Above the Gray Fog, the moment he saw the strangely styled modern city, Klein leaped to his feet.
The architectural style, the bizarre trolleybus, the rickshaws, and the young women in qipaos aboard them all looked far too much like a certain city from his memories.
"But the time period doesn't match. This isn't the era I lived in before I crossed over, but an earlier one."
"Perhaps the connection between these two worlds is far deeper than I imagined."
As he murmured, he saw the sky, perpetually shrouded in dark mist, suddenly crack with spiderweb-like lines that rapidly spread downward.
It was as if an invisible, terrifying hand was squeezing this world, trying to crush it.
He immediately shouted, "Run!"
Crash!
The phantom sound of shattering glass rang out all around them, countless times over.
The danger closing in from every direction made Cyril's scalp prickle. Fortunately, Klein's shout had snapped him back to his senses in time, and he instinctively opened a "door."
The instant he stepped through the "door" and escaped the Mirror World, which was on the verge of collapse, he thought he heard a sigh—at once ancient and youthful.
It lasted only a brief moment. Then he was out of that strange and dangerous Mirror World.
After he left, the Mirror World, which had fallen into boundless darkness, slowly lit up again. A new Mirror World, identical to the one before, took shape.
A hole had appeared in the dark mist that had always shrouded the sky, as if someone had punched it hard.
Through this "hole," he could vaguely see a stretch of gray-white mist, forever flowing in tranquil silence.
In the real world, deep in the forests of Bansy Island, inside a wooden cabin where hunters once rested but which had long since