What's going on with this house?

As Zhang Chen stepped out of the dance studio, a shattering sound echoed from upstairs. In his haste, he tripped over his left foot twice, nearly falling to the ground. Focusing his attention, he managed to start a light jog.

Just then, a figure leaped down from the spiral staircase, almost crashing to the ground, with drops of blood trickling down their body.

This person was Jia Xin. His shoulders, thighs, calves, chest, and back were all cut open by small knives, and the wounds weren't superficial scratches but deep gashes into the flesh.

Enduring the pain, Jia Xin pulled a green pill from his waist – the exact same kind he had given Zhang Chen in the woods that day.

As soon as he swallowed it, his wounds stopped bleeding.

"Hurry, go to the location of the formation we were just at. I underestimated this female ghost, hurry!" Jia Xin anxiously ran towards Zhang Chen.

Suddenly, a surge of danger washed over him. A pale leg stretched out from the glass on the spiral staircase, and soon after, a headless female ghost in a white ballet costume emerged from the glass, holding a small fruit knife.

While such a ghost might be terrifying to ordinary people, it didn't seem very threatening to Zhang Chen.

"Jia Xin wouldn't be this weak, what's going on? This ghost doesn't seem very powerful." Zhang Chen looked at the ghost, seemingly ready to strike a finishing blow.

"Hurry!" Jia Xin's face changed drastically as he saw the ballet ghost behind him.

However, Zhang Chen suddenly felt an extremely dangerous aura heading straight for Jia Xin. But strangely, the ballet ghost remained still in Zhang Chen's view.

"What's going on, a hallucination?" Zhang Chen thought it was his imagination, but then Jia Xin suddenly flipped to the right. A cut still appeared on his neck, though it didn't bleed due to the medicine's effect.

Zhang Chen quickly stepped forward to help Jia Xin, who had fallen to the ground.

"Go back to where we came in, let's get out of here first. Cough~" Jia Xin said, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

Zhang Chen nodded. As he helped Jia Xin up, another dangerous aura struck him from behind.

"Be careful," Jia Xin somehow sensed it too.

Zhang Chen activated his telekinesis and immediately felt an invisible object, like a small knife, shooting directly towards his back.

"Break!" Zhang Chen compressed the air, striking the invisible small knife and shattering it.

The ghost behind Zhang Chen seemed surprised and merged back into the glass.

"How did you do that?" Jia Xin was bewildered by what Zhang Chen had done, having nullified an attack that had left him clueless.

"Let's go, you're badly injured." Zhang Chen wasn't foolish enough to explain now, he directly supported Jia Xin and headed towards the dance studio.

As Zhang Chen pushed open the dance studio door, he froze.

"This... what do we do?"

Inside the dance studio, every mirror showed a headless, toeless ballet girl gracefully dancing. The exposed white bones of their feet tapped on the floor, supporting their entire bodies, creating a scene of dark ballet.

"There's no other way, you have to help me hold them off. We have to return the way we came in, or we'll be trapped in this Mirror World forever. Use that move you just did to block her attacks, I just need to set up the formation."

Jia Xin's words were firm, and Zhang Chen was startled by them. If he were trapped here, Wang Yizhi and the others in the outside world would be in danger.

Zhang Chen picked Jia Xin up and ran towards the center. At this moment, the ballet ghosts in the surrounding mirrors began to slowly crawl out.

Jia Xin had already started taking crystal sand from his waist and sprinkling it in a circle.

"How long will it take?" Zhang Chen watched the distorted figures closing in on him, swallowing a mouthful of saliva.

"3 minutes!"

As soon as he finished speaking, invisible small knives flew towards Zhang Chen. If he dodged them, Jia Xin, who was setting up the formation behind him, would surely die.

"Damn it, are all these ghosts this despicable?" Zhang Chen's nails grew longer, and he used telekinesis to block the small knives behind him. The ones in front were up to him.

He radiated his telekinesis into the space within 3 meters in front of him. As soon as any foreign object entered the range, Zhang Chen would strike with both claws.

"Clang!" The sharp collision made Zhang Chen's hands tingle slightly. Using telekinesis felt different; only by using his physical body did he realize the power of these small knives.

"Clang, clang, clang~" After blocking ten times, two of Zhang Chen's right-hand fingernails were severed, and the others were badly damaged.

"Can you attack their real bodies directly?" Zhang Chen roared.

"No, they're all fake bodies. I tried, it's completely useless." Jia Xin was already inserting the formation flags.

Zhang Chen also had no way to get close to the real bodies of those headless figures, because if he did, Jia Xin would become the target of all their attacks.

"Is this teamwork?" Zhang Chen continued to forcefully block all incoming attacks, his body's load increasing.

Just then, Zhang Chen noticed that the group of ballet ghosts, which had been staring at him motionlessly, had begun to move their hands. As their hands moved, Zhang Chen felt his body become unable to move.

"What..." After Zhang Chen devoured that large black monster, his strength had increased to about four times that of a normal person. Now he couldn't move, as if small snakes were coiling around him, locking every joint tightly.

The number of small knives Zhang Chen sensed had also halved, but in his current situation, even one small knife would be enough to kill him.

"Jia Xin!!!" Zhang Chen shouted.

"Alright, the formation is activated!" Jia Xin slammed his palm onto the ground, and the crystal sand around them slowly floated up.

"Ding!" The flying small knives were deflected by the silver needles in Jia Xin's hand, allowing Zhang Chen, whose telekinesis was nearly depleted, to breathe a sigh of relief.

"Wait, if we leave now, we'll have to come back and deal with it next time. That would be a lot of trouble, and we might still get injured. And before we solve it, who knows what might happen."

Zhang Chen also began to feel anxious, as this was the first time he had faced a ghost and felt so helpless.

"Mirror, mirror... Jia Xin said this is a world within mirrors. The mirrors here don't reflect us, but they can reflect its true form. So, if it's not its true form, it won't be reflected either?"

With this thought, Zhang Chen, whose attention had been solely on the ballet ghosts around him, began to observe the surrounding mirrors.

"Haha, as expected." Zhang Chen saw the scene reflected in the mirror. There were no ghosts and no him. But not far behind him, the mirror indeed reflected the ghost's true form.

Zhang Chen retracted all the radiating thoughts. Then, in the last second before the teleportation was to take place, he concentrated his telekinesis and directly pulled the ghost's main body into the formation.

At the same time, a stream of blood flowed from Zhang Chen's nose.

"Zhang Chen, you..." Jia Xin exclaimed in shock, but before he could finish speaking, the teleportation was complete.

A similar feeling of separation occurred. In front of them, there were no longer groups of headless ballet ghosts. Instead, there was one beside them, and it was corporeal.

"Jia Xin, you control it, I'll eat," the two of them retreated to opposite sides simultaneously.

Although Zhang Chen's head was dizzy, he held on with sheer willpower.

This ghost was clearly much weaker upon arriving in the real world. Moreover, it seemed momentarily stunned at first, and the small knives flying towards Zhang Chen became visible to the naked eye.

With Jia Xin no longer behind him, Zhang Chen simply turned and dodged the attack.

Just as the ghost was about to launch another attack on Zhang Chen, dozens of silver needles were precisely embedded into its vital acupoints, causing the ghost to collapse onto the ground.

Zhang Chen smiled and, like a wolf or tiger, rushed in front of the ghost. He licked his tongue, opened his mouth, and the eerie atmosphere in the dance studio instantly vanished.

A voice sounded: Consumed one Intermediate Vengeful Ghost (Aberrant), Saturation gained: 25%, Acquired Skill: Mirror (Incomplete), Original Skill: Telekinesis, Aberration occurred, Acquired Form Change (Small Knives).

Discovered Skill: Mirror (Incomplete) has a compatibility of 34% with Water (Extremely Incomplete), proceed with fusion?

"No," Zhang Chen decisively refused. Although the 1/3 probability was significant, it wasn't over 50%, and Zhang Chen wasn't going to gamble.

Zhang Chen

Main Soul Frame Status: Activated

Main Soul: Gluttonous Ghost

Saturation: 100% (Saturated)

Compatibility with Current **: 41%

Secondary Soul Frame Status: Not Activated

Skill Slot Count: 3

Skill Slots Used: 2

Owned Skills: Telekinesis (Evolvable, Used), Nail Growth (Arm Portion, Used), Water (Extremely Incomplete, Unusable), Flesh and Blood (Incomplete, Unusable), Mirror (Incomplete, Unusable)

Telekinesis: Can control invisible force with thought, current proficiency 87%, can manifest telekinesis into small knives.

Nail Growth: Strength of both arms increased by 350%, nail hardness increased by 1000%, length controllable at will.

Physical Condition: Medium

Perception Ability: High

Overall Evaluation: Medium

Jailer Rank: Pawn

"What a great haul, a truly great haul!" Zhang Chen was somewhat excited after hearing the system prompt.

Just then, Jia Xin ran up, grabbed Zhang Chen by the collar, and roared, "Do you know you were gambling with your life? Even if we couldn't kill that ghost, we could have gone in again with our plan. This Five Elements Reversal Array was originally designed for living people. Adding a ghost into it, who knows what would happen. If we weren't lucky, we might have been scattered into another dimension and shattered into pieces."

Zhang Chen wasn't angry. Jia Xin's words made a lot of sense. He shook his head and said, "I'll listen to you next time. This time, it was my fault for handling it."

As the saying goes, stepping back leads to a broader view. Zhang Chen's concession calmed Jia Xin down. In his earlier excitement, his wounds had reopened, and blood began to flow.

"I'll send you up first," Zhang Chen said, carrying Jia Xin on his back towards the second-floor apartment.

As soon as the two of them stepped out and were about to head upstairs, a "sizzling" sound came from the oil painting room on the left side of the hall, like the sound of drawing on paper with an ink brush. Simultaneously, in the swimming pool area opposite, the sound of someone swimming could also be heard.

"What on earth is going on here!" Zhang Chen's head was a bit fuzzy.

"Let's go back to the dorm and talk about it tomorrow," Jia Xin reminded him from behind.

Indeed, at this point, Jia Xin had basically lost all fighting strength, and Zhang Chen had overused his telekinesis. Their only hope was to make it through the night safely.

But would things turn out that way?