The helicopter lurched across the endless white snowfields, forced by the shrieking winds to make two emergency landings along the way.
By the time Tang Erda and the others reached the Edmund Observation Station, dawn was already approaching on the third day.
The helicopter landed several kilometers from the station.
The wind and snow had stopped by then. From a distance, the Edmund Observation Station looked buried and swaddled beneath heavy layers of snow. But eerily enough, the snow in front of the entrance had been cleared away, revealing a bare patch of ground, and the door stood half-open.
Tang Erda knew something was wrong with a single glance. “Someone’s inside.”
“Shit!” Mu Shicheng rubbed his arms, his expression darkening. “It can’t be that group of replicas of us still in there, can it?”
Bai Liu crouched in front of the basement trapdoor beside the helicopter hangar.
A cold smell of ash and the sharp, pungent odor of strong acid corrosion rushed up from beneath the trapdoor.
The snow covering the trapdoor had also been cleared, and it was wide open. The two barrels of gasoline Bai Liu had left there before departing were gone. In their place, the basement below was pitch-black, with faint heat still bubbling upward.
From Bai Liu’s angle, he could see that the walls were coated with coal ash left behind by incomplete combustion. Meltwater dripped down the stairs in thin streams. One glance was enough to tell that the fire had only just gone out, and the remaining liquid had not yet had time to freeze.
Liu Jiayi had also noticed the abnormality. She crouched down beside Bai Liu. “It looks like after we left, that group of replicas burned the monsters in the basement, then poured strong acid over them to corrode the remains.”
But as she spoke, her gaze swept over the layer of liquid pooled across the basement floor, and her brows furrowed in confusion. “But Mu Ke and I checked through the supplies at the Edmund Observation Station before we left. I don’t remember there being this much acid in reserve.”
As a chemical reagent, strong acid was a scarce resource even inside a research station. Before leaving, Liu Jiayi had practically emptied the station’s acid supply.
Even then, she had been forced to use it with extreme caution, calculating every portion carefully before she had barely managed to deal with those monsters and escape.
Liu Jiayi bent lower and used a piece of metal to catch two drops of acid dripping from the stairs.
The metal surface was quickly corroded, sizzling as it released gas. She frowned. “Whoever did this was pouring acid into the basement by the barrel. Where did they get so much of it?”
The person who had cleared the basement had used the strong acid with extreme recklessness, splashing it everywhere over the walls and steps. There was an extravagant carelessness to it, as though this person had no concept of treasuring a resource so difficult to obtain, especially in this instance.
“Then there’s only one possibility.” Bai Liu’s gaze settled on the acid slowly freezing over.
Liu Jiayi reacted instantly. “Someone who’s played this game before brought their own acid in—Spades has been here?!”
At that moment, Mu Shicheng’s shocked cry rang out from the second floor of the observation station. “Shit!! What the hell happened here?!”
Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi exchanged a glance, drew their weapons, and headed toward the entrance.
After entering the station and going up to the second floor, Liu Jiayi dragged her gun along alertly as she walked ahead of Bai Liu. “What happened?”
Mu Shicheng turned around, his face a mix of blue and white. With a trembling hand, he pointed toward the dining hall. Even his voice shook, as if he had been genuinely terrified. “...See for yourselves...”
Bai Liu walked past Mu Shicheng and looked into the dining hall behind him. Then he raised an eyebrow slightly.
He understood why Mu Shicheng had made that face.
The chairs in the dining hall had been kicked crudely aside. Broken tables and benches lay scattered and piled in the corners, clearing a large empty space in the center of the room.
And in that open space, something had smashed through the floor, leaving a roughly square-shaped hole.
The hole pierced straight through the second floor. Through it, the scene on the first floor could be seen.
The edges of the opening were densely covered in bloody handprints left by desperate struggles. It was obvious that a group of people had once clung to the edge, trying with all their might to climb up.
Directly below the hole’s indentation on the first floor stood an enormous glass water tank that seemed to have been moved down from the roof. At present, it was filled with concentrated acid so viscous that it could barely flow, and the acid was still bubbling and gurgling from the ongoing reaction.
Inside the glass tank, piled up like discarded trash, were all kinds of carbonized, charred, broken “corpses.”
Most of the corpses had not yet finished reacting. They squirmed bloodily in the concentrated acid as strange sizzling sounds rose continuously from the corroding flesh. “Their” palms slapped again and again against the acid pool, occasionally shaking loose an eyeball that had already half-dissolved.
What had made Mu Shicheng scream was the appearance of those corpses.
The person who had disposed of them had acted roughly and paid little attention to detail. A considerable portion of the corpses’ faces had not been completely charred by the fuel, so “their” appearances could still be seen clearly.
—These corpses had the faces of Bai Liu, Mu Shicheng, Tang Erda, Liu Jiayi, and Mu Ke.
Watching a group of charred corpses bearing one’s own face struggle in thick concentrated acid while their skin, muscle, and bone were gradually penetrated and eaten away by the liquid—
Even knowing that these things were not human, but monsters, a sympathetic horror still inevitably rose in the chest.
Mu Shicheng took two steps back, putting distance between himself and the bloodstained hole. His expression was taut as he swallowed hard, his voice incredibly hoarse. “...Someone killed all those monsters at the Edmund station that had turned into us.”
“And did it very quickly.” Tang Erda knelt by the edge of the hole. He touched the remaining bloodstains with two fingers, then lifted his head with a grim expression and added, “The blood hasn’t fully coagulated yet.”
Bai Liu’s gaze moved from the bloodstains to Mu Ke’s face. “I remember you saying that these monsters who turned into us had skills?”
“Yes.” Mu Ke also looked as though he had suffered a shock. His pupils were slightly contracted, and for a second or two, he seemed frozen, as if unable to think. Only then did he begin answering Bai Liu’s question. “Before we left, we had a conflict with these monsters and were nearly taken hostage by them.”
“But they weren’t as strong as we were. I think it may have been because they hadn’t fully developed yet; their abilities felt like they were only about half of ours.” Liu Jiayi took over, her expression cold as she looked toward the first floor and slowly exhaled.
“But here at the Edmund station, there wasn’t just one [us]. There was an entire group of [us] fighting together.”
“—Yet he managed to quickly subdue this whole group of monsters whose abilities were roughly similar to ours. He even used a whip to smash open the floor, make this acid pool, and throw the corpses in to dispose of them.”
For the first time, Liu Jiayi’s expression had turned this ugly. “Spades’ ability... is too strong. He’s even stronger than he was last year.”
“Even in a team battle, we wouldn’t be able to beat him. What do we do next?” She looked up at Bai Liu, waiting for his instructions.
Bai Liu crouched on one knee beside the edge of the hole, his expression unreadable as he stared for a while at the [Bai Lius] below, who were gradually sinking and dissolving in the acid pool.
Only after those charred corpses with his face had turned into bone, then into bubbles and shapeless remains, did Bai Liu stand. He withdrew his gaze and turned to the others.
“Search the entire observation station. Find out why Spades came here.”
Half an hour later, the group gathered again on the first floor.
Mu Ke, who was skilled at memorization and map-based searching, was the first to report his findings.
“Many places have been searched. He must have been looking for something, but the search was brief. It doesn’t look like he was searching for written materials or small objects.”
“So far, there’s no sign that Spades took anything away. That means he probably hasn’t found what he was looking for yet.”
“He didn’t touch the rifles or bullets scattered on the second floor either,” Tang Erda added. “They’re basically the same as when we left.”
Bai Liu sat by a table and took out a sheet of paper, summarizing the information on it. His tone was calm as he reached his conclusion. “First, there’s one thing we can be certain of. Spades repeatedly enters this game in order to find something, and that thing is very likely connected to the game’s main storyline.”
“When Spades and I first logged in together at the Edmund Observation Station, he didn’t search this place. Instead, he left directly for the outside. We can infer from this that, at the time, Spades believed the thing he was searching for was not at the Edmund Observation Station.”
Bai Liu paused his pen on the paper. “But now, he’s come back.”
Liu Jiayi quickly understood. “Spades didn’t find it outside either, so he decided to return to the Edmund Observation Station and try his luck. As it happened, he ran into the replicas we left behind. So he killed them, searched again, still failed to find it, and left.”
Bai Liu’s eyes lowered halfway. His pen tapped against the paper as he thought. “The key question now is what, exactly, Spades is searching for by repeatedly entering the game.”
“The main task of this game is global warming. What Spades is looking for may be something related to global warming.” After thinking for a moment, Mu Ke suggested, “Is it possible that the final boss is Edmund? According to ordinary game design, you should be able to clear the game and reach the [normal end] just by defeating the final boss.”
“I don’t think someone with Spades’ ability could have entered this game so many times without even reaching a [normal end],” Bai Liu denied.
His pen paused on the paper for two beats. Then he wrote the words [corpse pieces].
Bai Liu looked up. “I think what Spades wants to find may be the particle meteorological devices modified from the [corpse pieces]. The route he’s taking should be the [true end] route, one that eliminates, from the root, the possibility of the world turning cold again.”
“Given Edmund’s way of doing things, he most likely placed the particle meteorological devices at the six hundred locations where he believed Antarctica influenced the world’s climate.”
Mu Ke was puzzled. “But those six hundred locations are all marked on the map. If Spades wanted to find them, he could just follow the map. There’s no need to come rummaging through the Edmund Observation Station—the station doesn’t have any particle meteorological devices placed here.”
Bai Liu wrote [600] and [Experimental Sample Preservation] on the paper, then added a question mark beside them.
He lifted his eyes to look at Mu Ke. “Then that means what Spades wants to find isn’t the corpse pieces inside those six hundred particle devices, but the corpse pieces outside those six hundred particle devices.”
Mu Ke repeated Bai Liu’s words softly. “The corpse pieces outside those six hundred particle devices...”
As if realizing something, his eyes widened slightly as he looked at Bai Liu. “It’s the corpse piece Edmund hasn’t experimented on yet and turned into a particle device, right?”
“Edmund is an experienced scientific researcher,” Bai Liu reminded him plainly. “He wouldn’t use up all his experimental materials at once. Usually, he would keep a portion as a sample. That retained sample should be what Spades is searching for.”
“Go through the experimental reports. Among the corpse pieces Edmund obtained in the early stages, find out which one hasn’t been touched.”
Mu Ke quickly lowered his head and began flipping through the reports. His fingertips slid row by row down the obscure, difficult-to-understand records before finally stopping on a certain word.
“Found it!”
“Among the three corpse pieces Edmund obtained in the early stages, there was a left hand, a rear ankle, and an intact heart that still retained the branching of the arteries and veins.”
Mu Ke raised his head, somewhat excited, his speech quickening. “I can only find experimental records for the left hand and the rear ankle. There are no experimental records related to this heart—Edmund most likely kept the heart as a reserve sample!”
Bai Liu pulled on his gloves and hat, then pushed open the door. “This heart should be what Spades is searching for, and also the key to this game’s [true end]. Let’s go.”
Wind and snow covered Bai Liu’s dark, deep eyes, carrying his calm voice far into the dusky evening.
“—If we want to beat Spades, we have to find it before Spades destroys the heart.”
—
The tide rose and fell along the ice-covered coast. Farther inland, brown soil and white snow interlaced in mottled patches, and an old wooden hut stood upon them.
It was a very old-looking little hut. The paint peeling from its doorframe and floor rails left blotches like lesions on a leper’s skin. The roof rested atop swaying, decaying load-bearing walls, held in place by horizontal wooden planks.
A sign like a tourist marker stood before the door, with [Scott’s Hut] written on it, and beneath that, [Built in 1912].
Inside this century-old wooden hut, already treated as both cultural relic and tourist site, a warm fire was burning, as though someone were resting inside and warming themselves by the flames.
Following the firelight scattered across the snow and walking into the hut, one would see the fire roaring in the fireplace. Beside it sat an old man on a wooden stool, his eyes narrowed.
He wore a pair of faded gold-rimmed glasses and hummed a soft, off-key song. His feet tapped along to the beat. His hands, feet, and back were all hunched, as though he had endured a great deal of suffering.
The firelight shone over his pale, wrinkled face, casting a wavering shadow onto the wall.
Spades stepped out of the black shadow and stood tall at the edge of the firelight. He held a long whip in his hand, and snow that had not yet had time to melt clung to his long lashes and the tips of his hair.
Spades looked at the old man, his voice clear and steady. “Edmund.”
Only then did the old man open one eye and look over. He seemed helpless, yet also amused. “You’re here again, young man. You seem very fond of visiting my place.”
Edmund smiled kindly. “You’ve killed me so many times, all for that heart you can never find?”
“Is it that important to you?”
Spades spoke, but his answer did not respond to the question. “You shouldn’t remember that I killed you.”
Edmund removed his glasses and looked at Spades, smiling very gently. “Because I’m only an evil NPC in a game, and every time this instance resets and begins again after you leave, I should forget everything, right?”
Spades nodded.
Edmund gave a small laugh. “Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived too long and done things too cruel, so God refuses to forgive me and allows me to remember everything I’ve done. I do remember that you’ve killed me many times. You are the person who appears most frequently in this game; I have almost wanted to become friends with you.”
His gaze lingered playfully for a moment on Spades’ dripping long whip. “Though it would be better if you didn’t throttle me with your whip the moment you entered the game. The process of suffocation is always painful. If you were willing to let me choose a way to die, I would prefer being burned to death.”
Spades agreed without hesitation. “I can do that.”
Edmund burst into hearty laughter. “Child, I truly believe you can’t understand other people’s jokes.”
“Your teammates have always found you quite a headache, haven’t they? That fellow called [The Judge Who Defies God] was so troubled that he couldn’t help pouring out his worries to an NPC like me, saying he didn’t know what to do with you.”
Edmund studied Spades with teasing interest. “He looked so sad he was almost crying. Having a friend like you must be a very interesting, very troublesome thing.”
Spades offered no comment on other people’s definitions of him. His speech and actions had always been direct. “Are you still unwilling to tell me where the heart is this time?”
The firelight reflected in Edmund’s eyes. An old man like him should have had cloudy eyes, yet Edmund’s were still pure and flawless, as clean as the snow buried thirty thousand years ago beneath Antarctic ice, shimmering with a pale blue nearly like the surface of the ice itself.
“I cannot, my child.” Edmund’s expression became very distant as he shook his head. “You may kill me again, but I will never tell you where I hid the heart.”
“That is my original sin. Only God knows its hiding place.”
Spades pressed his lips into a straight line. He was clearly unsatisfied with this answer, and an extremely faint trace of gloom emerged in the small motion of his fingernails picking at his whip.
Edmund looked at Spades, still wearing that friendly smile that seemed to see through everything. “This time, you found all six hundred of my particle devices as well. I rarely see players who can find them all without freezing to death. You really are remarkable.”
“But one of the devices was invalid.” Spades looked at Edmund. “The device beneath Dome A was not loaded with corpse-piece particles. I cannot collect all six hundred corpse pieces.”
“But you have already won this game, haven’t you?” Edmund tilted his head meaningfully, raising a finger in emphasis. “Your friend, The Judge, told me that you only care about winning and losing. You have already obtained what you wanted, so why not let my secret remain a secret forever?”
Edmund looked at Spades, the corners of his mouth curved in a smile, his shard-of-ice pale blue eyes flickering with the yellow light of the fire. “Why are you so obsessed with a heart that does not belong to you? That is not very romantic.”
Spades paused slightly. It seemed he did not know the precise answer to this question either.
“Intuition—I must destroy this heart and all the corpse pieces.”
Spades looked up. “Everyone has a predetermined fate. I can see that this heart’s fate is tied to mine, and it should be destroyed by me.”
“It and I should not exist in this world.”
The smile on Edmund’s face gradually faded. He murmured, “You are destroying yourself, child...”
“Mm.” Spades answered calmly, then asked, “What is the original sin you want to hide?”
Not a trace of a smile remained on Edmund’s face. At last, he revealed a little of the senility that belonged to his age.
He supported his forehead and let out a long sigh, his expression and movements unable to conceal his exhausted bewilderment. “My original sin is something I never realized, from beginning to end, that I should repent for.”
“I resented the things that persecuted me, hated the students who betrayed me, and pitied the friends I yearned for.” Edmund took a very deep breath, then exhaled slowly through his nose, as if smoking. His gaze passed through the fire at his feet and looked toward some distant place. “I did not do a single thing right. I repent for all of it. But there was one thing that made me understand that my ugliness went far beyond that.”
Edmund’s hands, resting by the chair, began to tremble. He closed his eyes, tears falling into the trench-like wrinkles of his face, his voice rough and hoarse.
“—Those corpse pieces.”
“Those were not corpse pieces. They were the dismembered limbs of a living creature. He had consciousness, he had feelings, he had emotions. He knew what vile things I was doing to him.”
Edmund opened his eyes. At this moment, those clear eyes finally turned cloudy as he choked out, “—And I only realized what I had done when I saw that heart still beating.”
“I was torturing and killing a living person.”
Edmund turned his head to look at Spades. In an instant, he seemed to age to the point of death.
“The game plot you speak of may be my fate. I am guided by this fate, dragged by strings in the hands of an invisible deity toward the abyss of self-destruction, forming a playground-like cycle to entertain the people who come and go. I thought I could escape this terrifying game by myself.”
“But after escaping it, I discovered that I had merely entered an even larger cycle of fate, forever nothing but a toy in the hands of the deity who governs my destiny. Humans will always move toward self-destruction in every timeline because of uncontrollable desire. This is the fate God has bestowed upon us—He wants to see this.”
Tears shimmered in Edmund’s eyes. “All of us should be punished for the cruelty bestowed by fate. But I know that, in the eyes of that invisible deity, the improper punishment I inflicted in anger was no more than one link in the fate He calculated.”
“Everything I did was only... a game.”
Spades looked at him without the slightest ripple in his expression. “But you can decide how you die this time.”
“I will burn you to death as you wish. And for you, and for me, this is not a game.”
Edmund smiled through his tears. “I know.”
“This is... the victory you want, and the fate I want.”
——————
On the other side.
Bai Liu was riding in the helicopter, patrolling the ground below. They had already passed three points marked on the map—three of those six hundred locations.
But the results were not satisfactory.
The buoys in the sea had already been pulled out and destroyed. Bai Liu and the others did not even need to dive down to search for them; the wreckage of the instruments had been placed directly along the coast. The metal boxes had been casually thrown into the instruments as well, and the particles inside had been completely destroyed.
The particle devices on land had also been tied to meteorological balloons and released into the sky.
Bai Liu and the others had already seen several burst balloons buried in the snow. The situation was similar to the coast; the particles inside the metal boxes had also been destroyed.
The farther they proceeded along the locations marked on the map, the worse the situation became.
Upon seeing the empty device beside Dome A, Bai Liu gave the order to stop. “All six hundred devices should already have been found by Spades. Edmund probably didn’t hide the heart at any of those six hundred points.”
“Then where would he hide the heart?” Mu Ke had to shout into the gale to make sure Bai Liu could hear him over the wind. “Those six hundred locations already include every place that holds special meaning to Edmund. Dome A, the South Pole, Taishan Station, and Scott’s Hut are all included. Is it possible he hid the heart somewhere else?”
“Yes.” Bai Liu turned to look at Mu Ke. “Do you remember what the main task of this instance is?”
Mu Ke nodded. “Global warming.”
“If global cooling is the punishment Edmund inflicted on everyone, himself included, after his desires spiraled out of control, then global warming is the turning point.” Bai Liu’s breath was full of white frost.
During their conversation, Tang Erda operated the helicopter and landed steadily at a new location.
Bai Liu stepped out of the helicopter Tang Erda had brought down and arrived on an empty snowfield.
This was a brand-new location. There were no footprints, no traces left behind. No device had ever been placed here, nor were there any signs that anyone had visited. It was far from every observation station, and it did not even have a distinct geographical name of its own.
No matter how one looked at it, this was a strange location without any distinguishing features.
This was the location Bai Liu had selected for Tang Erda to land.
Mu Ke jogged to catch up with Bai Liu, his breathing rapid. “Bai Liu, do you think this is where Edmund hid the heart?”
He nearly wanted to ask, “Why do you think it would be here?” But given Mu Ke’s usual blind trust in Bai Liu, he felt it would be better to start digging first.
But someone else did ask.
Mu Shicheng turned around and looked in every direction, asking Bai Liu in confusion, “Why would Edmund hide the heart here? I don’t even know where this is, and I haven’t seen this place mentioned in Edmund’s legends or experimental reports.”
Bai Liu changed into anti-friction gloves and began helping Tang Erda carry the equipment used for excavation and ice-surface probing.
Mu Shicheng stepped forward to take over, his eyes brimming with the desire to ask questions as he looked at Bai Liu.
Bai Liu bent down, picked up a stack of experimental reports from the back seat of the helicopter, and handed them to Mu Shicheng. “Read while I explain. Just now, I said that global cooling was Edmund’s punishment for humanity in his anger. But before that, global warming was also a form of punishment, and it was a punishment humans brought upon themselves.”
Mu Shicheng could not help exclaiming, “What exactly did I do wrong? Whether it gets cold or hot, I’m still being punished?”
Bai Liu smiled faintly. “Yes. This is a Christian concept called ‘original sin.’ Human beings are born with it, and living itself is a process of atonement. If you understand the whole process as Edmund wanting humanity to atone for its sins, everything becomes much clearer.”
“He believed others were guilty, so he punished them. He believed Taishan Station was innocent, but innocence within a guilty environment is also a kind of sin because it invites persecution. So Edmund decided to temper Taishan Station and let its people survive as the people aboard ‘Noah’s Ark.’”
“Deep down, Edmund knew that what he was doing was wrong, that it was sinful. And his own process of atonement—” Bai Liu’s gaze deepened. “—was to hide the heart he had not touched, protecting the first innocent person he had been forced to harm under the pressure of various circumstances.”
“He preserved the heart partly to keep an experimental sample, and partly to preserve his own [original sin].”
Bai Liu looked at Mu Shicheng. “Where do you think a person like Edmund would preserve his original sin?”
Mu Shicheng shook his head honestly.
Bai Liu smiled. “Naturally, on the day he made up his mind to begin committing his crimes—and the day that decision took effect.”
Mu Shicheng’s eyes filled with question marks. “And what day was that?”
“August 10th, the day he began pickling sauerkraut for the people of Taishan Station.” Bai Liu looked at the empty ground before him, the corners of his lips curving into a smile. “And this location is the coldest place in Antarctica on August 10th, according to the temperature records Edmund accumulated over thirty-three years.”
“There is no place more suitable than this to store a beating heart.”
—
Author’s Note:
Don’t panic, don’t worry. A heart eager to fall in love cannot eat black tofu (?!). I’ll tell you when those two are about to meet.
