Chapter Seventeen - Who Breathes for Me

Silence cut off all public engagements, securing himself precious moments of respite with a hastily obtained medical leave note.

He moved into the evidence archive room three floors underground at the city bureau, a place once filled with dusty old case files—cold and lifeless. Now, he had transformed it into a fortress against “gaze.”

The walls were completely draped in heavy matte black fabric, absorbing every stray ray of light that might create a reflection.

The lighting system had been replaced with a low-frequency flickering deep red safety lamp. Under this intermittent and eerie red glow, the contours of any object became blurred and indistinct, incapable of forming a stable, clear image on the retina.

His only eyes were the miniature spectrometer he carried with him. Three times a day—morning, noon, and night—he meticulously checked for any abnormal reflective waves in the air, like a soldier clearing mines on an invisible battlefield.

Su Wanying was the sole supply line to this sealed chamber.

Every day, she would punctually leave food and water outside the door. Their only means of communication was an old-fashioned two-way intercom, with the hiss of electrical current as their background noise.

Shen Mo resolutely refused any form of video call; he could not risk exposure.

Su Wanying understood his paranoia, perhaps even grasping the core of the problem earlier than he did.

One day, she left a note outside, written with delicate yet firm handwriting: “If you are no longer seen, it has nowhere to take root.”

Yet absolute isolation was impossible.

That afternoon, a sudden announcement came through the intercom from the gate guard: Lin Xiaoya, the younger sister of the mirror repairman, insisted on seeing him, claiming to have life-or-death vital information.

“No meeting,” Shen Mo’s voice cut out through the intercom, edged with cold metallic hardness. “Have her write down the clue.”

He could not open the door. Under no circumstance could anyone directly “see” him.

Moments later, beneath the heavy iron door, a narrow crack allowed a pen and a folded slip of paper to be slid inside.

Shen Mo crouched down, picked up the pen and paper with tweezers, and retreated deep into the room.

Minutes later, the paper was slipped back through the crack.

He unfolded the note. The handwriting was neat but slightly trembling: “Before my brother repaired that mirror, he had a dream. He dreamt there was a person in the mirror exactly like him. That person said, ‘As long as someone remembers me, I am not the murderer.’”

His heart suddenly sank.

He grabbed the intercom, voice urgent: “Anything else? Did the dream say more?”

Outside came the sound of Lin Xiaoya sniffing, as if struggling to recall.

Soon, a new note was passed under the door again.

He unfolded it, reading a single added sentence that chilled his blood to ice:

“That person also said, ‘The more people who look at me, the more real I become.’”

His pupils constricted sharply.

Leaning against the cold wall, two lines of thought that had run parallel in his mind suddenly collided with a thunderous crash.

Perception is sustenance; being watched is acknowledgment.

The sinister logic behind the “resonance” finally revealed its full, grotesque form.

It was not merely a passive existence within the mirror; it actively sought to be “recognized.” Every gaze, every memory, was a brick laid in the foundation of its being.

He rushed to the terminal and accessed the city bureau’s internal surveillance system.

He needed to confirm one thing: had the contamination begun to spread?

He reviewed footage from the past week of everyone who had faced him directly—from detectives in the major crimes unit to the cafeteria ladies—without exception.

Frame by frame, he scrutinized, searching for any subtle, discordant clues.

At last, in a recording from the interrogation room, he found it.

On screen, a young auxiliary police officer was transcribing his interrogation.

Over fifteen minutes, the officer’s posture gradually shifted from upright to a slight recline, mirroring Shen Mo’s own habitual stance.

More disturbingly, during pauses in recording, the officer unconsciously tapped his knuckles on the table with a rhythm and frequency identical to Shen Mo’s thinking mannerisms.

The critical evidence was in the final seconds of the video: the officer raised his head, and his right eyebrow twitched ever so slightly—but unnaturally.

Without hesitation, Shen Mo submitted an anonymous psychological evaluation request for the officer.

Two days later, an encrypted report arrived on his terminal.

The evaluation revealed the officer had recently suffered severe insomnia and was plagued by recurring nightmares—trapped in a raging fire, with a man’s silhouette standing in the flames’ center, a figure identical to Shen Mo himself.

The contamination had begun.

It was no longer confined to Shen Mo alone; through “behavioral mimicry,” a subtler, more insidious transmission was underway.

Immediate action was imperative.

A bold plan took shape in his mind—the “cognitive masking” project.

He would design clothing capable of physically disrupting visual recognition.

Using police software, he created a unique visual interference pattern: a base of black and gray tones evoking urban ruins, blended with irregular, digital camouflage-like block patterns.

More crucially, he embedded irregular reflective strips made from special materials along key contours—shoulders, arms, and sides of the torso.

These reflective strips scattered light chaotically and diffusely under any illumination, enough to confound facial recognition systems and even the human eye’s perception of body outlines.

He encrypted the design and sent it to Su Wanying—the only person who could realize this plan.

A few days later, during a simulation, he had a volunteer don the prototype and stand ten meters away.

He instructed three observers to stare directly at the target for ten seconds, then immediately turn away to recall and describe the person’s facial and body features.

The results were exhilarating: the average accuracy of the observers’ descriptions plummeted to thirty-one percent.

The plan was viable. He immediately instructed Su Wanying to expedite the production of multiple backup sets.

That very night, Su Wanying left the newly made clothing on the iron rack outside the archive room door.

After confirming the corridor was empty through the peephole, Shen Mo swiftly opened the door and retrieved the package.

The fabric felt oddly textured, more resilient than he had imagined.

He eagerly unfolded it, ready to change immediately.

But as he spread the garment open, a small note slipped from an inner pocket.

Bending down to pick it up, a chill surged from his feet to his head when he recognized the handwriting.

Every stroke, every flourish, was exactly like his own.

The note read: “The moment you put me on, I become more like you.”

His breath caught for a moment.

He snatched the clothing and rushed to his workstation, switching on a high-intensity ultraviolet lamp.

Under the violet light, the fabric revealed a startling secret.

Between seemingly ordinary fibers were countless threads finer than spider silk, metallic and arranged with horrifying precision into innumerable microscopic mirror arrays.

They could not form a coherent reflection, but they shattered the wearer’s image into fragments, bouncing back countless times from infinite angles directly into their own eyes.

This was not a garment meant to “mask” him; it was a mirror made of countless shards, worn as a second skin.

He stared fixedly at the note, then at the meticulously crafted “skin,” his throat emitting a low murmur, as if speaking to himself:

“It didn’t just learn to write… it learned how to weave its own skin—and how to make me wear it.”

He slowly lifted his gaze, passing over the deadly garment to the cold two-way intercom mounted on the wall.

In that instant, he understood.

This clothing and the daily supplies delivered on schedule were the two ends of the same trap.

And Su Wanying, the keeper of his last line of defense, had become the one handing him the knife—whether knowingly or not.

This realization was colder and sharper than any ghostly shadow.

He was not isolated from danger, but from the truth.

The entire defensive system he had constructed had been built from the start on a battlefield carefully delineated by his enemy.