Mirror Image

This room wasn't like this before!

Yu Sheng reacted instantly, of course—he still clearly remembered what the room that had once trapped Eileen looked like. It had been completely empty, with no furnishings at all, not even a chair. The only thing in it had been an oil painting hanging alone on the wall directly opposite the door...

Not like now, when all kinds of furniture had been arranged inside, and a mirror facing the door hung on the wall.

Doubt and a trace of unease surfaced in Yu Sheng's heart, but he didn't sense any dangerous presence in the room.

Of course, he knew that this so-called "sense of crisis" sounded rather mystical. But after several experiences of narrowly brushing against death without actually dying, he genuinely felt that he had developed some awareness of danger. And here... he felt that the room before him was perfectly safe.

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

Everything in the room looked completely normal. Nothing suddenly burst out from the corner carrying a pitchfork, nor did a brazier drop from the ceiling just because he had walked in. Sunlight shone brightly outside the window, and the air in the room was fresh as well, without any trace of decay or suspicious stench.

Yu Sheng inspected the room once, confirming that all the furniture and furnishings were ordinary objects. He then finally arrived before the mirror facing the door.

In his impression, mirrors generally weren't placed directly opposite doors. As he understood it, feng shui was one reason, 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 customs existed in this "Boundary City."

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

And that eerie feeling wasn't merely because Eileen's oil painting had originally hung there. It was also because the scene in the mirror... looked strange.

It was an indescribable kind of oddness. The scene reflected in the mirror was actually perfectly normal—it showed the room exactly as it was now. Yu Sheng studied it carefully for a long time but still couldn't find the source of the strange feeling in his heart. The longer he looked, the more suspicious he became—what exactly was wrong?

Had the size and position of the objects in the mirror shifted in a way that was almost impossible to detect with the naked eye? Was there something jarring about the lighting? Or... had something appeared in the mirror that wasn't originally in the room?

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

A chill spread from his fingertip. Ripples like waves spread across the mirror where his finger touched it, and the reflected image shattered in an instant along with the ripples!

Yu Sheng's eyes widened. He instinctively took half a step back, and in that span of less than a second, the mirror had already turned pitch-black. The room's reflection shattered and dissolved amid the circles of ripples, and darkness as thick as ink eventually filled the entire frame. It seemed to have swallowed everything as it slowly writhed, rose and fell, and rotated before Yu Sheng's eyes.

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

A doll—but not Eileen. It had an unfamiliar face. She lay in pieces amid a ruin whose original appearance could no longer be made out. Her limbs were broken, her dress was tattered, and her body was covered in wounds, as if she had endured a brutal battle and ultimately died after exhausting her strength.

Dumbfounded, Yu Sheng widened his eyes and tried to see more through the mirror. The mirror seemed to respond to his thoughts, as the scene in the darkness slowly began to move. Yu Sheng noticed that the perspective shown on the mirror was pulling away and tilting, revealing a broader panorama—

He saw the area around the dead doll and the much larger ruins surrounding her. He saw many structures that resembled classical pillars and flying eaves, all of them broken and collapsed into the darkness that churned like mud. Many fragments of the doll's ruined limbs were scattered around the area, as if revealing a message to him:

Everything here had been destroyed because of this battle.

Suddenly, a sentence Eileen had once said to him echoed through Yu Sheng's mind:

"...Living dolls are blessed, you know. In the Otherworld, I'm much stronger than those so-called investigators and Spirit Realm Detectives and the like..."

"Are these 'living dolls' really that strong...?" Yu Sheng couldn't help murmuring.

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

A... huge shadow. Yu Sheng didn't know what it was. He only felt that it was enormous, nearly ten times the doll's size. Its outline was roughly humanoid, yet it also seemed to have twisted, overlapping wings growing from its back. It too lay amid the ruins. Part of its enormous body had melted like mud, fusing with the chaos around the ruins and with the fragments of the doll's limbs scattered throughout them. The remaining structure of its body was covered in distortions and damage.

Yu Sheng didn't know whether the distortions and damage on the huge shadow had been inflicted by the doll or whether it had originally looked that way. After all, the thing was already rather abstract-looking to begin with.

But there was one thing he could guess: the doll and the enormous shadow that seemed to have wings had probably perished together.

Just as Yu Sheng wanted to see more details, the scene before his eyes suddenly rippled again like water.

Everything in The Depths shattered and dissolved in an instant. Darkness as thick as a curtain surged upward, then receded toward the surrounding mirror frame. In the blink of an eye, the mirror before Yu Sheng had once again become an ordinary mirror, reflecting the scene in the room.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at this scene. He then tapped and touched the mirror several more times, but he couldn't bring about any further anomaly.

What exactly had that been?

Perhaps because he had dealt with too many abnormal things over the past two days, Yu Sheng felt that his ability to accept strange events had grown considerably stronger. At this moment, he didn't actually find the eerie scene frightening. Instead, he was filled with intense curiosity about what he had seen.

Had the scene that appeared in the mirror really happened in the past? Who was the dead doll? What was the enormous shadow that had perished together with the doll? Where were those ruins? And why had all of this... appeared in this house and before his eyes?

Yu Sheng furrowed his brows deeply as he pondered, and he couldn't help thinking of another question:

Was the scene recorded in the mirror connected to Eileen?

The dead doll didn't look much like Eileen. Although her face had been disfigured beyond recognition when she died in battle, at least her striking golden hair was completely different from Eileen's. Yet for some reason, whenever Yu Sheng saw that doll, he couldn't help thinking of the girl watching television downstairs—the one sealed inside the oil painting.

After a moment, Yu Sheng ended his contemplation. He looked at the mirror on the wall, reached out to hold its frame, and applied a little force, trying to see whether he could take it down and move it elsewhere.

The mirror didn't budge. It was as sturdy as if it had been cast directly into the wall.

After trying several times, Yu Sheng gave up.

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

The furnishings were still the same, and the mirror hadn't changed in the slightest.

Yu Sheng frowned and closed the door.

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

Nothing in the room had changed. It was still exactly the same.

Yu Sheng stood in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob, poking his head inside and suspiciously examining every corner. Gradually, he began to feel like a lunatic.

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

But he didn't return to his bedroom. Instead, he went thumping down the stairs and arrived in the dining room.

Eileen, who was watching television at the dining table, heard the commotion beside her and poked her head around the edge of the painting frame. "Huh? Yu Sheng, didn't you go to bed? Can't sleep? I don't tell bedtime stories, you know..."

She was still as carefree and familiar as ever.

Yu Sheng said nothing. He simply sat across from Eileen and stared at her earnestly, as if carefully observing something.

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

"Why are you looking at me..." Eileen drew her neck in. "I'm telling you, I know I'm very pretty, but a paper person and a real person have no future together..."

The topic Yu Sheng had been brewing all the way down was completely derailed by Eileen's one sentence.

"Ahem, I have something serious to tell you!" He had no choice but to cough twice and awkwardly steer the conversation back on track. "Do you remember what the room where you were hung on the wall looked like?"

"I remember." Eileen thought for a moment before answering naturally. "There was nothing in it. It was completely empty. You could see a door directly opposite, and there was wallpaper—the wallpaper in the corner was moldy and peeling, and you never even fixed it."

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

"Second question. Do you remember a place that looked like a ruin, with lots of classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and flying eaves? The whole ruin was 'immersed' in darkness. And there was also a doll—you don't need to worry about whether it was you. Anyway, there was a doll that died in the ruins, and she died horribly, with her arms and legs shattered all over the place..."

Eileen instantly drew her neck in. "That sounds terrifying."

"Forget whether it's scary or not. Just tell me whether this scene seems familiar to you."

"No."

Eileen answered without hesitation.