Chapter 24: Scenery in the Mirror

This room wasn't like this before!

Yu Sheng reacted instantly—he remembered clearly what the room that once held Irene looked like: empty, devoid of any furnishings, without even a single chair, with nothing but a solitary oil painting hanging on the wall directly facing the door...

It wasn't like this, filled with all sorts of furniture, with a mirror hanging on the wall facing the door.

Doubt and a sliver of unease surfaced in his heart, yet Yu Sheng did not sense any aura of danger in the room.

Of course, he knew that this so-called "sense of crisis" was difficult to explain, but after several near-death experiences, he truly felt he had developed a certain perception of danger, and here... the room before him felt safe.

Hesitating at the doorway for a few seconds, Yu Sheng stepped inside.

Everything in the room appeared perfectly normal. No monster wielding a pitchfork suddenly lunged from a corner, nor did a brazier of fire fall from above just because he stepped in. The sunlight outside was pleasant, and the air in the room was fresh, devoid of any scent of decay or suspicious, fishy odors.

Yu Sheng inspected the room, confirming that the furnishings were merely ordinary items, before finally approaching the mirror facing the door.

In his impression, mirrors were generally not placed directly opposite a door. According to his understanding, aside from Feng Shui considerations, another reason was that a mirror facing a door could easily startle someone entering the room at night.

However, he wasn't sure if similar superstitions existed in this "Boundary City."

He only felt that this mirror facing the door gave him a sense of... eeriness.

And this eeriness wasn't just because Irene's oil painting had originally hung here, but because the scene within the mirror... looked strange.

It was an indescribable oddity. The scene reflected in the mirror was actually quite normal—it was simply the current state of the room—but after staring intently for a long time, Yu Sheng couldn't find the source of that strange feeling. Instead, the more he looked, the more he doubted himself—what exactly was wrong?

Was there a subtle shift in the size or position of the objects in the mirror that was difficult to detect with the naked eye? Was there a dissonance in the light and shadow? Or... had something appeared in the mirror that wasn't in the room?

Yu Sheng pondered for a moment, then reached out and lightly brushed his finger against the surface of the mirror.

A cold sensation traveled up his finger, and ripples like water spread out from where he touched the glass. In the blink of an eye, the reflection in the mirror shattered along with the ripples!

Yu Sheng's eyes widened instantly, and he instinctively took a half-step back. In less than a second, the mirror had turned pitch black—the reflected image of the room dissolved and melted into those ripples, and a darkness as thick as ink eventually filled the entire frame. As if it had swallowed everything, it slowly writhed, surged, and rotated before Yu Sheng's eyes.

Then, new things gradually emerged from that darkness. Suppressing the unease in his heart, Yu Sheng took a step forward to look closely. Gradually, the darkness, which felt like a heavy black veil, receded before his eyes, allowing him to see the scene deep within the mirror

A doll—but it wasn't Irene, it was a stranger—lay broken amidst ruins that had lost their original form. Her limbs were snapped, her clothes were tattered, and she was covered in wounds, as if she had endured a brutal battle and finally died from exhaustion.

In his shock, Yu Sheng widened his eyes, trying desperately to see more through the mirror. As if responding to his thought, the image in the darkness began to move. Yu Sheng noticed that the perspective presented by the mirror was pulling back and tilting, revealing a much broader panoramic view—

He saw the surroundings of the fallen doll, saw even more massive ruins, and saw structures resembling classical columns and flying eaves. Those structures were all broken and collapsed, sinking into a dark, mud-like chaos. Many fragments of the doll's broken limbs were scattered around, as if conveying a message to him

Everything here had been destroyed by this battle.

Suddenly, a sentence Irene had told him earlier echoed in Yu Sheng's mind

"...Living dolls are blessed. I'm much better at fighting in the Otherworld than those so-called Investigators or Spirit Detectors..."

"Are these 'living dolls' really that good at fighting...?" Yu Sheng couldn't help but mutter to himself.

But even if they were that capable, the doll in the mirror was still dead. Something even more powerful than her had killed her—as the perspective shifted, Yu Sheng saw the "enemy" that had killed the doll.

A... massive shadow. Yu Sheng didn't know what it was; he only felt that it was enormous, nearly ten times the size of the doll. Its silhouette was roughly humanoid, yet it seemed to have twisted, overlapping wings on its back. It, too, lay amidst the ruins. Part of its massive body seemed to have melted like mud, merging with the chaos surrounding the ruins and with the doll's scattered limb fragments. The rest of its structure was riddled with distortions and damage.

Yu Sheng didn't know if the distortions and damage on that giant shadow were caused by the doll or if it had always looked that way—after all, the thing was inherently quite abstract in appearance.

But he could guess one thing: the doll and that winged, massive shadow had likely perished together.

Just as Yu Sheng wanted to see more details, the image before his eyes suddenly rippled like water once again.

Everything in the depths of the darkness shattered and dissolved in an instant. The heavy, curtain-like darkness surged upward and then receded toward the edges of the frame. In a flash, the mirror before Yu Sheng returned to being an ordinary mirror, reflecting the room.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at this scene, then tapped and touched the mirror several times, but he couldn't trigger any more anomalies.

What on earth was that just now?

Perhaps because he had been dealing with abnormal things for the past two days, Yu Sheng felt his capacity for acceptance had increased significantly. At this moment, he didn't find the eerie scene particularly frightening; instead, he felt a profound curiosity about what he had seen.

Was what appeared in the mirror something that had actually happened in the past? Who was that dead doll? What was that massive shadow that died with her? Where were those ruins? And why... did all of this appear in this house, right before his eyes?

Yu Sheng thought with a furrowed brow, and he couldn't help but think of another question

Did the scene recorded in the mirror have anything to do with Irene?

The dead doll did not look much like Irene. Although her face was unrecognizable in death, at least that striking blonde hair was completely different from Irene's. Yet, for some reason, when he saw that doll, Yu Sheng couldn't help but think of the girl sealed in the oil painting, currently watching TV on the first floor.

After a moment, Yu Sheng ended his contemplation. He looked at the mirror on the wall, reached out to grasp the frame, and applied a bit of force, trying to see if he could take it down and move it.

The mirror didn't budge; it was as solid as if it had been cast into the wall.

After a few attempts, Yu Sheng chose to give up.

He turned to walk toward the door, but before leaving the room, he suddenly turned back, his gaze sweeping quickly across the entire house.

The furnishings were still the same, and the mirror had not changed at all.

Yu Sheng frowned and closed the door.

Two or three seconds later, he suddenly pushed the door open again, as if trying to catch the room off guard.

There was no change in the room; it was still the same.

Yu Sheng stood at the doorway, gripping the handle, poking his head into the room and observing suspiciously everywhere, gradually feeling like a madman.

After confirming repeatedly, he finally stopped messing with the door.

But he didn't go back to his bedroom. Instead, he ran down the stairs with heavy footsteps and went to the dining room.

Hearing the commotion from nearby, Irene, who was watching TV at the dining table, poked her head out to look toward the edge of the painting: "Eh? Yu Sheng, didn't you go to sleep? Insomnia? I don't tell bedtime stories, you know..."

She still had that carefree and overly familiar manner.

Yu Sheng didn't speak. He simply sat opposite Irene and watched her intently, as if he were carefully observing something.

This finally made the doll in the painting feel a bit awkward.

"What are you looking at me for..." Irene shrank her neck. "I'm telling you, I know I'm pretty, but you have no future with a 2D character..."

The topic Yu Sheng had been brewing all the way there was instantly deflated by Irene's single sentence.

"Ahem, I'm talking about something serious!" He had to cough twice to awkwardly steer the conversation back on track. "Do you remember what the room you were hanging in before looked like?"

"I remember," Irene replied naturally after a moment of thought. "There was nothing, just empty. You could see a door right across from it, and there was wallpaper—the wallpaper in the corner is moldy and peeling, and you haven't even fixed it."

Yu Sheng nodded: Good. At least on this matter, Irene's memory was consistent with his own.

"Second question: do you remember a place—it looked like a set of ruins, with many classical columns, collapsed stone walls, and flying eaves? The entire ruin was 'submerged' in darkness, and there was a doll—don't worry about whether it was you or not, just that there was a doll dead in the ruins, and she died miserably, with limbs scattered everywhere..."

Irene instantly shrank her neck: "That sounds really scary."

"Forget whether it's scary or not, just tell me if you have any impression of this scene."

"No."

Irene answered without hesitation.

(End of Chapter)