Chapter 1: Rain

For the past twenty-plus years of his life, Yu Sheng had always considered himself to be just an ordinary person, living an ordinary life, doing ordinary things. In the foreseeable future, this ordinariness was destined to continue—right up until the day his life came to an ordinary end.

Yes, that was what he had always believed—but those days seemed like a very long time ago.

The sky was gloomy, and the heavy, leaden clouds were spreading from the northeast like thick cotton batting, shrouding the entire city. The air was saturated with a damp chill, and a downpour was brewing within that atmosphere; perhaps it would begin in a dozen minutes or so.

Carrying the vegetables and seasonings he had just bought from the supermarket, Yu Sheng mingled with the pedestrians, hurrying across the street and heading toward his residence under the increasingly dim light.

As he passed a shop, he subconsciously stopped, looking at the sign above the entrance. He stared at it for several seconds before pulling his gaze away and continuing his hurried pace.

The pedestrians on the road gradually thinned out. The vast city seemed to be growing quiet in the atmosphere of the impending rain. Yu Sheng lifted his gaze to look at the commercial street ahead, illuminated by the lights of the ground-floor shops. Despite it being a familiar sight, an indescribable sense of strangeness couldn't help but well up from the bottom of his heart.

Yes, strangeness—he had lived in this city for over twenty years, but now, this absurdly huge, seemingly boundless "Boundary City" was a very foreign place to him.

Because this city was not the "real" version from his memories. Although some places were very similar, most were not quite right—the Boundary City he grew up in was not this massive. He remembered that the building in the city center should have been called the Boyuan Building, not the "Council Tower" that stood there now. He remembered that the shop at the intersection of Siyuan Street used to be a wall, and his original home was not that huge, dilapidated, and crumbling old house deep in the old district.

And more importantly, the city in his memories certainly didn't have so many... "not quite right" things. This included, but was not limited to, old-fashioned telephone booths that would randomly appear at certain intersections as if they belonged to the last century, steam locomotives passing over the rooftops in the dead of night, empty classrooms from which the sound of reading constantly drifted, and...

On an evening about to rain, standing under a streetlamp, a pitch-black shadow as thin and tall as a utility pole.

Yu Sheng looked up, staring fixedly at the streetlamp not far away. A humanoid silhouette, thin as a reed, was standing there stiffly. At the top of its three-to-four-meter-tall body was a pitch-black face with no discernible features. The shadow seemed to have noticed him, but it just stood there rigidly, locked in a distant standoff with Yu Sheng’s gaze.

Hurried passersby walked right beneath the tall, thin shadow. It was as if no one noticed this eerie thing standing by the streetlamp; some even walked straight through the shadow without being affected in the slightest.

Only Yu Sheng could see it.

So, after a few seconds of meaningless staring, he withdrew his gaze, suppressed his pounding heart, and took a different route, walking away with hurried steps.

Yu Sheng had never been sure whether the city had suddenly changed or if he himself had changed. But he clearly remembered that the ordinary, normal life in his memories had left him one morning two months ago—

He remembered that on that sunny morning, he had pushed open his front door to go to the small supermarket at the intersection to buy some oranges.

That was the last time he had pushed open "his own front door." After that, he had never seen the home from his memories again.

He had analyzed it before; perhaps this was some kind of "transmigration." When he pushed open his door, he had stepped into a parallel world that looked similar to his hometown but was not the same. The reason he could no longer find the door to return to his original world was that the space-time channel had collapsed the moment he crossed the threshold.

Another possibility was that he had undergone a "mutation." When he stepped out the door, or perhaps at some moment after that, due to some unknown influence, he had become "different from ordinary people." Thus, his eyes had begun to see certain "things" hidden beneath the surface of reality. He was still living in the place he was familiar with, only he could no longer see those familiar things...

But these analyses were meaningless.

In any case, he could no longer return to that "ordinary and normal world" of his memories. This strange and massive city was like a boundless forest, trapping a bewildered drifter layer by layer between its gloomy, intertwined branches and vines. And a mere two months was not enough for Yu Sheng to uncover the secrets of this "forest."

In fact, he had only just roughly adapted to this familiar yet strange "new home" and had barely managed to resume his "daily life" here.

Fortunately, in this Boundary City that was so out of sync with his memories, he was still "Yu Sheng." He had normal identification, a legal and valid address, some modest savings, and a job that didn't seem particularly reliable—if this really was some kind of "transmigration," at least he didn't have to face the three great dilemmas most transmigrators faced: "Who am I, where am I, and where do I go to get an ID card?"

Considering this was an orderly, modern metropolis, the aforementioned dilemmas were particularly important. After all, modern society had a perfect population management system, and it wasn't easy for a transmigrator to shed the status of an undocumented person in such a city.

Of course, looking at it from another angle, transmigrating into a chaotic old society or a lawless alien world might have other troubles—like being executed for being a spy from an enemy nation, being executed for being an alien invader, being executed for being an evil creature that crawled out of the ground, or being caught and stewed as a temporary ration by goblins in a cave...

With these random, stray thoughts swirling in his mind, Yu Sheng passed through a narrow, old alleyway next to the commercial street and headed toward "home" via another path.

The sky grew increasingly gloomy, and it seemed that because of this darkening sky, those "not quite right" things began to multiply.

At the edge of Yu Sheng's vision, some swaying human figures were reflected on the mottled, aged exterior walls of the buildings along the road. An agile cat jumped out from the shadows on the wall, lightly climbed onto a beam of light shining from an unknown source, meowed twice in Yu Sheng's direction, and then melted away with the raindrops, splashing onto the ground.

It started to rain, earlier than expected.

The wind turned cold, and the chill swirled like a physical force, drilling into the gaps in his clothes.

Yu Sheng clicked his tongue and had no choice but to hold his shopping bag over his head, quickening his pace.

If not for avoiding that black shadow under the streetlamp, he could have walked along the main road and gotten home faster—although that house was also somewhat strange and eerie, at least it was a place to shelter from the wind and rain.

Thinking of the black shadow under the streetlamp, Yu Sheng felt a bit annoyed.

Based on experience, he knew that the strange things he saw were basically harmless. At least, as long as he didn't provoke them, those things would ignore him just as ordinary people ignored them. But even knowing this, he would instinctively avoid those things that looked too sinister—but now it seemed that taking a detour today wasn't a good idea.

It was getting colder.

For a rainstorm, this was absurdly cold.

Yu Sheng noticed that the breath he exhaled was slowly turning into frozen ice mist. The raindrops falling from the sky hit like sharp nails—hard, cold, and stinging.

And the ground was gradually turning into a smooth mirror in this freezing rain.

A massive sense of unease instantly alerted Yu Sheng. He realized the situation was wrong, very wrong. Even in this bizarre city, this was the first time he had seen such a situation.

Unlike the "shadows" he usually saw, which were at most an eyesore, this time he felt... malice.

This rain had malice.

He looked up abruptly, only to see that the small path, which had had a few pedestrians earlier, was now empty. He was the only one left in the narrow street.

He couldn't see a single person. The distant lights had become hazy and illusory. The intersection at the end of his vision seemed to be blocked by something, flickering between near and far. Around him, apart from the cold and enclosed buildings, there was only rain—cold, freezing rain.

He felt as if the whole world was raining for him alone.

Yu Sheng took a sharp breath and ran quickly toward the nearest house. An old iron door stood there, which looked like the back door of some ground-floor shop—no matter what it was, he had to find someone to help him as soon as possible.

Because the raindrops in the rain had begun to take on the sharp texture of blades, and the surrounding temperature had dropped to the point where every breath brought a needle-like pain to his lungs.

In just a few steps, Yu Sheng reached the door and slammed his hand against it: "Is anyone..."

His eyes widened, and his voice stopped abruptly.

His hand hit the wall; that door was painted on the wall.

The nearby windows were also painted on the wall.

A rustling sound came from nearby.

Yu Sheng slowly turned his head, looking in the direction of the sound.

In the blade-like freezing rain, a strange-looking thing was slowly rising from the mirror-like water surface. It had gained a physical form from the pitch-black shadows and was staring at Yu Sheng with indifference.

It was a frog—a frog nearly a meter tall, its head covered in a dense cluster of eyes, its body reflecting the freezing rain that filled the sky.

The frog opened its mouth, and a sharp tongue shot straight toward the prey's heart.

"F*** you..."

Yu Sheng’s choice of words was elegant, and his reaction was agile. Before the expletive had even finished leaving his mouth, his body had already reacted a step ahead—he lunged to the side, one hand already pulling the self-defense baton from his pocket, stepping, twisting his waist, and lunging forward...

The frog's tongue took a sharp angle in mid-air, piercing through Yu Sheng's heart from behind.

Yu Sheng: "...?"

He blinked, watching the frog's tongue extend from his chest, a heart beating rapidly at its tip.

"...F***ing hell, that thing is my..."

He thought about it and cursed in his heart.

Then he died.