Chapter Thirteen – Don’t Underestimate It

The heavy, sticky breathing on the other end of the phone lingered in the silence for a full seventeen seconds.

Then, as if cut off by an invisible pair of scissors, the sound abruptly ceased.

Without any hesitation, Shen Mo swiftly unplugged every communication device in his office, his movements so practiced they seemed rehearsed countless times.

He grabbed a black marker from the desk and wrote three lines on the smooth surface, the strokes steady and forceful, as if pressing through the wood itself.

I heard it.
I am not an operator.
I bear no unfinished duties.

This was his psychological bulwark, the last mental anchor against the intangible intrusions known as “residual echoes.”

Only after completing this did he lift his gaze toward the sprawling cityscape outside, a sea of countless lights.

He quickly pulled up a real-time monitoring map of all the public phone booths in the city; cold data streamed across the screen.

Soon, a distinct pattern emerged.

The six booths, each marked by a glowing red indicator, were not randomly placed. They followed the old city river’s course, precisely encircling a central point to form an irregular hexagon.

That center was the site of the long-destroyed Qiwu Li district, now reduced to ruins.

Shen Mo’s fingertips tapped lightly on the screen’s focal point, his eyes growing grave.

This was not unconscious diffusion; it was the “drawing realm,” a grand ritual quietly awakening—a ritual using obsession as brush and city as canvas.

At three in the morning, on the opposite side of the city, a shrill alarm shattered the stillness.

In the Jinxiu Garden residential area in the west, a male resident was found collapsed before a dressing mirror in his bedroom, lifeless and with the cause of death unknown.

The city bureau received the report, and the seasoned officer Wang Jianguo volunteered to lead the investigation.

The surveillance footage at the scene was chilling: for over half an hour, the deceased stared motionless into the mirror, as if his soul had been siphoned away, his behavior eerily unnatural.

Wang Jianguo dismissed superstition, suspecting some new drug or hallucinogen-induced illusion.

To dispel rumors and calm the residents, he chose to keep watch at the scene overnight.

Yet six hours later, his replacement found Wang collapsed before the mirror in nearly the same posture as the first victim.

Rushed to the hospital, he was diagnosed with sudden, massive cerebral hemorrhage and died despite resuscitation efforts.

The forensic autopsy cast a supernatural shadow over the case: the microvessels inside Wang’s eyeballs exhibited bizarre radial ruptures, as if subjected to an unimaginable extreme visual shock in a brief instant.

In the duty log he left behind, the last page bore scrawled, distorted handwriting filled with unending dread: “The person in the mirror… moved half a second before me.”

When Shen Mo arrived at the Jinxiu Garden crime scene, the air still carried a cold mixture of police tape and disinfectant.

He bypassed officers busy collecting evidence and immediately locked onto the antique mirror at the center of the incident.

The oval frame, its gilded edges flaking, bore a deep brown wooden body marred by subtle scorch marks, as if kissed by flickering flames.

It stood silently, like a mute witness to countless sorrows and joys.

From his kit, Shen Mo took out a pair of specialized polarized lenses and put them on, approaching slowly.

Instead of staring at the unnerving smooth surface, he pulled out a UV inspection lamp from his pocket and carefully scanned the seam between frame and glass.

Under specific wavelengths, faint carbonization traces appeared in the seemingly ordinary wood grain.

The pattern was peculiar—not natural burning, but resembling a small child’s tiny handprint pressed with all their might.

He quickly photographed it, encrypted the image, and sent it to his forensic partner, Su Wanying.

Within ten minutes, Su’s call came through, her voice tinged with restrained astonishment: “Shen Mo, you were right. I cross-referenced local archives; this kind of carbonized wood traces back to the ‘Yuying Orphanage,’ completely destroyed in a fire during the 1960s.”

She paused, flipping through documents, then added: “More importantly, I found an obscure note in an appendix of the Republican-era ‘Yiji Hall Funeral Records’ related to this mirror. It says: ‘A teacher self-immolated before the mirror, lamenting: The world sees me as a villain, yet no one notices I knocked on the door thirty-seven times before the fire.’”

Shen Mo’s pupils contracted sharply.

He understood.

This was no simple vengeful spirit; it was an obsession spanning over half a century, born of a life erased by history and deeds overshadowed by slander.

That teacher was perhaps not the arsonist, but a hero who tried to save lives.

Yet no one believed him.

His thoughts raced as he immediately retrieved all surveillance footage from the first victim’s home.

In an unremarkable hallway clip, he spotted someone performing minor repairs on the antique mirror at the victim’s request.

The video showed the repairman handing a maintenance receipt to the victim, who signed it.

Shen Mo froze the frame, zoomed in repeatedly until the signature became clear.

At one glance, his blood seemed to congeal.

The signature—the pen pressure, the habitual strokes and curves, even the tiny hook at the end—matched precisely the handwriting of Zhou Zhenguo, which Shen had seen recently in the hotline duty logs.

A terrible thought exploded in his mind.

These “residual echoes” were not isolated phenomena!

They were connected through unknown mediums, linked by “unanswered obsessions,” weaving a vast, silent web of grudges spanning time and space.

Zhou Zhenguo was a node—and this mirror was another.

“Seal it immediately!” Shen Mo’s voice was devoid of emotion.

He ordered the team to carefully pack the mirror into a specially designed, double-layered, anti-reflective, sealed container.

Just before the lid closed, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the smooth metal interior.

In that fraction of a second, he clearly saw a reflection—a man in a white coat, supposed to be himself—smiling slyly.

That movement was faster by a fraction of a second than any expression Shen himself had made.

Back at the forensic center, dawn was breaking.

Shen Mo devised a delayed observation experiment.

He removed the mirror from the container and placed it in a fully enclosed observation room.

A high-speed camera capturing 120 frames per second focused on the mirror, displaying real-time footage alongside a precisely delayed (by 0.1 seconds) playback on an external monitor.

He and Su Wanying waited silently, time ticking by.

Three hours later, a massive data analysis report was generated.

The results chilled them both—the mirror’s reflection consistently anticipated every subtle movement by an average of 0.3 seconds.

Expressions involving facial muscles showed even greater anticipation.

Shen Mo stared intently at the two nearly indistinguishable images on the screen, his voice low and hoarse as he spoke to Su Wanying—or perhaps to himself—“It’s not reflecting… it’s rehearsing. Whoever stares long enough, the mirror ‘becomes’ them in advance.”

Su Wanying’s fingertips went cold as she flipped through the yellowed pages of the borrowed “Yiji Hall Funeral Records.”

Between the pages, she found a nearly faded handwritten annotation—a warning left by the mirror’s original owner: “Avoid prolonged gazing; seven minutes is the limit.”

Seven minutes.

They exchanged a glance, each seeing the chill in the other’s eyes.

Officer Wang had stood before the mirror for a full six hours.

Shen Mo’s gaze left the cold experimental data and landed on the magnified, printed maintenance receipt from the scene.

That signature, identical to Zhou Zhenguo’s, now burned like a brand in his eyes.

The web of grudges was already spreading, and the person who repaired the mirror was a key node in weaving and transmitting this vast net.

He lifted the receipt, fingers brushing lightly over the signature.

Now, he needed to find this person.