(So this was Lilina's home turf. High-energy all the way...)
Entering the Fourth District was simple. There was a military outpost at the border of the Eastern District. You could undergo spatial displacement through that outpost, and afterward, you would enter the Transformed Shadow City from the normal Shadow City.
One second ago, behind me had still been bustling traffic, streams of pedestrians, and the lively prosperity of a city. The moment I crossed the outpost's displacement gate, everything around me abruptly fell silent, as if the entire world had receded from me. The formerly clear, gleaming sky was covered by a chaotic gray haze, and the light around us dimmed with it. The Fourth District's sky was monotonous, because there was no need to prepare any relaxing scenery for the prisoners here. I looked up. There was no sun, moon, or starlight in that dull gray haze. Gray—the only color—covered my entire field of vision with absolute uniformity. Every building and street around us twisted, connected, and overlapped in bizarre ways. Cracked roads twisted upward toward the sky. Tangled buildings bent back through the air at impossible angles before half-burying themselves in the ground. Several hundred meters away, a skyscraper slowly rotated as it floated overhead. Half of it had shattered apart, sliced into countless neat, smooth little cubes, and lights flickered in and out within those severed blocks. Beside the only flat stretch of road beneath my feet, a neon sign poked half its body out of a tar pit at an angle. Written on it in blood-red letters were: Welcome to the Fourth District.
This was the scenery of the Inner City District.
"Lilina's terrible taste really is something..." I looked at the absurd, distorted things around me. They had been painstakingly shaped into nightmares from reality,