“I’m not crazy, really!”

“You have to believe me! I’m not crazy! Everything I said is true! I really did see a monster!”

“Let go of me! Let go!”

Several doctors and nurses held the frenzied patient down with all their strength. Even with the restraints on, the patient struggled violently.

“Dr. Xu.”

“How’s the patient doing?”

Xu Heng took off his gloves and asked the young doctor beside him.

“We’ve treated the patient’s severed limb, but it’s been missing for too long, and the rain made the wound severely infected. The patient also lost too much blood, and the local nerves have died. There’s a chance we may never be able to reattach it.”

“Also, the patient seems to be having some mental issues.”

“All right. Once the patient’s injury has been treated, let the family know we recommend transferring them to psychiatry.”

Xu Heng left the operating room. A dozen seconds passed, but the other doctor kept following beside him without saying a word. Xu Heng turned and saw the hesitation on the doctor’s face.

“What is it?”

“Well… Dr. Xu, the patient is a vagrant who lives in the sewers. A private detective happened to come across him and brought him here…”

“He didn’t pay?”

“The detective covered the bill for him.”

Xu Heng’s furrowed brow relaxed.

“All right. Then take me to meet that detective.”

“Uh… the private detective left after paying.”

Xu Heng: “…”

It had been almost half a month since Ye Zhuangyan left the sewers.

Ye Zhuangyan was gradually getting used to the differences in this world.

The people around her spoke a language that wasn’t from Earth—or at least, she didn’t recognize it.

Still, somehow, she could understand it, read it, and even write it.

That was probably a gift from the original owner of this body.

And it was precisely thanks to that...

...that her human-girl appearance and ability to understand human language were such a great convenience to Ye Zhuangyan.

For the past half month, Ye Zhuangyan had mostly wandered around the forest on the outskirts of the city, the hospital, the market, and the alleys.

All the food Ye Zhuangyan had managed to get came from hunting in the forest, or from the fish heads, gills, eggs, vegetable leaves, and other scraps people threw away at the market at night.

Most of the time, though, Ye Zhuangyan hunted for food in the forest.

She’d discovered that the fresher a living thing was, the better it tasted compared with meat or vegetables that had been dead for a long time.

And eating was one of the few things that could stir any feelings in her.

Ye Zhuangyan was still an omnivore, but it seemed that she judged how tasty something was by its activity—or, to put it more mystically, its life force.

Ye Zhuangyan didn’t know how to define it exactly, but the larger a creature was, the stronger its life force—and the more abundant it was.

As a creature grew old, its life force gradually faded with the passing of time.

And when a creature died, unless it was preserved in something like sealed, refrigerated storage, its life force drained away hundreds or even thousands of times faster than when it was alive.

To Ye Zhuangyan, raw meat from something alive or freshly dead was the most delicious food.

Cooked food, no matter how delicious it was or how much it suited human tastes, just tasted awful to Ye Zhuangyan—and gave her less energy, too.

For now, she and the black cat were staying in another abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city.

As for why she wasn’t living in the abandoned warehouse...

Just thinking about how a vagrant from the sewers had followed the blood trail to the warehouse’s exit was enough to make Ye Zhuangyan feel that the place had no security at all.

Without being fully prepared, Ye Zhuangyan had no intention of casually getting involved with human society.

After all, once she entered human society, there’d be far too many unpredictable problems to deal with.

That wasn’t even getting into the differences between Ye Zhuangyan and ordinary humans when it came to food.

Even if Ye Zhuangyan entered an orphanage as a missing child, a medical examination could reveal that her body was far too different from a human’s—and expose her as a monster on the spot.

An ordinary needle couldn’t even pierce Ye Zhuangyan’s skin.

And Ye Zhuangyan wasn’t sure whether her insides were built like a human’s, either.

After all, she could grow a tail from her coccyx and scales on her face, among other strange things.

That was why learning about human society in this world was essential before Ye Zhuangyan could get involved with it.

Based on the information Ye Zhuangyan had gathered over the past half month...

This world seemed to be at roughly the same stage of development as the late twentieth century, with buildings clustered everywhere.

As for everyday life, cell phones existed, but they were the flip phones from her previous life.

Ye Zhuangyan didn’t know whether smartphones existed, but computers seemed to.

There’d been a computer in the abandoned laboratory where Ye Zhuangyan had woken up. Its screen was like a big box, bulky and awkward-looking. Unfortunately, it was broken and wouldn’t turn on.

Cars existed, too, though they looked… pretty old-fashioned.

At the same time, the city’s surveillance systems weren’t very advanced.

At least in this city, there weren’t enough surveillance cameras on the streets and in the alleys.

Most alleys had no cameras at all, especially on the outskirts, where there was simply no surveillance.

Even in many public places, the cameras had blind spots, and the footage was blurry.

So theft was pretty common.

People went missing at a relatively high rate, and children made up sixty percent of them.

Most poor newcomers and vagrants lived in the sewers, and most of them weren’t registered.

Oh, to be precise, the people here called it the Underground City.

You basically wouldn’t see a so-called slum in this city. They’d all been moved underground, where the government kept them fed with regular aid.

Most of them worked in factories, while the rest were unemployed.

That was what Ye Zhuangyan had learned about the city over the past half month.

The miserable conditions the lower classes lived in in this world made Ye Zhuangyan think, for a moment, that her life in her previous one had been heaven.

Sure, she’d been tired, and her salary had only just covered a normal life, though she could still save a little.

Sure, she’d often worked overtime voluntarily without extra pay, and sometimes they’d dock her wages over some tiny mistake.

She’d worked herself to the bone so her boss could buy a car and a house, while she rented a room just a few square meters wide and was too exhausted to even think about getting a girlfriend. It was…

Well, at least she hadn’t starved, even if she still felt like hanging someone from a lamppost.

Sure enough, whether life was good or bad was relative. There was always something better above you, and something worse below.

But there was no point thinking about that now. Ye Zhuangyan was completely dead in her previous life. She had no idea whether her body had been fished out and cremated, or sunk to the bottom to feed the fish.

Actually, Ye Zhuangyan would’ve preferred her old body to have been fed to the fish. At least then it could’ve become nourishment and returned to nature’s embrace.

Just kidding.

Though now that she’d become a monster girl, Ye Zhuangyan didn’t know how to feel amusement anymore.

Anyway, since she’d become a monster in this life, she needed to think carefully about how to survive as one.

Come to think of it, the name of this body I’m in now…

It should be Saya, right?

Then I’ll call myself Saya from now on.

That was what Saya thought.