Pousada de Outra Dimensão

In the more than twenty years that had passed before now, Yu Sheng had always believed himself to be nothing more than an utterly ordinary man, living an utterly ordinary life, doing utterly ordinary things, and that in the foreseeable future this ordinariness would continue without change, until the day his ordinary life came to an ordinary end.

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

The sky was overcast. Heavy clouds, like thick tufts of cotton, were slowly spreading in from the northeast, shrouding the entire city. The air was damp and saturated, pregnant with rain that might begin falling in a dozen minutes or so.

Carrying the vegetables and seasonings he had just bought from the supermarket, Yu Sheng merged into the stream of pedestrians, hurrying across the street and heading home through the dimming light.

As he passed a shop, he stopped without thinking and looked at the sign above the entrance, staring at it for several seconds before taking his eyes away and walking on again.

The number of people on the road gradually thinned. The vast city seemed to grow quiet in the atmosphere that foretold rain. Yu Sheng lifted his gaze toward the commercial street ahead, lit by the ground-floor shops. Though it was a scene he knew well, an indescribable sense of strangeness still welled up from the bottom of his heart.

Yes, strangeness—he had lived in this city for more than twenty years, and yet by now this absurdly enormous, seemingly boundless city was, to him,