He Jie pressed his forehead firmly against the ground, not daring to raise his head to look.
Cold sweat streamed down his temples, dripping onto the floor and mingling with the blood from his forehead.
"Useless!"
The blurry figure in the mirror merely gave a soft rebuke.
The voice was quiet, not even particularly stern.
Yet He Jie's entire body jolted upward as if struck by high-voltage electricity, then slammed back onto the ground.
He let out a scream so agonized it hardly sounded human.
It was not the scream of someone being slashed with a blade or burned by fire.
It was a deeper pain, one that reached the soul.
If the view pulled back now, the faint light inside the room would reveal...
A layer of black things shrouded the surface of He Jie's body.
They were densely packed, each only the size of a grain of rice, pitch-black all over, resembling some kind of insect.
Each had a mouth that took up a third of its body.
Their mouths were filled with fine, sharp teeth arranged in spiraling rings that extended deep into their gullets.
They were gnawing.
Not on He Jie's flesh.
But on his shadow.
The little things were savagely tearing at the edges of He Jie's shadow cast on the wall.
Like a school of piranhas attacking prey that had fallen into the water, they swarmed over it, frantically ripping at its edges with their sharp teeth.
A section of the shadow's finger was gnawed off.
A chunk was bitten out of the shadow's ear.
The shadow's ankle was gnawed down to a thin strand that might snap at any moment.
With each bite, no corresponding wound appeared on He Jie's body.
Yet his screams were more agonized than if he were truly being