The room fell silent.
Huan Guang looked at the curtains, his face dark.
"Did your aunt go to the Greenleaf Paranormal Agency just for this?" Xu Jiu asked after a long pause.
"Yeah. She'd also gone to other people before that. She hoped to settle this peacefully. She didn't believe in this superstitious stuff. The old folks on both sides were making a fuss and wouldn't listen, so the only option was to humor them. But it didn't work very well. The people she went to before were probably fortune-tellers... I don't really remember. Maybe the first ones were fortune-tellers. They said those mirrors couldn't ward off disasters. A mercury mirror definitely wouldn't work; it had to be a special kind of mirror. He sold a Bagua bronze mirror to the family across the way, then sold one to our family too. The mirror was tiny, like a decoration, and it wasn't reflective. Our family just wanted to avoid trouble and didn't believe in any of it, so we didn't care. But later..."
Nothing changed in the room as Huan Guang continued his story this time.
The curtains remained drawn, and the room stayed dim.
"What happened later?" Xu Jiu pressed, looking curious.
"The person my aunt found got greedy and wanted to make extra money. He sold a bunch of those mirrors to both our families. Some of the mirrors gave him away." Huan Guang's face darkened. "He'd bought them wholesale at a trinket market. One still had part of its label on it."
The whole thing was rather ridiculous.
But up to that point, it was still just a feud between the two families. Nothing supernatural had happened.
Huan Guang went on, "My grandfather got angry and threw all the mirrors away. He even mocked the family across