Chapter 24: Reflections in the Mirror
This novel is translated and hosted on Bcatranslation.
This room wasn’t like this before.
Yu Sheng noticed it right away. He remembered exactly how the room had looked when Irene was trapped inside—empty, bare, not a single piece of furniture, not even a chair. There had only been one oil painting hanging on the wall directly opposite the door.
But now, the room was completely different. There were all kinds of furniture arranged neatly, and a large mirror hung on the wall facing the door.
A flicker of doubt and unease crept into his mind, but Yu Sheng didn’t sense anything dangerous about the room.
Of course, he knew the idea of a “sense of danger” sounded strange, but after all he’d been through—all those close encounters with death—he had learned to trust his instincts. And right now, he felt the room before him was safe.
He hesitated at the doorway for a few seconds before stepping inside.
Everything seemed perfectly normal. No monsters jumped out from the corners to attack him, and no hidden traps were triggered. Sunlight poured in gently through the windows, and the air was fresh, without any smell of decay or anything suspicious.
Yu Sheng carefully inspected the room, checking all the furniture and decorations. They were just ordinary things. Finally, he stood before the mirror hanging on the wall across from the door.
In his experience, mirrors were rarely hung directly opposite doors. Some believed it was bad feng shui; others just felt it was unsettling to see your reflection the moment you walked into a room at night.
But this wasn’t an ordinary place. This was the “Dimensional Hotel.”
Yu Sheng couldn’t shake the eerie feeling the mirror gave him. It wasn’t just because the oil painting of Irene had been there before—there was something about the reflection itself that seemed… off.
It was hard to describe. The mirror reflected the room accurately; nothing seemed out of place. Yu Sheng stared at it for a long time, trying to figure out what was bothering him. The more he looked, the more uneasy he felt. What was wrong here?
Were the objects in the reflection slightly different in size or position? Was it something to do with the light and shadows? Or was there something in the mirror that wasn’t actually in the room?
He thought for a moment, then reached out and brushed his fingertip across the surface of the mirror.
The glass was cold to the touch, and suddenly, ripples spread out from where he touched it, as if the mirror were made of water. In an instant, the reflection shattered along with the ripples!
Yu Sheng’s eyes widened, and he instinctively stepped back. In less than a second, the mirror turned pitch-black. The room’s reflection dissolved into the ripples, and the darkness spread across the entire mirror, thick and inky. It moved, swirled, and shifted as though it were alive, devouring everything in its path.
Then, something began to take shape within the darkness. Yu Sheng suppressed his unease and stepped closer to get a better look. The darkness slowly lifted like a thick veil, revealing an image deep within the mirror:
A doll—not Irene, but someone else—lay shattered in a ruin. Her limbs were severed, her dress was torn, and her body was covered in scars. It looked like she had been through a fierce battle, and in the end, she had lost.
Yu Sheng’s eyes went wide as he tried to make out more details in the mirror. The scene shifted, as if responding to his thoughts, showing a wider view.
He saw the surroundings—an even larger expanse of ruins. Classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and ornate eaves lay broken in the muddy darkness. Pieces of the doll’s limbs were scattered everywhere, almost as if they were trying to tell a story:
Everything had been destroyed in this battle.
Suddenly, Yu Sheng remembered something Irene had said earlier:
“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 muttered to himself.
Yet even with all that power, the doll in the mirror had died. Something stronger had defeated her. As the scene shifted, Yu Sheng caught sight of the enemy—the one that had killed her.
A massive shadow. He couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was enormous, easily ten times the size of the doll. It had a vaguely humanoid shape, with twisted, overlapping wings on its back. It too lay fallen in the ruins, part of its body melted into the dark mud, mingling with the chaos and the doll’s shattered pieces. The rest of its body was full of strange distortions and damage.
Yu Sheng couldn’t tell if the doll had caused those distortions, or if the creature had always looked that way—its form was abstract to begin with.
But one thing was clear: the doll and the winged shadow had both perished in that battle.
Just as Yu Sheng tried to see more, the image rippled again, like water disturbed by a pebble.
The entire scene shattered and dissolved. The darkness that had filled the mirror surged, then slowly receded to the edges, until the mirror returned to normal. Once again, it reflected only the room.
Yu Sheng blinked, then tapped the mirror a few more times, but nothing happened. The reflection stayed perfectly ordinary.
What had he just seen?
Perhaps all the strange things he’d dealt with lately had made him more open to the unknown, because Yu Sheng wasn’t frightened by what he’d seen. Instead, he felt an overwhelming curiosity.
Was that scene real? Who was the doll? What was that giant shadow? Where was that ruined place? And why had all of this appeared in this house?
Yu Sheng frowned deeply, lost in thought, and found himself wondering one more thing:
Was the scene in the mirror connected to Irene?
The doll in the mirror didn’t look like Irene. Her face was unrecognizable, but her blonde hair was nothing like Irene’s. Still, something about the doll made Yu Sheng think of the girl—the one currently watching TV downstairs, sealed in the oil painting.
After a moment, he decided he’d had enough of contemplating. He looked at the mirror again, gripping the frame and trying to take it down to move it elsewhere.
It wouldn’t budge. It was as if the mirror were part of the wall itself.
After several attempts, Yu Sheng gave up.
He turned to leave, but before stepping out of the room, he suddenly spun around, his eyes scanning the space quickly.
Nothing had changed; the mirror was the same as before.
Yu Sheng frowned, then closed the door behind him.
After a few seconds, he abruptly opened the door again, as if trying to catch the room by surprise.
The room was exactly the same.
Standing there, hand on the doorknob, Yu Sheng felt a bit foolish. He stared into the room for a while, then finally let it go.
He didn’t return to his bedroom. Instead, he hurried downstairs to the dining room.
Irene, who was watching TV from atop the dining table, heard the commotion and craned her neck, looking over the edge of her 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, overly familiar tone.
Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He just sat down across from Irene, staring at her intently as if trying to figure something out.
After a moment, Irene seemed to grow uncomfortable under his gaze.
“Why are you staring at me?” She shrank back a little. “I know I’m quite the looker, but you and a two-dimensional character have no future together, you know…”
Yu Sheng rolled his eyes. “Ahem, I’m here to talk about something serious!” He cleared his throat and tried to steer the conversation back on track. “Do you remember the room you were in before—the one where you were hanging on the wall?”
“Yeah,” Irene replied, thinking for a moment. “There was nothing there. It was completely empty. I could see a door, and the wallpaper in the corner was moldy and peeling. You never bothered to fix it.”
Yu Sheng nodded. At least on this, Irene’s memory matched his own.
“Second question,” he said. “Do you remember a place that looks like a ruin—classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, ornate eaves, all of it shrouded in darkness? There was a doll there—not necessarily you—anyway, a doll that died in the ruins, arms and legs broken everywhere.”
Irene shivered. “That sounds really scary.”
“Don’t worry about whether it’s scary; just tell me if you remember it.”
“Nope.” She shook her head without hesitation.