Chapter 024

Chapter 24: Scene in the Mirror

[This room was not like this before!]

Yu Sheng realized it at once. He remembered clearly how this room had looked when it trapped Irene: it was bare and empty, with no furniture at all, not even a chair, and a single painting hung all alone on the wall facing the door.

Now, though, the room held all kinds of furniture, and a mirror hung on the wall facing the door.

Questions and a thin thread of unease rose in his heart, but he did not feel any real danger in the room.

He knew that “danger sense” sounded mysterious, yet after several close calls with death, he truly felt he had grown a little sensitive to danger. Here, he felt safe.

He stood at the doorway for a few seconds, then stepped inside.

Everything looked normal. Nothing jumped out swinging a pitchfork from a corner and no brazier dropped from above. Sunshine poured through the window, the air smelled fresh, and there was no rot or fishy stench.

He checked the whole room and confirmed the furniture and decorations were just ordinary items. At last he stopped before the mirror that faced the door.

In his experience, people usually did not place a mirror directly across from a door. Partly it was about feng shui, and partly because a mirror facing the door could easily startle someone coming in at night.

He was not sure if Boundary City had the same belief.

Still, this mirror facing the door made him feel a little… strange.

It was not only because Irene’s oil painting had once hung here. It was also because the reflection in the mirror looked… off.

It was a kind of weirdness he could not put into words. The mirror showed the room exactly as it was. Yu Sheng stared for a long time and could not find the source of that odd feeling, only that the longer he looked, the more certain he felt something was wrong. [What is it? What’s off here?]

Was it that the size or position of objects in the mirror had shifted in a way too small for the eye to notice? Was the light and dark in the image somehow wrong? Or… was there something in the mirror that did not exist in the room?

He thought for a moment and reached out to brush the mirror with his fingertip.

A chill met his skin. Rings of ripples spread from the place he touched, like water, and the reflection shattered at once.

He stared, eyes wide, and stepped back half a pace on instinct. In that less than one second, the mirror had already turned pitch black. The room image melted away inside the ripples and vanished. Thick ink-like darkness filled the frame, writhing, heaving, and slowly turning as if it were swallowing everything.

Then, something new slowly surfaced in that dark. Holding down his unease, Yu Sheng stepped closer and peered in. The heavy black veil seemed to thin and pull back in front of his eyes, letting him see what lay deep inside the mirror:

A doll lay there. It was not Irene. The face was unfamiliar. She was broken to pieces in a ruin whose original shape could no longer be guessed. Her limbs were snapped, her dress was torn, her body covered in wounds, as if she had fought a brutal battle and finally died when she had no strength left.

Shocked, Yu Sheng widened his eyes and tried to see more. The mirror seemed to answer his wish. The picture inside the darkness began to move. He noticed the viewpoint pulling back and tilting, opening into a wider panorama.

He saw the area around the fallen doll. The ruin was huge. He made out many structures like classical columns and flying eaves, all cracked, slumped, and collapsed into a muddy black chaos. Many pieces of the doll’s broken limbs lay scattered around, as if telling him one clear message: everything here had been destroyed by that battle.

Suddenly, a sentence Irene had said to him echoed in his head: “A Living Doll bears a Blessing. In the Otherworld I can fight way better than those so-called investigators or any Spirit Realm Detective…”

“Are these Living Dolls really that strong?” he could not help muttering to himself.

Even so, the doll in the mirror was dead. Something stronger than her had killed her. As the view kept moving, Yu Sheng saw the “enemy” that had died together with the doll.

It was a massive shadow. He did not know what it was. He only felt its size was huge, almost ten times the doll’s. Its outline was roughly human, yet on its back twisted, overlapping wings seemed to grow. It too lay in the ruin. Part of its huge body had melted like sludge, fused with the chaotic muck around the wreckage and with the scattered pieces of the doll’s limbs. The rest of its form was warped and broken in many places.

Yu Sheng could not tell whether those warped breaks on the giant shadow were caused by the doll or whether it had always looked like that, since the thing was abstract to begin with.

But one thing he could guess: the doll and that winged giant shadow had destroyed each other in the end.

Just as he tried to catch more details, the picture in front of him rippled again like water.

Everything in the dark shattered and dissolved. The heavy curtain of blackness surged upward, then sank away toward the frame. In a blink, the mirror was just an ordinary mirror again, reflecting the room like before.

He stared blankly at it. He tapped and touched the mirror a few more times, but nothing strange happened again. [What on earth was that?]

Maybe because he had dealt with too many weird things these days, his ability to accept the bizarre had grown. He did not feel scared by what he had just seen. He only felt deep curiosity.

Was the scene in the mirror something that had really happened? Who was that dead doll? What was the huge shadow that perished with her? Where was that ruin? And why did all this appear in this house, right in front of him?

Frowning, Yu Sheng thought hard, and another question came to mind: did this recorded moment in the mirror have anything to do with Irene?

The dead doll did not look like Irene. Even though her face was ruined, her bright golden hair was nothing like Irene’s. Yet, for some reason, the sight of that doll made Yu Sheng think of the girl sealed in the painting downstairs watching TV.

After a moment, he ended his thoughts. He held the mirror’s frame and pressed gently, wanting to see if he could take it down and move it somewhere else.

It did not budge. It felt as solid as if it had been cast into the wall.

After a few tries, he gave up.

He turned toward the door, but before leaving the room he suddenly looked back and swept his gaze across the whole place.

The furniture was the same. The mirror had not changed.

He frowned and closed the door.

Two or three seconds later, he pushed the door open again in a rush, like he meant to catch the room off guard.

Nothing had changed.

He held the doorknob and stood at the threshold, craning his head in and peering around like a suspicious man, and slowly felt like he was acting crazy.

After triple-checking, he finally stopped fussing with the door.

He did not return to his bedroom. Instead, he clattered down the stairs to the dining room.

Irene, watching TV from within the frame on the table, heard him and leaned to the edge of her painting to look his way. She asked, teasing and bright: “Hey? Yu Sheng, weren’t you going to sleep? Insomnia? I’m not telling you a bedtime story.”

She was the same carefree, overly familiar self.

Yu Sheng did not answer. He sat down across from Irene and studied her seriously, as if trying to confirm something.

That finally made the portrait doll feel a bit awkward.

She shrank her neck and said: “Why are you staring at me? I know I’m pretty, but you and a paper person have no future.”

All the words he had prepared on the way down got popped like a balloon.

He cleared his throat and forced himself back on track: “Ahem, let’s talk about something serious. Do you remember what the room looked like when you were hanging on the wall before?”

“I do,” said Irene, thinking for a moment before answering naturally: “Nothing in it, totally empty. Right across you could see the door and the wallpaper. The wallpaper in the corner was moldy and peeling, and you never fixed it.”

Yu Sheng nodded. Good. At least her memory matched his.

“Second question,” he said, “do you remember a place that looked like a ruin, with a lot of classical columns, collapsed stone walls, flying eaves, all of it soaking in darkness, and a doll-forget whether it’s you-a doll dead in the rubble, really dead, with broken arms and legs everywhere…”

Irene flinched a little and said: “That sounds scary.”

“Forget scary. Do you have any memory of that scene or not?”

“No,” she answered without a hint of doubt.