Chapter 24: The Scene in the Mirror

Chapter 24: The Scene in the Mirror

This room hadn’t originally looked like this!

Yu Sheng immediately realized it. He clearly remembered what the room that had once trapped Irene looked like, completely empty, without any furnishings at all. There hadn’t even been a chair. The only thing inside had been a lone oil painting hanging on the wall directly opposite the door...

Not a room like this one, filled with various pieces of furniture, with a mirror hanging on the wall facing the door.

Questions and a faint unease arose in his heart, yet Yu Sheng didn’t sense any dangerous aura in the room.

Of course, he knew that this so-called “sense of danger” sounded rather mystical, but after several near brushes with Death, he genuinely felt he had developed some perception for danger. And here...

The room before him felt safe.

After hesitating at the doorway for several seconds, Yu Sheng stepped into the room.

Everything inside appeared perfectly normal. Nothing suddenly jumped out from a corner carrying a pitchfork, nor did a brazier fall from the ceiling when he entered. Sunshine streamed through the window outside, and the air in the room was fresh. There was no smell of decay or any suspicious bloody stench.

Yu Sheng inspected the room thoroughly. After confirming that all the furnishings were merely ordinary objects, he finally stopped in front of the mirror facing the door.

In his impression, mirrors generally weren’t placed directly opposite doorways. As he understood it, feng shui was one reason for this, while another was that a mirror facing the door could easily startle someone entering the room at night.

But he wasn’t sure whether similar beliefs existed in this Boundary City.

He only felt that this mirror facing the doorway gave him a somewhat... eerie feeling.

And that sense of eeriness wasn’t merely because Irene’s oil painting had once hung here. It was also because the scene reflected in the mirror...

Looked strange.

It was the sort of strangeness that couldn’t be put into words. The image reflected in the mirror was completely normal, simply showing the room as it currently was. Yu Sheng studied it carefully for quite some time and still couldn’t identify the source of that odd feeling. Yet the more he looked, the more suspicious he became.

What exactly was wrong?

Had the size and positions of objects in the reflection shifted by an amount too subtle for the naked eye to detect? Was there something off about the lighting? Or...

Was there something in the mirror that didn’t actually exist in the room?

After thinking for a moment, Yu Sheng reached out and lightly brushed the mirror’s surface with a finger.

A cold sensation came from the glass. Ripples spread across the mirror where his finger touched it, like waves on water, and the reflected image shattered instantly with the ripples!

Yu Sheng’s eyes widened at once. He instinctively stepped back half a pace. In less than a second, the mirror had transformed into a field of pure darkness.

The room that had been reflected moments before shattered and dissolved within the expanding ripples. Darkness as dense as ink filled the entire frame, as though it had swallowed everything. Before Yu Sheng’s eyes, it slowly writhed, surged, and rotated.

Then, new things gradually emerged from within that darkness.

Suppressing the unease in his heart, Yu Sheng stepped forward and looked carefully. Little by little, the darkness, like a heavy black veil, receded before his eyes, allowing him to see the scene hidden in the depths of the mirror.

A doll.

But it wasn’t Irene.

It was an unfamiliar face.

The doll lay shattered amid ruins so devastated that their original form could no longer be discerned. Her limbs were broken, her dress torn, and her body covered in wounds. It looked as though she had endured a brutal battle and ultimately died after exhausting all her strength.

Stunned, Yu Sheng widened his eyes and tried desperately to see more through the mirror.

The mirror seemed to respond to his desire.

The image within the darkness slowly began to move.

Yu Sheng noticed that the perspective shown in the mirror was pulling farther away, tilting, revealing a broader panorama.

He saw the area surrounding the fallen doll.

He saw ruins on an even greater scale.

He saw structures resembling classical pillars and upturned eaves, but all of them had fractured, collapsed, and sunk into a chaos as dark and thick as mud.

Many fragments of the doll’s broken limbs were scattered throughout the area.

It was as though the scene was conveying a message to him:

Everything here had been destroyed by this battle.

Suddenly, a sentence Irene had spoken earlier echoed in Yu Sheng’s mind:

“...Living dolls are blessed, you know. In the Other Domain, I’m much better at fighting than those so-called investigators and spirit world detectives...”

“These living dolls are really that good at fighting...?” Yu Sheng couldn’t help muttering to himself.

Yet even one so capable had died.

Something even more powerful had killed her.

As the perspective continued to shift, Yu Sheng finally saw the enemy that had slain the doll.

A giant shadow.

He had no idea what it was.

He only knew it was enormous, nearly ten times the size of the doll. Its outline was vaguely humanoid, yet twisted, overlapping wings seemed to grow from its back.

It too lay amid the ruins.

Part of its colossal body had melted like mud, merging with the surrounding chaos and ruins, and also with the doll’s scattered body parts. The remainder of its form was covered in distortions and damage.

Yu Sheng couldn’t tell whether those twisted wounds had been inflicted by the doll or whether the thing had simply looked that way from the beginning.

After all, the creature already looked abstract enough as it was.

But one thing he could guess.

The doll and that enormous winged shadow had most likely destroyed each other together.

Just as Yu Sheng was trying to make out more details, the image before him suddenly rippled again like water.

Everything hidden in the darkness shattered and dissolved in an instant.

The curtain-like darkness surged upward, then retreated toward the edges of the frame.

In the blink of an eye, the mirror became an ordinary mirror once more, reflecting the room exactly as before.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at the scene.

He then tapped and touched the mirror several more times, but failed to trigger any further abnormalities.

What had that been just now?

Perhaps because he had spent the past two days dealing with one abnormal thing after another, Yu Sheng felt his tolerance had improved considerably. Rather than feeling frightened by what he had just witnessed, he was overwhelmed with curiosity.

Was what appeared in the mirror something that had truly happened?

Who was that dead doll?

What was the enormous shadow that had perished together with her?

Where were those ruins?

And why did all of it appear in this house, right before his eyes?

Frowning deeply, Yu Sheng pondered these questions.

Then another thought occurred to him.

Was the scene recorded in the mirror connected to Irene?

The dead doll didn’t resemble Irene at all. Although her face had been mangled beyond recognition in death, her striking blonde hair alone was completely different from Irene’s.

Yet for some reason, when he looked at that doll, Yu Sheng couldn’t stop thinking of the girl sealed inside the oil painting downstairs, currently watching television.

A moment later, Yu Sheng ended his contemplation.

Looking at the mirror on the wall, he grasped the frame and applied a bit of force, trying to see whether he could remove it and move it elsewhere.

The mirror didn’t budge.

It was as solid as if it had been cast directly into the wall.

After several attempts, Yu Sheng gave up.

He turned and walked toward the door, but before leaving the room, he suddenly looked back, his gaze sweeping rapidly across the entire interior.

The furnishings remained exactly as before.

The mirror hadn’t changed in the slightest.

Yu Sheng frowned and closed the door.

Two or three seconds later, he suddenly yanked it open again, as if trying to catch the room off guard.

Nothing had changed.

It looked exactly the same.

Standing in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob, Yu Sheng poked his head inside and suspiciously examined every corner.

Gradually, he began to feel like a lunatic.

After repeatedly confirming everything, he finally stopped tormenting the door.

But instead of returning to his bedroom, he hurried down the stairs.

Thump, thump, thump.

He arrived at the dining room.

Hearing the commotion, Irene, who was watching television atop the dining table, leaned her head out from the edge of the picture frame and looked over.

“Huh? Weren’t you going to sleep, Yu Sheng? Can’t sleep? I should tell you in advance, I don’t know any bedtime stories...”

Still the same carefree, overly familiar self.

Without saying a word, Yu Sheng sat across from Irene and stared at her intently, as though carefully observing something.

This finally made the doll in the painting feel a little uncomfortable.

“Why are you looking at me like that...” Irene shrank her neck. “I’m telling you, I know I’m pretty, but there’s no future between you and a two-dimensional girl...”

The topic Yu Sheng had spent the entire trip downstairs preparing was instantly ruined by that single sentence.

”Ahem, ahem. I’m talking about something serious!” He had no choice but to cough twice and forcefully drag the conversation back on track. “Do you remember what the room where you were hanging on the wall looked like?”

“Of course I remember.” Irene thought for a moment and answered naturally. “There was nothing in it. Completely empty. You could see the door on the opposite side, and there was wallpaper too. The wallpaper in the corners was moldy and peeling, and you never fixed it.”

Yu Sheng nodded.

Good.

At least on this matter, Irene’s memory matched his own.

“Second question. Do you remember a place, a place that looked like ruins, with lots of classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and upturned eaves? The whole ruin seemed submerged in darkness. And there was also a doll. Don’t worry about whether it was you or not. Anyway, there was a doll lying dead in the ruins. Dead horribly too, arms and legs shattered all over the place...”

Irene immediately shrank her neck.

“That sounds terrifying.”

“Never mind whether it’s terrifying. Just tell me if any of that seems familiar.”

“No.”

Irene answered without the slightest hesitation.