Chapter 88 – Strange Things, Strange Happenings

Yu Sheng leaned close to the mirror, studying the faint “second reflection” within it with increasing care. The overlapping image gave him a feeling much like the reflection on a glass window at night—the scenery outside and the reflection on the glass all mingled together. That dim, dark cave and the heavy snowfall beyond its entrance seemed to truly exist somewhere on the other side of the mirror, yet remained impossible to see clearly, layered and indistinct.

Eileen scrambled up Yu Sheng’s body in a few quick moves and perched on his shoulder, hugging his head as she curiously peered at the mirror on the wall. After quite a while, she finally muttered, “Could that snow be ‘blowing’ in from the other side of the mirror?”

“You can see it too?” Yu Sheng glanced at Eileen with some surprise.

“Of course I can. What’s so surprising about that?” Eileen felt it was rather baffling. “I’m not blind.”

Hu Li, standing to the side, didn’t wait for Yu Sheng to speak before nodding on her own initiative. “Benefactor, I can see it too.”

“Uh,” Yu Sheng scratched his hair, “it’s mainly because I’ve been dealing with Little Red Riding Hood and Li Lin lately—I keep feeling like the things I can see aren’t necessarily visible to others. I’ve gotten a bit paranoid.”

As he spoke, he rapidly weighed things in his mind for two or three seconds, then carefully extended his hand, attempting to touch the mirror’s surface.

He still remembered that last time, after he’d touched the mirror, it had reflected an unfamiliar field of ruins—a shattered puppet and a massive monster made of shadows had destroyed each other in the center of those ruins. So what about this time? What kind of change would the mirror produce?

Eileen instantly grabbed Yu Sheng’s hair tight, watching his movements nervously. “Hey, be careful! What if something goes wrong…”

“Ow ow ow… let go first!”

“Oh, oh okay, I got a little nervous and instinctively…”

The little doll belatedly released her fingers, and at that same moment, Yu Sheng’s fingertips made contact with the mirror’s surface.

It was extremely cold, as if touching the surface of ice directly. But apart from this abnormally frigid sensation, the image in the mirror didn’t change at all.

“It seems like… nothing happened?” Eileen also mustered her courage and reached out to touch the mirror in front of her. “It’s just a bit cold on the hands.”

Yu Sheng grunted in acknowledgment and withdrew his fingers, staring at the mirror with furrowed brows. Just then, he noticed that the overlapping image in the mirror had begun to gradually fade. After merely a few breaths, the scene of the cave entrance with its swirling snowflakes had vanished without a trace.

Only the normal reflection of the room remained.

Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, then reached out and touched the mirror surface again. He found that the ice-cold temperature was gone too—it had now returned to normal.

“Benefactor,” Hu Li had been watching from the side for a long time and finally couldn’t help speaking up, “has this mirror always been like this?”

“It’s always been off. Every now and then it reflects scenery from who knows where,” Yu Sheng said casually, though his tone carried a note of gravity. “But before, it only displayed some unusual images. It was never like today… there was actually snow piling up in the room, and some unknown lump of iron fell onto the floor from who knows where.”

As he spoke, he glanced again at the strange metal device he had just retrieved from under the desk.

The snow in the corner had already melted, leaving water stains on the floor. The dark, nondescript lump of iron remained in his hand. The bizarre image in the mirror had disappeared, but these things that seemed to have “come out” of the mirror… hadn’t faded away like an illusion. They had stayed in the real world.

Just as Eileen often said: this was truly messed up.

“I—I’m sleeping in your room again tonight!” Eileen squeezed Yu Sheng’s head tightly, her small body visibly tense. “A chair or the desk is fine! I absolutely refuse to stay in this room!”

“Even without you saying it, I wasn’t planning to let anyone stay in this room anymore,” Yu Sheng said as he pried Eileen’s hands off his head. “This place is way too strange. When I’m not around, don’t just open this door on your own either.”

Eileen and Hu Li immediately nodded repeatedly.

“Also, even if you’re not sleeping in this room, you could go share a room with Hu Li,” Yu Sheng continued, lifting Eileen off his shoulder and fixing her with a stern look. “Why do you insist on camping out in my room?”

“Tail-freak whips people with her tail in her sleep!” The little doll immediately began flailing wildly in midair. “If you kick me, at worst I fall on the floor, but when she swings that tail—I get plastered to the wall! Didn’t you see?!”

Then came an unbroken torrent of complaints—about not even having her own room, about being looked down on because she was small, about not having her own bed, about being shooed away from place to place at night. Puppets didn’t need to breathe, so once she got going there was no pause whatsoever, making his skull buzz nonstop.

Yu Sheng even considered stuffing her directly into Hu Li’s tail—but given that the puppet would absolutely raise an earth-shattering ruckus afterward, it remained just a passing thought. He then carried the ceaselessly chattering puppet and led Hu Li out of the eerie room, turning around to lock the door very carefully, then pushing on it several times to make sure.

“Benefactor, would you like me to stand guard at this door tonight?” Hu Li said softly from beside him, seeing how uneasy Yu Sheng looked. “If anything stirs inside, I’ll call you.”

Yu Sheng immediately pictured a nine-tailed fox lying in the hallway keeping watch and shook his head. “That’s not necessary. This room being strange is nothing new anyway.”

As he spoke, he seemed to suddenly remember something. He set Eileen on the ground and fished out the new phone he had just received from the Special Operations Bureau.

Eileen finally stopped her chatter and watched Yu Sheng’s actions with curiosity. “What are you trying to do?”

“For strange things, find a strange expert. I’ll post on that ‘Frontier Communications’ app and ask around—maybe someone recognizes this thing.” Yu Sheng said while exploring the app’s features. “Something like this should have a photo upload option, right? Those detectives and investigators who are always exploring all kinds of bizarre places would definitely need that feature… ah, here it is. There really is one.”

With that, he held the phone in one hand and the strange metal device in the other, snapping several photos of it from multiple angles before posting them on the public channel’s message wall.

Then he pondered a bit more, searched through the preset channel listings, found two channels that seemed potentially relevant—”Antiques and Curiosities Discussion Group” and “Anomalous Phenomena Discussion Group”—and posted the photos there as well. Following the format of other people’s posts, he left a brief description below:

“Unknown object, metallic material, no corrosive or living properties detected. Found it in a room. When I discovered it, there seemed to have been snowfall in the room. Additionally, I suspect it’s related to a mirror that can reflect distant scenery.”

Yu Sheng had originally wanted to write “found it at home,” but deleted it right after typing it. After thinking it over, he figured ordinary people probably couldn’t find something like this in their homes, nor would they discover snow accumulating in a sealed room—No. 66 Wutong Road was a special place, and he shouldn’t reveal too many of its secrets.

Yu Sheng felt he still had perfectly good common sense for a normal person.

“Will anyone actually reply?” By this point Eileen had deftly climbed back onto Yu Sheng’s shoulder and curiously leaned over to peer at the phone screen. “With just these few photos and barely any description—I’ve seen other people’s posts with at least a few hundred words of explanation, some even with videos…”

“I don’t really have much more information to write,” Yu Sheng sighed. “I mean, what am I supposed to say about the surroundings? It’s just a room. And as for any strange properties of the thing itself? Holding it in my hand, I don’t feel anything at all.”

“That’s true, I suppose…”

The little doll murmured to herself.

Yu Sheng returned to the living room and watched TV with Eileen and Hu Li while waiting for replies on Frontier Communications. He waited like this all the way until evening, when he finally received a notification.

Opening it, he found a reply in the “Antiques and Curiosities Discussion Group” from a user named “Three Thousand Wicked Disciples”: “May I ask about the specific environment where the object was found? Was it in an Otherworld? If so, what type of Otherworld? Were there any intelligent beings within the Otherworld’s boundaries, or traces left behind by intelligent beings?”

Looking at this string of questions, Yu Sheng’s expression was somewhat bewildered. But this was at least the only “colleague” who had so far noticed his post, and the first time he, as a Spirit Detective, had encountered a stranger to interact with on this platform. Accompanied by a sense of eagerness to try, he quickly began composing a reply:

“An Otherworld. A residential house. The environment is just an ordinary modern dwelling,” Yu Sheng typed while glancing up to survey his surroundings. “Pretty peaceful. No monster spawns. As for intelligent beings—”

He paused, his expression turning somewhat peculiar as he looked at Eileen sitting on his lap and Hu Li beside him, diligently combing her tail fur.

“There are intelligent beings.”

Eileen reached over and scrolled through Yu Sheng’s phone, then looked up after reading it. “Do you really think someone can answer your question? The Special Operations Bureau didn’t even know No. 66 Wutong Road existed until a few days ago, and here you are having a serious conversation about all this with some stranger from who knows where?”

“I know, but asking doesn’t cost anything. What if someone does know?” Yu Sheng understood perfectly well. “And besides, think of it this way—maybe nobody knows what’s going on with No. 66 Wutong Road, but this thing that suddenly dropped into our home could have come from ‘outside.’ It’s entirely possible someone might recognize it.”

Eileen thought about it, said “oh,” and went back to watching TV.

Yu Sheng’s phone soon vibrated again.

It was another reply from “Three Thousand Wicked Disciples”: “I have never heard of such an Otherworld. Your description is truly rather bizarre… However, this object is somewhat interesting. It appears to be man-made, yet the inscriptions in its corners are quite peculiar. Someone at the Academy might find it of interest.”

(End of Chapter)