Jiang Hong's words helped Su Bai make sense of the previously scattered clues. Not only had the picture of Jiang Hong's four-player team become clear, but the puzzle of Qingliu City's mutation was now almost complete.
According to Jiang Hong's account, they must have encountered the half-human, half-fish creatures that had escaped from the Lorimas Grand Hotel while they were in the Nightmare World. Those fish-men injected with Lorimas's serum had originally been Regular players. After leaving the Lorimas Grand Hotel, they would still be drawn into other nightmare games, so encounters with other players were inevitable.
Either during a nightmare game or elsewhere in the Nightmare World, Jiang Hong, Qi Yan, and the others must have noticed that, despite their bizarre appearance, those fish-men possessed greater strength and speed than Regular players, along with extraordinary regenerative abilities.
Moreover, the serum in the fish-men's bodies came from a remnant beneath the Red Moon, so they also carried more of the Red Moon's power than Regular players. It had simply been difficult for that power to manifest when they fought Su Bai at the Lorimas Grand Hotel.
Even Qi Yan, who considered himself exceptional, had been intensely jealous of the fish-men's physiques and strength.
Especially after learning that the fish-men's powers were not innate, but had come from injections of some unfinished "Elixir of Immortality" during an experiment, Qi Yan and the others had already begun coveting the substance.
As for the fish-men's accounts of the inhuman, hellish suffering they had endured during the experiments, to onlookers like Qi Yan and his companions, it seemed barely worth mentioning. They might even have considered it a price worth willingly paying for extraordinary abilities.
Qi Yan had already wanted to capture those fish-men back then. Although there were no researchers in the four-person