Chapter 24: A Scene in the Mirror

This room was not like this before!

Yu Sheng realized this instantly. He clearly remembered what the room that once trapped Irene looked like: empty, devoid of any furnishings, without even a chair, featuring only a lone oil painting hanging on the wall directly opposite the door.

It was not like it was now, filled with various pieces of furniture, with a mirror hanging on the wall facing the door.

Though a sense of confusion and a flicker of unease stirred within him, Yu Sheng did not sense any aura of danger in the room.

Of course, he knew that this so-called "sense of crisis" was somewhat metaphysical, but after several near-death experiences, he felt he had developed a certain perception for danger. And here... he felt the room before him was safe.

After hesitating at the threshold for a few seconds, Yu Sheng stepped inside.

Everything in the room looked perfectly normal. There were no monsters wielding pitchforks lunging from the corners, nor braziers falling from the ceiling as he entered. The sunlight outside the window was pleasant, the air in the room was fresh, and there was no trace of decay or suspicious, foul odors.

Yu Sheng inspected the room, confirming that the furniture and decorations were merely ordinary items, and finally stood before the mirror facing the door.

In his experience, mirrors were generally not placed directly opposite a door. As he understood it, there was the aspect of Feng Shui, and for another, a mirror facing a door could easily startle someone entering the room at night.

However, he was unsure if such notions existed in this "Boundary City."

He simply felt that this mirror, placed directly across from the door, gave him a... peculiar feeling.

And this sense of strangeness didn't just stem from the fact that Irene’s oil painting used to hang there; it was because the image within the mirror... looked off.

It was an indescribable weirdness. The scene reflected in the mirror was actually quite normal—it was exactly what the room looked like at that moment. Yu Sheng scrutinized it for a long time, unable to pinpoint the source of his unease, yet the more he looked, the more suspicious he became. Was there something wrong?

Was there a shift in the size or position of the objects in the mirror that was imperceptible to the naked eye? Was there a jarring dissonance in the light and shadow? Or... had something appeared in the mirror that wasn't actually in the room?

Yu Sheng pondered for a moment, then reached out to gently brush the surface of the mirror.

A cold sensation greeted him, and the mirror’s surface rippled like water where his finger touched it. In the blink of an eye, the reflection shattered along with the ripples!

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened, and he subconsciously stepped back. In less than a second, the mirror turned pitch black. The reflected image of the room dissolved into the ripples, and a thick, ink-like darkness filled the entire frame, as if swallowing everything, slowly writhing, undulating, and swirling before his eyes.

Then, new shapes gradually emerged from that darkness. Suppressing the unease in his heart, Yu Sheng stepped forward to look closer. Slowly, the dark, heavy veil faded, revealing the scene deep within the mirror:

A doll—though not Irene, but a face he did not recognize—lay in pieces amidst ruins that had long since lost their original form. Its limbs were snapped, its dress torn, and its body covered in wounds, as if it had endured a brutal, desperate battle and finally perished from exhaustion.

Stunned, Yu Sheng widened his eyes, trying hard to see more. The mirror seemed to respond to his intent; the image in the darkness began to shift, and Yu Sheng noticed the perspective pulling back and tilting, revealing a broader panorama.

He saw the area surrounding the fallen doll, seeing even larger ruins. He saw structures resembling classical columns and eaves, all fractured and collapsed into a chaos that looked like dark, muddy sludge. Many of the doll's broken limbs were scattered all around, as if conveying a message:

Everything here had been destroyed by this battle.

Suddenly, a sentence Irene had said to him echoed in his mind:

"...Living dolls are blessed. In the Otherworld, I can fight much better than those so-called investigators or spirit detectives..."

"Are these 'living dolls' really that capable in a fight...?" Yu Sheng couldn't help but mutter to himself.

But even being that capable, the doll in the mirror was dead. Something even more powerful had killed her. As the perspective shifted, Yu Sheng saw the "enemy" that had slain the doll.

A mass... of a giant shadow. Yu Sheng didn't know what it was, only that it was enormous, nearly ten times the size of the doll. Its silhouette was roughly humanoid, yet it seemed to have twisted, overlapping wings on its back. It, too, lay amidst the ruins, its massive body partially melted like sludge, fused with the chaos surrounding the ruins and the scattered fragments of the doll’s limbs, while the remaining structure of its body was riddled with distortions and damage.

Yu Sheng didn't know if the distortions on the giant shadow were caused by the doll or if it had always looked that way—after all, the thing looked quite abstract to begin with.

But one thing he could guess: the doll and the massive, winged shadow must have destroyed each other in the end.

Just as Yu Sheng wanted to see more details, the image before him suddenly rippled again like water.

Everything in the deep darkness shattered and dissolved in the blink of an eye. The heavy, curtain-like darkness surged up and then retreated toward the frame. In an instant, what stood before Yu Sheng was once again just an ordinary mirror, reflecting the room.

Yu Sheng stared blankly, then tapped and touched the mirror a few more times, but could not evoke any further anomalies.

What exactly was that just now?

Perhaps it was because he had been dealing with abnormal things too much over the last two days, but Yu Sheng found his capacity for acceptance had grown; he didn't feel that the bizarre scene was particularly frightening, but rather felt a deep curiosity about what he had seen.

Was what appeared in the mirror something that had truly happened? Who was the dead doll? What was that massive shadow that had perished with her? Where was those ruins? And why... did all of this appear in this house, before his eyes?

Yu Sheng frowned as he pondered, unable to stop another question from surfacing:

Did the scene recorded in the mirror have anything to do with Irene?

The dead doll did not look like Irene. Although her face was ruined, her striking blonde hair was completely different from Irene's. Yet, for some reason, upon seeing the doll, Yu Sheng couldn't help but think of the girl currently watching television on the first floor, sealed within an oil painting.

After a moment, Yu Sheng ended his contemplation. He looked at the mirror on the wall, reached out to grip the frame, and pulled with slight force, wanting to see if he could take it down and move it.

The mirror did not budge, as sturdy as if it had been cast into the wall.

After a few attempts, Yu Sheng gave up.

He turned to head toward the door, but before leaving the room, he suddenly turned back, his gaze sweeping quickly across the entire space.

The room remained as it was, and the mirror showed no change.

Yu Sheng frowned and closed the door.

Two or three seconds later, he suddenly shoved the door open, as if to catch the room off guard.

The room had not changed; it was still the same.

Yu Sheng stood at the threshold holding the doorknob, poking his head into the room and peering around suspiciously, gradually feeling like a madman.

After checking repeatedly, he finally stopped tormenting the door.

He did not return to his bedroom, but instead ran down the stairs, clattering as he went, and entered the dining room.

Irene, who was watching TV at the dining table, heard the commotion and leaned her head toward the edge of the frame to look over. "Hey? Yu Sheng, weren't you going to sleep? Insomnia? I don't know how to tell bedtime stories, you know..."

She was still her usual carefree and overly familiar self.

Yu Sheng didn't speak; he simply sat down opposite Irene and looked at her intently, as if observing something closely.

This finally made the doll in the painting feel a hint of awkwardness.

"Why are you looking at me..." Irene shrank her neck. "Let me tell you, I know I'm pretty, but you and a paper person have no future together..."

The topic Yu Sheng had been brewing the whole way was completely derailed by this one sentence from Irene.

"Ahem, I'm talking to you about something serious!" He had to cough twice, forcing the conversation back on track. "Do you remember what the room you were previously hung in looked like?"

"I remember," Irene thought for a moment and answered naturally. "There was nothing, it was empty. You could see a door directly opposite, and the wallpaper—the wallpaper in the corner was moldy and peeling, and you didn't even fix it."

Yu Sheng nodded. Good; at least on this matter, Irene’s memory matched his own.

"Second question: do you remember a place—it looked like ruins, with many classical columns, collapsed stone walls, and eaves. The ruins were entirely 'soaked' in darkness, and there was a doll—never mind whether it was you or not—a doll died in the ruins. It died quite miserably, with arms and legs shattered all over the place..."

Irene shrank her neck instantly. "That sounds terrifying."

"Never mind if it's terrifying, just tell me if you have any impression of this scene."

"No."

Irene answered without hesitation.