The night passed in uneasy stillness.
Shi Mu couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her.
Not just the haunting presence of the letters or the photograph—but something deeper, something closer.
She couldn't rest.
The image of the blurred figure on the cliff kept resurfacing in her mind.
Someone else had been there.
Someone else had witnessed her fall.Someone else had known the truth.
But they had kept it buried.
By morning, the house felt colder.
And the mirror in the hallway—one that had once been cracked and discarded—was now intact.
Shi Mu froze as she passed it.
Her reflection… was different.
For a brief second, it wasn't her own face staring back at her.
It was someone else's.
She turned quickly, heart racing.
But the figure was gone.Just her own reflection.Just her own breath fogging up the glass.
"Get a grip," she muttered to herself.
But when she moved to walk past it again, her reflection didn't follow her steps.
It paused.
Then smiled.
Shi Mu froze.The mirror was playing tricks.Her reflection—this time, her own—didn't look like her.
It was stretched. Twisted.
A grin wide and unsettling.
Her heart pounded in her chest as she reached out to touch the glass.
It felt cold.
Colder than it should have.
Her fingers pressed against the surface, and then—
The glass cracked.
[System Notification]
Altered Spatial Anomaly Detected – Mirror Distortion
Emotional Instability: Elevated
Brotherhood Value +275 (Reflection Alteration Triggered + Fear Controlled)
Current Total: 12,370 / 1,000,000
Shi Mu stumbled back, eyes wide.
The crack in the mirror widened, pulling her attention back to it.
It wasn't just a crack anymore.It was a rift.
A doorway.
Before she could move, a voice—her own voice—whispered from the depths of the glass.
"You can't escape me."
The glass shimmered.A figure stepped through.
It was her—her own face, but twisted, as if made of something darker.
"I'm the one who stayed."
Shi Mu's body went cold.Her reflection stepped out of the mirror.
Not as a distorted copy, but as an echo of the person she used to be.
The reflection reached toward her. Its hand was cold, its fingers stretched, long, and unnaturally pale.
"You are the one who should have stayed dead," the figure whispered.
A scream burned in Shi Mu's throat.
But the reflection didn't move. It stood there, staring into her soul with eyes full of hatred and familiarity.
Not a ghost. Not an illusion.But a memory that had come to life.