Chapter 819 - 23: Extreme Cold (Part 2)

Chapter 819: Chapter 23: Extreme Cold (Part 2)

The achievements they strained every nerve and pursued perfection to reach, Chen Zhou could probably resolve in just a few minutes.

Chen Zhou’s abundant vigor, terrifying endurance, and strength made his work far more efficient than ordinary people, and with Paul and Bi Kai joining, the team gained even more support.

During their cooperative hunting of hibernating animals, they could kill up to a dozen giant beasts each day, gaining nearly ten thousand kilograms of supplies.

Yet even after all their preparations, as hard-working and desperate as they were, the wood and food they’d stockpiled amounted to nothing but a tiny fraction of what Chen Zhou’s team had amassed.

When the blizzard arrived, the two couldn’t even leave their shelter, forced to sit inside and watch their supplies dwindle.

Chen Zhou and his crew couldn’t see any progress; neither could they.

And compared to Chen Zhou, their despair ran deeper—

The stove could never go cold; wood was consumed at a pace bordering insanity, the pile shrinking day by day, and food growing ever scarcer.

Yet the wind and snow never paused for their hardship, not even for an instant; no respite was granted.

Now, the two could only huddle on their beds within the cave, brooding on how to get through each day.

There was still some food left, enough for the two to last a few more days.

Fuel was their greatest problem.

Staring at the flickering embers in the stove, Shanua finally decided to act.

He persuaded Saman to put on their cotton coats and venture out together in search of anything burnable.

The grassland had always been a flat terrain, ideal for spotting enemies, and the cave itself was spacious—Cave Bear had even dug out several separate rooms. Once animal carcasses and refuse had been cleared, it became an inherently habitable place.

When they chose this cave, neither Shanua nor Saman thought anything was wrong.

Only now did they realize how foolish it had been to situate their shelter so far from the forest—

In this immense blizzard, with such cold weather, harvesting wood meant trekking at least three kilometers, which would freeze them to death, alive.

Even worse, the wind was so strong that their torches wouldn’t burn outside at all—leaving them to depend solely on cotton coats and animal skins for survival.

Yet in minus sixty-five degrees, ordinary cotton and skins felt no different than running naked; stay outside more than ten seconds and it felt as if the wind pierced right through, from soles to scalp, every inch cold as death.

Shanua and Saman pushed the door open; after only a dozen meters, the biting wind made it impossible to continue.

They shared a glance, both knowing: if they kept pushing forward, they’d most likely freeze to death out there.

"Die now, or die later?"

They both, tacitly, chose the latter.

So they hurriedly dug through the snow, yanking a few tufts of buried wild grass, then returned to the cave.

They’d planned to shove the snow-laden wild grass straight into the stove, but feared the melting snow would snuff out the fire.

Shanua forced his eyes wide, fumbling through the dim cave for a while, pulled out his axe, and suggested to Saman—

"We could saw open the handle and use it for fuel."

To avoid freezing outside, Saman, still trembling and barely warmed up, nodded in agreement.

With this thought, the two were like "discovering a New Continent"—they gathered every item that could serve as fuel, whether plastic, alcohol, or the wooden handles of their tools, sawed them to pieces, and fed it all to the stove.

They fully believed other challengers had reached this point too, maybe worse off.

Just like Chen Zhou’s trio, they felt the challenge had reached its final act—every minute and second pushing forward now led toward the dawn of victory.

...

Perhaps, from some angle, Shanua and Saman—struggling at the edge of death—were still lucky.

The power of the cold far exceeded anything challengers had imagined.

Of course, maybe they’d envisioned the horror of minus sixty-five long ago, but had no means to withstand it.

On the other side of the Baihar Mountain Range, by the frozen lake, wooden shelters built by challengers stood covered in glistening snow.

The wind slipped through cracks in the cabin walls; inside this shelter, a challenger swaddled in thick animal pelts had already slipped into eternal rigidity.

Beside his corpse lay another, incomplete body—his partner.

Perhaps fighting over clothing for warmth, desperate for a few more hours of life, or simply driven mad by the cold, before freezing to death, two partners who’d collaborated for months unleashed a fierce struggle.

This man managed to win, cut his companion’s throat, then stripped the clothes and wore them himself.

But it was all futile, so he did something even more insane—

He set the cabin on fire.

But the wind was too fierce, the snow too heavy.

The flames died before they spread; inside, only a blackened stain remained. While he struggled in the cold, forcing his numb fingers to try and ignite another fire, death came before warmth ever did.

Some died inside, others outside.

In the vast primeval forest, even hardy pines and firs couldn’t withstand this deathly cold—the water within their trunks froze into crystals, tearing apart the wood fibers.

Some trees, too weakened, crashed down with a roar; many more stood motionless in the shrieking wind, silently drained of life.

Beneath the snow, two naked corpses were buried.

Before dying, their temperatures dropped so drastically their hypothalami failed, triggering sensory confusion.

They couldn’t tell if they were freezing to the core or burning up.

When cold made the blood vessels contract and nerves go numb, massive volumes of chilly blood rushed from limbs to the core, causing a fierce burning sensation—as if their bodies were set aflame.

Sensory disorder brought hallucinations; in a haze, they stripped off their clothes, also displaying "burrowing behavior."

This was a relic of animal instinct—devoid of thought, they crawled and dug, searching for tree hollows or any safe, narrow shelter.

But in the woods, there was nowhere to go. Stripped naked, the two burrowed into the snowbank, and there, they died completely.

Extreme sports climbers know: "Feeling hot is the illusion of death; wrap up tight." But faced with ten chances in ten to die, even if they knew it was an illusion, some would never resist it, instead accepting it quietly.

And in the life-desert carved by this deep cold, deaths like these—from massive trees to tiny rodents to microbes—were happening every moment.

Just as Chen Zhou’s knowledge told him—

The Space-Time Administration Bureau placed no value on life. For those lofty beings, time, space, and all the universe’s living things were nothing but toys to be twisted and crushed at will.

They made the rules, and personally created death.