuckles could no longer bend. They looked like pieces of gangrenous flesh.

After the power was restored and the lightbulbs flickered on one after another, Bai Liu was finally able to see clearly where they were.

Before them was a very narrow, low ventilation corridor. The walls were made of sturdy assembled container panels—the sort of material generally used for temporary housing on construction sites. Bright incandescent bulbs hung from the ceiling, and the windows on both sides of the corridor were sealed with weatherstripping. Through the half-frozen glass, the endless, howling blizzard outside could be seen.

His gaze fell to the end of the ventilation corridor, where a sign had been nailed up crookedly.

Written on it was: [Edmund South Pole Station].

Bai Liu looked at the sign for several seconds, then lowered his head and opened his system panel, which was filled with a long string of notifications he had yet to check.

[System Notification: Welcome, player, to the game “Ice Age.”]

[System Notification: Player has obtained the game’s main quest—Global Warming.]

[Game Background Hint: One year ago, a sudden and ceaseless blizzard swept across the globe from Antarctica. Along with falling temperatures, shifting ocean currents, thickening cloud layers, and other meteorological abnormalities, regions all over the world began to freeze...]

[...The Antarctic ice cap seemed to have become a spreading disease, beginning to crawl across the entire planet. Meteorologists claim that, due to some irresistible force, humanity has been forced into another major glacial period after the fourth Ice Age. Unprepared humans have died in massive numbers due to food shortages and excessively cold weather...]

[Afterward, all scientific research activities in Antarctica were forcibly suspended. And you are an explorer who has received inside information. Someone told you that all of this is connected to an unsavory scientific research activity in Antarctica. Passionate about exploration, you gathered your own team and, with funding from the Antarctic United Glacial Company, arrived in Antarctica, intending to uncover the cold secrets buried beneath these layers of ice.]

[You arrived in Antarctica by plane, but lost your way in the blizzard. In a moment of crisis, you found this abandoned observation station in the snow and forced your way inside to take shelter from the wind and snow.]

[—Please remember, player: you are a great explorer! Please explore and discover bravely, find the truth, and make the globe warm once more!]

[Current Main Quest Progress: 0%]

[Player’s Current Geographic Location: Edmund South Pole Station]

By then, Mu Shicheng had also finished reading the game introduction and could not help complaining, “What is this? Isn’t the real world going through global warming? What kind of ghost story is this, entering an Ice Age?”

Liu Jiayi was buried inside a thick down jacket. Compared with adults like Bai Liu, children were more sensitive to temperature. The moment she entered the game, she had found various clothes and wrapped herself up like a ball. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

After finishing the game introduction, she frowned and reminded him, “Bai Liu, the Game Pool simulates the League. In the Game Pool, our shop trading system is closed. We can’t buy any items from the shop. With this kind of background, food and warm clothing are the first problems we need to solve.”

“Otherwise, we won’t last more than a few days before we can’t take it anymore and have to actively withdraw from the game.”

Bai Liu fully agreed with Liu Jiayi’s assessment. He nodded and began issuing orders. “Mu Ke, go search the warehouse for food reserves. Tang Erda and Mu Shicheng, inspect the entire building and turn it into our exploration base. Jiayi and I will go to the control room and see whether there are any black boxes or journals recording what happened here a year ago.”

“Understood.”

“Okay.”

“Got it.”

After receiving their orders, everyone dispersed. Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi went to look for the base’s control room. Fortunately, this base was not particularly large, and they found it very quickly.

Unfortunately, the control room door was wide open. The room was filled with blocks of snow, which were slowly melting under the flow of the restored warm-air system.

Looking at the control console covered in frost and meltwater, Liu Jiayi rubbed her hands together and let out an old-fashioned sigh. “Looks like the black box will have to wait until Tang Erda and the others come over to see whether it can be repaired.”

Bai Liu crouched down. Wearing gloves, he picked up a chisel and began hammering at the gaps around the drawers. These areas had also been sealed shut by frozen ice. To open the drawers, the ice had to be cleared first.

Fortunately, the ice here was not very thick. After Bai Liu struck it a couple of times, the entire frozen chunk fell away.

Bai Liu pulled open the stuttering, rattling drawer. There was no layer of dust inside; instead, it was lightly covered with a layer of condensed snow. After brushing it aside, several black-covered notebooks could be seen stored within.

According to Bai Liu’s common sense, in horror games, notebooks like these were generally used to provide plot details. That meant there would definitely be records like diaries inside.

But the moment he opened one, he froze.

Liu Jiayi, who had been rummaging through the other drawers, saw Bai Liu holding the notebook without moving and leaned over curiously. “This notebook looks like it has material in it. Why aren’t you saying anything...”

The moment Liu Jiayi saw the contents of the notebook in Bai Liu’s hands, she also fell into a subtle silence.

The notebook was filled with extremely neat, fluent English handwriting.

And Bai Liu, as a working adult in society, had indeed encountered a fair amount of English reading while making horror games—but that English had been relatively simple. As for this kind of large-volume, dense scientific research diary filled with professional terminology...

Bai Liu closed the notebook quite honestly. “Let’s give this to Mu Ke later. I don’t understand it.”

Liu Jiayi, who also did not understand it: “...”

Although she knew rationally that it was normal for Bai Liu not to understand—after all, intelligence and language ability were not the same thing—why did this feel so strange...

The Edmund Observation Station was not large. It had four floors in total.

The first floor was the storage area. Fuel, food, fresh water, and outdoor clothing were all stored in different warehouses on this floor, wrapped in layers of plastic sheeting. Two helicopter hangars were exposed outdoors, with only simple sheds built over them for shelter.

The second floor was the living area, containing a sauna, a dining room, an office area, and several computers that had been left there for who knew how long.

The third and fourth floors were both dormitories—or rather, living cabins. They were extremely cramped. In a space of less than five square meters, two bunk beds had been forcibly squeezed in, and the crowding carried a faint sense of compressed warmth.

Judging from the dormitories and living facilities, the entire base should have been able to accommodate around eighty to a hundred people. It must have been very crowded under normal circumstances, but now that it was empty, there was an eerie sense of former liveliness.

Liu Jiayi’s gaze swept over the frozen pulled noodles on the dining table, the half-cut moldy potato on the cutting board, and the gas switch turned to high flame.

“The people here must have left in a great hurry,” she concluded.

Bai Liu came down from the corner of the third floor and slightly corrected Liu Jiayi’s theory.

“—Or rather, they were ‘taken’ in a great hurry.”

Liu Jiayi looked up at him.

Bai Liu shook a pair of underwear and a sock in his hand. “I found these beside a dormitory bed. In weather this cold, I don’t think anyone would rush outside without even putting on underwear and socks.”

Liu Jiayi raised a question. “Is it possible these people were frightened by something and ran away without even putting on their clothes?”

“Not very likely.” Mu Ke, who had finished checking the warehouse, came up the staircase at the corner from the first floor. He looked at Liu Jiayi. “I just went to their exhibition hall. The personnel at Edmund Observation Station were all professional mountaineers, firefighters, and scientific researchers who had undergone considerable training. They had won many honors and endured the tests of various extreme environments. It would be very difficult for an ordinary situation to frighten all of them into this state.”

As Mu Ke spoke, he glanced at the food that had only been half-prepared.

“They should have been very clear that in this place, running outside without taking anything was no different from seeking death.”

Mu Shicheng and Tang Erda came down from the rooftop of the fourth floor. The two of them had just gone to inspect the radio mast.

Mu Shicheng’s cheeks were blue with cold. After coming down, he found a random dormitory, crawled into the bedding, and began kicking his legs frantically while shivering.

Tang Erda looked slightly better, but when he took off his gloves, Bai Liu saw that a bloody piece of skin had been torn off his palm. The bloody wound was exposed to the air, yet not a single drop of blood flowed out.

Because it was too cold.

The blood had frozen.

Tang Erda noticed Bai Liu’s gaze and explained, “The mounting platform was too cold, and there was no way to adjust the precision equipment through the gloves, so I took one glove off and touched it—”

“—And then a piece of your skin stuck to the metal on it?” Bai Liu finished for him.

Liu Jiayi took out the Life-Saving Remedy spray and sprayed it onto Tang Erda’s palm. The wound slowly healed, but Mu Shicheng, who was half-dead from cold on the bed, had no way to recover. He looked as though he was barely breathing.

The remedy could heal wounds, but it could not cure cold.

“I saw the outdoor meteorological thermometer.” Tang Erda clenched his restored hand and looked up at Bai Liu solemnly. “—Low temperatures of minus fifty degrees. This kind of extreme weather can’t be endured for long. We’ll freeze to death very soon. We have to withdraw quickly—”

From the game...

At that moment, Mu Ke, who was reading the black notebook Bai Liu had handed him, turned green and white by turns. His voice trembled as he interrupted Tang Erda.

“—This Edmund Observation Station was researching corpse pieces sent over by the Dangerous Heretic Management Bureau.”

Tang Erda’s heart skipped a beat, and he denied it without thinking. “Impossible. Items from the Heretic Management Bureau are bound by treaty regulations. They cannot be provided to any country for economic, military, cultural, or political scientific research. The sole research purpose of the Heretic Management Bureau can only be containment!”

“Personnel from District 3 are here to receive them, along with five personnel from District 1 as escorts. They would never allow anyone else to research things from the Heretic Management Bureau!”

Mu Ke let out a long breath. The vapor condensed into a layer of frost before his eyes, blurring his expression. His voice was very soft.

“What if I told you that the plane carrying the heretic’s corpse pieces crashed on-site when it arrived in Antarctica, and all five escorts on board died instantly?”