After Mu Ke finished reading through all the faxes and experimental reports, his expression grew increasingly grave. He turned to Liu Jiayi.

“Is the satellite phone still not getting through to them?”

“We lost contact a long time ago.” Liu Jiayi’s face did not look good either, but she remained very calm. “With Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda following him, Bai Liu won’t run into trouble that easily, even if they encounter some kind of monster. Keep reading. I’m going outside to deal with the monster in the basement.”

According to the experimental reports, guns could not kill that kind of monster, which meant the one in the basement was still alive.

Bai Liu had left a barrel of fuel beside the basement, and Liu Jiayi herself had corrosive poison. She did not know whether attacking it from both sides would work.

Mu Ke said, “Once we finish handling this, we’ll head to Taishan Station. They need to know about this.”

The door opened.

Three people covered in frost rushed inside.

Mu Sicheng exhaled a cloud of white breath as he stamped his feet. Tang Erda took off his gun and set it by the door. Bai Liu walked at the front, his eyelashes dusted with snow, and glanced sideways at them.

“We’re back.”

Mu Ke did not hesitate for even a second before raising his gun.

Liu Jiayi lifted her poison as well, warily watching the teammates who had suddenly returned. The two of them took two steps back, putting some distance between themselves and the three people before questioning them in low voices.

“What are you doing back here?”

Bai Liu shifted slightly, revealing the group of ragged Taishan Station members behind him, who looked as if they had just been dug out of an ice crevice.

These members were barely clothed and trembling from the cold. After walking through the snow for so long, they should clearly have frozen to death, but now they merely looked pale, their vital signs relatively stable.

However, their expressions were bleak and numb, as if they had endured some unbearable torture, and their souls had already left their bodies.

“We found this group of Taishan Station members buried in an ice crevice,” Bai Liu said. “At first, we wanted to take them directly to confront the people at Taishan Station, but we realized their mental states are severely abnormal. There’s no way to communicate with them normally. Only one member is slightly more coherent. This is Fang Xiao Xiao.”

A person stepped out from behind Bai Liu and struggled to wave at them.

“Hello, I’m Fang Xiao Xiao.”

“He told me these people need psychiatric medication, so I brought them back to get medicine.” Bai Liu lifted his eyes and looked at them calmly.

Mu Ke’s dark gun muzzle was aimed straight at him. His tone was cold.

“I don’t believe you. Open your system panel and let me see it.”

“You can’t see my system panel,” Bai Liu refuted flatly. Then he expressed approval toward Mu Ke. “That verbal trap you set for me was used well.”

Inside the game pool, because League Mode was in effect, not only did players’ system panels lack the shop function, the panels were also private from one another.

In other words, even if one party opened his system panel, the other party would not be able to see it.

Mu Ke looked at Liu Jiayi suspiciously.

At Liu Jiayi’s silent signal, he lowered his gun, but his fingers remained on the grip, ready to raise it again at any moment.

They stepped aside. Liu Jiayi hid the poison behind her back and said softly, “Then come in.”

——————

On the other side.

Bai Liu led the ragged group of members dug out from the ice crevice toward Taishan Station.

When they were less than five hundred meters away, they discovered another helicopter parked right beside theirs on the helipad outside Taishan Station. Its markings were identical to those on their own helicopter.

“It’s the other helicopter from Edmund Station.” Tang Erda recognized it at a glance. He frowned. “Why is it here? Did Mu Ke and the others come over?”

Bai Liu glanced at the helicopter, narrowed his eyes as if he had thought of something, then turned to Fang Xiao Xiao behind him.

“You people stay outside and find somewhere to hide. We have some internal team business to handle first.”

After the members obediently left, Bai Liu gave Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda a look.

Both of them understood and raised their guns.

Mu Sicheng’s hand trembled slightly as he held his gun. He swallowed nervously.

“Holy shit. Could it be the monster versions of them came here? Then where are they?! Could they have been swapped out at the base by those monsters?”

Tang Erda followed behind Bai Liu, his grip on his gun cold and solemn.

Bai Liu, however, held no gun at all. He walked toward the entrance of Taishan Station as casually as if he were taking a stroll.

The sentries at the door took another oral mucosa sample from them, then let them in.

Although the sentries asked where they had been last night, Bai Liu brushed them off with a simple excuse.

Even though they knew Bai Liu was being evasive, the sentries did not continue pressing him. After all, there were more urgent, more unsettling matters currently being handled that involved Bai Liu.

After they turned past a ventilation duct near the entrance, Fang Xiao Xiao’s high-pitched, excited voice could be heard from a distance inside Taishan Station.

The sound was coming from the cabin where Bai Liu and the others had briefly stayed last night.

“Heavens! How did you find these materials from Professor Edmund?!”

“With these firsthand materials about the climate anomalies and those creatures, we can research a solution to our current predicament!”

Bai Liu pushed open the cabin door.

Fang Xiao Xiao was sitting cross-legged on the lower bunk, holding a paper document with tears in his eyes as he sobbed and read softly.

The header of the document read: [Fax Records].

Bai Liu recognized it.

Liu Jiayi stood by the door, looking very well-behaved and polite.

Mu Ke was sitting on the upper bunk. The moment he saw Bai Liu enter, his eyes lit up for an instant before quickly cooling again. He jumped straight down from the upper bunk and, without the slightest change in expression, gripped the gun behind Liu Jiayi.

The two of them looked as though they had suffered quite badly from the cold. There were traces of frostbite on their noses and lips, though the wounds had already healed—most likely because Liu Jiayi had used a Life-Saving Remedy.

After seeing Bai Liu and the others enter, Fang Xiao Xiao’s expression changed slightly. Reluctantly, he put down the faxes and left.

“The people you were looking for are back. You talk first. We’ll discuss the materials later.”

Once Fang Xiao Xiao left, Tang Erda, Mu Sicheng, and the Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi standing across from them stared at one another for a few seconds.

Then, without the slightest hesitation, they all drew their guns and aimed at one another’s vital points.

Bai Liu sat motionless as a mountain in the narrow empty space surrounded by four guns and two teams.

Both confronting sides tacitly bypassed him, leaving him free to comment on the current situation.

“It seems both sides suspect the other side of being monsters rather than real people.”

“Let’s see who can convince whom first.” Bai Liu turned his head to look at Liu Jiayi. “Why did you bring Mu Ke here?”

Liu Jiayi pursed her lips.

“Because Edmund Station was overrun by monsters.”

“We found fax records inside Edmund Station and judged them to be important game clues, but the satellite phone couldn’t reach you. Players’ system panels are blocked from one another inside the game pool, so we planned to burn the monster in the basement first, then find a way to bring the fax records here to Taishan Station and deliver them to you.”

Tang Erda frowned and pointed out the flaw in Liu Jiayi’s account.

“But neither you nor Mu Ke can fly a helicopter. I’m the only one on the team who can. How did you fly the helicopter here?”

Liu Jiayi raised her eyes to look at Tang Erda.

“We can’t. But we only needed to know that you could.”

Bai Liu curled his lips into a meaningful smile.

“A good plan. You coerced his duplicate?”

“Yes.” Mu Ke took a deep breath and added, “But just as Jiayi was preparing to go out and use fuel and poison to burn the monster in the basement, the door opened, and ‘you’ came back with a team of Taishan Station members, saying you needed medicine. We suspected those were your duplicates, so we played along.”

“But the problem was that both Mu Ke and I lack combat power, while those three things imitating you had half the strength of the real you. They could even imitate your skills.”

Liu Jiayi’s expression darkened as she held her gun and continued, “After we used fuel and poison to kill [Mu Sicheng], we tried everything we could, but we still couldn’t kill [Bai Liu]. That thing was far too cunning. In the end, we had no choice but to settle for the next best option. While [Tang Erda] was off guard, we used poison to coerce him into flying the helicopter so we could escape, leaving the base to them.”

Mu Sicheng felt all the hair on his body stand on end.

“Then... what about that Tang Erda?”

Liu Jiayi shrugged.

“After we arrived at Taishan Station, I shot him in the head inside the cockpit. To prevent him from coming back to life, I burned him with fuel and drenched him in poison as well. That should be these monsters’ weakness. My Monster Book lit up.”

Tang Erda lowered his gaze.

He noticed bloodstains on the cuff of Liu Jiayi’s windbreaker. They had been wiped, but not completely clean.

At this very moment, back at Edmund Observation Station—

Upon entering the station, Tang Erda and Mu Sicheng swiftly drew their guns and aimed them at Liu Jiayi and Mu Ke.

Liu Jiayi and Mu Ke also quickly armed themselves with poison and rifles.

Bai Liu walked unhurriedly into the center of the four people aiming guns at one another.

“Wow. It seems the scene from Taishan Station is repeating itself. You suspect we’re monsters too?”

His pitch-black eyes stared straight at Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi.

“I also suspect you. That little trick of using hidden game settings to gain my trust was very well played.”

“Unfortunately, you already used it once at Taishan Station, Mu Ke.”

Mu Ke knitted his brows and asked in return, “What are you talking about?”

Mu Sicheng spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva. There was residual bleeding in his gums from being punched.

He turned his head gloomily toward Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi, baring a grin stained with blood.

“I really fucking hate this dungeon.”

“We already met a [Liu Jiayi] and a [Mu Ke] at Taishan Station. They said they had come to deliver materials and had already experienced a fight with monsters at Edmund Observation Station. They even said they had coerced a monster Tang Erda and successfully escaped.”

Bai Liu smiled faintly.

“But regrettably, we discovered that they were merely simulated creations meant to deceive us. So after killing them, we used Taishan Station’s helicopter to fly back with the remaining Taishan Station members to see what exactly had happened here, and—”

He lifted his eyes.

His tone was impossibly light.

There was not a single trace of light in his eyes. They were deep and dark like the polar night, without even the faintest hint of a bright horizon. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

“—where exactly my real teammates have been hidden.”

“Being unable to find the real teammates you hid away makes me slightly unhappy.”

Bai Liu lowered his eyes and raised his hand, moving his fingers slightly.

He gave the order without any fluctuation in his voice.

“Kill them.”

Mu Sicheng and Tang Erda expressionlessly raised their guns.

They pulled the triggers, and in the chambers, a faint red glow appeared—the glow of bullets about to burst into flame.

—

Author’s Note:

A new non-prize guessing question has appeared!

Exactly which station’s Bai Liu, Mu Sicheng, Tang Erda, Mu Ke, and Liu Jiayi are real?

A. Everyone at Edmund Station is real.

B. Everyone at Taishan Station is real.

C. The Bai Liu, Tang Erda, and Mu Sicheng at Edmund Station are real, while Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi are fake.

D. The Bai Liu, Tang Erda, and Mu Sicheng at Edmund Station are fake, while Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi are real.

There is a real Wandering Circus in here, and there is a real answer!

There is no “everyone is fake” answer!