Chapter 1132: Heat Extreme Challenge Information

After talking with Liu Yu, Chen Wen focused on enjoying the hot spring.

Led by the staff, he and Fred’s group arrived at a very famous hot spring club on the shores of Lake Baikal.

This hot spring club really was quite good.

Seeing how travel‑worn they looked, the receptionist quickly realized they probably needed a thorough cleaning.

So he arranged a very large hot spring for them and directly offered a deep-clean plus massage package.

Chen Wen and the others accepted gladly.

After they enjoyed the hot spring, Fred called in a barber to tidy up their messy hair and beards.

Then they all slept for a while on a warm, soft big bed.

When they woke up again, everyone felt as if they had been reborn.

Next, Fred started inviting everyone to taste Russian specialty dishes.

Chen Wen also called Hua Yun over to join them for free food and drinks.

Just like that, eating and drinking, plus going to the hospital for checkups, a week later, Chen Wen was the first to be discharged.

At the same time, he also received the information sent by the Association.

Chen Wen looked through the materials and quickly made his choice—Heat Extreme Challenge.

The Heat Extreme Challenge is also called Death Sandstorm, and the “death” in that name has two meanings.

The first is that in the desert there are too many things that can kill you.

The other is that the Heat Extreme Challenge has the highest death toll among all the Eight Extremes Challenges.

It has even killed more people than the Sea Extreme Challenge!

Of course, that’s also because fewer people enter the Sea Extreme Challenge—only experts attempt it—while the Heat Extreme Challenge is the kind most people will try.

Precisely because of this, the death toll in the Heat Extreme Challenge is ridiculously high!

So far, from the very first Heat Extreme Challenge up to now, more than a hundred Survivors have died in this event; the number has reached one hundred and seven.

And the deaths are evenly distributed—basically every edition has people dying.

More importantly, the ways they die are very distinctive, and in many cases the causes of death don’t repeat.

Chen Wen went over the Association’s records: some were killed because the sun was too strong, their skin burned, festered, got infected and they died; some died of thirst after long periods without water; some were killed by venomous snakes; some were stung to death by scorpions; some suffered heatstroke, hallucinated, then fell off a cliff; some were buried alive by sandstorms; and some lost their way and disappeared.

At the same time, aside from deaths caused by natural factors, there were unnatural causes as well, meaning contestants killed in fights with other contestants.

For example, one case Chen Wen had just read: a contestant from the Russian Association and a contestant from India got into a conflict, and the Russian contestant directly stabbed through the Indian contestant’s heart.

The man died on the spot.

But because the Russian contestant was technically in a defensive position at the time and his counterattack was in a panic, he ended up only having to pay humanitarian compensation.

However, the Association’s note on that case was rather suggestive.

[Suspected insider operation]

All signs pointed to the Heat Extreme Challenge being anything but simple!

High mortality, and a huge variety of causes of death.

For contestants, this Heat Extreme Challenge really is an extremely dangerous event.

But Chen Wen wasn’t too worried.

He was very confident in his own strength, and he already had his own plan for the Heat Extreme Challenge.

After he finished the data, the next part was specific information like locations.

Chen Wen saw that the survival area was in the eastern part of the Sahara Desert, which is also the most desolate and scorching region of the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara Desert is not one single continuous great desert.

It stretches from the Atlantic Ocean coast in the west; in the north it’s bounded by the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean; to the east it reaches the Red Sea; and to the south it extends to the Sahel, the semi-desert, semi-grassland transition zone at the border of Sudan and the Niger River valley.

Therefore, most of the time people divide the Sahara Desert into several parts.

Western Sahara.

The central plateau and mountain region, including the Ahaggar Plateau in Algeria, the Aïr Plateau in Niger, and the Tibesti Plateau in Chad.

The eastern Ténéré Desert and Libyan Desert, which is also the most desolate and hottest area of the entire Sahara Desert.

The Heat Extreme Challenge takes place in the Ténéré Desert and Libyan Desert.

And the rules of the Heat Extreme Challenge are quite interesting. Unlike previous single-draw formats, this one requires two draws.

In the first draw, contestants must draw for an oasis.

If you directly drop contestants into a stretch of desert with no oasis at all, that’s basically no different from murder.

So in the first draw, contestants decide around which oasis they’ll begin their survival.

From what Chen Wen saw, there are not many oases in the Heat Extreme Challenge, and none of them are large.

That means each oasis can support only a very limited number of contestants!

If all contestants drew the same oasis, then early encounters and eliminations would become unimaginably brutal!

Of course, the probability of that happening is very low.

Most of the time, contestants will be more or less evenly spread across three to four oases.

After the oasis is set, contestants then draw for their starting positions.

These starting positions are similar, all basically around the oasis, and the distance between any two adjacent positions is not very large.

They form a rough ring around the oasis.

So from the very first moments of the challenge, contestants will run into their opponents.

At that point, clashes and fighting over food and supplies are completely normal.

Chen Wen also specifically checked the cooperation penalty rules, which count as a unique mechanism of the Heat Extreme Challenge.

If two contestants cooperate for more than one day, they must discard twenty percent of the food they are carrying, with a minimum of 500 grams; for each additional day of cooperation, they must discard another 200 grams.

This rule is meant to prevent contestants from immediately forming alliances in the early stages, turning one-on-one conflicts into many-on-one or even many-on-many battles.

Overall, it favors lone-wolf contestants.

But if two fairly strong people team up and wipe out all contestants around an oasis, then the price they pay is still acceptable.

Chen Wen saw that Hua Country had a precedent for this, and that person was Liu Yu.

Liu Yu joined forces with President Bernard of the American Survival Association and the president of the Australian Survival Association; the three of them cleaned out all contestants at one oasis and then divided it into zones, splitting the oasis three ways.

In the end, the three of them paid some food as the price, but they occupied the entire oasis.

You could say it was very much worth it.

But this heavily depends on luck—if you land in an area with no contestants you know, and everyone else is familiar with each other but not with you, then you’re in serious trouble.

The example is still Liu Yu.

In his first Heat Extreme Challenge, he happened to be grouped with several competitors who all, without prior discussion, targeted him; Liu Yu was quickly eliminated.

But in the second Heat Extreme Challenge he regained his pride; of the three people he and Bernard took out together, two were the same ones who had eliminated him before.

Looking at these past cases, Chen Wen couldn’t help but be impressed by how ruthless the older generation of Survivors were.

Back then, when they took out opponents, those opponents were almost always seriously injured.

Completely different from now.

In this Forest Extreme Challenge, when Hua Yun eliminated the contestant who attacked her, she shot him in the thigh.

Whereas Liu Yu and the others used spears to stab directly into thighs!

After all, in that kind of environment, if you show mercy, there’s a good chance your opponent will take you down with a final counterattack.

Once they see no hope of continuing in the challenge, the odds are high they’ll think, “If I’m out, you’re not walking away either!”