Chapter 24 – Scene in the Mirror

This room was not like this before!

Yu Sheng, of course, realized it instantly — he still clearly remembered what the room that had once imprisoned Eileen looked like: empty and bare, without any furnishings whatsoever, not even a chair, with only a single oil painting hanging in solitude on the wall directly opposite the door…

And not like this, filled with all manner of furniture, with a mirror hanging on the wall directly facing the door.

Doubt and a faint unease rose in his heart, yet Yu Sheng sensed no dangerous aura within the room.

Of course, he knew that this so-called “sense of danger” sounded rather mystical, but after several brushes with death, he genuinely felt he had developed some perception of danger — and here… he felt the room before him was safe.

After hesitating at the doorway for a few seconds, Yu Sheng stepped inside.

Everything in the room looked perfectly normal. No monster wielding a pitchfork suddenly appeared from the corner the moment he stepped in, nor did a brazier drop from the ceiling. The sunlight outside the window was pleasant, the air in the room was fresh, and there was no scent of decay or suspicious fishy odor.

Yu Sheng checked the room over, confirming that the furniture and furnishings were all entirely ordinary items, before finally coming to stand before the mirror that faced the doorway.

In his experience, mirrors were generally not placed directly facing a door. As he understood it, feng shui considerations were one factor, and another reason was that a mirror facing a door could easily startle someone opening the door and entering at night.

But he wasn’t sure whether a similar saying existed in this “Boundary City.”

He only felt that the mirror facing the door gave him a somewhat… unsettling feeling.

And this sense of unease wasn’t only because an oil painting of Eileen had originally hung there — it was also because the scene reflected in the mirror… looked strange.

It was an indescribable kind of strangeness. The reflection in the mirror was actually perfectly normal — it was simply the room as it appeared at that moment — yet no matter how carefully Yu Sheng studied it for a long while, he couldn’t find the source of that odd feeling. The longer he looked, the more suspicious he became: just what was wrong?

Had the sizes and positions of the objects in the mirror shifted in ways too subtle for the naked eye to detect? Was there some dissonance in the light and shadow of the image? Or… had something appeared in the mirror that wasn’t actually in the room?

Yu Sheng thought it over, then reached out and lightly brushed his fingers across the surface of the mirror.

A cold sensation came through. Ripples like water spread out from where his fingers touched the mirror’s surface, and in the blink of an eye, the reflection in the mirror shattered along with the ripples!

Yu Sheng’s eyes went wide in an instant. He instinctively took half a step back, and in that less-than-one-second span, the mirror had already turned pitch black — the reflected image of the room had broken apart and dissolved into those spreading ripples, and a darkness as thick as ink ultimately filled the entire mirror frame. Like something that had swallowed everything whole, it slowly writhed, swelled, and swirled before his eyes.

Then, new things gradually emerged from within that darkness. Yu Sheng suppressed the unease in his heart and stepped forward to look closely. Slowly, the darkness — like a heavy black veil — receded before him, letting him see clearly the scene deep within the mirror:

A puppet — but not Eileen, a stranger’s face — lay broken and scattered amidst ruins that had lost any semblance of their original form. Her limbs were snapped, her dress torn to shreds, her body covered in wounds, as though she had endured a brutal and terrible battle and had ultimately exhausted her strength and died fighting.

In his astonishment, Yu Sheng opened his eyes wide, straining to see more within the mirror, and the mirror seemed to truly respond to his thoughts. The image in the darkness began to slowly shift. Yu Sheng noticed the perspective shown by the mirror was pulling back, tilting, revealing a broader panorama —

He saw the surroundings of the fallen puppet. He saw ruins on a far greater scale. He saw structures resembling classical pillars and overhanging eaves — all of them broken and collapsed, sunk into a chaos as dark as mud. The shattered fragments of the puppet’s broken limbs were scattered all around, as if conveying a message to him:

Everything here had been destroyed by this battle.

Suddenly, a phrase Eileen had once said to him echoed in his mind:

“…Living puppets are blessed, you know. In the Otherworld, I can fight far better than those so-called investigators or spirit detectives or whatever they call themselves…”

“These ‘living puppets’ are really that capable in a fight…?” Yu Sheng couldn’t help but murmur to himself.

But even so capable a fighter, the puppet in the mirror had died. Something even more powerful than her had killed her — as the perspective shifted, Yu Sheng saw the “enemy” that had killed the puppet.

A… massive shadow. Yu Sheng didn’t know what it was. He only sensed that it was enormous, roughly ten times the size of the puppet. Its outline was broadly humanoid, yet it appeared to have twisted, overlapping wings on its back. It too lay fallen amidst the ruins. Part of its massive body had melted like mud, merging with the chaos surrounding the ruins, and also merging with the scattered fragments of the puppet’s limbs. The rest of its bodily structure was covered in twisting damage and breakage.

Yu Sheng didn’t know whether the twisting damage on the massive shadow had been inflicted by the puppet or whether it had simply always looked like that — after all, the thing’s appearance was already fairly abstract to begin with.

But there was one thing he could guess: the puppet and that immense shadow with what seemed to be wings had most likely perished together in mutual destruction.

And just as Yu Sheng wanted to make out more details, the scene before his eyes suddenly rippled like water once again.

Everything deep in the darkness shattered and dissolved in an instant. The heavy curtain-like darkness surged upward and then receded toward the edges of the mirror frame. In the blink of an eye, what stood before Yu Sheng was once again an ordinary mirror, reflecting the scene of the room.

Yu Sheng stared blankly at this, then knocked and touched the mirror’s surface several more times, but was unable to summon any further anomaly. What exactly had that been just now?

Having dealt with abnormal things for the past couple of days, Yu Sheng felt his capacity for acceptance had grown considerably stronger. At this moment, he didn’t find the bizarre scene from a moment ago frightening in the least — he only felt a deep curiosity about what he had seen.

Had what appeared in the mirror been something that truly happened in the past? Who was the fallen puppet? What was that immense shadow that had perished alongside the puppet? Where were those ruins? And why had all of this… appeared in this house, appeared before him?

Yu Sheng furrowed his brows in thought, and couldn’t help but think of another question:

Did the scene recorded in the mirror have anything to do with Eileen?

The fallen puppet didn’t look particularly like Eileen. Although the puppet’s face had been beyond recognition when she died, at the very least that striking head of golden hair was completely different from Eileen’s. Yet for some reason, upon seeing that puppet, Yu Sheng couldn’t help but associate her with a certain girl who was currently watching television downstairs, sealed within an oil painting.

After a moment, Yu Sheng ended his contemplation. He looked at the mirror on the wall, reached out to brace the frame, and applied a little force, trying to see if he could take it down and move it somewhere else.

The mirror didn’t budge at all — it was solid, as if it had been cast directly into the wall.

After a few attempts, Yu Sheng chose to give up.

He turned and walked toward the door, but just before leaving the room, he suddenly turned back, his gaze sweeping quickly over the entire space.

The room’s furnishings were the same as before. The mirror had not changed in the slightest.

Yu Sheng frowned, and closed the door.

Two or three seconds later, he suddenly shoved the door open again, as if trying to catch the room off guard.

There was no change in the room — still the same as before.

Yu Sheng stood in the doorway gripping the door handle, his head poking into the room as he peered around suspiciously, gradually feeling like he was losing his mind.

After confirming it again and again, he finally stopped fussing with that door.

But he didn’t return to his own bedroom. Instead, he pattered down the stairs and came to the dining room.

Eileen, who had been watching television at the dining table, heard the commotion nearby and craned her head to peer out from the edge of the painting frame: “Huh? Yu Sheng, didn’t you go to sleep? Can’t fall asleep? I’m not going to tell bedtime stories, you know…”

Still that same carefree, overly familiar manner.

Yu Sheng said nothing. He simply sat down across from Eileen and looked at her seriously, as though carefully observing something.

This finally made the puppet in the painting feel a touch of awkwardness.

“Why are you staring at me…” Eileen pulled her neck back slightly. “I’ll have you know, I know I’m very pretty, but there’s no future between you and a paper person…”

The topic Yu Sheng had been mulling over the whole way down was completely derailed by that one sentence from Eileen.

“Ahem, ahem — I’m talking to you about something serious!” He had no choice but to clear his throat twice and very awkwardly yank the conversation back on track. “Do you remember what the room you were hanging in looked like before?”

“Of course,” Eileen thought for a moment and replied naturally. “Nothing at all, completely empty. Right across from you you could see the door, and the wallpaper — even the wallpaper in the corner was moldy and peeling and you never even bothered to fix it.”

Yu Sheng nodded: good. At least on this point, Eileen’s memory was consistent with his own.

“Second question: do you remember a place — somewhere that looked like ruins, with many classical pillars and collapsed stone walls and overhanging eaves, the whole ruin ‘soaked’ in a stretch of darkness, and then there was also a puppet — never mind whether it was you, just know that there was a puppet that died in the ruins, died quite terribly, arms and legs broken all over the ground…”

Eileen immediately pulled her neck back: “That sounds truly frightening.”

“Never mind frightening or not — just tell me whether you have any impression of this scene.”

“No.”

Eileen answered without the slightest hesitation.

(End of chapter)