Volume 11: The Days of Traversing Through the Mirror
Entering the Mirror
Are you the fucking ‘One Hundred Thousand Whys’?!
To find the medicine, first they had to know what kind of medicine they were looking for. But the female ghost hadn’t mentioned this point, so they could only rely on guessing.
However, the female ghost had already given a very obvious hint. Listening to her gasping, Shen Maomao guessed she was likely Zhan Xin, one of the two dead girls.
Wu Huiling was scared to death, while Zhan Xin died of asthma. Perhaps if they could find asthma medication, they could get help from Zhan Xin.
Following the formula of traditional horror movies, the two ghosts Wu Huiling and Zhan Xin should be innocent, and their main quest was probably to help the two get revenge or clear their names, and so on… but there were no guarantees. Sometimes, games liked to play outside the conventions. For now, they could only take one step and see the next.
The two of them wandered over to the classroom they had used for their lessons during the day. Shen Maomao, holding up her phone’s flashlight, searched around and actually found an asthma inhaler inside a desk cubby.
She raised the inhaler high, waved it at Lou Jingmo, and whispered, “I found it!”
Just as her voice fell, a loud bang suddenly came from downstairs, shaking the entire building. It sounded like the person on bed number two in the neighboring dorm had fallen off, and also like the head of a heavy statue smashing fiercely into the ground.
Startled by the sudden noise, Shen Maomao shivered and shot straight into Lou Jingmo’s arms.
Lou Jingmo held her and laughed, “Look at you, so pathetic.”
No further sounds followed. Shen Maomao clutched the medicine bottle and broke free from her grasp. “Can’t be helped. I was born in the year of the rabbit, so I’m timid.”
Lou Jingmo thought, Probably some new breed of Tyrant Rabbit1. Gets unhappy with just one word, makes a person… really want to pinch her rabbit ears.
Completely unaware that someone was plotting against her ears, Shen Maomao asked, “What was that sound? Did Wu Huiling appear?”
Lou Jingmo said, “I do not know, but delays breed complications2. Let’s hurry back. Turn off your flashlight.”
“Okay.”
The two crept through the darkness, returning to the girls’ bathroom without incident. Shen Maomao pushed the door open and was once again blinded by the voice-activated lights. She walked straight to the last stall on the left, raised her hand, and knocked on the door. “Miss? Is this the medicine you wanted? Should I slide it under from the bottom?”
Saying this, she squatted down. Just as she was about to reach out to deliver the medicine, she saw a deathly pale hand, palm up, extending out shakily.
The hand was extremely withered and thin, like dehydrated tree bark, not something a human could possibly possess.
Fortunately, this heart of Shen Maomao’s had already been tempered a thousand times. Unsurprised by the strange sight, she passed the medicine over without looking away.
Shua! The hand retracted in a flash. Shen Maomao took two steps back and waited at the entrance with Lou Jingmo. In less than a minute, the crisp sound of the lock being pulled open came from inside, followed by a ga zhi sound. The door was pushed open, and a pale, frail girl walked out.
The girl wasn’t tall, in her twenties, with deeply sunken cheeks. Her weight was estimated to be less than sixty jin3, and she was so thin she looked like a skeleton. But other than that, she had no non-human features and looked less terrifying than Shen Maomao had imagined.
Her gaze traveled down the girl’s body, landing on her hands. They were also thin, but their color was relatively normal, definitely not the withered claw from a moment ago.
Before she could look for more than a second, the girl said in a faint, ghostly voice, “What are you looking at…?”
Shen Maomao came to her senses and explained sincerely, “No, no, I wasn’t looking at you. I was just staring at you while thinking about something.”
“Thinking about what?” The girl narrowed her eyes dangerously.
Shen Maomao: “You didn’t flush after using the toilet.”
Lou Jingmo: “…”
The girl: “???”
Shen Maomao: “But it’s okay, we have a good relationship, I won’t hold it against you.”
The girl: “???” Who has a good relationship with you??!
“Ahem—” Lou Jingmo gave a dry cough. “This is not the place to talk. Let’s find an empty classroom to chat.”
Shen Maomao nodded repeatedly. “Right, right.”
“NO!” The girl’s voice suddenly shot up. “They’ll be watching me! I can’t go back! I’ll die if I go back!”
Her voice was so shrill that for a moment, Shen Maomao thought her eardrums would perforate. She quickly appeased her, “Okay, okay, we won’t go back, don’t get excited. We’ll just chat right here.”
The girl quieted down and said weakly, “Then… I’ll go wash my hands first.”
Shen Maomao and Lou Jingmo followed her outside and watched as she first nervously closed the bathroom door, then turned on the faucet. As she washed her hands, she said, “Thank you… if it weren’t for you, I might have died here.”
Shen Maomao chimed in, “Why were you hiding in the bathroom? Was someone bullying you?”
The girl said, “There are monsters outside.”
Shen Maomao and Lou Jingmo exchanged a look. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain it to you. The school is already filled with monsters. If you still want to live, you’d better find a place to hide quickly.”
Shen Maomao: “What kind of monsters?”
The girl: “It’s hard to say. They eat people and don’t seem to have any consciousness. My friend has already been eaten by them.”
By the light from next door, Shen Maomao saw her expression in the mirror. When she said this, she didn’t seem scared at all. Instead, she was very calm, as if she had already accepted her fate.
After she finished washing, Shen Maomao asked again, “So what do you plan to do next? Just hide in here forever?”
The girl shook the water from her hands and looked at her through the mirror. “I know a place. It’s very safe to hide there.”
Shen Maomao: “What place?”
The girl smiled. “Look here.”
Shen Maomao immediately turned her head, even covering Lou Jingmo’s eyes in the process. “I’m not looking.”
The girl: “…??”
Shen Maomao: “To be honest, I don’t think you have good intentions.”
The girl didn’t make a sound.
Shen Maomao said again, “Let’s all open the skylight and speak plainly4. What are you really trying to do?”
…
The air froze for a moment. Alarm bells screamed in Shen Maomao’s mind. Following her intuition, she grabbed Lou Jingmo and took a huge leap backward. A gust of wind blew across her face as a withered arm shot out from behind the girl, striking directly at her face.
“Fuck, why do you attack at the slightest disagreement??”
The girl said in a low voice, “Did you think that just because you won’t look, I can’t do anything to you?”
As her voice fell, a huge pushing force suddenly came from behind the two of them, shoving them directly toward the pale hand.
The dagger Shen Maomao had been holding in her hand for a long time instantly fell.
The blade sliced across the wrist, yet there was no sense of resistance; it slid through as if cutting tofu.
Pa ji! The severed hand fell to the ground and instantly shattered into black dust in the next second, swirling back to the cut surface of the girl’s wrist and coalescing into a new hand.
While Shen Maomao was making her move, Lou Jingmo hadn’t been idle either. She spun around and grabbed the thing that had pushed them from behind—it was also a hand, an equally withered and terrifying hand extending from the wall.
“Gu du—“
“Gu du—“
Sticky, disgusting black bubbles erupted on the wall, and from within them, black arms emerged one by one, dripping black water as they reached for the two people in the middle.
“To catch the bandits, first catch the king!” Lou Jingmo shouted sternly.
“Okay!” Shen Maomao charged forward with her dagger and got into a tangle with the girl.
The arms on the wall fully extended, like flexible snakes, twisting their bodies to wrap around her.
Lou Jingmo, holding the matching couple’s dagger, took down one “little friend”5 with each slash, diligently protecting Shen Maomao’s dharma6. These hands did not regenerate after being cut off, but a new arm would grow from the stump after a minute. They were cut, they grew back, they were cut again. Soon, several small hills of severed limbs piled up on the ground, severely impeding everyone’s movement.
The girl stood in front of the sink, her head lowered deeply as if to bury it in the ground, her lips murmuring incessantly, “Why won’t you listen to me… Why won’t you listen? I was saving you… I was saving you…”
“Why… why can’t you let me go… why… why why why why…”
“Are you the fucking ‘One Hundred Thousand Whys’?! 7” Shen Maomao spat. “If you want to save us, then retract your hands and talk to us properly, can’t you??”
Jolted from her own world by the interruption, the female ghost instantly appeared in front of Shen Maomao and began to literally handle her from top to bottom.
Shen Maomao rued how few hands she had when she needed them. She was soon at a disadvantage. The female ghost seized an opening and grabbed both of her hands.
Clang! The dagger fell to the ground, bounced up from the impact, and before it could fall again, a third hand snatched it out of the air and stabbed toward Shen Maomao’s eyes.
Feeling the profound regret of having too few hands when they were needed most, Shen Maomao’s pupils suddenly constricted. She pushed off hard with her feet, using the female ghost’s arm as a support, and swung both legs into the air, kicking her square in the chest.
The female ghost’s body instantly stiffened and she fell backward rigidly, still gripping Shen Maomao’s wrists tightly. The back of her head crashed toward the mirror above the sink.
The sound of shattering glass that Shen Maomao expected never came.
The mirror on the wall was like melted ice cream, or like a sudden vortex appearing on the sea, directly enveloping the female ghost’s head.
A massive suction force emanated from it. Shen Maomao’s eyes felt like they were about to split8, and she screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK! Darling, save me!!!”
Lou Jingmo reached her in a few steps. She first raised her dagger to chop at the female ghost’s wrists, but unexpectedly, sparks flew where the sharp blade met the skin. She then tried stabbing the mirror, only for the dagger to get stuck in it, unable to be pulled out.
Shen Maomao began to panic9. “Wh-wh-what do we do?!”
Lou Jingmo abandoned the dagger and grabbed Shen Maomao’s arms, pulling with all her might.
Shen Maomao immediately let out a howl like a pig being slaughtered. “It hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts!! My arm’s breaking, it’s breaking!”
Lou Jingmo could only let go. Her brow was tightly locked, furrowed into the shape of a ‘chuan’10. “There is no other way. If it has come to this, then let’s go right in and see what’s inside the mirror.”
Shen Maomao: “Can we get out after we go in?”
Lou Jingmo: “We’ll talk about that after we get in.”
The author has something to say:
Haven’t written in a long time _(:3」∠)_ Got a bit of writer’s block.
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