Chapter 88

Chapter 88: Strange Things, Strange Trouble

Yu Sheng leaned close to the mirror, staring harder and harder at the faint “second reflection.” It was like a window at night, when the outside scenery and the shadows on the glass mix together. The dark cave and the snowstorm beyond its entrance seemed to exist somewhere beyond the mirror, yet it was hard to see clearly—hazy, overlapping.

Irene scrambled up Yu Sheng’s body in a couple of quick moves and perched on his shoulder, hugging his head as she stared at the mirror with curiosity. After a long while, she muttered, “So that snow got blown over from the other side of the mirror?”

“You can see it too?” Yu Sheng asked, surprised.

“Of course. Why is that surprising?” Irene looked at him like he was crazy. “I’m not blind.”

Foxy didn’t wait for Yu Sheng to speak. She nodded on her own. “Benefactor, I can see it too.”

“Uh…” Yu Sheng scratched his hair. “It’s just that lately—dealing with Little Red Riding Hood and Li Lin and the others—it keeps feeling like the things I can see aren’t always things others can see. I’m getting jumpy.”

He weighed it for a moment, then cautiously reached out and tried to touch the mirror.

He still remembered the last time he’d touched it. The mirror had shown him a strange ruin—a shattered doll and a massive monster made of shadowspawn dying together in the center of that ruin. So what about this time? What would the mirror do now?

Irene instantly grabbed Yu Sheng’s hair, staring tensely at what he was doing. “Hey, be careful. If something’s wrong—”

“Ow, ow, ow… let go first!”

“Oh, okay. I got nervous and did it without thinking…”

Little Doll loosened her fingers, and at that moment, Yu Sheng’s fingertip touched the mirror.

It was very cold, like touching ice. But aside from that unnatural chill, the image in the mirror didn’t change at all.

“Seems… fine?” Irene said, emboldened. She reached out and touched the mirror too. “It’s just kind of freezing.”

Yu Sheng hummed, pulled his hand back, and stared at the mirror with a tight frown.

Then he noticed the layered image starting to fade. After only a few breaths, the snowy cave entrance vanished completely.

Only the normal reflection of the room remained.

Yu Sheng hesitated, touched the mirror again, and found the ice-like cold was gone too. The mirror had returned to a normal temperature.

“Benefactor,” Foxy asked after watching for a long time, “was the mirror always like this before?”

“It’s always been wrong. Every so often it reflects scenery from who knows where,” Yu Sheng said, casual words hiding a heavy tone. “Before, it only showed strange images. It never did anything like today… snow appeared in the room, and some unknown iron lump fell onto the floor.”

His gaze dropped to the strange metal device in his hand.

The snow in the corner had already melted, leaving water stains on the floor. The black metal lump was still in his grip. The strange image in the mirror was gone, but the things that seemed to have come out of the mirror didn’t fade away like an illusion.

They stayed.

” I-I’m sleeping in your room tonight!” Irene hugged Yu Sheng’s head tightly, her small body visibly tense. “I can sleep on a chair or the table, whatever! I’m absolutely not staying in this room!”

“Even if you didn’t say so, I wasn’t planning to let anyone sleep here anymore,” Yu Sheng said as he peeled Irene’s hands off his head. “This room is way too wrong. From now on, don’t open it unless I’m here.”

Irene and Foxy nodded hard.

“Also,” Yu Sheng added, lifting Irene off his shoulder with a stern look, “even if you’re not sleeping in here, you can sleep in the same room as Foxy. Why do you have to cling to my room?”

“That tail monster hits people with her tail in her sleep!” Irene immediately started flailing in midair. “If you kick me, at worst I fall on the floor. If she swings her tail, I’ll get plastered into the wall! Didn’t you see it?”

Then she launched into nonstop complaining—about not even having her own room, about being ignored because she was small, about not having a bed, about getting shooed around at night. A doll didn’t need to breathe, so once she started, she didn’t stop. It made your head buzz.

Yu Sheng even wanted to stuff her into Foxy’s tail—but considering the doll would then raise hell to an extreme degree, he only thought it and didn’t do it.

In the end, he carried the still-complaining doll and led Foxy out of the creepy room. He locked the door carefully behind them, then pushed and tugged it several times to make sure it was truly secured.

“Benefactor, do you want me to guard this door tonight?” Foxy asked softly, seeing how uneasy Yu Sheng looked. “If there’s movement inside, I’ll call you.”

Yu Sheng pictured a nine-tailed fox curled up in the hallway guarding the door, and immediately shook his head. “No. That’s not necessary. This room’s been weird for a long time.”

As he spoke, he remembered something. After setting Irene down, he pulled out the phone he’d just gotten from the Special Operations Bureau.

Irene finally stopped complaining and looked at him curiously. “What are you doing?”

“For weird stuff, you ask weird experts,” Yu Sheng said, opening Border Comms. “I’ll post and ask. Maybe someone recognizes this thing.”

He poked around in the app. “There should be a photo upload option, right? Detectives and investigators who go exploring strange places all the time would definitely need it… Ah, found it.”

He held the phone in one hand and the strange metal device in the other, snapped several photos from different angles, and posted them on the public message wall.

Then he searched through the preset channel list, found “ancient relics and oddities discussion group” and “anomalous phenomena discussion group,” and posted the photos there too. Copying the style of other posts, he added a short note:

“Unknown item, metal material. No corrosion or signs of living traits found. Picked it up in a room. When I found it, the room seemed like it had snowed. Also, I suspect it’s connected to a mirror that can reflect distant scenery.”

Yu Sheng had originally wanted to write “picked it up at home,” but after typing it, he deleted it. He figured normal people probably wouldn’t pick up something like this at home, and they definitely wouldn’t find snow in a sealed room. Wu Tong Road 66 was special, and he shouldn’t reveal too much of its secrets.

He felt pretty proud that he still had basic common sense.

“Will anyone reply?” Irene asked. She climbed onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder again with practiced ease and leaned in to look at the screen. “You’ve got just a few photos and barely any description. Other people write hundreds of words at least. Some even post videos…”

“I don’t have that much information to add,” Yu Sheng sighed. “If I talk about the surroundings, it’s just a room. If I talk about what’s weird about the thing itself, it doesn’t feel like anything in my hand.”

“That’s true…,” Irene muttered.

Yu Sheng went back to the living room. He watched TV with Irene and Foxy while waiting for replies, all the way into night.

Finally, a notification popped up.

When he opened it, he saw a reply from a user named Three Thousand Wayward Disciples in the ancient relics and oddities discussion group: “May I ask what the surrounding environment was like? Was it inside an otherworld? What type of otherworld was it? Within the otherworld’s range, were there intelligent beings, or traces left by intelligent beings?”

Staring at the rapid-fire questions, Yu Sheng looked a little stunned. But this was the first person to pay attention to his post at all. It was also his first exchange with a stranger on this platform as a spirit-realm detective.

With a hint of eager excitement, he quickly typed a reply:

“Otherworld. A residential house. The environment is just a normal modern home,” Yu Sheng wrote, glancing around. “Pretty peaceful. No mobs. As for intelligent beings—”

He stopped, expression odd, and looked at Irene sitting on his lap and Foxy nearby, carefully grooming her tail fur.

“There are intelligent beings.”

Irene reached out and fiddled with Yu Sheng’s phone, then looked up. “Do you really think someone can answer your question? A few days ago, the Special Operations Bureau didn’t even know Wu Tong Road 66 existed. And you’re seriously talking about this with some random stranger from who knows where?”

“I know,” Yu Sheng said, clear-eyed. “But asking doesn’t cost money. What if? Besides, even if nobody knows what Wu Tong Road 66 is, the thing that suddenly dropped into our house might’ve come from outside. Someone might recognize it.”

Irene thought about it, said, “Oh,” and went back to watching TV.

Yu Sheng’s phone vibrated again almost immediately.

It was still Three Thousand Wayward Disciples: “I have never heard of such an otherworld. Your description is truly peculiar… but this object is interesting. It seems manmade, yet the inscription in the corner is strangely unfamiliar. Experts from the Academy may be interested.”