In 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, and this ordinariness was destined to continue into the foreseeable future—until the day his life would come to an unremarkable end.
Yes, that was what he always believed—yet those days now seem to belong to the distant past.
The sky was overcast, the gloomy clouds, like thick cotton, slowly spread from the northeast, enveloping the whole city with a moist air, heralding an imminent rainfall—perhaps only minutes away.
Carrying the vegetables and condiments he had just bought from the supermarket, Yu Sheng hurried through the streets, rushing home under the increasingly dim sky.
As he passed by a shop, he stopped subconsciously, gazing at the sign at the entrance for several seconds before reluctantly moving on.
The number of pedestrians began to thin; the vast city seemed to quiet down under the atmosphere of the impending rain. Yu Sheng raised his eyes to the commercial street ahead, illuminated by the dim lights of storefronts. Despite the familiarity, an ineffable sense of strangeness inevitably rose from within.
Yes, strangeness—for over twenty years he had lived in this city. However, this enormous, seemingly boundless "Boundary City" had become a very unfamiliar place for him.
This city was not the "real" one he remembered. Though some parts were remarkably similar, many others seemed off. The city he grew up in wasn't this colossal; he remembered that the building in the city center was supposed to be the Bo Yuan Building, not the "Council Tower" now, the shop at the corner of Si Yuan Street was once a wall, and his real home wasn't the large yet decrepit house deep in the old district, on the brink of collapse.
More importantly, there were too many... "unusual" things in this city, which weren't supposed to be there. This included, but wasn't limited to, old-fashioned telephone booths that would randomly appear at certain intersections, looking like they belonged to the last century, steam locomotive heads traveling over rooftops at night, empty classrooms from which reading aloud could be heard continuously, and...
Standing under the streetlight on a rain-threatening evening, a tall and thin pitch-black silhouette, as if an electric pole, loomed over.
Yu Sheng looked up, staring intently at the streetlight not too far away. A humanoid figure, stiff as a pole, stood there, over three to four meters tall, its top a featureless dark face. This shadow seemed to notice him as well, but it just stood rigidly, confronting Yu Sheng's gaze from afar.
Hurried pedestrians passed under this tall, thin silhouette as if no one noticed this eerie presence, some even walking right through the shadow without any effect.
Only Yu Sheng could see it.
So after several seconds of meaningless staring, he looked away, suppressed his pounding heart, and hurriedly took another route to walk away.
Yu Sheng was never quite sure whether it was the city that had suddenly changed or something had changed within him. However, he clearly remembered that that ordinary, normal life, he recalled from memory, had drifted far from him on a sunny morning two months ago.
He remembered that on that bright and clear morning, he pushed open the door of his home to go to the local supermarket and buy some oranges.
That was the last time he opened "his home's door." Since then, he had never seen that home from his memory again.
He had analyzed it before, perhaps this was some sort of "dimensional travel." He pushed open the front door and stepped into another parallel world, eerily similar to his homeland, and he could no longer find the door that would take him back to the original world because the channels of time and space collapsed the moment he crossed the threshold.
Another possibility was that a "mutation" had occurred within him. At the moment of stepping out the door or perhaps at some point afterward, due to some unknown influence, he had become "unusual" and so his eyes began to see certain "things" hidden beneath the surface. He was still living in the same familiar place, but he could no longer see those familiar things.
But all these analyses were meaningless.
In any case, he couldn't return to the "ordinary and normal world" of his memory; this strange and gigantic city was like a boundless forest entrapping a bewildered drifter in its sinister, interwoven branches and vines, and in just two short months, it wasn't enough time for Yu Sheng to uncover the secrets of this "forest."
In fact, he had only just begun to adapt to that familiar-yet-strange "new home" and barely manage to reclaim a "regular life."
Fortunately, in this strangely different Boundary City, he was still "Yu Sheng," with legitimate identification documents, a legal and valid address, plus some savings and an unreliable livelihood—if this was indeed some sort of "dimensional travel," at least he didn't have to face the three major problems most transmigrators encounter: "Who am I, where am I, where do I get my ID card issued"?
Considering that this is an orderly modern metropolis, the aforementioned problems become particularly pertinent. After all, modern society has a comprehensive population management system; it's not easy for a transmigrator to shed the status of an undocumented migrant in such a city.
Of course, if looked at from another angle, traveling to a chaotically ordered old society or a lawless alternate dimension might have other inconveniences—such as being chopped for being suspected as an enemy spy, being chopped for alien invasion, being chopped for emerging from the ground as an evil creature, or being stewed by goblins in a cave as temporary rations...
With these random musings suddenly popping into his head, Yu Sheng walked through the old path next to the commercial street, heading towards "home" by another route.
The sky turned increasingly gloomy, and perhaps because of this deepening gloom, those "unusual" things began to slowly increase.
In the periphery of Yu Sheng's vision, shaking figures reflected on the mottled old walls of the buildings along the street. An agile cat leaped from the shadow on the wall, gracefully climbed onto an inexplicable ray of light, meowed twice in Yu Sheng's direction, then dissolved along with the raindrops, splashing water droplets onto the ground.
The rain began to fall, earlier than expected.
The wind was now chillier; the cold air, tangible, seemed to whirl into the gaps of his clothes.
Yu Sheng clicked his tongue, with no other choice but to hold his shopping bag over his head, quickly hastening his pace.
If it weren't for avoiding the shadow under that street lamp, he could have taken the main road and gotten home faster—although that house was somewhat strange and eerie, at least it provided shelter from the wind and rain.
Remembering the shadow under the street lamp, Yu Sheng felt a twinge of annoyance.
From experience, he knew that most of the odd things he saw were basically harmless, at least they would ignore him just as ordinary people did if he didn't provoke them. But even though he knew this, he still instinctively avoided those things that seemed overly sinister—however, it now seemed taking a detour today wasn't a good idea.
It was getting colder and colder.
For rain, this was unnaturally cold.
Yu Sheng found his breath slowly turning into condensed ice mist, the falling raindrops felt like sharp nails hammering down, hard and icy, painfully striking him.
And the ground was gradually turning into a smooth, reflective mirror under the freezing rain.
A wave of great unease instantly alerted Yu Sheng, he realized something was very wrong, extraordinarily so, even for this bizarre city, this was the first time he had encountered it.
Unlike the usually slightly unsightly "shadows" he was used to seeing, this time he felt… malice.
This rain had malice.
He suddenly looked up, only to see that the path, which had a few pedestrians earlier, was now completely empty, he was the only one left in the not so wide alley.
Not a single person was in sight, the distant lights were now vague and illusory, the intersection at the end of his vision seemed to be blocked by something, now distant, now close; aside from the cold, enclosed buildings, only the frosty rain remained.
He felt as if the entire world was raining just for him.
Yu Sheng suddenly took a deep breath and hurried towards the closest house, an old iron door stood there, apparently the back door of some store—whatever it was, he needed to quickly find someone to help him.
Because the raindrops in the rain were already showing a sharp, blade-like quality, and the temperature had dropped to the point where every breath brought a piercing pain in his lungs.
After just a few short steps, Yu Sheng reached the door, raised his hand, and slapped it heavily: "Is anyone…"
His eyes widened, voice abruptly cut off.
His hand had slapped against the wall, the door was painted on it.
The nearby windows were also painted on the wall.
A rustling sound came from nearby.
Yu Sheng slowly turned his head towards the direction of the sound.
In the rain of ice that fell like blades, a weird-looking thing was slowly rising from the mirror-like water surface and, gaining solidity from the pitch-black shadow, indifferently watched Yu Sheng.
It was a frog, almost a meter tall, its head densely covered with eyes, its body reflecting the vast freezing rain.
The frog opened its mouth, a sharp tongue shot straight toward the prey's heart.
"F**k you damn…"
Yu Sheng was eloquent, with quick reflexes, the curse had barely left his lips when his body had already instinctively reacted—he suddenly dodged to the side, and took out a swing stick he carried for self-defense from his pocket, stepping forward and twisting his body with a lunge...
The frog's tongue made a sharp turn in mid-air, piercing through the position of Yu Sheng's heart from his back.
Yu Sheng: "…?"
He blinked, watching the frog's tongue stretching out from his chest, a heart pulsating rapidly at its tip.
"…Damn it, that thing is mine…"
He thought for a moment, and cursed in his mind.
Then he died.