Chapter 30 Death Quiz on Avalanche Day

Chapter 30: The Death Guessing Game on Avalanche Day

Li Jianchuan's expression shifted between gloom and uncertainty.

He had pieced together some clues but lacked the crucial evidence—or rather, the key thread that could tie everything together.

As he examined the corpse and reflected on every detail since the game began, Li Jianchuan was about to turn and discuss the satellite phone with Ning Zhun when he suddenly felt a chill.

This wasn’t the dry chill of the wind but a deep, icy cold, as if snow and ice had seeped into his bones, damp and piercing.

Li Jianchuan knew his body well. The drop in temperature wasn’t drastic, but it was definitely unusual.

He touched his forehead. It wasn’t feverish—just cold, no longer warm like before.

“What’s wrong?”

Ning Zhun calmly closed Zhao Guanghui’s chest cavity, wiped his hands, and glanced up just as Li Jianchuan moved.

His eyes flickered, and he stepped over the corpse to squat beside Li Jianchuan.

With his usual boneless ease, he leaned toward Li Jianchuan.

But before he could lean fully against Li Jianchuan, Ning Zhun paused, his peach blossom eyes narrowing as he murmured, “You’re giving off cold air.”

His fingers brushed Li Jianchuan’s ear, sending a cold shiver through him.

Li Jianchuan’s senses were sharp; he could feel the warmth in his body draining away rapidly.

At first, it was barely noticeable, but as time went on, his body grew colder, and the air around him felt like packed snow, suffocating him.

“It’s nothing.”

Li Jianchuan pushed aside his discomfort and discreetly passed the satellite phone to Ning Zhun. “Take a look at this.”

Ning Zhun took the satellite phone and started inspecting it.

Meanwhile, Li Jianchuan glanced around the tent and was startled to see the guy with freckles nearby stripping clothes off his own corpse and putting them on, shivering as if freezing.

“It’s getting colder.”

Sun Chang suddenly said, “Let’s find an empty tent to sleep in. It’s warmer here than outside, and it’ll make investigating easier since they can’t see us.”

His teeth chattered as he spoke, his chin burrowing into his collar.

“Are you cold?” the red-haired guy, No. 2, looked puzzled. “I don’t feel any difference. Maybe you should do what he did and put on more clothes.”

He gestured with his chin toward the guy with freckles.

Just then, Zheng Xiang returned from examining the corpse in the neighboring tent.

He shook his head as he entered. “Nothing unusual. The body died in the avalanche—it’s obvious. I brought back everything I found on it; it’s in the hiking backpack.”

Zheng Xiang patted his hiking backpack, meticulous as ever.

“What’s going on? It’s all so confusing,” Zheng Xiang said, sitting on a felt mat, his brow furrowed. “We’ve only got two clues: the camp’s weird behavior and these bodies. And neither’s gotten us far.”

The players finished their inspections and gathered by the tent entrance.

Li Jianchuan and Ning Zhun exchanged a look. Li Jianchuan turned on the satellite phone. “We’re not completely empty-handed.”

"I found this satellite phone on my own body. There was a message sent over an hour ago, identical in content to the voting quiz text we saw earlier, and the sender is still Han Shu. However, by the time I saw it, the message had already been read."

Li Jianchuan set the satellite phone down in the middle of the group for everyone to see.

Zheng Xiang was the first to lean in, pressing a few buttons and scrolling through the text. His expression darkened: "Based on our previous experience, we should have received this message right around the time of the avalanche."

Everyone's eyes darted to the lit screen of the phone.

Each player seemed to have their own theories, their faces darkened and their brows furrowed tighter.

Zheng Xiang scanned everyone's reactions and was about to step up and start giving orders when he noticed Sun Chang, sitting next to him, suddenly started breathing faster and louder, as if something was suppressing him, forcing him to gasp heavily, like a broken accordion, using both his mouth and nose.

"Sun Chang, what's wrong?"

Zheng Xiang was startled but didn't immediately reach out to Sun Chang.

"It's cold... so cold... I can't... breathe..." Sun Chang couldn't stay seated, leaning to the side with his hands on the ground, his trembling becoming more intense, his whole body like a fish out of water, breathing heavily with a strained voice.

"What's happening?"

"Sounds like asthma... but it's not even cold here..."

Both the red-haired guy, No. 2, and Zheng Xiang were puzzled, quickly stood up and moved slightly away from Sun Chang.

"You're really not cold at all?" The freckled guy, bundled up in two layers of thermal clothing, gave Zheng Xiang and No. 2 a suspicious look. He was also shivering slightly, though not as severely as Sun Chang, but his pale face looked eerie in the night, his breathing slightly fast.

"Not cold."

Zheng Xiang realized something was wrong. "What's going on? Did you touch something?"

One person acting weird might be nothing, but two people is suspicious.

At this point, after observing the four of them for a while, Li Jianchuan chimed in: "I also feel my body getting colder, and it's getting harder to breathe. Every breath feels like it's filled with ice shards."

No. 2 glanced at Li Jianchuan's removed thermal layer and his calm expression, doubting: "You're cold too?"

Li Jianchuan ignored him, his sharp, cold features slightly shifting: "I think this situation feels similar to being buried in an avalanche..."

"Is there something wrong with the corpses?" Zheng Xiang guessed.

"No... not that."

Sun Chang seemed to recover a bit, shaking his head, his lips trembling uncontrollably, speaking haltingly, "If... if it's the corpses, why... only the three of us... are experiencing this... while you four are fine... The biggest difference... between us... is that... our corpses are here..."

No. 2 was confused: "Then it's still the corpses... You touched your own corpse, maybe triggered some death condition? But all the corpses here are members of the North Team from the first lottery division..."

"North Team..."

The shivering freckled guy's eyes suddenly lit up, and he looked sharply at the message on the satellite phone: "If the North Team is really dead, then if we reply to this quiz text, choosing the South Team to survive, could we get some answers from Han Shu?"

As he spoke, he reached out to grab the satellite phone.

But Li Jianchuan was quicker, taking the phone back.

He stared directly into the freckled guy's eyes, his voice cold and heavy: "Before I saw it, the message was already read. Do you know what that means? The corpses here are all dressed neatly, just brought down the mountain, and haven't been searched. In other words, aside from my corpse, no one would have touched this satellite phone."

The freckled guy's hand froze, a chill running down his spine.

But he steadied himself, calmly retracting his hand: "During or after the avalanche, your corpse shouldn't... have been able to sit up and read the message."

"Besides, the message should have been sent to us players," Zheng Xiang added. "It's obviously meant for players. Did the other two players' bodies not have any?"

Sun Chang immediately said, "I usually keep mine... in my backpack..."

No. 2 immediately stood up to look for it.

Soon, two more satellite phones were brought over, belonging to the freckled youth and Sun Chang respectively.

They also displayed the same message, marked as read.

"They're dead, their bodies lying right there, so who read the message?"

Confusion set in, accompanied by a creeping sense of dread.

"Maybe it was us who read this message," Li Jianchuan remarked coolly, without further explanation, quietly observing the reactions of the players opposite.

They all seemed to have thought of something.

But no one spoke.

Silence enveloped the tent for several minutes.

Ning Zhun suddenly spoke up, "Bro, let's get out of here and crash in an empty tent for an hour." He feigned exhaustion, leaning unsteadily towards Li Jianchuan.

Li Jianchuan caught him, gripping Ning Zhun's arm through his sleeve, glanced at Ning Zhun's face, and without caring about the other players' expressions and gazes, unzipped the tent and stepped out, displaying a self-assured demeanor.

Xie Changsheng followed, clearly signaling their alliance.

The tent flap closed, cutting off the prying eyes filled with hidden agendas.

The three left the tent used as a morgue and returned to Li Jianchuan's tent.

"We didn't gather many clues, so why rush to part ways with them?"

Li Jianchuan hurriedly fetched spare clothes for Ning Zhun as soon as they entered the tent, then grabbed a couple for himself.

Despite the cold and breathing difficulties, his high-intensity training had honed his tolerance, minimizing his reaction.

"There's no need for that."

A glint of light danced in his peach blossom eyes, Ning Zhun slightly lifted the corner of his mouth.

Once in the thermal suit, he grabbed a coat, leaned in, and enveloped both himself and Li Jianchuan tightly.

Clutching him from behind, shivering from his icy chill.

"It's freezing."

Ning Zhun muttered.

"If you're cold, let go."

Li Jianchuan tried to shrug him off impatiently, but those slender arms only tightened their grip.

Ning Zhun's breath warmed him for the first time, brushing his neck and ear, his voice calm.

"They've probably figured something out; someone's about to act. Let's leave and give them room."

Ning Zhun said, "This round's all veterans; they'll keep their cards close until the end. Don't expect much honesty from them."

Li Jianchuan felt the weight and warmth against his back, pondered for a moment, and said, "I have a bit of a judgment."

"Mm, go ahead."

Ning Zhun, like a Weeble, hugged Li Jianchuan and swayed slightly, his tone lazy.

Most of Li Jianchuan's thoughts were still unclear, but he knew that Ning Zhun wasn't necessarily omnipotent and still needed his clues, better than nothing.

He gathered his thoughts and said, "First, none of us are dead yet, and the seven just now were all players. But in six hours, that might change."

Ning Zhun's swaying paused for a moment.

Hearing Ning Zhun's gentle breathing behind his ear, Li Jianchuan continued, "There's a distinction between the surface and inner layers. The world we're in now is the surface, and the us here are the real us. It's just that our reality here is gradually being erased, or replaced."

"This idea didn't come from nowhere."

"This idea mainly comes from two aspects. The first aspect is within the second prison door. I came to the prison door twice, gave different answers, was locked in solitary confinement, unconsciously recited the problem, and then cycled back to see my past self at the door—there's a time issue here."

"I can't quite figure out the details, so for now, I'll treat it as 'the future determining the past.'"

"But in a normal timeline, the past determines the present and future. At the prison door, my future self asked the question, my past self answered, and because of the answer, was locked up, becoming my future self. This is itself a strange time loop."

"Thinking of this, I remembered the loops created by the monsters in the inner layer. That's the second aspect I want to talk about."

"In the inner layer, time was very chaotic. But even in chaos, it's certain that the several days we thought we experienced there didn't exceed two days. Because we only had one Pandora's dinner, and the real Han Shu said during the first dinner that we didn't need to attend the dinner on the second night."

"This sentence, I now think, is more than just its surface meaning."

"On the surface, he was saying that on the second night on the mountain, we didn't need to return to camp for dinner, but in reality, he might have been hinting that we wouldn't have time for a second dinner."

"Because of that six-hour voting game."

"This vote appeared in the inner layer, making us experience it three times, and then appeared again in the surface layer. If the surface layer is real, then this vote is real. So, do our votes in the inner layer count?"

Hearing this, Ning Zhun whispered, "You think we read the message ourselves, and there's a connection between the inner and surface layers."

Li Jianchuan coldly curled his lips, "I don't know if my guess is right, but I'm puzzled why the NPCs in the inner layer are so contradictory. On one hand, they act and create loops, but on the other hand, they guide us, reveal flaws, let us discover the inner layer is fake, and then seem to drive us into the passage... What was the purpose of the loops they created before?"

"Just saying it's to buy time, to play around, probably isn't comprehensive."

"Perhaps they deliberately trapped us, induced us to vote three times. Our three votes, choosing the surviving team, one vote for the North Team, two votes for the South Team. And now in the surface layer, the entire North Team is dead."

"Moreover, the three players who were initially assigned to the North Team in the first draw are starting to show signs of avalanche death."

"Based on this, I judge that the votes in the inner layer determined the life and death of the teams in the surface layer. It's the voting results that determine life and death, not life and death determining the voting. That is, before the voting results determine the winner, neither the North nor South Team was dead, but after one team gained a voting advantage, the other team was sentenced to death. So our votes will never be correct, because it's not the life and death of the teams that determine our choices, but our choices that determine the life and death of the teams—this is what I think is the timeline issue, a misplacement of cause and effect. This might also be part of the secret of these two snowy mountains."

"And I've tried, the message can't be replied to in the surface layer anymore. I guess, when the six hours for voting are up, the three of us in the North Team will die. As for the North Team corpses now, they remind me of those things dug out after the avalanche that were exactly like us."

"But there are still some lines that don't quite make sense. But this is all I can think of for now."

Li Jianchuan finished in one breath, bumped the back of his head against Ning Zhun's forehead, and glanced back with cold brows and sharp eyes, "Dr. Ning, how much did I guess right?"

"Nothing wrong, just missing some."

Ning Zhun chuckled softly, his hands on Li Jianchuan's body spread out, clapping lightly, seeming happier than if he had solved the mystery and obtained Pandora's Box himself, as if celebrating the rise in Li Jianchuan's IQ.

His lips, disregarding the cold, rubbed against the back of Li Jianchuan's neck, Ning Zhun's eyelashes trembling from the cold. He was about to say something but suddenly paused, turned to look at Xie Changsheng, and a look of realization appeared on his face, "Changsheng is still here."

The invisible Xie Changsheng said calmly, "Not here."

After a pause, he thoughtfully added, "I'm usually not here when you're doing things that need to be censored."