20: Chapter 20 The Long March in the Snowstorm

Her lungs were burning.

This was not a metaphor.

Every breath of cold air carried ice crystals invisible to the naked eye, scraping past her trachea like rough sandpaper polishing delicate mucous membranes.

The air she exhaled was scalding hot; the air she inhaled was bone-chilling.

With the constant shift between hot and cold, her chest felt stuffed with a thorny ball of wire.

The column did not stop.

A hundred-mile mountain road might be just a short line segment on a map, but on the snowy night of the Gaema Plateau, it was despair measured out by footsteps.

Jack’s legs had long since gone numb. The commands sent from his brain reached his peripheral nerves sluggishly and vaguely.

He could only mechanically repeat the action of lifting a leg, setting it down, and lifting it again.

The inner thighs were chafed raw by his soaked, coarse cloth trousers. Sweat seeped into the wounds, causing piercing pain with every step.

But he dared not stop.

Because along the roadbed ahead, there were already several white snow lumps. Those were not stones; they were his 'comrades' who had been walking beside him half an hour ago.

"This damn... game..."

Brother Bao behind him let out a wheezing gasp, his voice so light it was almost scattered by the wind, "Does it really not give... us a way to live?"

No one answered. Even the energy for complaining had to be saved to fight against gravity.

To his front left, the small, slender figure wavered slightly.

The first-aid kit Dai Dai carried on her back was wider than she was. It was an old-fashioned wooden box, its corners reinforced with iron strips, containing gauze, iodine, and the extremely precious sulfanilamide powder.

Including her own burden, it was equivalent to making her run a marathon while carrying half her own weight in this minus-thirty-degree freezer.

Her foot slipped, and she tilted over to the left.

That direction was a cliff.

Jack reacted quickly, grabbing the strap of the kit on her back and yanking hard backward.

The two tumbled together, falling into the accumulated snow by the roadside.

"Give me the box," Jack scrambled up from the snow, spitting out ice shards from his mouth, and reached for the wooden box.

"Your stamina bar is in the red. This thing is too heavy. I’m a man; I’ll carry it."

According to usual game logic, or the common sense of this world, a female player would definitely accept the offer at a time like this.

After all, this was a march carrying thirty pounds; every pound less felt like shedding a thousand pounds.

But Dai Dai didn't move.

She lay on the snow, her hands, which were originally fair, now covered entirely in chilblains. The backs of her hands were swollen like risen steamed buns, and several cracks had split open at the knuckles, oozing beads of blood.

Just as Jack’s hand touched the box strap,

"Don't touch it!"

A sharp cry, laced with an unfamiliar fierceness.

Dai Dai abruptly turned sideways, pressing the first-aid kit beneath her like a small beast guarding its food.

Her bangs were frozen into icicles by sweat, sticking to her forehead. Her large eyes, which always held timidity and a desire to please, were now bloodshot.

"Who are you looking down on?" she panted, her voice hoarse.

"This... this is something that saves lives."

Jack’s hand froze mid-air.

He looked at Dai Dai. Was this still the streamer who spent two hours putting on makeup before entering the game and would scream at a fake snake?

Dai Dai clutched the box tightly. Her mind held no game guides, no streaming content.

Her mind was full of the blood-stained malt candy Second Girl held before she died, and Old Man Li whose wound festered because there was no medicine.

"I am the Medic," Dai Dai gritted her teeth, leaning on the ground and shakily standing up.

She didn't look at Jack, merely lowered her head and readjusted the straps digging into the flesh of her shoulders.

On the snow, where she had just stood, two faint red footprints remained.

It was blood seeping from her ground-down heels.

"As long as I don't die, this box stays with me," she dropped the line, turned, and followed the column ahead.

Jack watched her stubborn silhouette, feeling as if a stone was lodged in his throat.

He said no more, silently taking two quick steps forward to walk on Dai Dai’s left side—the direction the wind was coming from.

The wind grew stronger.

A system prompt sounded in his ear: [Warning: Ambient temperature has dropped to minus 35 degrees. Stamina consumption doubled.]

A commotion suddenly erupted ahead of the column.

Jack squinted. Several players were gathered by the roadside, trying to pull up a person who had collapsed.

It was 'Man Like The Wind,' the third-ranked player, who usually maintained a tough-guy image on his stream.

"Get up! Don't sit! If you sit, it's over!"

"Old Wind! Don't sleep! This is a damn game, stand up!"

Several players roared, reaching out to yank his arm.

'Man Like The Wind' sat in a snow hollow, leaning against a black rock.

His face showed no expression of pain; instead, it held a strange, serene smile.

He waved his hand, the movement slow as a slide projector.

"I'll... rest for a bit..." His voice was light, like a sleep-talker's.

"Just one minute... I feel warm... It seems... it seems like I'm home..."

This was a classic symptom of severe hypothermia.

The brain, starved of oxygen and subjected to extreme cold, began to hallucinate, causing the body to feel a non-existent warmth.

Jack rushed over, intending to slap him awake.

But before his hand could touch the other person's face, the figure sitting on the ground suddenly began to fade.

There was no sound effect for an empty health bar, no red letters spelling 'GAME OVER.'

His body, starting from his feet, dissolved into countless white specks of light, merging into the swirling snow and wind.

The face that had worn a smile froze in its last moment into a stiff, purplish-blue shell, and then completely dissipated.

By the roadside, only the human-shaped snow indentation remained.

In the live stream rooms, hundreds of millions of viewers fell into a dead silence at that instant.

This was not the collapse after being hit by a bullet in ordinary games, nor the black screen after being instantly killed by a BOSS.

He had been 'eaten' by this world.

Devoured by the wind, the snow, and those invisible, cold hands, he was stripped of the qualification to exist.

"Old Wind..." A player nearby stared blankly at the empty snow hollow, reaching out to grab, but only catching a handful of icy snow.

"Move!"

The squad leader NPC did not stop walking. He didn't even look back at the spot where the player had vanished.

"Don't let your body get cold!" the squad leader's voice was torn apart by the wind, "If you want to live, keep moving! As long as you still have breath, you must take the next step!"

Cruel?

No.

This was Chosin Lake.

Here, nature was the primary killer. The American planes and artillery came second.

Jack gritted his teeth, forcing the heat welling up in his eyes back down. Tears would freeze, gluing his eyelids shut.

He stepped over the snow hollow without looking back again.

This silent column moved like a black blood vessel, struggling to pulse across the pale earth. Some fell, some vanished, but the vessel did not break.

They had to pump their hot blood into the heart named 'Hŭichŏn' before dawn.