The boundary between humans and Strange Creatures was sometimes clear, and sometimes blurred.
In this Nightmare World, the definition of "human" was clear: a living being from the Real World with a living, breathing body. Once they died and lost their bodies, they would become wraiths too weak to be easily detected, just like the players who had died in Happiness Residential Complex. Only after being steeped in the Red Moon for decades or even centuries could they mutate into Strange Creatures like the other things in the Nightmare World.
Strange Creatures, on the other hand, were far more complicated.
In Su Bai's vast, pieced-together understanding of the Nightmare World, this world now steeped in the Red Moon had once held at least two civilizations that had already collapsed. Nonhuman races such as the merfolk Lorimas had once lived beneath the sun, too. Their civilization might have contained many beings with unusual or even powerful abilities, but that civilization should also have been destroyed long ago.
Yet Lorimas's lover, Jialan, looked no different from an ordinary human. He seemed to have been born into a civilization similar to the Real World several hundred years ago. The beings of that civilization were as weak and ordinary as humans in the Real World, and nonhumans like Lorimas, who had survived the collapse of their civilizations, became monsters in their eyes... and Strange Creatures.
Thus, the ancient nonhuman races became "Strange Creatures" with physical bodies.
Although Su Bai did not know what had happened afterward, it now seemed that Jialan's civilization had also been destroyed long ago. Even Jialan had previously scraped by in the Nightmare World under Lorimas's protection. After the humans of Jialan's civilization died, they seemed to have become wraiths as well, before gradually turning into vengeful ghosts and vengeful