[I]
Qi Si felt that everything about today seemed strange.
Someone had replaced the alarm by his bed with Gloomy Sunday. The opening line, "Sunday is gloomy," carried the distorted sound of an old cassette tape from the last century, like an omen of ghosts about to appear.
At breakfast, his father and mother sat neatly across from him at the other end of the long table, identical yet perfectly appropriate smiles hanging on their faces. At the same time, they picked up dumplings with their chopsticks and put them into their mouths.
Qi Si ate a dumpling and nearly threw up. The filling was clearly far from fresh—sour and rotten, with a fingernail clipping from who knew where mixed inside.
Qi Si sincerely cursed whoever had made that dumpling. The thought that every time he saw food like dumplings in the future, he would probably remember this disgusting experience made him feel that careless cook was guilty of a heinous crime.
In short, after that awful breakfast, Qi Si set down his chopsticks and went into the washroom, intending to rinse his mouth.
He was not very familiar with the washroom's layout. After fumbling around for quite a while, he finally found the mouthwash. As he leaned over the sink, he instinctively glanced at the mirror. The young man in the reflection wore a white shirt stained with specks of blood.
For a moment, he could not remember when he had dirtied his clothes. He looked down and found himself properly dressed in his school uniform. When he looked back up, the person in the mirror flashed him an eerie grin.
A shrill sound of fingernails scraping against glass suddenly rang out beside his ears, as though some living thing had been sealed inside the mirror and was struggling