异界旅馆

第 1 章 雨

For over twenty years of his life, Yusheng had always believed he was just an ordinary person living an ordinary life, doing ordinary things. He thought that this ordinariness was bound to continue into the foreseeable future—until the day his ordinary life would come to an ordinary end.

Yes, that's what he'd always believed—until those days seemed like they were long gone.

The sky was overcast, heavy clouds spreading from the northeast like thick cotton batting, gradually blanketing the entire city. The air was saturated with moisture, and the promise of rain was brewing in the atmosphere. It seemed the rain would start falling in about ten minutes.

Carrying a bag of groceries and seasonings he had just bought from the supermarket, Yusheng hurried through the streets among the pedestrians, making his way back home in the ever-darkening twilight.

As he passed a shop, he instinctively stopped in his tracks, staring at the store's sign. He gazed at it for several seconds before tearing his eyes away and continuing to walk briskly forward.

The streets grew increasingly empty, and the vast city seemed to quiet down in anticipation of the coming rain. Yusheng lifted his gaze to the commercial street ahead, illuminated by the lights of ground-floor shops. Even though it was a familiar scene, an inexplicable sense of unfamiliarity welled up from deep inside him.

Yes, unfamiliarity—that's what it was. He had lived in this city for over twenty years, but now this massive, seemingly boundless city known as the "Boundary City" felt utterly foreign to him.

Because this city wasn't the "real" one he remembered. Some places looked similar, but most felt subtly off—he remembered the Boundary City he grew up in wasn't this enormous. The skyscraper in the city center should have been called Boyuan Tower, not the "Council Tower" it was now. The store at the corner of Siyuan Street used to be just a wall, and his actual home wasn't the enormous, dilapidated old house deep in the city's old district.

And more importantly, there were many things in this city now that seemed... "off." Things like the vintage phone booths with an art style from the previous century that randomly appeared at street corners, the steam locomotives driving over rooftops at night, the empty classrooms that echoed with the sounds of lessons, and...

On evenings like this, right before the rain started, under the streetlamp, a tall, thin, pitch-black shadow.

Yusheng looked up and stared hard at the streetlamp not far away. A figure, thin and reed-like, stood there stiffly. It had a body that was three or four meters tall, topped by a black face with no discernible features. The shadow seemed to notice him too, but it remained standing stiffly, its eyes locking with Yusheng's from a distance.

Pedestrians hurried past underneath the shadow as if no one else could see it. Some even passed right through the eerie figure without any reaction, utterly unaffected.

Only Yusheng could see it.

So, after a few seconds of pointless staring, he averted his eyes, suppressing the quickening of his heartbeat. He hastily changed course and quickened his pace down a different path.

Yusheng had never been sure whether the city itself had changed, or if he had, but he distinctly remembered that his ordinary, normal life had slipped away on a morning two months ago.

He remembered that on that bright and sunny morning, he had opened the door to his house, intending to walk to the corner store to buy a few oranges.

That was the last time he had ever opened the door to what he remembered as his home. Since that day, he had never seen that familiar home again.