I’m Trapped in a Cube - Chapter 117

With the nurse’s introduction, Bai Zhou became the bodyguard for the medical team, protecting them whenever they went out.

It was then that Bai Zhou realized the cost of his relic seemed to be permanent, even if he took off the helmet, he wouldn’t turn back into a handsome fishman.

“Sigh, humans are so ugly.”

With this appearance, how could he return to the fishman tribe? Even if he did, he wouldn’t be accepted.

But, since he was here, he might as well settle in. Bai Zhou simply stayed at the Black Tower , following the nurse 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 go perform surgery.”

“But they told me to ask you if I have any questions,” Bai Zhou said, placing his hand on his helmet, at a loss.

The nurse sighed, then softened her tone, “Just wait for me to come out.”

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

Early the next morning, the nurse came out of the operating room, exhausted, and saw Bai Zhou still sitting upright in his chair.

“Aren’t you tired?” she asked, a little angry.

“Fishmen don’t need to sleep.”

“……”

After a moment of silence, the nurse sat beside him and said, “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, our unit handed these out. Fishmen can’t eat them, they’re poisonous-so I’m giving them to you.”

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

……

During his time at the Black Tower, Bai Zhou also tried to prove he was a fishman, but no one believed him.

Later, he switched from martial work to scholarly, joining the hospital and hoping to prove it through biology, but before he could, the Black Tower’s distortion appeared.

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

“You don’t need to look at the relic entry. I’ve told them so many times, it’s wrong, but they just don’t believe me.”

Li Luo could only nod helplessly, “admitting” he was a fishman.

There was no point arguing with him about this anymore-the most important thing now was the Black Tower’s distortion.

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

For Bai Zhou, just like those ghosts in the Needle Stone Forest , his self-identity was completely locked and couldn’t be changed.

“So, this really is a distortion targeting identity,” Mo Ling thought.

“But why did it lead to language disorder?”

“Could this just be a precursor?””

Li Luo guessed as much and asked Bai Zhou what exactly had happened inside the Black Tower.

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

“At first, the distortion didn’t spread so quickly.”

……

In many people’s eyes, the Black Tower Monitoring Station was a safe haven. Even without relic expeditions, one could get by in the Abyss with a few life skills.

Safe and hidden.

With all sorts of ecosystems, if you were tired from work, you could find a random hole and see strange natural wonders to soothe your mind.

But the higher up the Black Tower, the more dangerous it was, so people gathered at the bottom-no one wandered upward for no reason.

Only some professional Hunter teams hired by the research institute would go up high to collect rare biological samples.

The first signs of distortion appeared in these Hunter teams returning from the upper Black Tower.

On an ordinary day, a Hunter team returned fully loaded, arriving at the checkpoint, where the guards routinely disinfected and checked them.

Everything was normal. The guard, seeing the familiar team leader, casually asked, “Was it smooth this time?”

The captain looked puzzled by the guard’s words and didn’t answer.

The guard didn’t think much of it, continuing to check the samples. Finding nothing unusual, he waved them through.

Seeing the guard’s gesture, the captain turned and shouted to his team, “Study!”

The team members shouted back, “Sleep!”

When the captain turned to enter, the guard, finally sensing something wrong, stopped him. “We suspect your team has a problem. You’ll have to come with us.”

But the captain only gave him a confused look.

It was then the guard realized things might be more serious than he’d thought. He quickly reported the anomaly, and the team was sent to a special quarantine area.

They were suspected of having some unknown disease.

After examination, the station’s doctors quickly discovered that the team’s language system was completely disordered.

Their vocabulary had been entirely replaced with words of completely different meaning, with no connection between the two.

Completely random, with no pattern at all.

Yet the team members could communicate fluently among themselves, with no barriers.

Other than this, their bodies were normal-lively and healthy, no different from anyone else.

The medical staff had to use pictures and drawings to communicate with the team and learn what had happened.

Through images, they asked the captain if anything strange had happened during the expedition, or if they’d encountered anything unusual, but the captain said everything was normal.

They’d just followed their usual route to the top of the Black Tower, found the target organism, collected samples, and returned.

Nothing dangerous or abnormal happened along the way.

The biological samples they brought back tested negative for unknown bacteria and viruses.

The staff guessed they might have been affected by some area-based relic phenomenon and had them live together for a while to see if they’d recover.

A few days passed like this.

One morning, a cleaner brought food as usual to the team’s room, cleaned up, and everything seemed normal.

But as he left, a team member said “thank you.”

“No problem,” the cleaner replied calmly.

After disinfecting, he walked out the quarantine gate, then suddenly realized something was wrong.

He rushed back inside and told the on, duty doctor, “Those distorted people seem to have recovered! I could understand them just now!”

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

His hands were trembling as he frantically scrolled, searching for something.

“Did you hear me? That team recovered-the distortion must be temporary! Go check!” the cleaner urged.

But the doctor held up his screen for the cleaner.

On it was a mess of text, dense and jumbled. Every character was recognizable, but to the cleaner, it was just gibberish.

“It’s not that they recovered, we’re sick too!”