Liu Li's pale and slender body was immersed in a zero-degree ice water mixture. He was now in a very contradictory state—the constantly rising body temperature due to "overload mode" forced him to suppress it with ice water, but as the cold penetrated his bones, his fingertips and toes were gradually losing sensation. His biological instincts drove his muscles to constantly tremble to generate more heat.

The so-called "ice and fire dual heaven" might just be this feeling.

The ice floating on the water surface occasionally hit the inner wall of the bathtub with a slight crisp sound due to Liu Li's trembling.

A large crowd surrounding the bathtub held their breaths, not daring to utter a sound for fear of disturbing Liu Li, who was in the midst of precise calculations.

As for touching Liu Li's body, that was an absolute taboo.

Even in his "semi-comatose" state, Liu Li knew that he was running out of time. He was almost madly squeezing his brainpower and the computing power of the main computer—this method of calculation had no shortcuts, it could only use the dumbest yet most reliable method, simulating all possible moving paths of the building blocks in the entire Baikal Remains, and then continuously deducing the possible changes that could occur in the next few tens of minutes.

The construction area of Lake Baikal City covered more than 2,700 square kilometers, and the area of the Baikal Remains was even larger than the original Lake Baikal City. The number of movable blocks numbered in the hundreds of thousands— and this didn't even include those ghastly buildings that could sink underground or rise from the ground at any time.

Anyone with a slight understanding of the situation of the Baikal Remains would think that calculating an accurate path was absolutely impossible—all paths in the ghastly city were random, there were no fixed routes at all, and even if at one moment the computed route coincided with the real-world roads, as time passed, subsequent routes would deviate... In the face of complete randomness, there was simply no absolutely correct solution.

But Liu Li did not think so.

The movement of the Baikal Remains was indeed random, but he didn't need to provide Sun Hang and others with a so-called correct route. What he needed to do was establish a complete dynamic mathematical model, and after every step of Baikal Remains' changes, provide a real-time "dynamic correct path" for the next step.

Liu Li couldn't help but think of a puzzle block game he played as a child called "Huarong Road", except that Huarong Road had a total of only ten movable blocks, while the Baikal Remains increased this number tens of thousands of times.

If it were merely a simple "giant Huarong Road", the computing power of a supercomputer could easily find the optimal solution, but this "giant Huarong Road" added a plethora of random factors, with all the blocks automatically and randomly swapping positions, which left people without a clue where to start.

"The sample data is still too little..." Liu Li couldn't help but complain to himself, "If the sample data could be nearly infinite, maybe I could figure out whether the changes of the Baikal Remains are truly random or pseudo-random... If it's pseudo-random..."

But Liu Li also knew that infinite sample data was simply a fantasy—for now, all the sample data was exchanged for by the lives of reconnaissance team soldiers, and many people had already lost their lives in this ghastly city for the sake of these samples.

A string of seemingly inconspicuous data might carry behind it a few vibrant lives and a dozen shattered families.

"Hurry... faster..."

...

"Ah!" In the tense silence, a young nurse suddenly broke the atmosphere—she pointed at Liu Li's ear and exclaimed, "He... seems to be bleeding..."

Just as the nurse said, a blush was slowly seeping from Liu Li's ear canal, diffusing in the ice water, at the same time, blood was also flowing from his nostrils, and the thick blood accumulated at the place where the breathing mask contacted his skin.

"I demand immediate termination of Liu Li's mission!" Liu Li's direct supervisor said—it was a forty-year-old woman, dressed in a deep red suit skirt, with a knee-length white lab coat draped over it. Her black long hair was styled into a high bun at the back of her head, and a delicate pair of gold-rimmed glasses rested on her high nose bridge.

Her last name was Nangong, and everyone who knew her knew that Ms. Nangong, the head of the Dubhe Tower's fourth research group, was synonymous with elegance and intellect... But at this moment, her elegance and intellect had been completely replaced by anxiety and tension. If not for her colleagues stopping her, she would have rushed to pull Liu Li out of the ice-filled bathtub.

"Professor Nangong, if we terminate the mission now, all efforts would be wasted." Another researcher said, "We are also worried about Liu Li's physical state, but compared to here, the situation at Baikal Remains is more urgent!"

"Liu Li's 'overload mode' physiological endurance limit is fifteen minutes, only thirteen minutes have passed now, with two minutes remaining... he should be fine." Another doctor-like person comforted.

"Fifteen minutes is the extreme value tested under the strict monitoring of all medical support equipment, not like this, soaking him in a bathtub full of ice water!" Ms. Nangong snapped coldly, "Liu Li's physiological functions are no different from ordinary people! May I ask, if it were you, who can guarantee that you can hold on for fifteen minutes in such an environment every time?"