Scene in the Mirror

This room hadn't been like this before! Yu Sheng realized it instantly, of course—he clearly remembered what the room that had once trapped Irene had looked like. It had been empty and bare, without a single piece of furniture, not even a chair, with only an oil painting hanging lonesome on the wall directly opposite the door... It hadn't looked like this at all, furnished with all kinds of pieces, and a mirror hanging on the wall facing straight toward the door. Doubt and a sliver of unease surfaced in his heart, yet Yu Sheng didn't sense any aura of danger in the room. Of course, he knew this so-called "danger sense" sounded rather mystical, but after several near-miss brushes with death, he did feel he had developed some perception for peril. And here... the room before him felt completely safe. Hesitating at the doorway for a few seconds, Yu Sheng stepped inside. Everything in the room looked perfectly normal. A pitchfork-wielding monster didn't suddenly spawn from a corner just because he took a step inside, nor did a brazier drop from above. Outside the window, the sunlight was pleasant, and the air in the room was fresh, carrying neither the stench of decay nor any suspicious foul odor. Yu Sheng inspected the room, confirmed the furnishings were all perfectly ordinary items, and finally walked up to the mirror directly facing the door. In his experience, a mirror was rarely placed directly opposite a door. As far as he understood, feng shui was one factor, but another reason was that a mirror facing the entrance could easily startle anyone opening the door and walking in at night. He wasn't sure if similar beliefs existed in this "Jiecheng." He only felt that this mirror facing the doorway gave him an eerie impression... And this eerie feeling wasn't merely because Irene's oil painting had originally hung here; it was also because the scene in the mirror... looked strange. It was an indescribable oddity. The reflection in the mirror was actually perfectly normal—just the room as it currently appeared. Yu Sheng scrutinized it for a long while without finding the source of the uncanny feeling, growing only more suspicious the longer he looked. Just what was wrong? Had the sizes and positions of the items in the reflection shifted in ways undetectable to the naked eye? Was the balance of light and shadow off? Or... had something appeared in the mirror that didn't belong in the room at all? Yu Sheng pondered for a moment, then reached out and lightly brushed his finger across the surface of the mirror. A cold sensation met his touch. Where his finger grazed the glass, ripple after ripple spread out like water, and in the blink of an eye, the reflection shattered along the ripples! Yu Sheng's eyes went wide, and he took a half-step back by reflex. In less than a second, the mirror turned pitch-black—the reflected room dissolved and vanished into the ripples, and an inky, suffocating darkness filled the entire frame. As if swallowing everything whole, it slowly writhed, heaved, and churned before Yu Sheng's eyes. Then, something new gradually emerged from the darkness. Subduing the unease in his heart, Yu Sheng stepped closer to look carefully. Bit by bit, the darkness—like a heavy black veil—pulled back before his eyes, revealing the scene deep within the mirror: A doll—not Irene, but an unfamiliar face—lay broken to pieces in a ruin whose original form was unrecognizable. Her limbs were snapped, her dress torn to shreds, covered in wounds, as though she had fought a brutal, harrowing battle and ultimately perished from exhaustion. Stunned, Yu Sheng widened his eyes, trying to see more in the mirror. As if responding to his thoughts, the image in the darkness began to shift slowly. Yu Sheng noticed the perspective pulling back and tilting, revealing a wider panorama— He saw the surroundings of the fallen doll, a much vaster expanse of ruins. He saw structures resembling classical pillars and upturned eaves, broken and collapsed into a chaos as dark as mud. Many fragmented pieces of the doll's shattered limbs lay scattered all around, as though conveying a single message: Everything here had been destroyed by this very battle. Suddenly, words Irene had spoken to him earlier echoed in Yu Sheng's mind: "...Living dolls are blessed, you know! In the foreign domain, I'm way better at fighting than those so-called investigators or spirit realm detectives..." "Are these 'living dolls' really that good at fighting...?" Yu Sheng couldn't help muttering. Yet even so, the doll in the mirror was dead. Something stronger had killed her—and as the viewpoint drifted, Yu Sheng saw the "enemy" that had slain the doll. A... giant shadow. Yu Sheng couldn't tell what it was, only that it was massive, nearly ten times the doll's size. Its silhouette was roughly humanoid, yet twisted, overlapping wings seemed to sprout from its back. It lay fallen among the ruins as well, part of its colossal body melted like mud, blending into the surrounding chaos and merging with the doll's severed limb fragments scattered through the debris, while its remaining form was wracked with distortions and tears. Yu Sheng had no idea whether the tears and distortions on the giant shadow were inflicted by the doll or if it had simply looked that way to begin with—after all, the thing was pretty abstract in appearance already. But there was one thing he could surmise: the doll and that winged, colossal shadow had taken each other down in mutual destruction. Just as Yu Sheng tried to make out more details, the image before him rippled like water once again. Everything in the depths of the darkness shattered and dissolved in an instant. Darkness like a heavy curtain surged upward, then receded toward the edges of the frame. In the blink of an eye, what stood before Yu Sheng was an ordinary mirror again, reflecting the room. Yu Sheng stared blankly at the scene, then tapped and touched the glass several times, but failed to elicit any further reaction. What on earth was that just now? Perhaps from dealing with so many abnormal things over the past two days, Yu Sheng felt his capacity for acceptance had grown considerably. At this moment, he didn't find the eerie scene terrifying in the slightest; instead, he felt only a profound curiosity about what he had witnessed. Was what appeared in the mirror something that had truly happened in the past? Who was that dead doll? What was the colossal shadow that had died alongside her? Where were those ruins? And why... had all of this appeared inside this house, right before his eyes? Yu Sheng pondered with furrowed brows, unable to help considering yet another question: Did the scene recorded in the mirror have anything to do with Irene? That dead doll bore no resemblance to Irene. Though her face had been mangled beyond recognition in death, at least her striking blonde hair was completely different from Irene's. Yet for some reason, when looking at that doll, Yu Sheng couldn't help thinking of a certain girl currently watching television on the ground floor, sealed inside an oil painting. After a moment, Yu Sheng pulled himself from his reverie. He looked at the mirror on the wall, placed his hands on the frame, and applied a bit of force, trying to see if he could take it down and move it elsewhere. The mirror didn't budge at all, as solid as if it had been cast directly into the wall. After a few attempts, Yu Sheng gave up. He turned and headed for the door, but before leaving the room, he suddenly spun around, sweeping his gaze across the whole space. The furnishings were the same, and the mirror hadn't changed in the slightest. Frowning, Yu Sheng shut the door. Two or three seconds later, he shoved the door wide open again, as if trying to catch the room off guard. Nothing had changed. It looked just as it had. Yu Sheng stood in the doorway holding the doorknob, craning his head inside to scan suspiciously all around, slowly beginning to feel like a lunatic. After confirming repeatedly, he finally stopped messing with the door. He didn't return to his bedroom, however. Instead, his footsteps clattered as he ran down the stairs to the dining room. Irene, who was watching TV on the dining table, heard the noise and poked her head toward the edge of the frame. "Huh? Yu Sheng, weren't you going to sleep? Got insomnia? I don't know any bedtime stories, you know..." Still as carefree and overly familiar as ever. Without a word, Yu Sheng sat down across from Irene and stared at her intently, as if examining something with great care. This finally made the doll in the painting feel a bit uncomfortable. "What are you staring at me for...?" Irene pulled her neck back. "I'm telling you, I know I'm pretty, but you have no future with a 2D girl..." The conversation Yu Sheng had been formulating the entire way down was completely derailed by that single line. "Cough, cough. I'm talking about something serious!" He let out a couple of dry coughs, rather awkwardly dragging the conversation back on track. "Do you still remember what the room you were hanging in looked like before?" "Of course I do," Irene replied casually after thinking for a moment. "There was nothing in there. Totally empty. Across from me was just the door, and the wallpaper—the wallpaper in the corner had mold and curled edges, and you never even fixed it." Yu Sheng nodded. Good. At least on this point, Irene's memory aligned with his own. "Second question: do you remember a place—a ruin with lots of classical pillars, collapsed stone walls, and eaves, the whole ruin submerged in darkness? And there was a doll—never mind whether it was you or not—a doll died in the ruins, a horrible death, arms and legs scattered in pieces all over the ground..." Irene instantly shrank her neck. "That sounds terrifying." "Never mind whether it's terrifying or not. Just tell me if you have any recollection of it." "None." Irene answered without hesitation.