The sky was dim, the drizzle hazy, and the entire street was soaked.
It was already early morning, just when people were getting up for work.
There seemed to be no gunfights in Birdsong City that morning. At home, an office worker named Ueno Mizuna put on her safety shorts, then took out a pair of black stockings and slowly pulled them up from her feet to the tops of her thighs. She slipped on a straight skirt and wore an ordinary white blouse on top.
A glance at the wall clock showed it was already six thirty. Mizuna silently calculated the commute from her residential complex to her company and had no choice but to hurry downstairs.
With a ding, the elevator came to a smooth stop on the first floor. Its doors opened, and she pushed through the entrance door to see the Fountain Pool in the Garden Residential Complex.
The fountain statue in the Fountain Pool was a monster with a frog's head, belly, and hands, but octopus tentacles.
She was a graphic designer at a design company and had worked on some bizarre advertisements before, but this peculiar statue was the strangest, most unsettling, most grotesque design she had ever seen.
It wasn't the nausea that gruesome pictures provoked. Simply standing there, this sculpture made people instinctively feel disgusted.
When she first rented a place in this complex and saw the statue, it had revolted her so much that she couldn't enjoy her meals all day.
But what could she do? The rent here really was low. These were already the cheapest homes in Birdsong City.
Besides, the apartment was spacious and bright, with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Rent was only five hundred yuan, with one month's deposit and one