Chapter 24: Scene in the Mirror

This room was not like this before!

Yu Sheng instantly realized that, of course. He still clearly remembered what this room, which had once trapped Eileen, looked like: empty and bare, with no furnishings, not even a chair, only a lone oil painting hanging on the wall directly opposite the door...

Not like this now, filled with all kinds of furniture, with a mirror hanging on the wall directly facing the door.

A sense of doubt and vague unease arose in his heart, but Yu Sheng didn't sense any dangerous aura in the room.

Of course, he knew this so-called "crisis sense" sounded mystical, but after a few brushes with death, he really felt he had developed some perception of danger. And here... he felt the room before him was safe.

After hesitating at the door for a few seconds, Yu Sheng stepped into the room.

Everything in the room looked perfectly normal. No monster wielding a pitchfork suddenly appeared from a corner, nor did a brazier fall from the ceiling when he stepped inside. The sunlight outside the window was just right, and the air in the room was fresh, with no trace of decay or suspicious fishy stench.

Yu Sheng inspected the room and confirmed that the furniture and decorations were just ordinary items. Finally, he came to the mirror directly facing the door.

As far as he knew, mirrors were generally not placed directly opposite the door. In his understanding, one reason was feng shui, and another was that a mirror facing the door could easily startle someone entering the room at night.

But he wasn't sure if similar beliefs existed in this so-called "Boundary City."

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

And this eeriness wasn't just because Eileen's painting had originally hung here, but also because the scene in the mirror looked... strange.

It was an indescribable weirdness. What the mirror reflected was actually perfectly normal—just the current state of the room. Yu Sheng examined it closely for a long time but couldn't find the source of the strange feeling. The more he looked, the more suspicious he became—what exactly was wrong?

Was the size and position of the objects in the mirror slightly offset in a way difficult to detect? Was there a discrepancy in the brightness and darkness of the image? Or... was there something in the mirror that didn't exist in the room?

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, then reached out a finger and lightly brushed it across the mirror's surface.

A cool touch came through. Where his finger touched, ripples like water waves spread across the mirror's surface, and the reflection shattered in an instant!

Yu Sheng's eyes widened, and he instinctively stepped back half a pace. In that less-than-a-second, the mirror had turned completely black. The original reflection of the room broke and dissolved into those ripples, and an ink-black darkness filled the entire frame, as if swallowing everything. It slowly writhed, undulated, and swirled before Yu Sheng's eyes.

Then, something new gradually emerged from that darkness. Yu Sheng suppressed his unease, stepped forward, and looked closely. Gradually, that layer of darkness, like a heavy black veil, faded before his eyes, allowing him to see the scene deep within the mirror:

A doll—but not Eileen, an unfamiliar face—lay shattered in a pile of rubble, its original form unrecognizable. Its limbs were broken, its dress torn, and it was covered in wounds, as if it had been through a fierce battle and finally died from exhaustion.

Startled, Yu Sheng widened his eyes, trying to see more in the mirror. The mirror seemed to respond to his thought; the image in the darkness slowly moved. Yu Sheng noticed the perspective of the mirror was pulling back and tilting, revealing a wider panoramic view.

He saw the surroundings of the fallen doll, saw a larger expanse of ruins. He saw many structures resembling classical pillars and upturned eaves, all broken, toppled, and collapsed into a chaos as dark as mud. Fragments of the doll's broken limbs were scattered around, as if telling him one thing:

Everything here was destroyed by this battle.

Suddenly, a sentence Eileen had said earlier echoed in Yu Sheng's mind:

"...Living dolls are blessed, you know. I can fight way better than those so-called investigators or spiritual detectives in the otherworld..."

"Are these 'living dolls' really that tough...?" Yu Sheng muttered to himself.

But even so, the doll in the mirror had died. Something stronger than her had killed her. As the perspective shifted, Yu Sheng saw the "enemy" that had killed the doll.

A... massive shadow. Yu Sheng didn't know what it was, only that it was huge, almost ten times the size of the doll. Its outline was roughly humanoid, but seemed to have twisted, overlapping wings on its back. It too lay among the ruins, part of its massive body melted like mud, merging with the chaos around the ruins and with the fragments of the doll's limbs scattered there. The remaining body structure was twisted and damaged.

Yu Sheng didn't know whether the twisting and damage on the massive shadow were caused by the doll or were its original form—after all, this thing looked pretty abstract to begin with.

But one thing he could guess: the doll and that huge, seemingly winged shadow had most likely died together.

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

Everything deep in the darkness shattered and dissolved in an instant. The thick darkness surged up and then receded toward the edges of the frame. In the blink of an eye, the mirror before Yu Sheng became ordinary again, reflecting the room's scene.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at this, then tapped and touched the mirror a few more times, but couldn't evoke any abnormality again.

What was that just now?

Probably because he had dealt with too many abnormal things in the past two days, Yu Sheng felt his tolerance had improved considerably. At this moment, he didn't find that eerie scene particularly frightening, but instead felt a strong curiosity about what he had seen.

Was what appeared in the mirror something that had really happened? Who was that dead doll? What was that huge shadow that died together with the doll? Where was that ruin? And why... did all this appear in this house, before him?

Yu Sheng frowned in thought and couldn't help thinking about another question:

Was the scene recorded in the mirror related to Eileen?

The dead doll didn't look like Eileen. Although her face was disfigured in death, at least her striking blonde hair was completely different from Eileen's. But for some reason, when he saw that doll, Yu Sheng always unconsciously thought of a certain girl sealed in an oil painting, currently watching TV downstairs.

After a moment, Yu Sheng ended his contemplation. He looked at the mirror on the wall, reached out, grabbed the frame, and tried with a little force to see if he could take it down and move it somewhere else.

The mirror didn't budge, as solid as if it were cast into the wall.

After several attempts, Yu Sheng gave up.

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

The furnishings in the room were still the same, and the mirror hadn't changed at all.

Yu Sheng frowned and closed the door.

After two or three seconds, he abruptly pushed the door open again, as if trying to catch the room off guard.

There was no change in the room. It was still the same.

Yu Sheng stood at the door, holding the handle, his head poking into the room, suspiciously observing everywhere. He gradually felt like he was acting like a madman.

After confirming repeatedly, he finally stopped messing with the door.

But he didn't go back to his own bedroom. Instead, he clattered down the stairs and arrived at the dining room.

Eileen, who was watching TV at the dining table, heard the commotion and craned her neck to look over the edge of the frame: "Hey? Yu Sheng, weren't you going to sleep? Insomnia? I can't tell bedtime stories..."

She was still that carefree and overly familiar as usual.

Yu Sheng didn't speak. He just sat across from Eileen and looked at her seriously, as if carefully observing something.

This finally made the living doll in the painting feel a bit awkward.

"What are you staring at me for..." Eileen shrank her neck back. "Let me tell you, I know I'm good-looking, but you and a 2D character have no future..."

The topic Yu Sheng had been pondering all the way was shattered by Eileen's one sentence.

"Cough cough, I'm being serious!" He had to clear his throat loudly and forcefully steer the conversation back on track. "Do you still remember what the room you were hanging on the wall looked like?"

"I remember," Eileen thought for a moment, then answered naturally. "Nothing in it, empty. The door was right opposite, and there was wallpaper—the corners were moldy and peeling, and you never fixed it."

Yu Sheng nodded. Good. At least on this matter, Eileen's memory matched his.

"Second question. Do you remember a place—looked like a ruin, with lots of classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and upturned eaves. The whole ruin was 'soaked' in darkness. And there was a doll—don't worry about whether it was you or not—but a doll died in the ruins. Died horribly, arms and legs scattered everywhere..."

Eileen immediately shrank her neck. "Sounds scary."

"Forget whether it's scary. Just tell me if you have any memory of this scene."

"No."

Eileen answered without hesitation.

(End of this chapter)