A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

Before me was a secret room.

It was described as a secret room, but it was more like a morgue. The four walls were painted a ghastly white, and in the middle was a stone platform on which lay a shriveled corpse.

The body was dressed in a butler's uniform.

Zhou Lang held up the oil lamp and took a closer look. The corpse was dressed exactly like the butler who had been killed upstairs, down to the placement of the folds in the clothes. The only difference was that the corpse had an expression on its face—a twisted terror, its mouth wide open, its eyes bulging, as if it had seen something extremely horrifying before it died.

"Is this... the real butler?" Zhao Qiang's voice came from behind Zhou Lang, trembling uncontrollably.

Zhou Lang didn't answer. He noticed a leather notebook on the corpse's chest, yellowed and brittle. He reached out, picked it up, and opened it. The first page read:

"The thirty-seventh day. It has arrived."

The handwriting was crooked and became increasingly illegible towards the end, as if it had been written in extreme fear.

Han Yingying peeked over from the other side and looked at it with Zhou Lang. The green light of the oil lamp shone on the notebook, making the words appear one by one:

"The master brought back a mirror from the auction. He said it could communicate with ghosts and gods, and it cost him half his fortune. I advised him not to touch such things, but he wouldn't listen."

"On the third day, the master started talking to himself in the mirror. He would talk when no one was around, and he would talk while eating. The madam was very scared and told me to hide the mirror, but I dared not."

"On the seventh day, the master's face changed. This is not a metaphor, it really did change. When he looked in the mirror, the face in the mirror did not match his own."

"On the fifteenth day, the young master disappeared. The madam searched the entire house frantically, and finally found the young master's clothes in front of a mirror. Only the clothes."

The records became shorter and shorter, and the handwriting became increasingly difficult to decipher.

"On the twentieth day, the lady disappeared too. The cook disappeared. The coachman disappeared. Only the master and I were left in the whole house. No, that wasn't the master anymore."

"On the thirtieth day, I locked myself in the basement. There was something knocking on the door. It imitated the old man's voice, telling me to open the door."

"Day thirty-seven. The lock is broken. It—"

It ends abruptly here, with a long scratch on the paper, as if left when the hand was suddenly pulled away by something.

Zhao Qiang's face was as white as paper: "So this entire manor..."

"It's the mirror's doing." Zhou Lang closed his notebook and looked around. In the corner of the secret room, there were some odds and ends: old clothes, canned goods, candles—clearly, the butler had been hiding there for a long time.

Han Yingying suddenly said, "Don't you guys think this notebook's appearance was a bit too deliberate?"

Zhou Lang glanced at her.

"I mean," Han Yingying frowned, trying to find the right words, "we broke the lock, went down the stairs, and entered the secret room. The notebook was right in the center of the corpse's chest, visible to anyone. It doesn't seem like something the butler left behind; it's more like..."

"The clues left for us," Zhou Lang finished speaking for her.

"Yes." Han Yingying nodded. "The game is guiding us to find that mirror."

Zhao Qiang swallowed hard: "What do you need the mirror for?"

This question does not need an answer.

Zhou Lang stuffed the notebook into his pocket and turned back to the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped and looked down at the oil lamp in his hand—the flame began to flicker, and the flickering frequency increased.

The last time the lights flickered like this was when he encountered a large number of ghosts in the corridor.

"Hurry up." Zhou Lang quickened his pace.

The three rushed up the stairs, pushed open the iron gate, and returned to the first floor. There were even more ghosts in the corridor than before; they were densely packed together on the ceiling, walls, and floor, all facing the same direction—the end of the second floor.

They were no longer monitoring Zhou Lang.

What are they looking at?

Zhou Lang followed the direction of the ghosts' gaze and saw a door at the far end of the second floor that he had never noticed before. The door was red, standing out starkly against the gray backdrop.

"That door... when I was cleaning during the day, it was a wall." Han Yingying's tone was very certain.

Zhao Qiang gripped Zhou Lang's clothes tightly; the man in his twenties had ripped Zhou Lang's clothes out of shape.

Zhou Lang slapped his hand away: "Stop arguing, we still need to wear it tomorrow."

"Can you please speak appropriately for the occasion?"

"We don't have any spare clothes."

Zhou Lang carried the oil lamp upstairs. The ghosts automatically made way for him, but they were no longer as quiet as before—they made faint noises, like gears grinding or fingernails scraping glass.

Reaching the red door, Zhou Lang noticed it had no handle and a smooth, mirror-like surface. He touched it; it was icy cold.

Ding--

A system notification sounded.

[Hidden Area Discovered: Hall of Mirrors]

[Entry Requirements: Possess the "Truth" item]

Zhou Lang rummaged through his pockets and pulled out the notebook. The notebook automatically lit up, and the red door slid open silently to both sides.

It was so dark inside that you couldn't see anything. The green light from the oil lamp shone in for about three steps, and beyond that, it was all darkness. It wasn't ordinary darkness—it was the kind of darkness that swallowed up light; the light from the oil lamp was abruptly cut off at the edge, as if it had been bitten off by something.

Zhou Lang stepped across the threshold.

The moment my foot touched the ground, the entire space lit up.

It wasn't that the lights were on—it was that countless mirrors were reflecting light simultaneously, so bright that all three of them squinted. After their vision adjusted, Zhou Lang found himself standing in a spherical space, surrounded by mirrors all around him, with countless reflections of himself in them.

But in the reflection, there was only him.

Zhao Qiang and Han Yingying disappeared in the mirror.

Zhou Lang looked back—the two were still standing behind him, but they weren't in the mirror.

"Look at your own reflections," Zhou Lang said.

Zhao Qiang and Han Yingying looked at the nearest mirror at the same time, and their expressions changed simultaneously.

Zhao Qiang was a different person in the mirror. To be precise, he was something else—his reflection had no face, only a smooth skin covering the space where his features should have been, like an unfinished doll.

Han Yingying's reflection was even more bizarre—she was smiling in the mirror, but the real Han Yingying wasn't. The Han Yingying in the mirror tilted her head, looking at the Han Yingying outside the mirror, the curve of her mouth growing wider and wider, to a degree that human facial muscles could not possibly achieve.

"Stop looking," Zhou Lang said decisively.

Han Yingying looked away, her breathing a little rapid. Zhao Qiang was already covering his eyes with his hands.

Zhou Lang re-examined the hall of mirrors. Mirrors of various sizes, round and square, were densely packed together, covering the entire space. He counted them—twelve on each side, plus nine on the ceiling and nine on the floor, for a total of sixty-six mirrors.

Sixty-six?

He recalled the number he had noticed when he checked the rooms earlier—the room numbers in the manor added up to sixty-six. Even earlier, when the butler was assigning tasks, he mentioned that the manor was built in 1866.

The recurring appearance of this number cannot be a coincidence.