Rain

Over the past twenty-some years of his life, Yu Sheng had always believed that he was just an ordinary person, living an ordinary life and doing ordinary things. And in the foreseeable future, this ordinariness was destined to continue—until the day his life came to an ordinary end. Yes, that was what he had always thought—but those days seemed like they had happened a very long time ago. The sky was dark and oppressive. Clouds, thick as cotton wadding, spread slowly from the northeast and covered the entire city. The air was damp, and a rain shower was brewing in that moisture. It might begin in a dozen minutes or so. Carrying vegetables and seasonings he had just bought at the supermarket, Yu Sheng slipped among the pedestrians and hurried across the street, heading toward his place under the increasingly dimming daylight. As he passed a shop, he instinctively stopped. He looked at the sign above the entrance and stared at it for several seconds before pulling his gaze away and hurrying on again. The pedestrians on the road gradually thinned. The vast city seemed to grow quiet in the atmosphere of the coming rain. Yu Sheng raised his eyes toward the commercial street ahead, lit by storefront lights. Although the scenery was familiar, an indescribable strangeness still rose unbidden in his heart. Yes, strangeness—he had lived in this city for more than twenty years, but now this absurdly huge, seemingly boundless 'Jiecheng' was a very unfamiliar place to him. Because this city was not the 'real' Jiecheng of his memory. Some places were very similar, but in many more they were only superficially the same—the right shape, but subtly wrong. The Jiecheng he had grown up in had not been this enormous. He remembered that the building in the city center should have been called the Boyuan Building, not the 'Council Tower' that stood there now. He remembered that the shop at the Siyuan Street intersection had originally been a wall, and that his own home was not that enormous, dilapidated old house deep in the old district—the kind that looked ready to collapse at any moment. More importantly, the city in his memory had never contained so many... 'off' things. They included, but were not limited to, old-fashioned telephone booths that appeared at random on street corners, as if they had stepped out of a previous century; steam locomotive engines that ran across rooftops in the dead of night; empty classrooms where the sound of reading never stopped; and... On the verge of rain, in the dusk, a pitch-black shadow stood beneath a streetlamp, as thin and tall as a utility pole. Yu Sheng raised his head and stared intently at the streetlamp not far away. A human-shaped outline, thin as a hemp stalk, stood there stiffly. At the top of its body, three or four meters tall, was a pitch-black face with no discernible features. The shadow seemed to notice him too, but it only stood there rigidly, staring back at him from a distance. Hurried pedestrians passed beneath that tall, thin shadow as if no one noticed the strange thing standing beside the streetlamp. Some even walked straight through the shadow without any effect. Only Yu Sheng could see it. So after a few seconds of meaningless staring, he withdrew his gaze, suppressed his pounding heartbeat, and hurried off along another route. Yu Sheng had never been quite sure whether the city had suddenly changed, or whether he had changed. But he remembered clearly that the ordinary, normal life in his memory had left him on a certain morning two months ago— He remembered that on that sunny morning, he had pushed open the front door of his home, intending to go to the small supermarket at the intersection to buy some oranges. That was the last time he pushed open 'his own front door.' After that, he never saw the home from his memory again. He had analyzed it before. Perhaps this was some kind of 'transmigration.' He had opened his front door and stepped into another parallel world that was merely similar to his hometown. It was just that he could never again find the door that would take him back to his original world—the passage through space and time had collapsed the moment he stepped across the threshold. Another possibility was that a 'mutation' had occurred within him. When he stepped out the door—or perhaps at some later moment—some unknown influence had made him 'different from ordinary people.' His eyes had begun to see certain 'things' hidden beneath the surface. He was still living in the place he knew, except that he could no longer see the things he knew... But these analyses were meaningless. Regardless, he could not return to the 'ordinary and normal world' of his memory. This unfamiliar and enormous city was like a boundless forest, trapping a bewildered drifter layer upon layer among its sinister, interwoven branches and vines. Two months had been far too short a time for Yu Sheng to uncover the secrets of this 'forest.' In fact, he had only just managed to adapt, roughly, to that familiar yet unfamiliar 'new home,' barely restoring a 'daily life' here. Fortunately, in this Jiecheng, which clashed so completely with his memory, he was still 'Yu Sheng.' He had proper identification, a legally valid address, some savings—neither abundant nor meager—and a way of making a living that didn't look entirely on the up and up. If this really was some kind of 'transmigration,' at least he did not have to face the three great problems most transmigrators faced: 'Who am I? Where am I? Where the hell do I go to get an ID card?' Considering that this was an orderly modern metropolis, those problems seemed especially important. After all, modern society had a well-developed population management system. For a transmigrator to shake off the status of an undocumented person in a city like this would not be easy. Of course, from another angle, transmigrating into a chaotic old society or a barbaric alien world might bring other troubles—for example, being taken for an enemy spy and chopped up, being taken for an alien invader and chopped up, being taken for some evil creature crawling out of the ground and chopped up, or being caught by goblins in a cave and chopped up to stew as emergency rations... As Yu Sheng turned these strange associations—appearing from who knew where—over in his mind, he crossed an old alley beside the commercial street and walked toward 'home' by another route. The sky grew darker, and perhaps precisely because of that darkness, those 'off' things slowly became more numerous. At the edge of Yu Sheng's vision, some swaying human figures were reflected on the mottled, weathered exterior wall of a building by the road. An agile cat leaped out from a shadow on the wall, lightly climbed a beam of light falling from somewhere unknown, meowed twice toward Yu Sheng, then melted and scattered along with the raindrops, splashing into little blossoms of water as it struck the ground. The rain had begun, a little earlier than expected. The wind turned cold. The chill swirled as if it had substance, slipping through the gaps in his clothes. Yu Sheng clicked his tongue. He had no choice but to hold the shopping bags over his head and quicken his pace. If he had not been trying to avoid the black shadow beneath the streetlamp, he could have taken the main road and gotten home faster—though that house was also somewhat unfamiliar and eerie, it was at least a place that could shield him from wind and rain. Thinking of the black shadow beneath the streetlamp, Yu Sheng felt a certain regret. From experience, he knew that most of the strange things he saw were basically harmless. At least, as long as one did not provoke them, they would ignore him just as ordinary people ignored them. But even though he knew this, he still instinctively avoided those things that looked too sinister—except now it seemed that taking this detour today had not been a good idea. It was growing colder. For a rain shower, the cold was absurd. Yu Sheng noticed that his exhaled breath was slowly turning into a frozen mist. The raindrops falling from the sky struck like sharp nails, hard and icy, stinging painfully. And the ground was gradually turning into a smooth mirror beneath this freezing rain. A huge unease snapped Yu Sheng to full alertness. He realized something was wrong, very wrong. Even in this strange city, he had never seen this before. Unlike the usual 'shadows,' which were at most a bit unsightly, this time he sensed... malice. This rain was malicious. He jerked his head up, only to find that the small road, which had earlier held a few scattered pedestrians, was now empty. He was alone in the not very wide street. Not a single person could be seen. The distant lights had grown blurry and unreal. The intersection at the end of his vision seemed to drift far and near by turns, as if something blocked the way. Around him, apart from the cold, enclosed buildings, there was only rain—cold rain. It felt as if the entire world were raining for him alone. Yu Sheng took a sharp breath and ran swiftly toward the nearest house. An old iron gate stood there, apparently the back door of some storefront—whatever it was, he needed to find someone to help him quickly. Because the water droplets in the rain had begun to gleam with the sharpness of blades, and the temperature around him had dropped so low that every breath brought a needle-like pain to his lungs. In a few steps he was at the door, and he pounded hard on it. 'Is anyone—' His eyes widened, and his voice cut off. His hand 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 nearby. Yu Sheng slowly turned his head toward the sound. Amid the blade-like fall of freezing rain, a bizarre thing was slowly rising from the mirror-like surface of the water. It took physical form from the pitch-black shadow and stared at Yu Sheng coldly. It was a frog—a frog nearly one meter tall, its head densely covered with eyes, its body reflecting the freezing rain that filled the sky. The frog opened its mouth, and a blade-edged tongue shot straight at its prey's heart. 'F— you, you f—ing—' Yu Sheng was elegant in his choice of words and quick to react. His body reacted a beat ahead of his mouth—he jerked sharply to the side, one hand already pulling from his pocket the collapsible baton he usually carried for self-defense. He adjusted his step, twisted his waist, lowered his body, and lunged forward... The frog's tongue bent at a sharp angle in midair and pierced through the position of Yu Sheng's heart from behind. Yu Sheng: '…?' He blinked and saw the frog's tongue protruding from his chest, a heart beating rapidly at its tip. '…F—ing bastard, that thing's mine…' He thought it over for a moment, then cursed it that way in his heart. Then he died.