Chapter 24: Reflections in the Mirror
This novel is translated and hosted on Bcatranslation.
This room wasn’t like this before!
Yu Sheng realized it instantly. He vividly remembered how the room that had once trapped Irene looked—empty, barren, not a single piece of furniture, not even a chair. There had only been a solitary oil painting hanging on the wall directly opposite the door…
But now, various kinds of furniture were arranged inside, and a mirror hung on the wall facing the door.
A flicker of doubt and unease surfaced in his mind, but Yu Sheng didn’t sense any dangerous aura in the room.
Of course, he knew that this so-called “sense of danger” sounded strange, but after several brushes with death, he did feel he’d developed a knack for sensing peril. And here… he felt the room before him was safe.
He hesitated at the doorway for a few seconds, then stepped inside.
Everything in the room appeared perfectly normal. No monsters wielding pitchforks sprang from the corners as he entered, nor did a firepot drop from above. Sunlight streamed gently through the windows, and the air was fresh, without any hint of decay or suspicious odors.
Yu Sheng inspected the room thoroughly, confirming that the furniture and decorations were just ordinary items. Finally, he came to stand before the mirror facing the door.
In his experience, mirrors weren’t usually placed directly opposite doors. Partly due to feng shui beliefs, and also because a mirror facing the door could easily startle someone entering at night.
But he wasn’t sure if such customs applied in this “Dimensional Hotel.”
He just felt that the mirror directly facing the door gave him a somewhat… eerie feeling.
And this eeriness wasn’t just because Irene’s oil painting had originally hung here, but also because the reflection in the mirror… looked odd.
It was an indescribable strangeness. The mirror reflected the room as it was; nothing seemed amiss. Yu Sheng scrutinized it for a long time but couldn’t pinpoint the source of his unease. The more he looked, the more suspicious he became—what exactly was wrong?
Was it that the size and position of objects in the mirror had shifted ever so slightly, imperceptible to the naked eye? Was there something off about the light and shadows? Or… was there something in the mirror that wasn’t actually in the room?
He pondered for a moment, then reached out and lightly brushed the surface of the mirror with his fingertip.
A cold sensation greeted him, and ripples like water spread from where he touched. In an instant, the reflection shattered along with the ripples!
His eyes widened as he instinctively stepped back. In less than a second, the mirror had turned pitch-black—the room’s reflection had dissolved into the ripples, and darkness as thick as ink filled the entire mirror frame. It writhed, undulated, and slowly swirled before his eyes as if devouring everything.
Then, something began to emerge from the darkness. Suppressing the unease in his heart, Yu Sheng stepped forward for a closer look. Gradually, the heavy darkness receded like a thick veil, revealing a scene deep within the mirror:
A doll—not Irene, but an unfamiliar face—lay broken and shattered in an unrecognizable ruin. Her limbs were severed, her dress tattered, and scars covering her body, as if she had been through a fierce battle and ultimately died from exhaustion.
Stunned, Yu Sheng widened his eyes, trying hard to see more in the mirror. The mirror seemed to respond to his thoughts; the scene in the darkness slowly shifted. He noticed that the perspective was pulling back, tilting, showing a broader panorama.
He saw the surroundings of the fallen doll—an even larger expanse of ruins. Classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and ornate eaves were all broken and toppled into the mud-like chaos of darkness. Many fragments of the doll’s limbs were scattered around as if conveying a message:
Everything here was destroyed because of this battle.
Suddenly, a sentence Irene had said earlier echoed in his mind:
“Living dolls are blessed; in the Otherworld, I can fight better than those so-called investigators or spirit detectives…”
“Are these ‘living dolls’ really that powerful?” Yu Sheng couldn’t help but mutter to himself.
But even being that powerful, the doll in the mirror had still died—something even stronger had killed her. As the perspective shifted, Yu Sheng saw the “enemy” that had slain the doll.
A massive… shadow. He didn’t know what it was, only that it was enormous, almost ten times the size of the doll. Its outline was roughly humanoid, but it seemed to have twisted, overlapping wings on its back. It too lay fallen among the ruins. Part of its colossal body had melted like mud, merging with the chaotic darkness around the ruins and the scattered pieces of the doll’s limbs. The remaining body was riddled with distortions and damage.
Yu Sheng couldn’t tell whether the distortions on that giant shadow were inflicted by the doll or if it had always looked that way—after all, the thing appeared abstract to begin with.
But one thing he could surmise: the doll and that huge shadow with what seemed like wings had perished together.
Just as he tried to see more details, the scene before his eyes rippled like water once again.
Everything in the depths of the darkness shattered and dissolved. The heavy, curtain-like darkness surged up and then receded toward the edges of the mirror frame. In the blink of an eye, the mirror before Yu Sheng was once again ordinary, reflecting the room.
He stared blankly, then tapped and touched the mirror a few more times but couldn’t trigger any anomalies again.
What was that just now?
Perhaps dealing with strange things lately had increased his capacity for acceptance. He didn’t find that eerie scene frightening but was simply very curious about what he had seen.
Was the scene in the mirror something that had actually happened? Who was that dead doll? What was that huge shadow that perished with her? Where was that ruin? And why did all this appear in this house before him?
Frowning deeply, Yu Sheng pondered and couldn’t help thinking of another question:
Was the scene shown in the mirror related to Irene?
The dead doll didn’t resemble Irene. Although her face was unrecognizable, that striking blonde hair was completely different from Irene’s. But for some reason, when he saw that doll, Yu Sheng couldn’t help but think of the girl who was currently watching TV downstairs, sealed in the oil painting.
After a moment, he ended his contemplation. He looked at the mirror on the wall, reached out to hold the frame, and tried to see if he could take it down and move it elsewhere.
The mirror didn’t budge, as if it were fused to the wall.
After a few attempts, he gave up.
He turned and walked toward the door, but before leaving the room, he suddenly turned back, his gaze sweeping quickly across the room.
Everything was still the same; the mirror hadn’t changed.
Yu Sheng frowned and closed the door.
After two or three seconds, he suddenly pushed the door open again, as if trying to catch the room off guard.
The room remained unchanged.
He stood in the doorway, hand on the doorknob, peering into the room suspiciously, starting to feel a bit foolish.
After confirming several times, he finally stopped fiddling with the door.
But he didn’t return to his bedroom. Instead, he hurried downstairs to the dining room.
Irene, who was watching TV atop the dining table, heard the commotion nearby. She craned her neck to look over the edge of the picture frame. “Hey? Yu Sheng, weren’t you going to sleep? Can’t sleep? I can’t tell you a bedtime story, you know…”
Still the same carefree and overly familiar demeanor.
Yu Sheng didn’t say anything; he just sat down across from Irene and looked at her intently as if carefully observing something.
This finally made the doll in the painting feel a bit uncomfortable.
“Why are you staring at me…” Irene shrank back. “I’ll have you know, I realize I’m quite the looker, but you and a two-dimensional character have no future together…”
Irene’s words completely derailed the conversation Yu Sheng had been preparing.
“Ahem, I’m here to talk about something serious!” He cleared his throat twice, forcibly steering the topic back. “Do you remember what the room looked like where you were hanging on the wall before?”
“Yes,” Irene thought for a moment and answered naturally. “There was nothing there, completely empty. I could see a door opposite me, and the wallpaper in the corner was moldy and peeling, and you didn’t fix it.”
Yu Sheng nodded. At least on this matter, Irene’s memory matched his own.
“Second question,” he continued. “Do you recall a place—it looks like a ruin, with many classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and ornate eaves. The entire place is ‘soaked’ in darkness. There’s a doll there—never mind whether it’s you or not—anyway, a doll who died there, quite miserably, arms and legs broken everywhere…”
Irene instantly shrank back. “That sounds really scary.”
“Don’t worry about whether it’s scary; just tell me if you remember such a scene.”
“Nope.”
She answered without hesitation.