Chapter 264

Chapter 264: In the Mirror

Shadowy wolves surfaced around Little Red Riding Hood. With a single thought from their master, they scattered soundlessly into the rolling fog.

Behind Foxy, her many tails slowly unfurled. Six of them detached and drifted out like roaming cannons, circling the group and patrolling the air at a slow, guarded pace. She held two more in her arms, one on each side, their tips flickering with foxfire, ready to strike. One tail was for storage, still dragging along the ground like a slack cord.

Irene let one hand dangle beside Yu Sheng. Black spider silk spilled from her fingertips and slithered through the fog like something alive, probing for any mental response in the mist while also watching for hostile movement. In theory, the depth here might only be L-2, maybe even L-1. But otherworlds never followed reason. Depth and danger didn’t always match. Sometimes the most lethal entities showed up in the shallowest places.

Yu Sheng glanced at the three of them and sighed. Why did everyone around him have to be so flashy?

“Honestly, I want skills with special effects, too,” he muttered. “Like—whoosh. Even if it doesn’t work, at least it scares people first.”

“You have special effects,” Irene said from his shoulder. “Wasn’t you ripping open doors out of nowhere flashy enough?”

Yu Sheng sighed again. Then he casually opened a door in midair and pulled out his Reason Staff—the one that meant one swing and he bled out, one hit and he’d be permanently crippled. He slung it over his shoulder.

Irene immediately did a practiced flip, hooked an arm around his neck, and smoothly switched shoulders to sit on the other side.

Little Red Riding Hood stared at the staff. “…You turned your door into storage space?”

“I opened it to the basement under Wu Tong Road 66,” Yu Sheng said, suddenly pleased with himself. “See? Doesn’t it work just like storage space?”

Little Red Riding Hood clicked her tongue, equal parts impressed and offended. Foxy, meanwhile, looked thoughtfully at Yu Sheng’s move, like she was making a new connection to the concept of “immortal bearing.”

Yu Sheng ignored them and focused on the fog and the street beyond.

This place looked like the plaza in front of the mall, mapped point for point onto reality.

Except the entire world was drowned in eerie mist, and there wasn’t a single person.

Yu Sheng took only a few cautious steps before he saw the black bureau vehicles—several parked at the edge of the small plaza, exactly where he remembered them.

They were empty, too.

“So this is… the world inside the mirror?” Little Red Riding Hood frowned at the scene, then shook her head. “No. It should be an otherworld with mirror traits. It reflects objects from reality, but it doesn’t reflect humans.”

“Have you heard of this one?” Yu Sheng asked.

Little Red Riding Hood thought for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “No. There are many mirror-related otherworlds, but I haven’t heard of one that matches this.”

“Benefactor, this fog feels wrong to me,” Foxy said quietly. “It feels like something is closing in, but when I sweep with divine sense, there’s actually nothing.”

Yu Sheng turned to the doll on his shoulder. “Irene, do you sense anything nearby?”

Irene shook her head. Little Red Riding Hood added, “My wolves didn’t find anything either—no entity forming, and no trace of a person’s scent. In theory, he couldn’t have run that far.”

Yu Sheng hummed. Then he glanced toward the mall entrance. “He said he escaped from the mall. If things felt dangerous outside, is it possible he ran back inside to hide?”

Irene tilted her head. “…Could be. Want to check?”

“Let’s check,” Yu Sheng said. As they moved, he reminded them, “Stay together. Foxy said the fog feels strange. If we get separated in this, who knows what happens.”

They kept close, crossed the fog-filled plaza, and entered the mall through the open glass doors.

Inside was just as empty. Lights that hadn’t been turned off yet painted the deserted shops in a cold glow. Thin fog seeped in through every crack, drifting in front of them like gauze.

Then Foxy inhaled sharply. “There are mirrors everywhere!”

The mall was full of mirrors.

Storefront glass doors had become mirrors. Ad screens had become mirrors. Even products on the counters had turned into mirrors of all sizes. The few items that hadn’t been replaced were warped into bizarre shapes, like models rendered at the wrong scale—failed drafts of reality—piled across shelves and displays in a twisted imitation of the real world.

Yu Sheng passed one mirror, his gaze flicking over the surface and catching his own reflection.

Before he could make out any detail, the mirror cracked and shattered.

The glass-like surface shriveled as if it had weathered for countless years, wrinkling and collapsing into a curled, charred mass. It silently became black ash.

Yu Sheng only remembered the briefest glimpse of a pitch-black humanoid outline, wrapped in dark mist, standing inside the mirror.

Irene jumped. “…What the heck? It just broke?!”

Yu Sheng didn’t know what had triggered it. He watched the ash scatter across the floor. Instinctively, he bent down, dabbed a finger into it, and rubbed it between his fingertips. He didn’t even know what he expected to learn—he just remembered how detectives in movies always did this at crime scenes.

After a couple rubs, everything in front of him drained of color. A dead black-and-white world dropped over him in an instant, and a blurry voice forced its way straight into his mind:

“…What the heck? Ahhh, I’m dead!”

It lasted maybe one second. Then the black-and-white world faded away, and normal sound and color returned.

Yu Sheng straightened, completely dumbfounded. One thought rose in his mind: So rubbing it actually works?

Foxy seemed to sense a shift in his aura and turned at once. “Benefactor, what happened?”

“It feels like I learned two things,” Yu Sheng said, dusting the ash off his hands. “First, the mirrors here are alive. Second, I heard its last words.”

Foxy, Irene, and Little Red Riding Hood all stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

Irene blurted, “What were the last words?”

Yu Sheng said, dead serious, “The last words were that it died.”

Irene’s mouth opened and closed. “…What the heck?!”

“Don’t ask me. I’m confused too,” Yu Sheng said with a helpless frown. He looked cautiously at the mirror surfaces around them.

The scene he imagined—where he glanced around and every mirror shattered while screaming about dying—didn’t happen.

Instead, the mirrors simply stopped reflecting him at all.

In the largest mirror straight ahead, only Foxy and Little Red Riding Hood stood in the image. Irene looked like she was floating in midair.

His figure had been neatly cut out of the reflection.

Not even pretending anymore.

Yu Sheng’s brow furrowed. “Can you see me in the mirrors?”

“Yeah,” Little Red Riding Hood said, nodding. “You’re standing right next to us. Looks normal—wait. You can’t see yourself?!”

Yu Sheng nodded slowly. “…Yeah. I can’t.”

So the key wasn’t who was being reflected, but who was looking?

Or maybe both conditions had to be met at once for a mirror to “drop dead” like the first one had.

But why?

What was the rule?

Yu Sheng’s head filled with questions. The others had even more.

“I honestly don’t know if this place is cursed, or if you’re more cursed than this place,” Little Red Riding Hood said, giving him a look. “Do you eat too much random stuff?”

Yu Sheng said nothing.

The interruption didn’t slow their search for long.

Between Foxy’s divine sense, Irene’s spider silk, and the phantom wolves Little Red Riding Hood kept sending into the fog, they swept most of the mall. They found no trace of anyone hiding.

With no other choice, they returned outside—and faced the fog again.

Maybe it was just Yu Sheng’s imagination, but the mist seemed thicker than before. Now they could barely make out the black vehicles at the edge of the plaza.

“Do you feel like the fog is chasing us?” Irene muttered. “Wherever we go, it gathers there. And it’s getting thicker from all directions.”

Yu Sheng frowned. He couldn’t sense what Irene described as “pursuit,” or what Foxy had meant by “something closing in.” He didn’t have their flashy spider-silk probes or divine-sense sweeps.

But he could feel the atmosphere shifting, like his instincts were about to go haywire and were currently doing warmups.

The fog was changing.

Something seemed to be moving inside it.

Little Red Riding Hood’s expression sharpened. “My wolf got attacked!”

In the next instant, a shadow wolf snapped into existence at her side. A huge chunk had been bitten out of its body, nearly cutting it in half. It loosed a chaotic, furious howl—but the sound quickly collapsed into a defeated, unwilling whine. After rubbing against its master’s boots twice, it retreated weakly into the shadows.

The injured wolf brought back one thing: certainty.

Little Red Riding Hood lifted her head sharply. “There’s a huge monster in the fog. Lots of limbs and teeth. I couldn’t see its full shape—but it can defeat a lone wolf instantly!”

Before she even finished, Irene raised her hand and pointed at the mall’s massive glass curtain wall.

“…Do you mean that thing crawling down the wall?”