The whole nation: You're put to survive on a desolate planet, you'll be running an alien b

The night was deep, and time seemed to thicken, like asphalt slowly flowing in the deep sea. The neon lights of Donghai City were shut out by the heavy floor-to-ceiling windows, leaving only a cold, white table lamp casting a pale glow inside the apartment. Li Haotian sat on the sofa, toying with the bronze fragment he had brought from the imperial tomb, his gaze never leaving Lin Mo lying on the bed.

Qin Yue sat at the control panel, the sample under the microscope revealing an unsettling form under high magnification. An indescribable sense of oppression hung in the air; even breathing seemed to become cautious. Xiao Hei curled up at the head of Lin Mo's bed, its eerie green eyes half-open, as if wary of some unseen intruder.

"They're out."

Qin Yue's voice broke the deathly silence, trembling slightly. She removed her goggles, her face appearing exceptionally pale in the blue light of the screen.

Li Haotian put down the bronze shard in his hand, stood up and walked to the control panel: "What is it? Don't tell me this is just some kind of new hallucinogen."

"It's much worse than that." Qin Yue pointed to the spectral analysis chart on the screen, her tone somber. "This isn't blood at all. Or rather, it's more than just blood. These tears... at the microscopic level, their molecular structure has been rewritten."

On the screen, where there should have been round red blood cells, countless grotesquely regular geometric polyhedra were now displayed. They were not static under the microscope, but rather wriggled and rearranged extremely slowly, as if they were alive, as if they were performing some kind of precise calculation.

"What is this?" Li Haotian frowned, staring at the tiny crystals.

"Liquid crystals, or more accurately, 'solidified' void energy." Qin Yue took a deep breath and pulled up another thermal imaging image. "This substance has almost zero thermal reaction; it doesn't follow the laws of thermodynamics. It's more like a... container."

"container?"

"Yes. It crystallized in Lin Mo's tear ducts, and then tried to carry some kind of information beyond human comprehension." Qin Yue turned her head, looking at Lin Mo on the bed with a complicated expression. "Li Haotian, the arrangement of these crystals is exactly the same as the star map we saw in the murals of the imperial tomb. This kind of thing is not within the natural laws of this dimension."

Li Haotian felt a chill run down his spine. If Qin Yue's words were true, then what Lin Mo shed wasn't tears at all, but a byproduct of something breaking free from its cocoon within her. That "voice" was assimilating her physical body.

Just then, a strange noise suddenly came from outside the window.

It wasn't the sound of wind, nor the sound of traffic on the street, but a buzzing sound similar to glass vibrating at an extremely high frequency. Li Haotian abruptly turned his head to look at the huge floor-to-ceiling window, his pupils instantly contracting.

The glass curtain wall, which had originally reflected the night view of Donghai City, now resembled a charred photograph, distorting from the edges towards the center. The skyscrapers, flowing traffic, and dazzling neon lights outside the window melted into chaotic blocks of color within this distortion. These blocks of color seemed to move across the glass surface as if they were alive, even beginning to seep into the interior.

"Time..." Lin Mo let out a painful groan on the bed, breaking the eerie silence.

Li Haotian rushed to the bedside and saw Lin Mo with her eyes tightly closed, her forehead covered in a fine layer of cold sweat. Her eyeballs were rolling violently back and forth under her eyelids, clearly trapped in a very deep nightmare.

"Lin Mo! Wake up!" Li Haotian reached out to pat her awake, but recoiled the moment his fingers touched her skin, scalded by the heat. Her body temperature was alarmingly high, as if a furnace was burning inside her.

"No...don't come any closer..." Lin Mo murmured incoherently, his voice hoarse like sandpaper scraping, "They...are crawling...the reflections...are crawling..."

"Who's climbing?" Qin Yue also came closer, clutching a portable scanner tightly in her hand. The data on it was jumping wildly. "Her brainwave readings are off the charts. This level of activity will burn out her brain!"

"Mirror..." Lin Mo suddenly opened his eyes.

In that instant, Li Haotian and Qin Yue were both stunned. Lin Mo's pupils disappeared, replaced by two bottomless black holes, like two black holes leading to an abyss. She stared blankly at the empty space on the ceiling, her voice becoming sharp and mournful:

"It wasn't manufactured...it's always been there! In the mirror...in the reflection...it's watching us! It's coming out!"

"roar--!"

Little Black, who had been guarding the bedside, suddenly let out a furious roar. Every hair on its body stood on end, and beneath its originally smooth black skin, it seemed as if some kind of dark red magma was flowing.

The moment Lin Mo uttered the word "mirror," Xiao Hei seemed to sense a great threat. Instead of attacking anyone, it suddenly turned around and pounced on the huge floor-to-ceiling mirror in the corner of the living room like a black lightning bolt.

That was the mirror Li Haotian usually used to tidy his clothes. At this moment, the mirror did not reflect the living room furnishings, nor did it reflect the little black dog that was pouncing on him.

Li Haotian instinctively reached for the gun at his waist, and in that split second, he looked through the scope at the full-length mirror.

The mirror was calm and still, like a stagnant pool. But just as Xiao Hei was about to crash into the mirror, the scene on the mirror changed.

The image that had been reflecting in the living room rippled outwards like water, and then a pale, enormous hand slowly emerged from the depths of the mirror. The hand had no fingerprints, its skin had a deathly gray texture, and its knuckles were twisted in the opposite direction, giving it an extremely incongruous ugliness.

"This is impossible..." Qin Yue covered her mouth in horror, and the scanner in her hand fell to the ground.

The hand wasn't materialized; it was like a projection of light and shadow, yet it carried a suffocating sense of oppression. Ignoring the laws of physics, it pierced directly through Xiao Hei's body. Xiao Hei let out a scream, falling to the ground as if burned, but it immediately struggled to its feet, desperately blocking Li Haotian and the mirror, baring its teeth at the mirror, black saliva dripping from its fangs.

The things in the mirror are forcibly squeezing into the real world.

Lin Mo's screams turned hysterical. She clutched her head, her nails digging deep into her scalp, blood mingling with those eerie crystalline tears streaming down her face: "It's alive! It's a living crystal! Don't let it see you! Don't go into the mirror!"

Li Haotian did not hesitate for a moment. Faced with this supernatural and bizarre phenomenon, fear is the cheapest emotion; only swift, accurate, and ruthless action is the way to survive.

He held the gun with both hands, the dark muzzle locked onto the center of the full-length mirror—where a dark mist was churning, like a beating heart.

"Back off!" Li Haotian roared, pulling the trigger at the same time.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"

Gunfire erupted in the dimly lit apartment, tearing through the stagnant air. Large-caliber bullets, carrying immense kinetic energy, struck the mirror with pinpoint accuracy.

The sound of shattering glass was crisp and pleasant, but in this environment it sounded particularly jarring. With the first bullet's impact, the mirror surface was instantly covered in a spiderweb of cracks. Then came the second, the third, the fourth…

With the final gunshot, the massive floor-to-ceiling mirror collapsed with a deafening roar. Countless shimmering shards rained down, scattering across the floor with a series of soft, clattering sounds.

The pale hand and the churning black mist vanished the moment the mirror shattered, as if they had never existed.

Lin Mo's screams stopped abruptly. Her body went limp, and she fainted on the bed. Her chest heaved violently, and her dark eyes returned to normal, though they remained tightly closed as she fell into a coma.

The living room fell silent again, save for the rapid breathing and Xiao Hei's low whimpers.

Li Haotian maintained his gun-raising stance, not immediately lowering his guard. He slowly walked forward, his boots crunching on the shards of glass. Qin Yue picked up the scanner and followed cautiously behind him, her hand still gripping the gun handle tightly.

"Is it over?" Qin Yue asked in a low voice, her eyes scanning her surroundings warily.

Li Haotian did not answer; his gaze was fixed on a large shard of mirror at his feet.

The fragment was about the size of a palm, with sharp edges. Li Haotian crouched down and looked at the fragment in the light of the lamp.

Logically, his face should be reflected in the fragments, or the light from the ceiling should be visible.

but.

The broken mirror did not reflect Li Haotian, nor Qin Yue, nor the scene in the living room.

In that small, fragmented space of reflection, there was only one eye.

It was a gigantic, bloodshot eyeball, almost filling the entire field of vision of the fragment. The pupil wasn't round, but a vertical slit-like pupil, its color a nauseating violet. At this moment, this eyeball was silently "staring" at Li Haotian, its eyelids blinking extremely slowly, the sticky, moist movement as if it were directly meeting Li Haotian's soul through this fragment.

A chill ran down his spine and straight to the top of his head. Li Haotian felt as if his heart was being gripped tightly by an icy hand.

"Qin Yue." Li Haotian's voice was terribly dry.

"What's wrong? That's your reflection... No, what is that?!" Qin Yue followed his gaze, her pupils dilated suddenly, and she took a step back in horror, almost stepping on another fragment.

"It's watching us." Li Haotian slowly straightened up, without touching the shard. He knew this was just an illusion. The mirror was shattered, but the thing inside wasn't dead. It had simply returned to its own dimension, and this shard was like a peephole.

"Lin Mo is right." Li Haotian turned to look at the unconscious Lin Mo, his gaze becoming more serious than ever before. "We made a mistake. We thought the void was some kind of energy source, or some kind of monster. But actually..."

He pointed to the fragment at his feet that reflected his eyeball.

"That world, or that existence, is an omnipresent mirror. We are not merely being observed; we... may be the reflection itself."

The tremors outside the window had ceased sometime earlier, the distorted curtain wall had returned to calm, and the night view of Donghai City was once again clearly visible. But beneath this false calm, Li Haotian felt an unprecedented sense of crisis.

If reality is just a projection of a mirror, then when the things in the mirror crawl out, what gets crushed is the real world.

"Pack your things." Li Haotian holstered his gun, his voice cold and hard. "We can't stay here any longer. Until we figure out what this 'eyeball' really is, we're not safe at all."

Xiao Hei got up from the ground, ran to the shard, angrily raised its paw and smashed the eerie eyeball to pieces, then let out a low growl that sounded like it was trying to soothe Li Haotian.

The night grew deeper. But the real nightmare seemed to have only just begun.