At the nurse’s recommendation, Bai Zhou became the medical team’s bodyguard, tasked with protecting them whenever they went out.

Bai Zhou also discovered that the price of his relic seemed to be permanent. Even when he took off his helmet, he didn’t change back into a handsome Fishman.

’Sigh, humans are so ugly.’

How could he return to the Fishman Race looking like this? Even if he did, they wouldn’t accept him.

But since he was stuck, he decided to make the best of it. Bai Zhou simply settled down in the Black Tower and started following the nurse around every day to learn all sorts of human knowledge...

"Stop following me!" the nurse said angrily to Bai Zhou, who was trailing behind her. "I have to get to surgery."

"But they told me to ask you if I had any questions," Bai Zhou explained, placing a hand on his helmet in bewilderment.

The nurse sighed, then softened her tone. "You can wait for me out here."

So, Bai Zhou waited outside the operating room all night.

The next morning, the nurse emerged from the operating room, exhausted, only to see Bai Zhou still sitting ramrod straight on a chair.

"Aren’t you tired?" she asked, a little annoyed.

"Fishmen don’t need to sleep."

"..."

After a moment of silence, the nurse sat down beside him. "What did you want to ask yesterday? Go ahead."

Bai Zhou took out a box of chocolates and gave it to the nurse.

"It’s nothing. They gave these out at my unit. Fishmen can’t eat them—we get poisoned. So they’re for you."

With that, Bai Zhou stood up and left the hospital.

...

During his time living in the Black Tower, Bai Zhou had tried to prove he was a Fishman, but no one ever believed him.

After a while, he even switched from a martial to a civil role, joining the hospital staff. He hoped that through his own efforts, he could prove his identity biologically. But before he could, the Black Tower’s distortion appeared.

Bai Zhou pointed at the electronic screen, arguing his case forcefully with Li Luo.

"You don’t have to look at the record for that relic. I’ve told them so many times that it’s wrong, but they never believe me."

Li Luo nodded helplessly, "conceding" that he was indeed a Fishman.

There was no point in arguing with him about it. The most important thing right now was the distortion in the Black Tower.

After hearing his story, Mo Ling finally understood why he hadn’t been affected by the Black Tower.

For Bai Zhou, just like the phantoms in the Thorn Stone Forest, his perception of his own identity was completely locked in, impossible to change.

’It seems this really is a distortion that targets one’s identity,’ Mo Ling thought.

’But why does it cause linguistic chaos?’

’Could this just be a precursor?’

Li Luo had the same suspicion and asked Bai Zhou what exactly had happened inside the Black Tower.

Bai Zhou pulled up his records on the electronic screen and began sharing them with Li Luo.

"In the beginning, the distortion wasn’t this rapid."

...

In the eyes of many, the Black Tower Monitoring Station was a safe haven. Even without venturing into ruins, one could survive in the Abyss with just a few life skills.

It was safe and hidden.

It also housed a variety of ecosystems. If you were tired from work, you could find any random aperture and gaze out at a bizarre natural landscape to soothe your body and mind.

However, the higher one went in the Black Tower, the more dangerous it became. That was why human settlements were all located at the bottom; no one would wander upwards for no reason.

Only a few professional Hunter Squads, hired by the research institute, would regularly travel to the upper reaches of the Black Tower to collect rare biological specimens.

The distortion first appeared in one of these Hunter Squads upon their return from the upper levels of the Black Tower.

On a typical day, a Hunter Squad returned with a full haul to the monitoring station’s checkpoint. The guards performed a routine disinfection and inspection.

Everything seemed normal. The guard saw that the team’s captain was an acquaintance and casually asked, "Successful trip?"

The captain heard the guard’s question but just looked confused and didn’t answer.

The guard didn’t think anything of it and continued inspecting the squad’s samples. Finding nothing unusual, he waved his hand, signaling them to pass through.

Seeing the guard’s gesture to proceed, the captain turned his head and shouted to his teammates, "Study!"

The squad members immediately shouted back in response, "Sleep!"

As the captain turned to enter, the guard, realizing something was wrong, finally stopped him. "I suspect there’s a problem with your squad. You’ll have to come with us."

But the captain only responded with a look of confusion.

It was then that the guard realized the situation might be more serious than he had imagined. He immediately reported the anomaly, and the squad was sent to a dedicated quarantine area.

They were suspected of carrying some unknown disease.

After an examination, the monitoring station’s doctors quickly discovered that the squad members’ language systems were in complete disarray.

Their vocabulary had been completely replaced by other, entirely unrelated words. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

It was completely random, with no discernible pattern.

Yet, these squad members could communicate fluently among themselves, with no barriers whatsoever.

Other than that, the squad members showed no other physical abnormalities. They were still perfectly healthy and active, no different from anyone else.

The medical staff had to resort to communicating with pictures and drawings to explain the situation to the squad members and try to learn what had happened.

Using these images, the medical personnel asked the captain if they had encountered anything strange or come into contact with anything unusual during their expedition, but the captain indicated that everything had been normal.

They had simply followed their usual route to the upper levels of the Black Tower, found their target creature, collected the samples, and returned.

They hadn’t encountered any danger or unusual situations along the way.

The biological samples the squad brought back were tested and showed no signs of any unknown bacteria or viruses.

The medical staff speculated that they might have been affected by some sort of area-of-effect phenomenon from a relic. They decided to keep the squad quarantined together to see if they would return to normal over time.

「A few days passed.」

One morning, a janitor was making his usual rounds, delivering meals to the squad’s living quarters, helping them clear away the trash, and cleaning up. Everything seemed perfectly ordinary.

But as he was leaving, one of the squad members said "Thank you" to him.

"No problem," the janitor replied calmly.

It was only after he had finished his own decontamination and walked out the main gate of the quarantine area that he suddenly realized something was wrong.

He hurried back into the quarantine area and alerted the doctor on duty, "The people affected by the distortion seem to have recovered! I just understood what one of them said!"

But the doctor was just staring at his electronic screen, lost in thought.

His hands, holding the screen, began to tremble more and more as he scrolled frantically, as if searching for something.

"Did you hear me? The squad has recovered! That distortion must be temporary! Go and check on them," the janitor urged.

But the doctor just lifted the electronic screen and held it up in front of the janitor’s face.

On it was a dense, chaotic jumble of text. Each character was legible, but to the janitor, the whole thing looked like a screen of garbled code.

"They didn’t recover. We’re the ones who are sick now!"