The moment Spades’s hand pierced through Bai Liu’s chest, the heart Bai Liu had fastened to a blood vessel slipped out through his back and fell.
The heart, which had never stopped beating, sank into the blue-black depths of the sea.
Bai Liu’s eyes were half-lidded. He knew it was useless, but he still could not stop himself from reaching out, trying to catch the heart as it disappeared into the deep sea.
His slender fingers opened and closed weakly in the freezing seawater.
Spades grabbed Bai Liu’s ribs and lifted him upward. At the same time, he turned and chased after the heart, clearly intending to catch it and destroy it completely.
Bai Liu’s limbs spread lifelessly. Under that upward force, he slowly and passively floated toward the surface of the sea, which shimmered with faint phosphorescent light.
The sun had already sunk below the horizon, leaving only a faint, silver-rimmed glimmer plated along the edge of the boundless seawater.
Glaciers and floating ice—souvenirs, or perhaps wreckage, left behind by a planet that had first frozen and then burned—brushed past Bai Liu as he floated on the surface, drifting away with the current.
The pure black sky held no clouds, only the rotation of countless stars in the universe. They gave off an intoxicating brilliance, dazzling and radiant, like crushed, large-carat diamonds or strings of pearls scattered across velvet.
It was as if all the luxurious, lingering things in this world bloomed with a heartbreaking, mad beauty at the moment of their destruction.
And that beauty was veiled by a pale green gauze spilling down from the southeastern sky.
That was the aurora.
The aurora shifted across the night sky, its fluorescent colors floating like the cheap curtain at the opening of a dream.
Bai Liu’s eyes were half-open. Both his mental value and health value were falling drastically. As if he were hallucinating, Edmund’s aged voice rang in his ears, repeating his warning.
[Child, never use truth and falsehood to test the person you love. I once did the same. I insisted on completing that experiment, but the only conclusion I reached was—]
[They can tell the difference.]
[What exactly is the difference between a monster and a human? Even now, I still haven’t figured it out. Even if they possess the same memories, the same body, and the same structure as us, like another version of us in a parallel dimension, in the eyes of those who love us, they are still not us.]
[What is it that distinguishes them from us?]
[The experiment I originally wanted to conduct was meant to explore whether these manufactured monsters could truly become indistinguishable from humans through the Turing test, and what exactly made them different from us humans.]
[If they are the same, then are we humans truly human?]
[Perhaps we are merely the same kind of monsters placed on this planet, inside this game. We carry memories injected by others, a species produced in order to march toward war and self-destruction—just as my superiors required me to do with those monsters.]
[Then everything becomes logical. I understand all the misfortune that has always befallen me, my friends, and everyone around me—because we were born this way. There is a being in a dimension higher than ours, or perhaps something more fittingly called a God, who decided that this world’s fate would be so cruel.]
[If we are different, then when the machinery, the core, and the memories are all the same, where do these differences come from? In a situation where even we ourselves cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, why can someone else identify the real us?]
[The people at Taishan Station gave me the answer. Through you, I verified that answer once again. But I still do not understand why.]
[Where exactly does this difference come from?]
[Before you arrived, many guests came here. I used them all for experiments. Some left halfway, and some remained here forever. Beneath every ice crevasse here, the “corpses” of those failed experimental guests are hidden.]
[The people at Taishan Station had their memories wiped and reloaded again and again, but no matter who the guests were, they could still recognize each other. Sometimes, the guests could recognize one another as well.]
[But why?]
[Why can some people recognize it while others cannot? Why can the people of Taishan Station always recognize it, while the incoming guests cannot maintain such consistency?]
[I could not find the factor that affected the experimental results, so no matter how many times I conducted the experiment, I still could not control the outcome.]
[Until I met Spades.]
[He was the fastest guest I had ever seen at recognizing his teammates. He was willing to talk to me, and he gave me the answer—intuition.]
[This is the strangest experimental variable I have ever heard. If my student handed me an experimental report with those two words written on it, I would absolutely make him jump into the Ross Sea out of shame.]
[In the memories of Spades’s friend, I saw you, Bai Liu. You would conduct an experiment a thousand times more extreme and more insane than the one I am doing now. You would use thousands of your own replicas to create an unsolvable situation in order to test another person’s perception of you.]
[I knew you would do this. And I believe you knew the consequences of doing it as well. But, like me, you still wanted to see it one more time. You still wanted to verify that result once more—]
[These Bai Lius have the same appearance, memories, and core as you. You have even been alienated into one of these monsters, becoming the monster itself.]
[Can Spades still find you?]
[Thank you for finally letting me know the answer to this unsolvable riddle.]
[I always thought it was the side acting as the human that identified the side acting as the monster. But in truth, that is not the case. Rather, it is the side acting as the monster that cannot provide the special emotional feedback the human side wants.]
[Even though you have already become a monster, you love him, Bai Liu.]
[So you had no way to hide Tawil’s heart inside the bodies of the other “Bai Lius,” because that was a heart that belonged to you.]
[Your reaction exposed you.]
[Love turns you from a monster into a person. Love gives you a weakness. Love causes your heart to be gripped by him and left drifting in the deep sea. Love makes you stand out from thousands of monsters, becoming the most special monster to Spades.]
[And so, he found you.]
[But do not be sad, child. It is not fate that leads you toward your destiny, but love.]
[Love makes you part, but in the end, it will also make you meet again.]
Huge sheets of ice melted and broke apart. The “corpses” of the pale monsters frozen inside floated on the sea, mingling with shattered ice as they drifted past Bai Liu.
Fine grains of ice condensed on his eyelashes, glowing fluorescent green beneath the aurora. Seawater washed back and forth through his empty chest cavity.
Someone emerged from underwater.
Spades held Bai Liu by the waist and knees, lifted the seemingly unconscious Bai Liu, and placed him on the shore.
In his hands, he held two hearts.
One was crushed and ragged, yet still faintly beating.
The other was frozen inside a block of ice, fresh as if it had just been taken from a chest. This was the heart Spades had dug out from the body of one of the [Bai Lius].
Spades carefully thawed the heart.
“This is your real heart.”
Spades looked down at the motionless Bai Liu and placed the newly thawed heart back into Bai Liu’s body.
“Giving it back to you.”
Bai Liu’s body, which had been modified by Edmund, rapidly grew and connected its blood vessels to the heart. The muscles and skin over his thin chest healed in an instant, and his previously cold, rigid chest began to show a slow, weak rise and fall.
Spades turned around.
He took out the fuel and strong acid stored in the warehouse and, without any hesitation, began dealing with the other heart that was still faintly beating in his hand.
Amid roasting flames and the hissing corrosion of acid, the heart turned to ash.
Bai Liu’s frostbitten fingers twitched slightly.
His pitch-black eyes reflected the beautiful night sky, empty of everything.
At the moment the other heart was destroyed until it stopped beating, Bai Liu’s chest, which had just resumed rising and falling, paused for an instant.
It was as if his heartbeat had stopped as well, following the complete stillness of that other heart.
[System Notification: Player Spades has destroyed the final corpse fragment and achieved the True End route achievement. All players have cleared the game. The dungeon is about to close...]
The snowfield collapsed behind them.
Bai Liu’s system panel popped out and automatically exited the game for him. Spades knelt beside the ashes and the seemingly dead Bai Liu, tilting his head slightly as he gazed at this melting world of ice and snow.
Only after the Bai Liu beside him turned into a cluster of light and vanished did Spades stand, preparing to leave the game as well.
He did not understand why he had to wait for Bai Liu to exit before exiting himself.
It seemed to be a deep-rooted habit, something like intuition.
Spades felt as if he had watched this person exit the game and turn into motes of light many times before. Then he would sink into a long darkness, waiting for the next game to begin so he could see this person again.
So this time, he did the same.
Just like the subconscious intuition that told him he had to come here and destroy all the corpse fragments.
Spades vaguely sensed that the person who designed this game was using these corpse fragments and hearts, preparing to trap Bai Liu forever with these things, letting Bai Liu live as a monster, cold and alone in the snowfield for his entire life.
This was a very likely possibility.
Liu Jiayi was even glad that the person who had entered the game with them was Spades.
Because no one else could have stopped Bai Liu from going mad.
If Bai Liu had entered the game with other players and discovered that the main task here was to destroy corpse fragments, then as long as one player found a corpse fragment and destroyed it, the [True End] route would be triggered.
Even if those players and Edmund were killed, the game could not be ended.
Because the game was already on the [True End] route. Without reaching the final ending of destroying all corpse fragments, the game would not clear.
Bai Liu could also have directly exited the game.
But by then, the game would have become reality and loaded into the real world.
After leaving [Ice Age], Bai Liu would likewise enter the [Ice Age] dungeon in the real world. In essence, it would be no different from remaining inside the game.
And in the real world, once the method of destroying corpse fragments was already known, the complete destruction of these particle-phenomenon devices would be inevitable.
The corpse fragments would absolutely face the fate of being completely destroyed. Countless people would try every possible method to make that happen.
Bai Liu understood very deeply that he could not remain the enemy of the entire world forever.
That was why, at that time, he would have chosen to stay in the game.
He used that method to prevent this game from ending, to stop the True End from arriving, and to keep the game from loading into reality.
It could be said that this game had been a trap designed specifically for Bai Liu from beginning to end.
The moment Bai Liu stepped into this game, there were only two choices before him—
—Either become a monster forever and remain in the snowfield.
—Or... destroy Tawil’s heart, destroy his only psychological emotion, his love, and his weakness. Become cold and heartless. Become cruel. Stop at nothing. Calculate everything. Then clear the game as a winner.
Let Bai Liu turn from Bai Liu into Bai Six.
That was what the person behind the scenes had been doing all along.
Liu Jiayi sincerely gave thanks that the player they had encountered in this game was Spades.
Because other players simply could not stop what Bai Liu wanted to do.
But Spades had the ability to win against Bai Liu.
As long as he won, Bai Liu would no longer need to choose.
As long as Spades destroyed that heart, Bai Liu would have no choice but to come out of the snowfield.
Liu Jiayi did not know where Spades’s obsession and intuition to destroy this heart had come from, or who had given it to him.
Although Spades’s intuition was very cruel to Bai Liu, destroying the heart of the person who mattered so much to Bai Liu.
But he had indeed saved Bai Liu.
Because he had completely destroyed Bai Liu’s only weakness, so that the person who designed the game behind the scenes could never use that weakness again.
—
Author’s Note:
This part is a little convoluted, so let me clarify it for everyone.
Essentially, it goes like this: Bai Liu is the final beta tester. After he tests a game, that game can go live. Therefore, in order to prevent the game from going live, and because he doesn’t want to trigger the game’s [True End], Bai Liu stalls inside the game and refuses to leave, basically playing rogue. The developers can’t do anything about him and can only give up on the game.
Then Spades forcibly made Bai Liu clear the game.
That’s roughly how it works!
I’m sorry. This was originally supposed to end in the previous chapter, but I realized there was still a section of the plot missing, so I added it here.
Theater:
Me: Interviewing the person involved. Spades, do you have any thoughts on this heart-gouging action?
Spades, zoning out: ......
Bai Liu, smiling: I think he planned it long ago. When he said those things °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° at the Rose Factory, he was probably giving me advance warning. I think it’s fine. I’m not very angry. It’s not the first time he’s done something like this.
Spades, subconsciously: I’m sorry.
Bai Liu, still smiling: I’m not angry.
Spades: ......
Afterward, the person involved, Spades, reported to us that he felt a burst of killing intent at that moment.
