Taishan Station.

Within the small space enclosed by four guns, Bai Liu’s demeanor could only be described as leisurely.

He looked toward Liu Jiayi.

“Next, you took the duplicate Tang Erda hostage and chose to come to Taishan Station to meet up with us. But because you weren’t sure whether we were monsters, you decided to strike first?”

Bai Liu leaned back against the chair, lifted his eyelids, spread his hands, and gave a soft laugh.

“Now that you’ve controlled us, what comes next? How do you plan to distinguish whether we’re monsters or your real teammates?”

Liu Jiayi’s lips pressed into a thin line.

She turned the gun in her hands and tightened her grip. The pair of gloves that were much too large for her were the ones Bai Liu had taken off and given her.

But those gloves no longer held any residual body heat. They were so cold that her fingertips had gone numb.

“I have a way to distinguish you from the monsters.” Liu Jiayi’s breath came out as a puff of white mist.

The little girl’s gray eyes shot through her fogged goggles toward Bai Liu’s face with piercing sharpness.

But the moment that sharpness met Bai Liu’s calm gaze, it involuntarily softened.

It seemed she could not bring herself to voice that cruel method, even though she had already used it successfully twice.

So Bai Liu considerately said it for her.

“Monsters have weaknesses. You can use those weaknesses to distinguish us from them. Earlier, at Edmund Station, you used fuel and poison to burn [Mu Sicheng] to death. After confirming that this was indeed their weakness, you quickly used the same formula to take [Tang Erda] hostage.”

“[Tang Erda] was a monster afraid of those things, so it was indeed held hostage just as you intended.”

Bai Liu raised his eyes and looked directly at Liu Jiayi.

“But as for [Bai Liu], I’m guessing it wasn’t because he was cunning that you let him escape, was it?”

As Bai Liu spoke, he used his gloved hand to grasp the barrel of Liu Jiayi’s gun and pressed it against his heart. Then he stood up unhurriedly.

He looked down from his height, forcing her back step by step, yet his gaze as he looked at her was almost pitying.

“Jiayi, you couldn’t bring yourself to attack [Bai Liu].”

Liu Jiayi had no way to use such a cruel method to test whether Bai Liu was real or not. So she had let that [Bai Liu] go—even though she knew there was a ninety-nine percent chance that [Bai Liu] was a monster.

But what if he wasn’t?

She did not want to kill him.

Especially not with that kind of method.

There was even less need to mention Mu Ke. When it came to any monster wearing Bai Liu’s face, if that guy could bring himself to use a knife and cut even a little of the other party’s skin, he would be the first one to cry.

Liu Jiayi’s lips had turned blue.

She looked up and met Bai Liu’s gaze for more than ten seconds. Then she took a deep breath, decisively put away her gun, and took out her poison.

“Yes. The last ‘you’ said the same thing to me.” Liu Jiayi said coldly, “So get lost. I need to identify the other two.”

“No need to test them. We’re all real.” Bai Liu smiled. “I’m certain that I’m the real Bai Liu, so you’re also the real Liu Jiayi.”

Liu Jiayi looked up in astonishment.

“How did you recognize us?!”

Bai Liu patted her on the head.

“This is a controlled experiment. We’ve already gone through the observation station version.”

Liu Jiayi frowned.

“What experiment?”

Bai Liu recounted the experiment the monsters had performed on Fang Xiao Xiao and the others. Then he smiled with great interest.

“Don’t you think it’s very similar to our current situation? Both involve a team of people familiar with one another. One side separates from the other and leaves, then returns halfway, while the other side stays behind to wait for rescue. After that comes an experiment in which both sides must identify whether the other party is human.”

Once Bai Liu said this, Mu Sicheng rubbed his chin, lowered his gun, and sank into thought.

“...It does seem that way.”

Then he froze at once, as if he had suddenly reacted, and retorted loudly, “Wait, that’s not right! According to that experiment, some people on our side should be real and some should be fake!”

“No, no, no.” Bai Liu pressed down Mu Sicheng’s gun, which he had once again raised in alertness and aimed at Liu Jiayi’s forehead, then explained with a smile, “This time, it’s an experiment where one side is entirely real and the other side is entirely fake.”

Mu Sicheng was bewildered.

“Why?!”

Liu Jiayi could not help rolling her eyes.

She was the first to put away her poison and muttered under her breath, “Idiot. And you’re still a university student?”

Mu Ke also lowered his gun, leaned his head against the upper bunk, and let out a long, exhausted sigh. His hands slid down weakly as he turned to explain to Mu Sicheng.

“If, as Bai Liu said, this is a social experiment with extremely low repeatability, then logically speaking, an experiment that has already been done won’t be performed a second time. They already obtained the experimental results from Fang Xiao Xiao’s group, so his situation won’t repeat itself with us. We’re meant to serve a different experimental function.”

Bai Liu raised one finger, and the smile on his face deepened.

“Simply put, we are the control group for Fang Xiao Xiao’s set of experiments. Following that logic, we can further conclude that because we are real, Mu Ke and the others who came to find us must also be real.”

Mu Sicheng listened until his vision nearly went dark and his eyes spun.

“...What is all this? How can you just directly draw that conclusion...”

Liu Jiayi glanced sideways at Mu Sicheng, giving him a hopeless look.

She turned around, yawned, lifted the covers of the lower bunk, took off her bloodstained outer coat, and curled up into a ball on the bed.

“I’m going to sleep.”

After speaking, Liu Jiayi closed her eyes. Her hands were curled together, tightly clutching Bai Liu’s gloves. Like a cub that had finally found the right nest, her breathing soon evened out, and she fell asleep.

Mu Ke partially blocked the front of the bed and lowered his voice.

“Jiayi relied on poison to deal with the monsters all the way here. Although there are physical recovery agents, she’s still a child. She’s mentally exhausted.”

Tang Erda glanced at the blood splattered all over Mu Ke, as well as the exhaustion and weathering that were difficult to hide on his face.

He knew that this person had first read through the memory data, then later forcibly led Liu Jiayi out through a swarm of monsters. That must have consumed a great deal of mental strength as well.

“You should rest for a while too,” Tang Erda said in comfort.

Mu Ke nodded. With restraint, he turned to take off his outer clothes, climbed onto the upper bunk, and even straightened the corners of the quilt.

But less than a minute after lying down, he was already fast asleep, one hand dangling from the edge of the bed.

Tang Erda sighed, stepped forward, and tucked Mu Ke’s hand back under the covers.

“It seems they really went through a fierce battle to come deliver this information to us. It must have been hard on them.”

Mu Sicheng scratched his head curiously and paced around Bai Liu, pointing at the two people on the bed as he questioned him in a low voice.

“How exactly did you determine those two weren’t monsters?!”

They had not been burned, nor had they been doused with strong acid.

The only weaknesses that could distinguish players from monsters had not been used at all. Bai Liu had simply taken one look and been certain.

What on earth was Bai Liu thinking?

Bai Liu smiled.

“You’re really that curious?”

Mu Sicheng nodded frantically.

Bai Liu took out a piece of paper and a pen, placed them on the small desk in the center of the cabin, leaned over, and began explaining to Mu Sicheng.

“You still remember the experiment Fang Xiao Xiao told you about, right?”

“I remember.” Just thinking about that experiment made Mu Sicheng want to rub the goosebumps on his arms. “It was the one where several people from their team escaped into the ice crevices outside Taishan Station. Then those people turned back to save them, but they ended up meeting fakes, and one side failed to recognize them.”

Bai Liu lowered his eyes.

“What do you think the purpose of that experiment was?”

Mu Sicheng froze, then racked his brains and tentatively gave an answer.

“It should’ve been... to explore how humans within the same group distinguish between monsters and humans in an extreme environment?”

He remembered Fang Xiao Xiao had told him that.

“In other words, this was an experiment exploring the degree to which humans within a group can discriminate between their own kind and another species.”

Bai Liu wrote the four subscripted letters [A1], [A2], [B1], and [B2] on the paper, then continued writing.

“Assume that we are the monsters. A is the human group. A1 and A2 are two teams within that group that we forcibly separated. B is the monster group, while [B1] and [B2] are the mirror-image masquerading organisms simulated by the monsters to infiltrate the separated groups [A1] and [A2].”

Bai Liu arranged the four letters into a two-by-two table.

“Then, according to the purpose of our experiment, there are four exploratory experiments to be conducted: A1 meeting B2, and A2 meeting B1. These two are the experiments Fang Xiao Xiao and his team underwent.”

“Since human group A1, which underwent the experiment, now has memories of this discrimination experiment, and human group A2 was unable to endure the experimental results and committed suicide, we can’t perform the experiment on them again.”

“Therefore, we need a brand-new human group that has not come into contact with other groups to complete the remaining two experiments.”

Bai Liu slowly raised his head and looked straight at Mu Sicheng.

“That is: A1 meeting A2, and B1 meeting B2. These two control experiments are the experiments we are undergoing.”

“That’s why I said that if we are real, then Mu Ke must be real as well.”

“Of course, judging from the current situation, we can’t rule out the possibility that we are all fake. I now suspect that these monsters’ experiments involve the level of memory.”

Although he was speaking of such a terrifying conjecture, Bai Liu’s tone remained exceptionally flat.

“However, in a situation where both sides are fake, to me, there is no difference from being real.”

Mu Sicheng took two steps back.

He looked at the four experiments Bai Liu had listed on the white paper, horror raising every hair on his body. He could not help feeling a chill seeping out from his very bones.

This cold was even colder than walking through snow at negative fifty-five degrees.

It was a pure, cruel cold born from the feeling that his emotional perception and his identity as a human being had both been lost.

As though there was no difference between him and any other organism in the world. As though he was merely a pile of bones, connective tissue, and fat wrapped in skin and arranged in a fixed order—an organic body left to be toyed with wantonly by higher existences.

Just like what humans did to other organisms.

Life was stripped of its value and purely objectified into meaningless symbols written on paper.

A1, A2, B1, B2.

Mu Sicheng’s lips trembled. Uneasy, he looked at Bai Liu helplessly.

“If... if we’re the fakes, then what should we do?”

Bai Liu looked at him with a flat, unruffled gaze.

“Naturally, we kill the real ones and replace them.”

—

Author’s Note:

Now that two incorrect answers, C and D, have been eliminated, everyone, please continue choosing between A and B.