I unconsciously closed my eyes tight. The entire surrounding space was swallowed by a thick, dense darkness. A deep, muffled voice rang out, creeping into every corner of my mind, leaving me stunned as I realized: it was my own voice.
When I opened my eyes again, the scene before me had completely changed. A blank white color covered everything, vast and eerily silent. Right in the middle of that infinite void, an ancient mirror stood tall, reflecting my image.
But the person in the mirror… seemed to be a different version. It was still that face, but the clothes on his body were incredibly strange. His complexion was as pale as a corpse, and his entire body was riddled with seeping wounds, looking exactly as if he had just crawled out of a horrific battlefield.
Stunned, I stammered:
-"Who… are you?"
-"I am you, but from the future." - The ancient mirror spoke, the reflection inside moving its lips in perfect synchronization.
My heart skipped a beat. Instinctively, I stepped back, my eyes unable to hide my suspicion:
-"Date of birth?"
-"March 21st, 2006." The shadow answered immediately.
-"What is my favorite color?"
-"Grey." It replied very quickly, with absolute precision.
But a flicker of logic still urged me to be cautious. It wasn't impossible that the entity in the mirror could read my memories. These personal questions proved nothing.
After a moment of consideration, I decided to get straight to the point:
-"How can you contact me - this past version?"
-"What you are doing right now will branch out into countless different futures, and I am the consequence of one of them." - The voice in the mirror suddenly became gloomy: "In my timeline, I was betrayed by my teammates and died. When my soul left my body, I luckily managed to stay within the River of Destiny - the gap between dimensions. I gambled my soul to return here, just to warn you of one thing: Be absolutely careful with the girl named Kuyan Ni."
-"A gap between dimensions?" - I frowned and asked back.
-"It is a tiny crack located right on the boundary between Earth and this Eerie World." - The entity in the mirror replied: - "Otherwise, how do you think you reincarnated? Wasn't it by slipping through that very crack?"
The doubt in my heart still did not diminish. I continued with a probing question:
-"Are you planning to just stand there in the River of Destiny and chat with me forever? Or do you have a specific time limit?"
-"More accurately, I am not sure." - He paused slightly - "In the River of Destiny, there exists something called the 'Abyss.' It is like a black hole, ready to clear out anything that accidentally falls into this place, including me. So I don't know when I will be swallowed by it."
Saying this, the reflection in the mirror moved slightly. He reached out his hand; in his palm was a bunch of leaves shimmering with strange colors. He held it out toward me:
-"This is a Gemstone that I managed to keep after death. Since you are me in the past, sooner or later you will have to face terrifying dangers, so just take it. Touch the corners around the mirror surface twice, and you will be able to reach your hand through."
I stared at the object, but my mind was in a fierce struggle. Strange… How could a soul carry a physical object like a Gemstone?
Furthermore, if it were "me" from the future, would I speak in such a roundabout way? If I were truly standing on the verge of being swallowed by the "Abyss," someone like me would surely only say the most important things, as briefly as possible, because I wouldn't know how much time was left. Instead, he was too leisurely, explaining every little detail as if he were intentionally luring me into a pre-set trap.
He… really didn't seem like someone in a hurry.
But if what he said contained even a fraction of the truth, this might be my only chance to discover the secrets of this world. Recalling the secret conversation at the cafe between Manager Ming and the mysterious person about the "Lord of Eternal Night" organization and the person named "Master Yue," I decided to throw out a test:
-"If you are truly me from the future, then do you know who 'Master Yue' is?"
-"Haha!" - The dry laughter of the ancient mirror rang out: "I admit that the past me is truly hard to convince. Fine then, you won't take this Gemstone, right? It's about to vanish. If you don't need it, then just ignore it."
I watched the shimmering branch gradually fade and then shatter like grains of sand.
-"Why is it disintegrating?"
-"Mental Power has run out." - The shadow replied, his voice lowering: - "I know you don't have a concept of this yet. Understand it simply like this: In the future, you will possess the power of a Demon. To activate it, you must consume Mental Power. If that runs out, you will go insane. I used the last of my strength to bring the Gemstone here, but it seems it couldn't hold on much longer."
He paused, the eyes in the mirror suddenly looking deep into mine, as if seeing through my soul:
-"You are wondering why I am so calm even though I don't have much time left, aren't you?"
I flinched slightly because he hit the mark.
He curled his lips:
-"Hmm… Perhaps time has changed me? No longer the eagerness or haste of youth."
I remained silent for a long time, then asked in a low voice:
-"In the end… what happened in the future?"
-"I participated in the Demon Gate mission as usual. At that time, you already had quite a few teammates. You saved a girl named Kuyan Ni because you saw her being treated poorly by her teammates, and then you trusted her enough to bring her into the team. Only for the one you took in to eventually drive a fatal blade into your back. It turns out it was all a perfectly staged play. Sounds pathetic, doesn't it?" - The shadow in the mirror mocked himself with a distorted smile.
-"You didn't realize she was a spy? With the power of the Demon and the Gemstone, couldn't you fight back?" - I still didn't stop questioning.
-"Even if I told the truth, you wouldn't be able to understand it at the present..." - His voice was solemn, showing clear helplessness.
Suddenly, a piercing static sound rang out like a broken engine. The image in the mirror began to blur and shake violently. It seemed the "Abyss" had come to carry out its purge.
Before being swallowed by the darkness, he looked me straight in the eyes and left one calm but heavy sentence:
-"Yashu - your teammate… she will die."
I froze, my pupils contracting:
-"What… did you just say? What happens to her?!"
-"F… Flip… the mirror… over…" - The voice was torn apart by magnetic interference, leaving only fragmented sounds before falling silent.
The blank white space returned to its deathly silence. I stood stunned in the void, cold sweat drenching the back of my shirt. The feeling right now was like both a spectacular deception and a brutal truth waiting ahead.
My heart pounded wildly. Should I believe him? Should I flip the mirror over?
Suddenly, the mirror surface flashed repeatedly and then brightened again. I stood still, my chest tightening at the horrific sight before me: My future version was frantically using his bare hands... to pull the demon entity out of his own body. He was using that very agony to resist the pull of the Abyss, trying to trade for a few final short seconds.
He screamed, his face contorted in pain and helplessness:
-"The back of the mirror... there is a Memory Fragment... Just... take it!" Then suddenly, all the frenzy vanished. He looked at me, giving a strangely gentle smile - a smile that I had never seen on my own face since stepping into this eerie world.
-"I know... I always wanted to end everything quickly to go home to mom, to cook the tofu soup she likes most again... But perhaps... I must hand this wish over to you..."
As he finished speaking, the pitch-black hole of the Abyss loomed like an ancient monster, completely swallowing that figure into nothingness. The light went out. Everything disappeared as if it had never existed.
Suddenly, a splitting headache struck, leaving me no time to react. My legs collapsed onto the blank white floor, my whole body twitching under waves of continuous throbbing pain. I mumbled in a delirium, my voice drifting:
-"Tofu… soup? Why tofu soup?"
I frantically rubbed my temples, with enough force that it was as if I wanted to smash my own skull to pull something out. And then… the shattered memory fragments from the depths of my heart—the things I had always stubbornly denied—began to flood back. Each image passing by was another time my head throbbed as if gripped by iron pliers.
I saw a hazy white patch… then the gentle figure of my mother leading me by the hand when I was a child.
The memory fast-forwarded to when I was eight years old, the time I was naughty and got covered in scratches; it was my mother who patiently applied medicine and comforted me.
And then… the image of me proudly carrying a bowl of tofu soup I had just learned to cook to show off to my mother appeared vividly. I clearly remembered my naive smile then, but I also remembered exactly her waving her hand in refusal:
-"Mom is allergic to tofu, I can't eat it!"
Right… my mother was allergic to tofu! So why did that person say she liked it? Why did such a distorted thought exist in my head?
The peak of the pain arrived when the image of my eighteen-year-old self appeared. It was the mourning white of the funeral headband on my head… the cold tombstone carved with the silhouette of the woman I loved most.
The pain now no longer stopped at my brain; it spread throughout my body, as agonizing as if every bone were being snapped.
I remember now… I remember everything!
So… that's how it was.
The real memories returned, cold and cruel like the storm that year. I remembered arguing with my mother, a meaningless argument full of rage. I had stormed out of the house, leaving behind the frail figure of the mother who had just been discharged from the hospital after heart disease treatment less than a few months prior.
The door slammed shut, and that was when her heart shattered. She had writhed in chest pain, her eyes looking desperately toward the door that her only son had just walked through. By the time someone discovered her, everything was too late.
I ran back, my breath coming in gasps, but what awaited me was only the smell of antiseptic and stark white cloths. Watching the doctors shake their heads as they stepped out of the emergency room, watching my mother's body being quietly wheeled away, my chest felt as if someone had hollowed it out. My heart from that moment had also stopped beating along with her.
I continued to exist like a soulless corpse, carrying a mass of hatred for myself. The first year, I lived in frantic torment, ignoring all advice. I was a murderer. That murderer was me!
By the second year, in order not to completely collapse, I built a prison called "delusion." I painted a world where my mother was still alive, using that lie as a crutch to keep going. But the truth cannot be buried forever. The headaches tearing at my temples, the nightly nightmares were reminders from my subconscious: Mom is gone. I had indirectly taken her life with my own hands.
I had been lying to myself all this time. And now, standing in this infinite white space, I wondered in shock:
In the end... what exactly am I trying for?