Chapter 261 |
The helicopter stumbled over the long white snowfields, having to make two forced landings in the middle of the flight due to gusty winds.
By the time Tang Erda’s group arrived at the Edmond Observatory, it was almost early morning on the third day.
The helicopter landed a few kilometres away from the Edmond Observatory.
Now that the snow and wind had stopped, the Edmond Observatory looked like it was buried in a thick blanket of snow from a distance, but strangely enough, the ground at the entrance had been cleared of snow to reveal an open space underneath and the door was half open.
Tang Erda knew something was wrong as soon as he saw it: “Someone’s in there.”
“Shit!” Mu Sicheng rubbed his arms, grimacing, “It’s not that group of our clones still in there, is it?”
Bai Liu crouched in front of the flap door of the basement opening next to the helicopter hangar.
A pungent smell of cold ash and strong acid corrosion poured out of the flap doors of the basement.
The snow had been cleared from the flap door, which was wide open and the two barrels of petrol that Bai Liu had left were gone. Instead, the inside of the basement was dark and hot air was pouring out.
Liu Jiayi also noticed the anomaly and crouched down next to Bai Liu: “It seems that after we left, the clones burned the monsters in the basement and poured strong acid to corrode them.”
But as she spoke, her eyes swept over the layer of liquid on the basement floor, and she wrinkled her nose in disbelief, “But I cleared the Edmond Observatory’s supplies with Mu Ke before I left, and I don’t recall this much acid being stockpiled here.”
Strong acids are a scarce resource even in research stations, and Liu Jiayi emptied the Edmond Observatory of acid before she left.
Even then, she had to be careful and calculating to be able to deal with the monsters and escape.
Liu Jiayi leaned down and took out a piece of metal to catch two drops of acid dripping down the steps.
The metal surface quickly corroded, and gas bubbled out. She frowned, “This guy is totally pouring acid into the basement in buckets, where did he get that much acid?”
The man who cleared the basement had used strong acid quite casually, spreading it all over the walls and steps with a sense of wastefulness, as if he had no sense of appreciation for the hard-won and scarce resource of strong acid in this dungeon.
“Then there’s only one possibility.” Bai Liu’s eyes fell on the slowly freezing acid.
Liu Jiayi snapped to attention: “Someone who played this game brought in the acid himself – Spades was here?!”
At that moment, Mu Sicheng shouted from the first floor of the Observatory, “Shit! What the hell is going on?!”
Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi looked at each other and took out their weapons then headed for the door.
When they entered the observation post and went up to the first floor, Liu Jiayi alertly walked in front of Bai Liu, gun in tow: “What’s wrong?”
Mu Sicheng turned back, his face streaked with blue and white, and his shaking hand pointed in the direction of the dining room. His voice shook as if he was terrified: “…… you guys, see for yourselves …… “
Bai Liu crossed over to Mu Sicheng, looked behind him at the canteen and then raised an eyebrow slightly.
He understood why Mu Sicheng had such a look on his face.
The seats in the dining room were all roughly kicked out of the way and the broken tables and benches were stacked in scattered piles in the four corners of the room, freeing up a large open space in the middle of the dining room.
And the clearing was smashed by something that had an outline that approximated a square hole.
The hole penetrated directly through the floor of the first floor, allowing a view of the ground floor.
On the edge of the cave entrance, there was a circle of bloody handprints left by people struggling which densely covered the floor – it can be seen that there was a group of people clinging to the edge of the hole, trying to climb up.
On the ground floor, directly below the recess of the hole, was a huge glass tank of water that appeared to have been brought down from the roof and was now filled with thick acid so viscous that it barely flowed. At this moment, it was gurgling and bubbling with reaction.
The glass tank was filled with all sorts of carbonised, charred and broken ‘corpses’ as if they had been thrown away like rubbish.
Most of these corpses had not yet finished reacting, writhing bloodily in the acid, their flesh making strange, corrosive bubbling noises as “they” slapped their palms against the pool of strong acid, occasionally shaking off their half-dissolved eyeballs.
What made Mu Sicheng shriek was the appearance of the bodies.
The people who disposed of the bodies were a bit crude and not very careful, and quite a few of them still had faces that were not completely burnt by the fuel, so you could clearly see what “they” looked like.
–These bodies had the faces of Bai Liu, Mu Sicheng, Tang Erda, Liu Jiayi, and Mu Ke.
Such a group of charred corpses with their own faces struggling so painfully in the sticky, thick acid, their skin, muscles, and bones being eaten away by the acid in all its pervasiveness.
Even knowing that these things are not people, but monsters, it is hard not to feel empathetically creeped out.
Mu Sicheng took two steps back and distanced himself from the bloodstained hole, swallowed nervously and spoke in a raspy voice: “…… Someone killed all the monsters that turned into us at Edmond Station.”
“And it’s fast.” Tang Erda half-crouched at the edge of the hole, he touched the lingering blood stains with two fingers and looked up with a stony face to add, “The blood hasn’t all clotted yet.”
Bai Liu’s eyes moved from the bloodstains to Mu Ke’s face, “I thought you said that these monsters that turned into us had skills?”
“Yes.” Mu Ke also looked shocked, his pupils were in a slightly constricted state, as if he couldn’t think for a second or two before he started to answer Bai Liu’s question, “We had a confrontation with these monsters before we left, and almost got held hostage by them.”
“But they’re not as strong as us, I think it might be because they’re still immaturely developed, and their abilities feel like they’re only about one-half of ours.” Liu Jiayi took the words, and she looked coldly towards the ground floor, exhaling slowly.
“But there isn’t just one [us] here at Edmond Station, there’s a bunch of [us] in the mix.”
“- he took such a group of monsters with roughly similar abilities to us and brought them under control quickly in a short period of time. He also made this acid pool by smashing the floor with a whip and throwing the bodies in to dispose of them.”
Liu Jiayi’s face had an ugly expression for the first time: ” Spades’ ability …… is too strong. He’s even stronger than last year.”
“We can’t win against him even as a group, so what’s next?” She tilted her head to look at Bai Liu for instructions.
Bai Liu knelt down on one foot at the edge of the cave, staring for a moment at the submerged and dissipating [Bai Liu] in the acid pool below.
After the charred corpses with their own faces had turned into bones, then into bubbling particles and some debris with no concrete shape, Bai Liu stood up, withdrew his gaze and turned to the others.
“Search the entire observatory for the reason Spades is here.”
Half an hour later, a group of people gathered once again on the ground floor.
Mu Ke, who specialises in memorising and searching maps, first reported his findings.
“A lot of places were searched, supposedly for something, but the searches were brief, it doesn’t seem like they were looking for text-based information or small objects.”
“Spades hasn’t been found to have taken anything so far, so what he’s looking for shouldn’t be found yet.”
“He didn’t touch the rifles and bullets scattered around the fourth floor either.” Tang Erda added, “The situation is similar to when we left.”
Bai Liu sat down at the table, pulling out a piece of paper on which he summarised the information and concluded in a calm tone: “First of all, we can be sure of one thing: Spades repeatedly entered the game in search of an object, which is most likely related to the main game line.”
“Spades and I logged in together at the Edmond Observatory at the beginning, but instead of searching the place at that time, he left it and went outside. From that, we can tell that at the time Spades thought that the Edmond Observatory did not have what he was looking for.”
Bai Liu paused for a moment on the paper with the tip of his pen, “But now he’s back.”
Liu Jiayi soon realised why: “Spades didn’t find it outside either, so he decided to come back to Edmond Observatory to try his luck and happened to come across the replicas we had left here, so he killed them, searched again, but still didn’t find it, so he left.”
Bai Liu’s eyes were half-closed, and the tip of his pen was drawing bit by bit as if it was thinking as he spoke: “The question now is, what is Spades looking for when he repeatedly enters the game?”
“The main quest of this game is global warming and Spades is probably looking for something related to global warming.” Mu Ke mused “Is it possible that the boss at the end of the level is Edmond? According to the general design of the game, if you defeat the boss at the end of the level, you can pass the game and reach the [normal end].”
“I don’t think with Spades’ ability, he wouldn’t have even reached [normal end] after being in the game so many times.” Bai Liu denied.
The tip of his pen paused twice on the paper before he wrote the word [corpse].
Bai Liu looked up, “I think Spades is probably looking for a particle weather device made from a [corpse] and he should be going for the [true end] line to eliminate the possibility of global cooling again at the root.”
“In Edmond’s way of doing things, it’s likely he put the particle weather devices on the same six hundred sites where he felt the Antarctic affected the world’s climate.”
Mu Ke was puzzled: “But the six hundred locations were marked on the map, so if Spades wanted to find them, he could have just followed the map, there was no need to come to the Edmond Observatory – there were no particle weather devices at the Edmond Observatory. “
Bai Liu wrote down [600], [Experimental Sample Preservation] on the paper and then put a question mark next to it.
He lifted his eyes to look at Mu Ke: “That means Spades is not looking for body parts among the six hundred particle devices, but outside of them.”
Mu Ke repeated Bai Liu’s words softly, “The corpse beyond these six hundred particle devices……”
As if realising something, he opened his eyes slightly and looked at Bai Liu: “It’s the body part that Edmond hasn’t done an experiment on to turn it into a particle device, right?”
“Edmond is an experienced researcher.” Bai Liu cautioned lightly “He doesn’t consume all the experimental material at once, but usually keeps some of it as samples. That should be what Spades is looking for.”
“Look through the lab report, which of the pieces Edmond got in the preliminaries was left untouched?”
Mu Ke quickly looked down and flipped through it, his fingertips sliding down the lines of obscure report entries, finally settling on a word.
“Found it!”
“Among the three parts of the body obtained by Edmond in the early days was the left hand, the hind ankle, and a whole heart with preserved arterial vessels and veins derived from it.”
Mu Ke looked up slightly excitedly and spoke quickly, “I could only find records of experiments on the left hand and hind ankle, but nothing on this heart – Edmond most likely kept it as a sample reserve! “
Bai Liu put on his gloves and hat then pushed open the door, “This heart should be what Spades is looking for and the key to passing this game’s [true end]. Let’s go.”
The wind and snow covered Bai Liu’s dark, deep eyes, and carried his calm voice away in the dusk.
“- We have to win over Spades by finding this heart before Spades destroys it.”
The tide on the coast was full of ice and snow. The ground was mottled with brown soil and white snow and there was a cabin on it.
It was a rather old-looking old cabin, with peeling paint on the door frame and floor rails leaving leper skin-like stains on the exterior of the old cabin. A roof stacked on rickety, decaying load-bearing walls, held in place by horizontally arranged planks.
In front of the entrance there was a sign like a tourist location sign saying [Scott’s Cottage] and below it [Built in 1912].
This 100-year-old, already heritage, old cabin was emanating a warm fire, as if someone was resting and warming up inside.
The fire was burning under the mantelpiece and an old man sat squinting on a wooden bench next to it.
He wore a pair of faded gold charmed glasses and hummed a song softly that was out of tune, his feet tapping along with it. His arms and legs hunched to the spine, as if he had endured much torture.
The light of the fire shone on his pale, wrinkled face, reflecting shadows shifting against the walls.
Out of the dark shadows emerged Spades, standing erect at the edge of the firelight, the long whip in his hand, his long eyelashes and hair tipped with snow that had not yet had time to melt.
Spades looked at the old man and his voice was clear and slow: “Edmond.”
The old man then opened one eye slightly to look over, he seemed a little helpless and amused, “There you go again young man, you seem to enjoy coming to my place.”
Edmond smiled amiably, “You’ve killed me many times, for that heart you can never find?”
“Is it that important to you?”
Spades opened his mouth, but it was to answer the first question only, “You shouldn’t remember that I killed you.”
Edmond removed his glasses and looked over at Spades with a soft smile, “Because I’m just an evil NPC in a game where every time you leave, this instance dungeon is supposed to start over and I forget everything, right?”
Spades nodded.
Edmond smiled, “Maybe I’ve lived too long and done things so cruelly that God won’t forgive me and made me remember everything I’ve done – I do remember you killing me so many times, you’re the most frequent person in this game, I almost want to be friends with you. “
His gaze landed on Spades’ dripping whip for a moment, “Surely it would be nice if you didn’t strangle me with it as soon as you enter the game – the choking is always painful, and I’d prefer to be burned if you’d let me choose how I die. “
Spades agreed without a second thought, “Yes.”
Edmond then laughed out loud, “Son, I believe you really can’t understand people’s jokes.”
“That group of your teammates have been having a headache with you, right? That guy called [The Judge of Defying Gods] has been so distressed that he couldn’t resist pouring out his troubles to me, an NPC, saying he didn’t know what to do with you.”
Edmond playfully surveyed Spades: “He looked sad to the point of tears, it’s a funny and troubling thing to have a friend like you.”
Spades didn’t judge the definitions others gave him, he always spoke and acted in a straightforward manner: “Are you still not going to tell me where the heart is this time?”
Edmond’s eyes reflected the light of the fire and while it seemed that an old man like him should have cloudy eyes, Edmond’s eyes remained pure, as clean as the snow that had fallen 30,000 years ago under the Antarctic ice, with a pale blue colour that was almost icy.
“I can’t, my boy.” Edmond’s look became distant, and he shook his head, “You can kill me again, but I will never tell you where I hid the heart.”
“That is my original sin, and only God knows where it hides.”
Spades pursed his lips into a straight line, clearly unhappy with the result, and a very shallow depression surfaced from the small movement of his fingernails clasping the whip.
Edmond looked at Spades with the same friendly smile of insight, “You found all six hundred of my particle devices this time too. I rarely see a player find all of them without freezing to death, you’re good.”
“But there is one device that is ineffective.” Spades looked at Edmond, “The device under Ice Dome A is not filled with corpse particles, so I can’t gather all six hundred corpse particles.”
“But you’ve already won this game, haven’t you?” Edmond shook his head seriously and held up a finger for emphasis, “Your friend, The Judge of Defying Gods tells me that you only care about winning and losing, you’ve got what you want, so why not let my secret remain just a secret forever?”
Edmond looked at Spades with a smile on his lips and a dusky campfire glint in his ice-shattered light blue eyes: “Why are you so attached to a heart that doesn’t belong to you? It’s not romantic.”
Spades paused briefly – it seems he didn’t know the exact answer to this question either.
“Intuition – I have to destroy the heart and all the body parts.”
Spades raised his eyes: “Every man has his own predetermined destiny, and I can see that the destiny of this heart is linked to me and should be destroyed by me.”
“Neither it nor I should exist in this world.”
The smile on Edmond’s face faded and he muttered, “You’re self-destructing, son……”
“Hmm.” Spades replied calmly, then asked, “What was the original sin you are trying to hide?”
Edmond didn’t have a smile on his face, and he was finally showing a little of the old-fashioned attitude that came with his age.
He held his forehead with a long sigh, unable to hide the fatigue in his movements: “My original sin was the one thing I never realised I should repent for.”
“I resented the things that persecuted me, hated the students who betrayed me and pitied the friends I yearned for.” Edmond drew in a deep breath, exhaling slowly from his nose as if he were smoking, his gaze looking far away through the fire at his feet, “I have not done one thing right for which I repent, but one thing has made me realise that there is much more to my ugliness than that.”
Edmond’s hands trembled on the side of his chair and he closed his eyes, tears falling into furrowed wrinkles, his voice hard and hoarse: “-those are the body parts.”
“That’s not some corpse, that’s the dismembered limb of a living creature who is conscious, who has feelings and emotions, who knows what an ugly thing I’m doing to him.”
Edmond opened his eyes, his clear ones finally clouding at that moment, and choked out, “-and I didn’t know what I’d done until I saw the heart that kept beating.”
“I’m killing a living person.”
Edmond turned his head to look at Spades while seeming to have aged to the point of death in an instant.
“The plot of the game you speak of is, perhaps, my destiny. I am drawn by this fate, by the threads of the unseen gods towards the abyss of self-destruction, forming a hell-like cycle that supplies the playful entertainment of others who come and go, and I thought I could escape this terrible game myself.”
“But after escaping, I found that I was only in a larger cycle of destiny again, always a toy in the hands of the gods who set my fate, and that humans will always lead to self-destruction because of uncontrolled desires in all world lines, a fate we were given by the gods – they wanted to see this.”
Edmond’s eyes were shaking with tears: “All of us deserve to be punished for the cruelty we have been given by fate, but I know that in the eyes of the unseen god, the undue punishment I inflicted out of anger was just one piece of his calculated destiny.”
“Everything I do is just…… a game.”
Spades looked at him blankly, “But you can decide how you die this time.”
“I will burn you as you wish, and it will be no game to you, nor to me.”
Edmond smiled away with tears in his eyes, “I know.”
“It’s …… the victory you want, and the fate I want.”
——
The other end.
Bai Liu was on the ground in a helicopter, having passed three points marked on the map – one of the six hundred locations.
But none of the results were satisfactory.
The buoys on the surface had all been pulled out and destroyed and they didn’t even have to go down to find them; the remains of the apparatus lay directly on the edge of the shore and the metal box had been casually dropped in the apparatus, the particles inside having been destroyed cleanly.
The particle devices on the ground were released into the sky tied to weather balloons.
They had already seen several punctured balloons buried in the snow on the ground – in much the same condition as on the coast – and the particles in the metal box had been destroyed.
The further you go towards the locations marked on these maps, the worse it gets.
At the sight of the hollowed-out device next to Ice Dome A, Bai Liu gave the abort order: “All six hundred devices should have been searched by Spades, and Edmond should not have hidden the heart in these six hundred spots.”
“And where would he have hidden the heart?” Mu Ke shouted into the gale so that Bai Liu could hear him over the wind, “That’s six hundred locations that include all the locations of special significance to Edmond, Ice Dome A, the South Pole, Tarzan Station, Scott’s hut, could he have hidden the heart anywhere else? “
“Yes.” Bai Liu turns his head to Mu Ke, “Remember what the main quest of this instance dungeon is?”
Mu Ke nodded: “Global warming.”
“If global cooling is Edmond’s punishment for everyone, including himself, when his desires get out of hand, then global warming is an opportunity for him to transform.” Bai Liu’s breath was white with frost.
As he talked, Tang Erda steered the helicopter to a new landing site.
Bai Liu stepped out of the helicopter, which had been steadily landed by Tang Erda, onto an open snowfield.
It was a new, untouched site, with no footprints or traces left behind, with no devices placed here, no signs of anyone having visited. It was far from all the observatories and without even a geographical name unique to itself.
A strange, featureless location any way you look at it.
This is the spot Bai Liu chose for Tang Erda to land.
Mu Ke jogged after Bai Liu, breathing heavily, “Bai Liu, do you think this is where Edmond hid the heart?”
He’s almost ready to ask why you think this is the place, but because of Mu Ke’s ever-present blind faith in Bai Liu, he thinks he’ll dig in first.
But instead, Mu Sicheng turned around and asked Bai Liu, puzzled, “Why would Edmond hide the heart here? I don’t even know where this place is and I haven’t seen it in Edmond’s faxes or lab reports.”
Bai Liu put on his anti-friction gloves and started to help Tang Erda carry the equipment for the ice excavation.
Mu Sicheng stepped forward to take over, looking at Bai Liu with inquisitive eyes.
Bai Liu leaned over and removed a pile of lab reports from the back seat of the helicopter and handed them to Mu Sicheng: “I’ll explain as you read – as I said earlier, global cooling is Edmond’s punishment for mankind in his anger, but before that, global warming was also a punishment, and it was a punishment that mankind has brought upon itself.”
Mu Sicheng couldn’t help but exclaim: “What have I done wrong, why am I being punished for being cold and hot?”
Bai Liu laughed a little: “Yes, it’s a Christian idea called being born with original sin and living is the process of atonement. If you look at the whole process as Edmond asking humans to atone for their sins, it’s much clearer.”
“He felt that the others were guilty, so he punished them. He felt that Tarzan Station was sinless, but this sinlessness was also a sin in a guilty environment because it invited bullying, so Edmond was determined to sharpen Tarzan Station so that they would survive as humans on Noah’s Ark.”
“Edmond knew deep down that what he was doing was wrong and sinful, and his own process of atonement -” Bai Liu’s eyes were deep, ” -was to hide the heart that he himself hadn’t touched, to protect the first innocent person he was forced to mutilate under the suppression of various circumstances.”
“He saved the heart to preserve the experimental samples on the one hand, and to preserve his [original sin] on the other.”
Bai Liu looked to Mu Sicheng: “Where do you think a person like Edmond would keep his original sin?”
Mu Sicheng shook his head honestly.
Bai Liu smiled: “Of course it would be the day he made up his mind to start committing his crime and it took effect.”
Mu Sicheng’s eyes popped with questions, “What day is this, again?”
“The tenth of August, the day he began pickling sauerkraut for the men of Tarzan Station.” Bai Liu looked to the empty space in front of him and curled his lips into a smile, “And this location is the coldest place in the Antarctic on August 10th in Edmond’s accumulated thirty-three years of temperature records.”
“There is no better place to store a beating heart than this one.”
EN1: closer to the end of this arc and closer to even LONGER chapters…
EN2: this was so long oh my god
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