Chapter 1: Rain

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, an entirely unfamiliar place.

Because this city was not the “real” one from his memory. Though some parts were very similar, far more of it felt neither one thing nor the other. The boundary city he had grown up in had not been this large; he remembered the high-rise in the city center should have been called Bohai Tower, not this so-called Council Tower. He remembered the shop at the intersection of Siyuan Street had once been a wall, and his original home had not been that huge, dilapidated old house deep in the old district, seeming ready to collapse at any moment.

And, more importantly, the city in his memory would never contain so many… “wrong” things, including but not limited to the old-fashioned telephone booths that appeared at random intersections with the visual style of another century, the steam locomotive heads that passed over rooftops in the dead of night, the empty classrooms where the sound of reading constantly drifted out, and…

On evenings just before rain, standing beneath streetlamps like a telegraph pole, a tall, black shadow thin as a reed.

Yu Sheng raised his head and fixed his eyes on the streetlamp not far away. There stood a human-shaped outline, as skinny as a stalk of straw, with a body three or four meters tall and a black face at the top so featureless that no countenance could be made out. The shadow seemed to have noticed him as well, but it merely stood there in a wooden stupor, meeting Yu Sheng’s gaze from afar.

Hurrying pedestrians passed beneath the tall, gaunt shadow as though no one noticed the uncanny thing standing beside the lamp. Some even walked straight through it without any effect at all.

Only Yu Sheng could see it.

So after several seconds of meaningless staring, he looked away, forced down his pounding heart, and took another route, hurrying off.

Yu Sheng had never been entirely sure whether the city itself had suddenly changed, or whether something had changed in him. But he remembered clearly that the ordinary, normal life in his memory had drifted away on a morning two months ago—

He remembered that on that bright, sunny morning, he had opened the front door to go buy a few oranges from the small supermarket at the intersection.

That was the last time he ever opened what had been “his own front door.” After that, he never saw the home from his memories again.

He had once analyzed it, suspecting perhaps some kind of transmigration: the moment he opened the door, he stepped into a parallel world that only resembled his hometown, and he could no longer find the door leading back to his original world because the passage through time and space had collapsed the instant he crossed the threshold.

Another possibility was that something had “mutated” within him. Perhaps when he stepped outside, or perhaps at some moment after that, some unknown influence had made him “different from ordinary people,” and thus his eyes had begun to see certain “things” hidden beneath appearances. He still lived in the place he knew, only he could no longer see the familiar things there...

But all such analysis was meaningless.

No matter what, he could no longer return to the “ordinary and normal world” in his memory. This strange and vast city was like a boundless forest, trapping a bewildered drifter layer upon layer among its eerie, interlaced branches and vines, and two short months were far from enough for Yu Sheng to uncover the secrets of this “forest.”

In fact, by now he had only just roughly adapted to that familiar yet unfamiliar “new home,” and barely managed to restore a semblance of “daily life” here.

Fortunately, in this boundary city so out of keeping with his memories, he was still Yu Sheng. He had proper identification, a legally valid address, a modest sum of savings, and a somewhat dubious livelihood. If this really was some kind of transmigration, then at least he did not need to face the three great trials that plagued most transmigrators: Who am I, where am I, and where the hell do I go to get an identity card.

Given that this was a well-ordered, modern metropolis, those problems were especially important. After all, in modern society the population registration system was thorough, and for a transmigrant to shake off the status of an illegal resident in a city like this was no easy matter.

Of course, looked at from another angle, being flung into a chaotic old society or a lawless otherworld might bring its own troubles—such as being mistaken for an enemy spy and cut to pieces, mistaken for an invading foreigner and cut to pieces, mistaken for some evil creature emerging from underground and cut to pieces, or being seized by goblins in a cave as a temporary ration and chopped up for stew...

Such random associations spun through Yu Sheng’s mind from nowhere as he passed through a shabby alley beside the commercial street and headed home by another road.

The sky grew even darker, and perhaps precisely because of that darkness, the number of “not quite right” things began to increase slowly.

At the edge of Yu Sheng’s vision, swaying human silhouettes appeared on the mottled, aged outer walls of the buildings along the road. A nimble cat leaped out from the shadow on the wall, lightly climbed onto a beam of light shining from who knew where, meowed twice in Yu Sheng’s direction, and then dissolved and fell together with the raindrops, splashing into little bursts of water on the ground.

Then the rain began, earlier than expected.

The wind turned cold. The cold air spun as though it had substance, slipping into the seams of his clothes.

Yu Sheng clicked his tongue and could only raise the shopping bag over his head, quickening his pace.

If not for the need to avoid the shadow beneath that streetlamp, he could have taken the main road and gotten home faster—though that house was strange and unfamiliar in its own way, at least it was somewhere that could keep out wind and rain.

Thinking of that shadow beneath the streetlamp, Yu Sheng felt a little annoyed.

From experience, he knew that the strange things he saw were basically 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 those things that looked far too unwholesome. Yet now it seemed that taking a detour today had not been a good idea.

It was getting colder and colder.

For rain, this was absurdly cold.

Yu Sheng realized that the breath he exhaled was slowly turning into condensed frost, and the raindrops falling from above were like sharp nails, hard and icy, striking with painful force.

The ground, under this freezing rain, was gradually turning into a smooth mirror.

A surge of dread instantly sharpened Yu Sheng’s alertness. He realized something was wrong—very wrong. Even in this strange city, this was the first time he had encountered anything like it.

Unlike the shadows he usually saw, which at most were unpleasant to look at, this time he sensed... malice.

This rain was malicious.

He jerked his head up, only to find that the little road, which a moment ago had still held scattered pedestrians, was now empty without his noticing. In the narrow street, there was only himself.

Not a single person in sight. Even the lights in the distance had turned hazy and unreal. The intersection at the edge of his vision seemed to drift near and far as though blocked by something. Aside from the cold, enclosed buildings around him, there was only rain—cold rain.

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

Yu Sheng drew a sharp breath and ran toward the nearest house. Before him stood an old iron door, which looked like it should have been a back entrance to one of the street-level shops. Whatever it was, he had to find help as quickly as possible.

Because the raindrops had already begun to take on the sharpness of blades, and the temperature around him had dropped to the point that every breath brought a needle-like pain through his lungs.

In just a few strides, Yu Sheng reached the door and slammed a hand against it. “Is anyone—”

His eyes widened. The words stopped dead.

His hand had struck the wall. The door was painted on the wall.

The nearby windows were painted on the wall as well.

A rustling sound came from somewhere nearby.

Yu Sheng slowly turned his head toward the source.

In the freezing rain that fell like blades, a grotesque thing was slowly rising from the mirror-smooth water. It had gained substance from the pitch-black shadow and was staring at Yu Sheng with cold indifference.

It was a frog. A frog nearly a meter tall, its head densely covered in eyes, its body reflecting the frozen rain from the sky.

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

“Damn—”

Yu Sheng’s language remained refined, his reflexes keen; the expletive in his mouth had not yet reached the ground before his body reacted a step ahead. He sprang aside, one hand already pulling out the collapsible baton he usually carried for self-defense, feet shifting, waist twisting, body driving forward—

The frog’s tongue bent at a sharp angle in midair, piercing through Yu Sheng’s back at the position of his heart.

Yu Sheng: “...?”

He blinked and looked at the tongue protruding from his chest, where a heart was beating rapidly at its tip.

“...Damn bastard, that thing is mine...”

After a moment’s thought, he cursed inwardly like that.

Then he died.