"Chang Wenyu took out my left eye, and I became identical to the monster in the mirror."
"She shattered every illusion I had. I wasn't Lin Sisi—I was Zhang Ju. That hideous monster in the mirror was me."
Blood seeped from his wounds. Most of Zhang Ju's jacket had already been stained red. What was even more terrifying was that the bloodstains on his clothes were weaving together, multiplying, spreading.
"I was dragged into the mirror. I stood there watching Chang Wenyu on the other side, holding my left eye in her hand, her lips moving as if saying—one more to go."
"My left eye slowly changed in her hand. Every memory of my life flashed through my pupil. When she took my left eye, she took away everything beautiful and hopeful in my life."
Drip. Drip...
Blood dripped from Zhang Ju's body onto the hallway floor. Faint footsteps echoed from somewhere inside the teaching building, but no matter which direction anyone looked, no one was coming.
"What kind of world exists behind the mirror?" Chen Ge asked softly.
"Red. Nothing but red. Everything is red."
Zhang Ju's description reminded Chen Ge of the scene behind the door in the three-star trial mission. "Then how did you come back from there?"
"There was another me inside the mirror, drenched in blood, trying to eat me. I didn't have time to think—I could only run. After running for what felt like forever, I realized the world behind the mirror was also a school. Completely empty—or at least that's how it looked on the surface."
"What happened after that?"
"I didn't make it through the first night. In the end, the other me in the mirror caught me." A hint of confusion flickered in Zhang Ju's eyes. "In my memories, he killed me. But when I opened my eyes again, I was back in this school, and I had lost most of my memories, becoming one of the people here."
"So your memories were altered after your death?"
"You could put it that way. I don't know what happened in between. If you want to find the answer, you'd probably have to go looking in that blood-red world behind the mirror." Zhang Ju didn't seem to be lying. His face was terrifying, but his expression was entirely earnest.
"I think I understand," Chen Ge said quietly. "Normally, a 'door' is the only passage into the blood-red world. But in this scenario, there's an entity far beyond anything we can imagine—possibly something above the Red Coat level. This being used the mirror as a medium to separate a second scene from the blood-red world, which is the school we're standing in now. Does that make sense to everyone?"
Every club member present shook their head.
"Let me put it simply. We push open a door and enter the blood-red world. Inside that world, we find a mirror. When we touch the mirror, we enter the world within it."
"If you think of it like dreaming, it should be easy to understand. Ordinary people live in reality. When they fall asleep and dream, our consciousness appears in the dream world. But what happens if we dream inside the dream world? Our consciousness ends up in a dream within a dream."
"The blood-red world is made of despair and negative emotions. The world behind the mirror is more like a 'dream' created by the person who opened the door themselves."
Chen Ge tried hard but couldn't quite make the students understand. However, he did figure out something critical.
When he had woken up, he had lost contact with all his employees, and the black phone was nowhere near him. That put him in an extremely dangerous position.
He had never been able to figure out how the owner of the school had managed to do this.