Chapter 24: The Scene in the Mirror
This room wasn’t like this before!
Yu Sheng instantly realized something was wrong—he distinctly remembered how this room looked when it had once trapped Irene. It had been barren and empty, not a single piece of furniture in sight, not even a chair. The only thing that had adorned the room was a solitary painting hanging on the wall directly opposite the door.
But now, it was completely different. Various pieces of furniture were scattered about, and on the wall directly opposite the door hung a mirror.
Suspicion and unease stirred in his heart, but Yu Sheng didn’t sense any immediate danger within the room. He knew that this so-called “sense of crisis” was an abstract concept, but after narrowly escaping death multiple times, he had developed a faint intuition for danger. Yet, here… the room felt oddly safe.
After hesitating at the door for a few seconds, Yu Sheng stepped inside.
Everything seemed perfectly normal, and nothing strange happened the moment he crossed the threshold—no monsters wielding pitchforks leapt from the shadows, no flaming cauldrons dropped from above. The sunlight streaming through the window was warm, and the air was fresh, devoid of any foul or suspicious odors.
He meticulously inspected the room, confirming that all the furnishings were just ordinary objects. Eventually, he approached the mirror directly facing the door.
In his understanding, placing a mirror directly opposite a door was uncommon. Besides the principles of feng shui, it could easily startle anyone entering the room at night. However, he wasn’t sure whether such beliefs held any relevance in Boundary City.
Still, something about the mirror facing the door felt… unsettling.
The unease didn’t stem solely from the fact that it replaced Irene’s painting, but rather from the scene reflected within the mirror itself… it looked strange.
It was an inexplicable oddness. The reflection showed nothing but the current state of the room—completely normal. Yu Sheng scrutinized it for a long time, unable to pinpoint the source of his discomfort. The more he looked, the more uncertain he became—what exactly was wrong here?
Was it the subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the positions or sizes of objects in the reflection? Was the contrast and brightness somehow off? Or… was there something in the mirror that wasn’t actually in the room?
Pondering these thoughts, Yu Sheng reached out and lightly touched the mirror’s surface with his fingertip.
An icy chill greeted his touch, and where his finger made contact, ripples like water waves spread across the mirror’s surface, shattering the reflection into countless fragments!
Yu Sheng’s eyes widened instantly, and he instinctively took a half-step back. In less than a second, the entire mirror had turned pitch-black—the original room scene dissolved into the ripples, leaving behind a dense, inky darkness that writhed, pulsated, and spun within the frame.
Gradually, something began to emerge from the darkness. Suppressing his rising anxiety, Yu Sheng took a step closer to carefully observe the new image forming beyond the black veil.
A doll—one unfamiliar to him—lay shattered amidst an unrecognizable wasteland. Her limbs were broken, her dress tattered, and her body bore countless wounds as if she had fought fiercely before succumbing to death.
Stunned, Yu Sheng’s eyes widened as he strained to discern more from the scene. The mirror seemed to respond to his desire, and the perspective shifted, pulling back and tilting to reveal a broader panorama.
Around the fallen doll stretched a massive ruin—ancient pillars and arches, once magnificent, now toppled and crumbled into the black, mud-like chaos. Fragments of the doll’s limbs were scattered about, as if whispering a grim truth:
All that remained here had been laid to waste by the battle.
Suddenly, Yu Sheng’s mind echoed with a line Irene once told him:
“Living Dolls are blessed, you know? In the Otherworld, I’m way stronger than those so-called Investigators and Spirit Realm Detectives…”
“Are these ‘Living Dolls’ really that powerful…?” Yu Sheng couldn’t help but murmur to himself.
Even so, the Doll in the Mirror had died—something far stronger had killed her. As the perspective shifted, Yu Sheng saw the entity that killed the Doll.
A massive shadow… Yu Sheng couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was enormous—at least ten times the size of the Doll. Its outline vaguely resembled a human form, but distorted, with grotesquely overlapping wings on its back. The colossal figure had collapsed amid the ruins, parts of its vast body melting like sludge, merging with the surrounding chaos and the scattered limb fragments of the Doll. The remaining structure of the creature was riddled with warped and broken elements.
Yu Sheng couldn’t discern whether the distortions and damage on the gigantic shadow were inflicted by the Doll or if it was naturally formed that way—after all, its appearance was abstract enough to seem born from nightmares.
One thing he could infer, though—the Doll and that winged shadow had perished together.
Just as Yu Sheng tried to observe more details, the scene before him rippled like water. The darkness within the mirror shattered and dissolved in an instant, as thick, curtain-like shadows surged up and withdrew to the mirror’s edges. In the blink of an eye, Yu Sheng found himself staring at an ordinary Mirror, reflecting the room as it always had.
Dazed, Yu Sheng tapped and knocked on the mirror a few times, but nothing unusual reappeared. He frowned, thoughts racing through his mind.
[What on earth was that just now?]
Perhaps dealing with strange occurrences over the past few days had toughened his mind—Yu Sheng didn’t feel frightened by the eerie sight, only deeply curious about what he had witnessed.
Was that scene from the Mirror a record of something that actually happened? Who was that dead Doll? What was that massive shadow that perished alongside her? Where were those ruins? And why… why did it all appear in this house, right before his eyes?
Yu Sheng furrowed his brows, pondering, when another question crossed his mind:
[Could that scene have something to do with Irene?]
The dead Doll didn’t resemble Irene at all—despite being disfigured in death, the blonde hair was clearly different from Irene’s own. Yet, for some reason, Yu Sheng couldn’t help but link the fallen Doll to the carefree, TV-watching girl downstairs, sealed within the Painting.
After a brief contemplation, Yu Sheng stopped dwelling on it. He glanced at the mirror again, pressing his hand against the frame, trying to see if he could remove it and change its position. However, the Mirror didn’t budge—firmly fixed to the wall, as if it had been forged into place.
After several attempts, he gave up and turned to leave the room. Before stepping out, he abruptly spun around, pushing the door open as if trying to catch the room off guard.
Nothing had changed. The room was just as it had been.
Feeling increasingly like he was losing his mind, Yu Sheng paused at the doorway, hand on the doorknob, leaning in suspiciously before finally resigning to his own antics.
He didn’t return to his bedroom but instead hurried downstairs to the dining room.
Irene, still watching TV at the dining table, looked over at him with mild surprise. “Huh? I thought you were going to sleep. Having trouble? I’m not telling you a bedtime story…” she teased with her usual carefree tone.
Yu Sheng didn’t answer right away, just sat down across from her, his gaze serious and scrutinizing as if trying to analyze something hidden.
Finally, feeling slightly unnerved by the silence, Irene shrank back a little. “Why are you staring at me like that… Look, I know I’m pretty, but you and a two-dimensional character have no future together…”
That one remark shattered the serious atmosphere Yu Sheng had been building up.
He coughed, trying to regain his composure. “Ahem… I’m serious! Do you remember what the room looked like when you were hanging on the wall before?”
Irene thought for a moment, then replied casually, “Empty, nothing inside. You could see the door opposite, and the wallpaper… The wallpaper at the corner was peeling and moldy—seriously, you should fix that.”
Yu Sheng nodded—it matched his own memory, at least.
“Second question: do you recall a place that looked like a ruin, with classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and flying eaves? The whole ruin seemed soaked in darkness. There was a Doll—dead, horribly mangled, limbs scattered everywhere…”
Irene visibly shivered. “Sounds scary.”
“Forget whether it’s scary or not. Just tell me—do you remember seeing that scene?”
“No.” Irene answered without hesitation.