Chapter 256 |
Tarzan Observatory.
In the small space enclosed by the four guns, Bai Liu’s demeanour could be described as leisurely as he looked to Liu Jiayi: “So you took the clone Tang Erda as a hostage and chose to meet us at Taishan Station, but decided to strike first as you weren’t sure if we were monsters?”
Bai Liu leaned back in his chair, lifted his eyes, and smiled softly, “Now that you have us under control, what then? How do you decide if we’re monsters or your real teammates?”
Liu Jiayi’s lips pursed into a thin straight line as she twirled the gun in her hand, the anachronistically large gloves in her palm having been given to her by Bai Liu.
But the gloves were now devoid of any residual body heat, and the cold was so cold that her fingertips tingled.
“I have a way to tell you from the monster.” Liu Jiayi’s breath brought out a white haze.
The young girl’s grey eyes shot up to Bai Liu’s cheeks through the hazel goggles with a harshness that was forced upon her, but which softened when Bai Liu’s calm eyes met hers.
She seemed unable to name that cruel solution, even though she had used it successfully twice.
So Bai Liu kindly spoke up for her, “Monsters have a weakness and you can use it to distinguish us from them, earlier at Edmond Observatory you used fuel and poison to burn [Mu Sicheng], and after determining that this was their weakness, you quickly used the same recipe to hold [Tang Erda] hostage.”
Bai Liu said, while holding Liu Jiayi’s gun in his gloved hand and holding it with his heart against the muzzle, as he slowly and deliberately stood up.
He took a few steps back from her and looked down at her as if in pity: “Jiayi, you can’t do anything to [Bai Liu].”
Liu Jiayi had no way to test Bai Liu’s authenticity in such a cruel way, so she let the [Bai Liu] go – even though she knew that there was a 99% chance that the [Bai Liu] was a monster.
But what if it’s not?
She didn’t want to kill him, or use this method.
Not to mention Mu Ke, a guy who could cut the skin of any monster with Bai Liu’s face and be the first to cry.
Liu Jiayi’s lips turned blue as she tilted her head and stared at Bai Liu for ten seconds before taking a deep, dry breath, putting away her gun and pulling out her poison: “Yes, that’s what you said to me last time, so fuck off, I’m going to identify the other two.”
“There’s no need to test, we’re both real.” Bai Liu smiled, “I’m sure I’m the real Bai Liu, so you’re the real Liu Jiayi too.”
Liu Jiayi looked up in dismay: “How did you recognise it?!”
Bai Liu patted her on the head, “It’s a controlled control experiment, we’ve heard the observatory version.”
Liu Jiayi frowned: “What experiment?”
Bai Liu told Fang Xiaoxiao about the experiment the monster had done on them, and then smiled with great interest.
“Don’t you think it’s similar to what we have now? It’s all a group of people who know each other well, one of them goes their separate ways and leaves, then turns back halfway, the other stays put and waits to be rescued, and then the two sides identify each other as human experiments or not?”
When Bai Liu said this, Mu Sicheng rubbed his chin, put down his gun and said in deep thought, “……seems to be eh.”
Then he was stunned, as if reacting violently, and retorted loudly, “That’s not right, according to this experiment, someone on our side should be real and someone fake too!”
“No, no, no.” Bai Liu held down the alert Mu Sicheng who once again raised the gun aimed at Liu Jiayi’s forehead and explained with a smile, “This time it’s an experiment where one side is all real and one side is all fake.”
Mu Sicheng is confused: “Why?!”
Liu Jiayi couldn’t resist rolling her eyes as she took the lead in putting away the poison, muttering in a low voice, “Idiot, are you still a college student?”
Mu Ke also lowered his gun, leaned his head back on the top bunk with a long, weary sigh of relief, slumped his hands and turned to Mu Sicheng to explain.
“If, as Bai Liu says, it’s a social experiment with low reproducibility, then the common sense of the experiment that was done would not be carried out a second time because they’ve already got the results of the experiment in Fang Xiaoxiao’s situation. Then Fang Xiaoxiao and their situation would not be reproduced a second time on us, and we would have to serve another experimental role.”
Bai Liu held up his finger, his smile deepening: “In short, we are the control group for Fang Xiaoxiao’s experiment, and by extension, we can go on to conclude that because we are real, Mu Ke and the others who came to us must also be real. Therefore reaching that conclusion.”
Mu Sicheng’s eyes rolled up in circles as he listened, “……What the hell is all this, why can we just launch into this conclusion……”
Liu Jiayi squinted her eyes and gave Mu Sicheng a breathless look. She then turned around as she yawned and took off her blood stained coat. After lifting the blanket and laying on the bunk, she curled herself up into a ball before shouting, “I’m going to sleep!”
After that Liu Jiayi closed her eyes, her hands huddled together, clutching Bai Liu’s gloves in her hands, like a cub that had found its right nest, breathing evenly and soon falling asleep.
Mu Ke half stepped in front of the bed, softened his voice as he explained, “Jiayi has been relying on poison to deal with the monster all the way here, and although she has a stamina restorer, she is still mentally exhausted as a child.”
Tang Erda took one look at the blood splattered all over Mu Ke’s body and the tired, weathered look on his face, and knew that Mu Ke had spent a lot of time reading and processing his memories, then forcing Liu Jiayi to fight her way out of a pile of monsters.
“You should rest too.” Tang Erda opened his mouth to comfort them.
Mu Ke nodded, turned haughtily and undressed, climbed into the top bunk and straightened the corners. Within a minute of lying down, he was asleep with his hands drooping off the side of the bed.
Tang Erda sighed and stepped forward to tuck Mu Ke’s hand back in “It looks like they’ve had a hell of a battle to get here to deliver our message so it’s been hard for them.”
Mu Sicheng scratched his head and circled around Bai Liu, pointing at the two people on the bed and questioning in a low voice, “How on earth can you be sure that these two guys aren’t monsters?!”
It wasn’t burned, it wasn’t doused with strong acid, and none of the only weaknesses that distinguish players from monsters were used, just by looking at it. Bai Liu…what the hell is this guy selling in his gourd!1
Bai Liu smiled: “Really that curious?”
Mu Sicheng nodded furiously.
Bai Liu took out a piece of paper and a pen then placed it on a small desk in the centre of the cabin. Afterwards, he bowed down and started to explain to Mu Sicheng: “Remember the experiment that Fang Xiaoxiao told you about earlier?”
“I remember.” Mu Sicheng wanted to rub the goose bumps on his arms at the thought of that experiment, “It was when a group of them let a few escape the ice chasm outside Tarzan Station, then the guys turned back to try and rescue them but ended up running into fake ones, one of which they didn’t recognise.”
Bai Liu lowered his eyes, “What do you think is the purpose of this experiment?”
Mu Sicheng froze, then racked his brain and gave a tentative answer, “I think it’s …… trying to find out how humans in the same colony can tell the difference between monsters and humans in extreme conditions?”
He remembered Fang Xiaoxiao saying this to him.
“That is, this is an experiment to explore how well humans within a group discriminate between like and unlike.” Bai Liu writes the four accompanying letters [A1], [A2], [B1] and [B2] on the page, and then continues.
“Suppose we are monsters, A is the human group, A1 and A2 are two groups of people in a group that we have forced apart, B is the monster group, and [B1], [B2] are the mirror image hybrid creatures of the two scattered groups [A1], [A2] that the monsters have simulated.”
Bai Liu listed the four letters in a 2 x 2 table, “So according to our experimental purpose, there are four exploratory experiments to be carried out, A1 meets B2, A2 meets B1, and these are the two that Fang Xiaoxiao and the others have carried out.”
“As human group A1, who conducted the experiment, has memory of this identification experiment and human group A2 could not bear the results of the experiment and died by suicide. We cannot conduct the experiment on them again, so we need a completely new group of humans who have not had contact with other groups to complete the remaining two experiments.”
Bai Liu looks up slowly, raising his eyes to Mu Sicheng: “That is, A1 meets A2 and B1 meets B2, two control experiments – that’s the experiment we’re conducting.”
“So I say, if we’re real, then Mu Ke must be real.”
“Of course, from what we’ve seen so far, we can’t rule out the possibility that we’re all fakes, and I now suspect that this group of monsters’ experiments involve a level of memory.”
Despite this ghastly speculation, Bai Liu’s tone is incredibly flat: “But in a situation where both sides are false, it makes no difference to me as to what is true.”
Mu Sicheng took two steps back, looking creepily at the four experiments listed by Bai Liu on the white paper, and felt a chill seeping from his bones.
The cold was even colder than if they had been walking in the snow at fifty-five degrees below zero – it was a pure, brutal, feeling of losing their emotional perception and existence as human beings.
It was as if he was no different from any other creature in the world, just a pile of bones, connective tissue, and a few organic bodies wrapped in skin with fat placed in a solid order, at the mercy of something higher than himself.
As humans do to other creatures, life is stripped of its value and objectified purely into meaningless symbols on paper – A1, A2, B1, B2.
Mu Sicheng’s lips were trembling as he looked at Bai Liu with uncertainty and confusion: “What if, if we’re fake?”
Bai Liu looked at him flatly, “Kill the real one, of course, and take its place.”
EN1: If you feel like you have no clue what’s going on with the experiments..You’re not alone..😭
EN2: so lemme explain… basically they uh then yeah and uh huh yeah mhm !!
This is just an MTL edited chapter and can have some errors in it. Feel free to report them in the ERRORS channel on our server !
- in chinese, it’s a metaphor for not knowing what a person’s intentions are ↩︎
Dawn Scott
<time datetime="2023-10-11T22:10:28+02:00">October 11, 2023</time>
A1 ( Bai Liu, Tang Erda, Mu sicheng) B1(monster bai Liu, tang Erda, Mu sicheng)<br /> A2( Mu Ke, Li Jiayi) B2 ( fake Mu ke, li jiayi )<br /> First condition: A1 meets B2, already satisfied at the helicopter scene in the Tarzan zone. A2 meets B1 already done at the cabin in the scientist place.
Second condition: A1 meets A2 and B1 meets B2. Quite straightforward but it isn’t because there is no way of knowing if the A group that calls themselves the og are actually the real og. “Bai Liu in this scene might be lying, he might not be the real one but says he’s the real one anyways. example Bai Liu can’t know for certain know if he’s the real one or not. They both believe that they are the real one, if we take this scene from the other bai Liu’s perspective, he will still say he’s the real one while the other is fake. How do we know, when both are claiming to be the real one? Simple answer we don’t.
However, One thing we know for 100% certainty is that in that group rn in the scene from this chapter they are the same type of people, all of them are either monsters or the real humans. No in between. They believe that they have killed the outgroup (“the monsters disguising as them”). They don’t know themselves if they are the og or not.
That’s why Bai Liu said at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. The whole point of the experiment is to see if they recognize the outgroup and kick them out, so they are all the same in a group. So they can always kill the “fake group” if they ever meet each other because they know that in their “real group” they are all the same kind of people, so basically they are all either (A1 +A2) or (B1 + B2)
Thx for the chapter.
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