Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Rain

For more than twenty years, Yu Sheng had believed he was ordinary—an ordinary man living an ordinary life, doing ordinary things. He’d assumed that, for the foreseeable future, it would stay that way until the day he died, ordinary to the end.

That was what he’d believed. Now those days felt like they belonged to someone else.

The sky had gone dark. Heavy, drowsy clouds pushed in from the northeast like thick cotton, swallowing the city whole. The air was swollen with moisture, saturated with the promise of a downpour. Ten minutes, maybe less.

Yu Sheng carried a bag of vegetables and seasonings from the supermarket and hurried across the street under the dimming light, blending into the flow of pedestrians.

As he passed a certain shop, his feet stalled. He stared at the sign by the entrance for several seconds, then tore his gaze away and forced himself to keep walking.

The farther he went, the fewer people he saw. The enormous city grew quiet beneath the rain-heavy sky. Ahead, the commercial street glowed with warm storefront light—familiar, the kind of sight that should have soothed him.

Instead, an indescribable wrongness rose in his chest.

Unfamiliar. That was the word.

He’d lived in this city for more than twenty years, and yet this absurdly vast, seemingly endless Boundary City now felt foreign. Not because he’d forgotten it, but because it wasn’t the city he remembered.

Some places looked similar. More places looked almost right—and still wrong.

In his memory, the city hadn’t been this big. The tower downtown was supposed to be called the Boyuan Tower, not the Councilor Tower standing there now. The shop at the intersection of Siyuan Street used to be a blank wall. And his old home had never been this enormous, crumbling house buried deep inside the Old Quarter.

More than anything, the city he remembered didn’t have so many things that shouldn’t exist.

Old-fashioned phone booths that appeared at certain intersections without warning. Steam locomotives that rolled over rooftops late at night. Empty classrooms where the sound of reading never stopped.

And sometimes—

On an almost-rainy evening, beneath a streetlamp, a pitch-black shadowspawn stood tall and thin as a utility pole.

Yu Sheng lifted his head and stared hard at the lamplight ahead. A humanoid silhouette, stiff and narrow as a beanpole, stood motionless like a statue—three, maybe four meters tall. Its “face” was nothing but darkness, no features he could make out at all.

The shadowspawn seemed to notice him. It didn’t move. It simply stared back from a distance.

Pedestrians hurried past beneath it as if it weren’t there. Some even walked straight through the thing without reacting.

Only Yu Sheng could see it.

After several seconds of pointless staring, he looked away, forced his heartbeat down, and took a side route, quickening his pace.

He’d never been sure whether the city had changed, or whether something inside him had.

But he remembered the moment his “normal life” slipped away: a bright, sunny morning two months ago. He’d opened his front door and gone to the little corner market for a few oranges.

That was the last time he ever opened his own front door.

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

He’d tried to make sense of it. Maybe it was transmigration—he’d stepped through his doorway into a parallel world that looked almost like his hometown. The passage had collapsed the instant he crossed, leaving no way back.

Or maybe it was an aberration—something had happened to him, some invisible contamination that made him different, and his eyes started catching what lay beneath the surface. Maybe he still lived in the same city, and it was only his perception that had shifted. Familiar things had simply become unrecognizable.

In the end, it didn’t matter.

He couldn’t return to the ordinary world he remembered. This strange, enormous city was like a forest with no borders, locking a bewildered drifter deeper and deeper among its tangled branches. Two months wasn’t nearly enough time to understand the rules of this place.

He’d only just managed to adapt—to carve out something that resembled a daily life.

And at least, in this Boundary City that no longer matched his memory, he was still Yu Sheng. He had a legal ID. A valid address. Savings that weren’t much, but weren’t nothing. Even a way to earn a living, flimsy as it felt.

If this was transmigration, then he’d been spared the three classic disasters: Who am I? Where am I? And how do I get an identification card?

In a modern city with a complete population system, those questions could ruin you fast. An unregistered person didn’t last long before someone noticed.

Of course, there were worse places to land. A lawless other world might solve the paperwork problem—and replace it with the problem of being chopped up as a spy, chopped up as an invader, chopped up as a monster from underground, or chopped up and stewed as a goblin’s dinner in some cave.

With those useless thoughts spinning in his head, Yu Sheng slipped down the worn side lane beside the commercial street, taking the detour home.

The sky darkened further, and as the gloom deepened, the not-quite-right things began to show themselves more and more.

At the edge of his vision, shaky reflections crawled across the mottled outer walls of old buildings. A nimble cat sprang out of a shadowspawn clinging to a wall, hopped lightly onto a beam of light that came from nowhere, and meowed twice in his direction.

Then it melted—like a drop of ink in water—and fell with the first raindrops, splattering into scattered droplets on the ground.

The rain started earlier than he’d expected.

The wind turned sharp and cold, the chill almost solid as it slipped into the gaps of his clothes. Yu Sheng clicked his tongue, lifted the shopping bag over his head, and hurried faster.

If he hadn’t tried to avoid the shadow under the streetlamp, he could’ve taken the main road and gotten home sooner. Even if that old house unsettled him, it was still a roof and four walls.

Thinking of the shadowspawn again made him grit his teeth.

He’d learned by now that most of the strange things he saw were harmless—as long as he didn’t provoke them. They ignored him the way ordinary people ignored them.

Even so, he still avoided anything that looked too cursed.

And the detour was starting to feel like a mistake.

It kept getting colder.

For a rainstorm, the temperature was absurd.

His breath came out as pale mist. Raindrops struck like tiny nails—hard, freezing, sharp enough to sting wherever they hit. Underfoot, the ground began to glaze, turning into a slick mirror.

Unease slammed into him.

Something was wrong—very wrong. Even in this bizarre city, he’d never experienced anything like this.

This wasn’t like the shadowspawn—at worst, unsettling to look at.

This felt like malice.

The rain itself felt malicious.

Yu Sheng jerked his head up. A moment ago, there had been pedestrians. Now the lane was empty. In the narrow alleyway, he was the only one left.

No voices. No footsteps. The distant lights turned hazy, unreal. The intersection at the end of his view seemed to drift closer and farther away, as if something were warping the space between.

All around him were sealed buildings and freezing rain.

It was as if the whole world was raining only for him.

He sucked in a breath and sprinted for the nearest doorway—an old iron door, probably the back entrance of a ground-floor shop. He didn’t care what it led to. He just needed shelter. Someone. Anything.

Because the raindrops were beginning to gleam with a razor edge, and the temperature had fallen so low that every breath stabbed his lungs like needles.

He reached the door in a few strides and slapped it hard.

“Is anyone—”

His voice cut off.

His palm struck the wall.

The door was painted on.

The nearby windows were painted on too.

A soft skittering sound came from behind him.

Yu Sheng turned his head slowly.

From the mirror-smooth ground, something misshapen began to rise. It gathered itself out of pitch-black shadowspawn, took shape as if poured into a mold, and stared at him with cold indifference.

A frog.

Nearly a meter tall. Its head was packed with countless eyes. Its body reflected the frozen rain filling the sky, glittering like glass.

The frog opened its mouth.

A tongue shot out—straight for his heart.

“Holy—”

Yu Sheng moved on pure instinct. Before the curse could fully leave his mouth, he threw himself sideways and yanked an extendable baton from his bag. He stepped in, twisted his waist, lowered his center of gravity, and lunged as if he could beat the thing back—

The frog’s tongue snapped at an impossible angle midair.

It punched through Yu Sheng’s back and burst out of his chest.

Yu Sheng blinked, stunned.

The tongue protruded from his ribs. At its tip, skewered and still beating wildly, was his heart.

“…Fuck it,” he thought bitterly. “That’s mine.”

Then he died.