"She's the engine!" Bai Mo said through gritted teeth, his face contorted with pain. "Her existence is the final authorization key that sustains and awakens this Mirror Realm! Once she merges with the eye, the Mirror Realm will fully activate again... If she can control it, she can rewrite the structure of this entire domain!"
"What if she can't?!"
Bai Mo shuddered and gave a bitter smile. "Then she'll become... the next Mirror Master."
Jiu Jia Yi froze, his pupils abruptly contracting to pinpoints.
That meant Yan Zhi would be trapped forever in this empty, terrifying Mirror Realm, becoming its next keeper, losing herself, her past, everything.
Meanwhile, Yan Zhi's consciousness was fracturing—
She saw herself standing before a mirror. Countless versions of "her" smiled at her from within it, their smiles taking every form: innocent, seductive, deranged, haggard.
"Welcome back," they said in unison.
Yan Zhi clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. "Get lost."
"You can't get rid of us," a voice chuckled inside her head. "You are us."
Her body shook violently, her consciousness seemingly torn to shreds as memories surfaced one after another—
She had once tried and failed to hang herself on a snowy night; when she opened her eyes, she had been placed in a desolate hospital room;
She had once approached a boy who screamed in his dreams under the name "Lin Yun," trying to awaken his dormant "memories";
During a voyage, she had repeatedly dreamed of walking aboard a black ship without sailors, a ship with no sails, no masts, no direction...
She had long since ceased to be an ordinary human.
Her fate had been rewritten the first time she stepped into the Mirror Realm, and now this "contract" was finally being fulfilled.
"I have to win," she told herself, her voice soft but firm as iron.
Then she raised her hand.
All the versions of "her" in the mirror vanished at once. Fragments danced through the air, forming new symbols, new paths, a new self.
And she slowly walked toward the core of the Eye of the Center—the perpetually sealed gate of consciousness.
She would enter.
Not for anyone else.
Only for herself.
When Yan Zhi's fingertips touched that invisible "gate," an icy, burning sensation spread from the bones of her fingers to her shoulder. Her body felt as though some invisible force were slicing it apart, her consciousness about to be stripped from her body.
It was not pain, but a deeper kind of weightlessness, as though her very "existence" were being drawn out by the Mirror Realm and reshaped. She saw light slowly revolving before her eyes like some sluggish ancient mechanism, ring after ring, character after character, embedding itself in her consciousness, slowly but inexorably.
Suddenly, a familiar voice rang in her ears.
It was Jiu Jia Yi.
"Wake up! Yan Zhi, wake up, damn it!" His roar was like a thunderclap, refracted through layer after layer of mirrors, crashing against her already hazy consciousness.
She instinctively furrowed her brow, a faint ripple stirring in her heart.
...He was still waiting for her.
She did not know whether she could still return, or whether "returning" was merely a delusion she used to deceive herself. But that cry pierced like a needle into a corner deep within her consciousness, opening a tiny crack in the frozen layer of emotion within her heart.
"Why haven't you left yet..." she murmured. A tear silently slipped from the corner of her eye, refracting countless false colors in that world of interwoven light and shadow.
Meanwhile, Jiu Jia Yi gritted his teeth, his palms braced desperately against the already cracked barrier. Beside him lay the unconscious Bai Mo. He had long since exhausted his strength; the last trace of energy remaining in the shield was something he had roused at the risk of his life.
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