Q: How can you be sure you haven’t become a completely inhuman monster?

A: When other people still see you as human.

When Ye Zhuangyan met a wanderer in the sewer.

When the wanderer noticed a girl who had suddenly appeared.

In just a few seconds, his eyes shifted from numbness to surprise, then from surprise to delight.

The wanderer swallowed, then let out a leering whistle and looked the girl up and down.

Beneath the dim yellow lights, the girl’s perfect curves stood out. The hem of her white dress fell to her ankles, leaving her clean, pale feet, ankles, and calves exposed.

Those were the first things the wanderer noticed—and the things that captivated him.

Seeing the other man’s lecherous expression, Ye Zhuangyan understood that, to ordinary humans, she looked the same as she did to herself.

Not like the writhing mass of flesh described in Saya’s Song.

At least, on the surface.

Still, the best thing of all was this:

In Ye Zhuangyan’s own eyes, humans were still humans, not “jelly.” That alone was more than enough.

Ye Zhuangyan looked at the other man’s vaguely stiffening… part, and at the way he seemed lost in some kind of fantasy.

Ye Zhuangyan decided it’d be better not to disturb him.

Ye Zhuangyan had turned a corner and run into him. They were about ten meters apart.

So slipping out of his sight was as simple as turning the corner.

The girl disappeared.

When the wanderer came to his senses, the girl who’d briefly appeared beneath the dim yellow light was nothing more than a beautiful dream.

To the wanderer, her existence might have been a figment of his imagination—only this time, it had been so vivid, hazy, and deeply etched in his mind.

All he could think was that he’d had a dream.

After all, how could anyone really meet a beautiful girl in a sewer?

…

Looking at the moss-covered sewer, Ye Zhuangyan wondered what the sewers back on her previous life’s Earth had been like.

The sewers in this world felt more like an underground city.

The surroundings varied from one area to another.

But for the most part, a long river of wastewater ran down the middle, with uneven, dangerous ground on either side.

When Ye Zhuangyan had first entered the sewer, the wastewater’s stench had been overpowering. She suspected that her soul was affecting this body to some extent, making her recoil from the smell.

Well, it was just unpleasant. Not unbearable.

Ordinary people who stayed in a place like this for long would be almost certain to get sick. And that was on top of the damp and generally miserable conditions.

There weren’t any wanderers around here.

That was probably one reason the abandoned laboratory had gone undiscovered for so long.

But Ye Zhuangyan’s body was completely immune to this environment.

At least, that was her instinct.

As Ye Zhuangyan headed toward the outskirts, the stench gradually faded. In places with less moss and drier surroundings, crude, hollowed-out cubic shelters began to appear.

A raised patch of earth and rock served as a bed. Trash left behind by humans could also be found inside the shelters from time to time.

Including the wanderer she’d met earlier, this was the fourth person Ye Zhuangyan had found living in the sewer.

The four wanderers living in this underground city hadn’t told Ye Zhuangyan anything about how developed this world was.

They’d only confirmed that her senses were more or less human, rather than picking up some bizarre mass of flesh, tentacles, or eyeballs.

And whatever the circumstances, at least the other humans saw Ye Zhuangyan as human.

This was a much better start than turning into a mass of flesh.

As for gender, Ye Zhuangyan was a monster now, and her sense of gender seemed to have blurred under the influence of her body. At least for now, she didn’t feel any aversion to it.

As long as she didn’t look inhuman, that was enough.

Of course, getting used to her body didn’t mean she truly thought of herself as a girl.

Deep down, Ye Zhuangyan still thought of herself as male.

But she often forgot that, biologically speaking, the body inhabited by the monster was still a young girl’s.

…

“Mm… This sewer system is so complicated…”

Ye Zhuangyan headed down an unfamiliar passage, thinking as she went.

Thanks to this body, Ye Zhuangyan could easily remember anything she wanted to and construct a proportional map of it in her mind.

If the entire sewer system was a web, Ye Zhuangyan had only explored one percent of it so far.

Her main goal was to find an exit from the sewer that led to the surface.

Generally speaking, the more wanderers living in an area of the sewer, the more likely it was that an exit to the outside could be found there.

But whenever Ye Zhuangyan ran into humans, she had to hide herself.

She kept forgetting what she looked like, but every time she met a wanderer (they’d all been men),

their behavior reminded her that she wasn’t the male office drone she’d been in her previous life. She was a girl who wasn’t even fourteen.

Ye Zhuangyan had to guard against the malice of strangers.

Besides, a barefoot underage girl in a dress suddenly appearing around a dimly lit corner of a sewer…

That was pretty creepy.

It sounded like something straight out of an urban legend.

If someone said they’d met a barefoot girl in white in a sewer, people would probably think they were joking—or that they were crazy.

But if enough people said it, especially the wanderers who’d lived in the sewers for years, and they all described the same scene…

Then it would start to feel a little supernatural.

Still, the story would most likely end up filed away as an urban legend.

And it wouldn’t be impossible for a few curious people to team up and come here to investigate the truth behind this urban legend.

But none of that had anything to do with Ye Zhuangyan. All she wanted now was to find an exit to the surface.

When she reached another corner, Ye Zhuangyan stopped, as usual.

She’d run into people around corners many times by now, and she was getting a little more familiar with her body’s senses.

If she focused, she could amplify her senses to some extent.

Her hearing and sense of smell, for example.

Ye Zhuangyan could even hear the heartbeat of a living human or the movements of a rat from more than ten meters away.

Ye Zhuangyan crouched down, focused her attention, and began to sharpen her senses.

She waited quietly for several seconds, then heard a strange sound.

It was very faint. By the sound of it, something on four legs was moving.

The sound was so faint that whatever it was must have had soft paw pads. Ye Zhuangyan would probably have missed it if she hadn’t focused her attention.

She watched the corner in silence. Suddenly, a pair of bright blue eyes darted out of the darkness.

And then…

A cat stepped out from the dark corner…