An era where black smoke spewing from factory chimneys replaces oxygen to choke the respiratory system, and the lives of all human kind are stacked high, destined to be replaced by a single cogwheel. The sound of workers' clogs thumping and crawling over stone floors fills the streets, and the river, stained with wastewater, nobly bestows a curse of death upon all who dare touch it—the tangled lives of the metropolis... and the few bourgeois who hold the strings of those tens of thousands of lives in their hands.

However, that was a slightly different story from this place, where the blue sky still hangs without fail every morning. They say those who left the countryside live forced skin-to-skin between concrete, but the misfortune of others—especially that which is never witnessed and only barely caught through rumors—tends not to stay long within an individual. The hardship of someone who reached the city was, of course, their own share of pain, and the traditional human way of survival was to be grateful that one's own life wasn't like that right now.

Looking up from the village, the vast wilderness was visible. Occasionally, the thought occurred that the place, abandoned by both city and country, was quite pitiful, but that was all. The reason for heading out that day was pure curiosity. Life in the countryside was, of course, as peaceful and monotonous as city dwellers might covet, but as someone who had dedicated a lifetime to this land, those dreadfully monotone days had long since become tiresome. If one mentioned going for a walk in the wasteland, strange looks would follow a hundred percent of the time. Of course, there was nothing they could do, so there was never a moment of hesitation.