Chapter 1: Rain

Chapter 1: Rain

For more than twenty years of his life, Yu Sheng had always believed that he was nothing more than an ordinary person, living an ordinary life and doing ordinary things. And in the foreseeable future, that ordinariness was destined to continue, right up until the day his life ended in an ordinary way.

Yes, that was what he had always believed, but those days now seemed as though they belonged to a very distant past.

The sky was dark. Thick, drowsy clouds spread gradually from the northeast like dense cotton wool, covering the entire city. The air was saturated with moisture, and rain was brewing within that dampness. Perhaps it would begin in another ten or twenty minutes.

Carrying vegetables and seasonings he had just bought from the supermarket, Yu Sheng moved among the pedestrians, hurrying across the street and heading toward his residence beneath the increasingly dim daylight.

As he passed a shop, he unconsciously slowed to a stop. He looked at the sign hanging outside the store, stared at it for several seconds, then finally withdrew his gaze and continued forward in haste.

The number of pedestrians gradually dwindled. The vast city seemed to be growing quieter beneath the atmosphere of the impending rain. Yu Sheng lifted his eyes toward the commercial street ahead, illuminated by the lights of the ground-floor shops. Though it was already a familiar sight, an indescribable sense of unfamiliarity still rose from deep within him.

Yes, unfamiliarity.

He had lived in this city for more than twenty years, but now this absurdly enormous city, this seemingly boundless Boundary City, felt like a thoroughly unfamiliar place.

Because this city was not the “real” one from his memories. Although some places were remarkably similar, even more were subtly wrong. The Boundary City where he had grown up was not nearly this large. He remembered that tower in the city center being called Boyuan Tower, not the current Council Tower. He remembered that the shop at the Siyuan Street intersection had originally been a wall. And his own home had not been that enormous, decaying old house hidden deep within the old district, a structure so dilapidated it seemed ready to collapse at any moment.

And more importantly, the city in his memories had never contained so many... things that were “not quite right.”

Including, but not limited to, old-fashioned telephone booths that looked as though they belonged to the previous century and appeared randomly at certain intersections; steam locomotives that passed over rooftops late at night; empty classrooms from which the sound of reading never ceased; and...

On evenings just before rain, beneath streetlights, pitch-black figures as tall and thin as utility poles.

Yu Sheng raised his head and stared fixedly at a streetlight not far away. A humanoid silhouette, thin as a stalk, stood rigidly beneath it. The body was at least three or four metres tall (~10-13 ft), and atop it sat a black face whose features could not be discerned. The shadow seemed to have noticed him as well, but it merely stood there stiffly, confronting his gaze from afar.

Hurried pedestrians passed beneath the tall, thin shadow as though no one noticed the bizarre thing standing beside the streetlight. Some even walked directly through it without suffering any effect.

Only Yu Sheng could see it.

So after several seconds of utterly meaningless staring, he withdrew his gaze, suppressed the pounding of his heart, chose a different route, and hurried away.

Yu Sheng had never been entirely certain whether the city had suddenly changed or whether he himself had changed. But he clearly remembered that the ordinary, normal life in his memories had departed from him on a certain morning two months earlier.

He remembered that bright and sunny morning. He had pushed open the front door of his house and planned to buy a few oranges from the small supermarket at the intersection.

That was the last time he ever opened the door of “his own home.”

After that, he never saw the home from his memories again.

He had analyzed the situation before. Perhaps it was some form of “transmigration.” He had opened the door and stepped directly into another parallel world that resembled his hometown while remaining fundamentally different. He could no longer find the door back to the original world because the passage through space and time had collapsed the moment he crossed its threshold.

Another possibility was that he himself had undergone a mutation. Perhaps when he stepped outside, or perhaps at some point afterward, some unknown influence had made him “different from ordinary people.” As a result, his eyes had begun to perceive certain “things” hidden beneath appearances. He was still living in the place he knew, he simply could no longer see the familiar things that had once been there...

But none of those analyses had any meaning.

No matter what had happened, he could no longer return to that “ordinary and normal world” from his memories. This unfamiliar and gigantic city was like a boundless forest, trapping a bewildered castaway layer upon layer among its sinister, intertwined branches and vines. And two short months had not been enough for Yu Sheng to uncover the secrets of this “forest.”

In fact, he had only recently managed to roughly adapt to that familiar yet unfamiliar “new home” and barely restore something resembling a normal daily life.

Fortunately, within this Boundary City that clashed so thoroughly with his memories, he was still “Yu Sheng.” He possessed valid identification, a legal address, some modest savings, and a source of income that did not look particularly reliable. If this truly was some form of transmigration, then at least he did not have to face the three great questions that plagued most transmigrators:

Who am I? Where am I? And where exactly am I supposed to apply for a new identity card?

Considering that this was a modern metropolis with excellent order and administration, those problems became especially important. After all, modern population management systems were highly developed. A transmigrator dropped into such a city would not find it easy to escape the status of an undocumented resident.

Of course, from another perspective, transmigrating into a chaotic old society or a lawless fantasy world would bring different problems.

For example, being chopped up as a spy from an enemy nation.

Being chopped up as an invading foreign race.

Being chopped up as some evil creature that crawled out of the underground.

Or being chopped up and stewed by goblins in a cave after being mistaken for emergency rations...

These absurd thoughts of unknown origin drifted through Yu Sheng’s mind as he passed through an old alley beside the commercial district and headed toward “home” by another route.

The sky grew increasingly gloomy.

And perhaps because of that growing gloom, the number of things that were “not quite right” began to increase.

At the edge of Yu Sheng’s vision, swaying human figures appeared upon the mottled, weathered walls of roadside buildings. A nimble cat jumped out from one of those shadows on the wall, lightly climbed a beam of light shining from nowhere, meowed twice toward Yu Sheng, then melted together with the raindrops and scattered downward, splashing into countless droplets when it struck the ground.

The rain had begun.

Earlier than expected.

The wind became cold. The chill twisted through the air as though it possessed substance, slipping into every gap in his clothing.

Yu Sheng clicked his tongue and could only raise his shopping bag above his head as a makeshift cover while quickening his pace.

If he had not been avoiding the black shadow beneath the streetlight, he could have taken the main road and reached home much sooner. Although that house was somewhat unfamiliar and eerie itself, it was at least a place that provided shelter from wind and rain.

Thinking of the shadow beneath the streetlight, Yu Sheng felt a trace of regret.

Based on experience, he knew that most of the strange things he saw were actually harmless. At least, if he did not provoke them, they would ignore him just as ordinary people ignored them. But even knowing that, he still instinctively avoided things that looked excessively sinister.

Now it seemed that taking a detour today had not been a good idea.

It was getting colder.

Far too cold for an ordinary rainstorm.

Yu Sheng noticed that his breath was gradually turning into condensed icy mist. The raindrops falling from the sky struck like sharp nails, hard and freezing, painfully battering his body.

Meanwhile, the ground was gradually transforming into a smooth mirror beneath the freezing rain.

A tremendous sense of unease instantly put him on alert.

Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

Even in this bizarre city, he had never seen anything like this before.

Unlike the “shadows” he usually encountered, things that were merely unpleasant to look at, this time he felt...

Malice.

The rain itself was malicious.

He suddenly raised his head.

The path that had held a scattering of pedestrians moments ago was now completely deserted. Without his noticing when it happened, he had become the only person left within the narrow street.

Not a single person could be seen.

The distant lights had become blurred and unreal. The intersection at the far end of his vision seemed to shift closer and farther as though blocked by something. Around him there remained only cold, sealed-off buildings and rain.

Cold rain.

It felt as though the entire world was raining for him alone.

Yu Sheng drew a sharp breath and sprinted toward the nearest building. An old iron door stood there, apparently the rear entrance of some ground-floor business.

Whatever it was, he needed to find help immediately.

Because the raindrops had begun to gleam with the sharpness of knife blades, and the surrounding temperature had fallen so low that every breath sent needle-like pain through his lungs.

After only a few strides, Yu Sheng reached the door and slammed his hand against it.

“Is anyone...”

His eyes widened.

His voice stopped abruptly.

His hand had struck a wall.

The door was painted onto the wall.

The nearby windows were painted onto the wall as well.

A rustling sound came from somewhere nearby.

Yu Sheng slowly turned his head and looked toward the source of the noise.

Within the blade-like freezing rain, a grotesque thing was slowly rising from the mirror-like surface of the water.

It gained substance from a pitch-black shadow and gazed at Yu Sheng with cold indifference.

It was a frog.

A frog nearly one metre tall (~3.3 ft), with countless eyes densely covering its head and the reflection of the freezing rain covering its body.

The frog opened its mouth.

A sharp tongue shot straight toward its prey’s heart.

“Fuck, what the hell...”

Yu Sheng’s language was refined, and his reactions were swift. Before the expletive had even fully left his mouth, his body had already moved first.

He dodged violently to the side. One hand had already drawn the telescopic baton he normally carried for self-defence. He stepped forward, twisted his waist, lowered his body, and charged...

The frog’s tongue bent at a sharp angle in midair and pierced directly through the position of Yu Sheng’s heart from behind.

Yu Sheng: “...?”

He blinked and looked at the tongue protruding from his chest.

A heart was attached to its tip, beating rapidly.

“...You bastard, that’s mine...”

After a moment’s thought, he cursed that way in his heart.

Then he died.