An era where black smoke spewing from factory chimneys replaces oxygen and chokes the lungs, and the lives of all humans are packed tightly together, each destined to be replaced by a single gear. The sound of workers' clogs clattering 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 intertwined lives of the metropolis... and the few bourgeois who hold the strings of those tens of thousands of lives.

However, that was a slightly different story from this place, where the blue sky still unfurls every morning without fail. 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 linger long within an individual. The suffering of someone who reached the city was, of course, their own burden, and the traditional human way of survival was to be grateful that one's own life wasn't like that right now.

If you looked up from the village, you could see the vast wilderness. The thought that the place, abandoned by both city and country, was quite pitiful occurred to you occasionally, but that was all. The reason you set out that day was pure curiosity. Life in the rural village was, of course, as peaceful and monotonous as city dwellers might envy, but for someone who had dedicated their life to this land, those dreadfully monotone days had long since become tiresome. Whenever you mentioned going for a walk in the wasteland, a hundred out of a hundred strange looks would follow. Of course, there was nothing they could do, so you never hesitated.