Chapter 9: The Corridor in the Mirror

Cold.

A bone-deep cold that seemed to freeze even his soul.

Darkness stretched endlessly in every direction, silent and absolute. Lin Yan felt himself sinking deeper and deeper, as though he were being swallowed by a bottomless ocean.

His body was weightless. His senses were fading.

Only his mind remained conscious, and even thinking was becoming a struggle.

“Did it… work?”

He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt impossibly heavy.

In that final moment, he’d poured every last shred of his mental energy into Omnicrafting. It had been nothing more than a desperate gamble, and failure meant death either way, so he’d chosen the only path that offered even the faintest chance of survival.

Crafting himself into the mirror world… was madness. He hadn’t even known if it was possible, but it had been his only chance.

And it seemed he’d been right… at least partly.

He hadn’t been blown apart by the director’s attack, but the price had been steep.

His head throbbed as though someone had driven a sledgehammer straight into his skull—a telltale sign that he’d completely exhausted his mental energy. Every wound on his body burned with searing pain, while wave after wave of dizziness washed over him from blood loss.

I can’t pass out.

Lin Yan bit down hard enough to draw blood from the tip of his tongue.

A sharp burst of pain jolted his sluggish mind awake, and his eyes snapped open.

The specimen room was gone. Instead, he found himself in a world washed entirely in gray.

Above him hung a dull, oppressive sky, devoid of both sun and moon. That lifeless expanse seemed to stretch on forever, pressing down on him with suffocating weight. Beneath his feet lay a rough surface resembling concrete, except its unnaturally dark color looked disturbingly like dried blood.

The air was thick with the stale scent of rust and dust, while the entire world lay deathly still around him.

He stood in a corridor that was strangely familiar. The layout was identical to the corridor on the abandoned hospital’s third floor, but everything here was ancient and decayed, as though the place had been abandoned for centuries. Large sections of the walls had crumbled away, exposing rusted steel rebar beneath. A thick layer of dust blanketed the floor, while dense cobwebs hung undisturbed in every corner.

“So this is… the world inside the mirror?”

Lin Yan struggled to his feet, bracing himself against the wall as he warily surveyed his surroundings.

Silence.

Utter, absolute silence.

There was no wind, no dripping water, no distant monster cries. Even the sound of his own heartbeat had faded to barely a whisper.

Somehow, that suffocating stillness was even more unnerving than the chaos of the specimen room.

Then he looked down at himself.

His wounds were still there, crusted with blood, yet strangely, the pain had faded considerably. It felt as though an invisible membrane enveloped his body, dulling some of the pain.

He clenched and unclenched his fist.

His strength had diminished as well. By his estimate, he was down to roughly eighty percent of normal.

Looks like the mirror world weakens the body, but dulls pain at the same time.

His gaze shifted to the short staff in his hand.

It had come with him.

The dark crimson veins winding along its surface seemed deeper than before, faintly glowing as though resonating with this strange realm.

This place seems to favor items tied to the supernatural or imbued with lingering resentment.

Lin Yan tightened his grip on the short staff, its icy chill keeping his mind sharp.

He needed to figure out the rules of this world, find the director’s weakness, and get out as quickly as possible. Su Wan had warned him that the world inside the mirror was far more dangerous than reality, so he couldn’t afford to stay here long.

With that in mind, he started down the corridor.

His footsteps echoed through the deserted halls, unnaturally loud in the silence.

Every hospital room he passed was shut tight, the numbers on the doors faded almost beyond recognition. Lin Yan stopped in front of one marked “305” and tried the handle.

But it didn’t budge.

The door might as well have been welded into the wall.

With no way inside, he moved on, searching for something familiar.

Before long, he reached a corner.

In the real hospital, turning here should have led him to the stairwell.

Lin Yan rounded the corner and froze.

There were no stairs.

Instead, another corridor stretched out before him, identical to the one he had just left and so long that its end disappeared from sight. Closed hospital room doors lined both sides. Paint peeled from the walls, and thick layers of dust blanketed the floor.

The corridor seemed to go on forever.

A spatial loop?

Lin Yan frowned but didn’t venture any farther. He pulled out the blade from his Swiss Card and carved a deep mark into the wall.

Then he turned around and headed back the way he had come.

About five minutes later, he found himself back where he had started.

The mark he’d carved into the wall was still there.

But that was impossible. He had walked straight the entire time without making a single turn.

“The space here is distorted,” Lin Yan murmured, his expression growing grave. “Or maybe it follows some kind of non-Euclidean geometry?”

That complicated things.

If he couldn’t find the correct path through this place, he might be trapped here forever.

Just then, Lin Yan remembered Su Wan’s diary. Pulling out the brown notebook, he flipped it open.

Neat, graceful handwriting filled the first page.

“March 15 – Clear

Today was my first day interning at the hospital. The place is pretty old, but everyone here is friendly, and the director seems nice too. I hope I can learn a lot while I’m here and help as many patients as I can.”

“March 20 – Overcast

A patient passed away today. He went peacefully, but there was something strange about the look in his eyes. He seemed… scared of something.

Maybe I’m just imagining things?”

Lin Yan quickly skimmed through the pages.

The first half of the diary chronicled Su Wan’s early days at the hospital, when she was still full of optimism for the future and genuine concern for her patients. But as the entries progressed, her once-neat handwriting deteriorated into an uneven scrawl, and a growing sense of unease seeped into every word.

“April 5 – Rainy

I heard something strange coming from the treatment room during my night shift. It sounded like… chewing? I went in to check, but no one was there.

All I found was a puddle on the floor, but it smelled like… blood.”

“April 10 – Downpour

Xiao Zhe had another fever today. He’s such a good kid, but he keeps saying he sees ‘shadows’ floating around his room.

I went to check on him, but I didn’t see anything. Then why was his room so cold?”

“April 15 – Thunderstorm

I found it! I found out what the director’s been hiding! He’s… he’s experimenting on the patients! Those missing patients never left the hospital. They were all…

Oh God! I can’t believe this! I have to stop him!”

The entries stopped there. The next several pages had been torn out, leaving only jagged edges along the binding.

Lin Yan continued flipping through the diary.

When the writing resumed, ink had been replaced by blood.

The words sprawled crookedly across the pages, distorted and frantic.

“They’re all dead… Xiao Zhe was taken away… I have to save him…”

“The mirror… Everything inside the mirror is reversed… The director’s in here… HE’S A MONSTER!”

“The way out is… It’s… Where is it? I can’t find the way out…”

Then came the final line.

The words had been scrawled with such force that the pen had nearly torn through the paper.

“DON’T TRUST YOUR REFLECTION! IT WILL REPLACE YOU!”

Lin Yan closed the diary, the pieces finally falling into place.

It seemed Su Wan had also ventured into the world behind the mirrors in search of the truth, only to fail. Something in there might have gotten inside her head, driving her to madness.

“Don’t trust your reflection…” Lin Yan murmured, turning the warning over in his mind.

Just then, something at the edge of Lin Yan’s vision caught his attention.

There seemed to be a mirror hanging on the wall farther down the corridor.

It was an oval vanity mirror set in an ornate Rococo-style frame, its surface marred by cracks and grime. Hanging there alone against the peeling, mottled wall, it looked strangely out of place.

Lin Yan tightened his grip on the short staff and approached cautiously.

He stopped about fifteen feet away.

The mirror reflected him exactly as he was now—covered in blood, his clothes torn and ragged, his face pale. Yet his eyes remained sharp, and he still held the oddly shaped short staff in one hand.

Everything looked… normal.

But Lin Yan didn’t lower his guard. Slowly, he raised his left hand and waved at the mirror.

The “Lin Yan” in the mirror raised his left hand as well and waved back.

Perfectly synchronized.

Not even the slightest delay.

Lin Yan frowned.

Was he just being paranoid?

After a moment’s thought, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin—one he’d brought with him from the real world.

With a flick of his finger, he sent it spinning toward the mirror.

Clink.

The coin struck the glass with a crisp metallic sound, dropped to the floor, and rolled away.

The reflection didn’t catch it. It simply mirrored Lin Yan’s movements, following the coin with its eyes exactly as he did.

Could it really be… just an ordinary mirror?

Lin Yan wasn’t convinced, but with Su Wan’s warning still fresh in his mind, he had no intention of getting any closer.

Instead, he decided to give the mirror a wide berth and continue exploring the hospital.

But the instant he turned to leave, something changed.

The “Lin Yan” in the mirror… stopped moving.

Lin Yan was still mid-step, yet his reflection remained frozen in place, its eyes fixed on the coin.

For a heartbeat, he could only stare.

Then, before his stunned eyes, the other “Lin Yan” began to move.

Slowly.

Unnaturally slowly.

It turned its head.

Eyes identical to his own stared back through the glass, boring into him.

Then its lips began to curl upward.

Wider.

And wider.

Until a smile filled with unmistakable malice and mockery spread across its face.

“Found… you…”

Lin Yan’s blood ran cold. That was… his voice.