Chapter 001

Chapter 1: Rain

For more than twenty years, Yu Sheng had believed he was just an ordinary person, living an ordinary life, doing ordinary things, and that this ordinary path would keep going until the day that ordinary life ended.

Yes, that was what he had always thought, but those days now felt far away.

The sky was dim. Heavy clouds, like thick cotton, spread in from the northeast and covered the whole city. The air was soaked with damp. A shower was brewing in that damp, likely to start in ten minutes or so.

Carrying vegetables and seasonings he had just bought, Yu Sheng moved with the crowd and hurried across the street, heading home under the darkening light.

As he passed The Shop, he stopped without thinking and looked up at the sign above The Shop’s door, stared at it for a few seconds, then pulled his eyes away and hurried on.

People on the road grew fewer. The big city was quieting under the threat of rain. Yu Sheng lifted his gaze to the commercial street ahead, lit by the ground floor stores. Even though the scene was familiar, a strange feeling crept up from his heart.

Strange, yes. He had lived in this city for more than twenty years, but now this huge, almost endless place called Boundary City felt unfamiliar.

Because the city was not the “real” one from his memory. Some parts matched, but more felt off. The Boundary City he grew up in had not been so huge. He remembered the downtown high rise was named Boyuan Tower, not Council Tower. He remembered that at the corner of Siyuan Street, where The Shop stood now, there had been a wall. His home had not been that giant, shaky, run down house deep in the old district.

More important, the city he remembered did not have so many things that were just wrong. Old phone booths would not appear at random on street corners like something from last century. Steam engines would not glide over rooftops late at night. Empty classrooms would not keep whispering with the sound of people reading. And there would not be this:

On a rainy evening, a tall, thin black shadow under a streetlamp, skinny as a utility pole.

Yu Sheng looked up and stared hard at the streetlamp not far ahead. A human shape, thin like a reed, stood stiffly there. It was three or four meters tall. On top was a pitch black face with no features. The shadow seemed to notice him too, but only stood there, trading a distant stare with him.

Hurried pedestrians walked right under the tall shadow. No one seemed to notice the strange thing by the lamp. Someone even passed straight through it and nothing happened.

Only Yu Sheng could see it.

After a few seconds of useless staring, he looked away, pressed down his pounding heart, chose another street, and rushed off.

He could not tell whether the city had changed or he had changed. But he clearly remembered that the ordinary life he used to know had left him on a sunny morning two months ago.

He remembered that on that bright morning, he opened the door of his home to go to the small store at the corner to buy a few oranges.

That was the last time he ever opened his own home’s door. After that, he never saw the home from his memory again.

He had tried to explain it. Maybe it was a kind of crossing. He stepped through his home’s door and into a parallel world that looked almost like his old one. He could not find the door back because the passage collapsed the moment he crossed the door’s threshold.

Another possibility was that something had changed inside him. When he stepped out the door, or sometime after, some unknown force made him different. His eyes began to see things hidden under the surface. He still lived in the place he knew, but he could no longer see the familiar things.

But these ideas did not matter.

Either way, he could not return to that ordinary, normal world. This strange, giant city was like a boundless Forest, trapping a drifting traveler in its gloomy, tangled branches and vines. Two short months were not enough for Yu Sheng to uncover the Forest’s secret.

In truth, he had only just begun to adapt to his new home, which felt both familiar and strange, and had barely rebuilt a daily routine.

Luckily, in this Boundary City that clashed with his memory, he was still “Yu Sheng.” He had a valid Identification Card, a legal address, some savings, and a job that did not look very reliable. If this really was a crossing, at least he did not face the three big problems most travelers had: who am I, where am I, and where do I go to get an Identification Card.

In an orderly modern metropolis, those problems mattered a lot. Modern population systems are strict. For a traveler who lands in a city like this, shaking off the status of a person with no record would be hard.

Of course, if you flip it around, dropping into a chaotic older era or a rough fantasy world brings other kinds of trouble. You might get cut down as an enemy spy, cut down as an invading outsider, cut down as some evil creature from underground, or cut up and stewed by goblins in a cave.

With these random thoughts popping into his head, he left the commercial street for an old narrow lane and took another way toward home.

The sky grew even darker. Maybe because of that deeper dark, the things that felt wrong began to multiply.

At the edge of his vision, shaky human shapes slid over the cracked, stained walls. A quick cat leaped out of a shadow on the wall, climbed along a beam of light that seemed to fall from nowhere, meowed twice in Yu Sheng’s direction, then melted with the raindrops and splashed into little bursts on the ground.

The rain started. It was earlier than he had guessed.

The wind turned cold, and the chill spun like a real thing, slipping through the seams of his clothes.

He clicked his tongue, lifted the grocery bag over his head, and walked faster.

If not for avoiding the black shadow under the lamp, he could have stayed on the main road and reached home sooner. That building was strange too, but at least it kept out wind and rain.

Thinking of the shadow, Yu Sheng felt annoyed. From experience, he knew the strange things he saw were usually harmless. If he did not provoke them, they ignored him just like other people ignored them. Even so, he still tried to avoid the ones that looked too creepy. Now it seemed that taking a detour had been a bad choice today.

It was getting colder.

For a simple rain, this cold was ridiculous.

He saw his breath turning into icy mist. The raindrops hit like sharp nails, hard and freezing, stinging his skin.

The ground was turning into a smooth mirror.

A heavy unease snapped him to full alert. Something was wrong, very wrong. Even in this weird city, he had never seen this before.

Unlike the usual shadows that were only ugly to look at, this time he felt malice.

The rain had malice.

He looked up and saw the little path, which had held a few people just moments before, was now empty. The narrow street held only him.

Not a single person was in sight. Distant lights blurred into a haze. The intersection at the edge of his vision seemed to shift near and far as if something blocked it. Besides the cold, sealed buildings around him, there was only rain, cold rain.

He felt like the whole world was raining just for him.

He sucked in a sharp breath and sprinted to the nearest building. An old iron door stood there. It looked like a back door for a ground floor shop. Whatever it was, he needed help fast.

The raindrops now carried a blade’s edge, and the air was so cold that each breath stabbed his lungs.

In only a few steps he reached the door, lifted his hand, and slammed the metal with his palm: “Anyone there…”

He stared, and his voice stopped.

His hand had hit bare wall. The door was painted on the wall.

The nearby windows were painted too.

A soft rustling came from close by.

He turned his head slowly toward the sound.

In the freezing rain that fell like knives, something strange rose from the mirror smooth water. It pulled an entity out of the black shadow and watched Yu Sheng with a cold stare.

It was a frog, almost a meter tall. Its head was crowded with eyes. Its slick skin reflected the storm of freezing rain.

The frog opened its mouth. A sharp tongue shot straight at his heart. Seeing it, he snapped: “Oh f*** you…”

Yu Sheng was neat with words and quick to react. Before the last sound left his mouth, his body had already moved. He dodged to the side, yanked a collapsible baton from his pocket, and lunged forward.

The frog’s tongue bent hard in midair and punched through Yu Sheng’s back, right where his heart was.

He made a confused noise: “…?”

He blinked at the tongue sticking out of his chest. A heart beat fast at the tip.

[Damn it, this thing is mine…]

He had that thought, swore once in his head, and died.