A debt-ridden tycoon inherits a luxury mansion, but the tenants are not human.

The eleventh day of the seventh lunar month, early morning.

The old house at No. 17 Qingshi Lane was shrouded in a thin mist.

The leaves of the sycamore trees in the alley moved swiftly without any wind.

When Chen Mo woke up, he found a small piece of broken jade hairpin on his pillow.

It is green, and the hairpin head is carved with half a peony.

This is not his.

He picked up the jade hairpin, and the moment his fingers touched it, a fragmented image flashed through his mind: a woman's hands, doing her makeup in front of a mirror.

A blurry face was reflected in the mirror, with only a hint of red on the lips visible.

Those hands picked up the jade hairpin, gently inserted it into the hair bun, and then paused for a moment.

The corners of her mouth in the mirror were slightly upturned, her expression a mixture of crying and laughing.

The video stopped.

Chen Mo sat up. The jade hairpin was a little hot in his palm. Was it Liu Fengchun's or a hint from another tenant?

"Brother Chen!"

Liu Xiaoyu's voice came from downstairs; she sounded panicked.

"Come down and take a look!"

Chen Mo put on his coat and rushed downstairs.

Inside the main room, Liu Xiaoyu stood in front of the old-fashioned full-length mirror, her face pale.

The mirror reflected a dressing room in the style of the Republic of China era.

A rosewood dressing table, a bronze mirror, scattered rouge boxes, and several theatrical costumes hanging on the wall.

A man sits on a round stool in front of the dressing table in the mirror. He has his back to the mirror, wears a moon-white satin theatrical costume, and has long hair that falls to his shoulders. He is holding a bronze mirror and applying makeup to his eyebrows.

"It's been like this since... since three in the morning," Liu Xiaoyu said, her voice trembling.

"I got up to get a drink of water and noticed something was wrong with the mirror. I called for the Earth Spirit to come and see, and it said that this was a case of overlapping mirror realms, and the boundary between the old house and some other place was blurred."

Chen Mo walked closer to the mirror.

The scene in the mirror was very clear. He could even see the pattern on the rouge box on the dressing table, with peonies intertwined and the gilded edges faded. The figure with its back to the mirror was drawing its eyebrows slowly and attentively, as if it were completely immersed in another time and space.

"Is it Liu Fengchun?" Liu Xiaoyu asked softly.

"uncertain."

Chen Mo reached out to touch the mirror.

What my fingertips touched wasn't the coolness of glass, but a sticky, slippery sensation that felt disgusting. The mirror surface was slightly concave, rippling outwards.

Just then, the figure in the mirror who was drawing her eyebrows suddenly stopped.

He slowly turned his head.

Chen Mo held his breath.

Turning around, there was another mirror, an oval bronze mirror held in hand, its surface facing the full-length mirror.

The bronze mirror reflected a face that was only half-made up. The face had a pinkish-white base, delicate eyebrows, and light red eyeshadow around the right eye, but the left eye was completely bare. The face was asymmetrical and looked very strange.

The hand painted with nail polish raised the bronze mirror and gently waved it towards the dressing mirror, as if greeting someone or confirming something.

Then, the figure turned back and continued to apply makeup to the left eye.

"He...he didn't see us?" Liu Xiaoyu breathed a sigh of relief.

"No, he saw it." Chen Mo stared at the bronze mirror in the mirror. "He's using a mirror to look at himself, observing us through the refraction."

"and……"

He paused, then pointed to the corner of the dressing table, where a larger bronze mirror stood, its surface facing upwards. Through the reflection of the dressing mirror, one could see the scene reflected in the bronze mirror. It wasn't the dressing room, but rather Chen Mo and Liu Xiaoyu standing in the main room. However, behind them in the mirror, there was another figure—a man wearing a gray Zhongshan suit, his fingers twirling walnuts.

"Is he behind us?" Liu Xiaoyu turned around abruptly.

The main room was empty, there was nothing there. Looking in the mirror, the man in the Zhongshan suit was gone.

"A mirror within a mirror, a world within a world." The earth spirit floated onto Chen Mo's shoulder at some point, its voice filled with a very suppressed solemnity, "Landlord, this dressing mirror can't be kept. It has been corrupted by Liu Fengchun's obsession and has become a passage connecting two spaces. If this continues, the thing in the mirror might come out."

Chen Mo frowned: "Is there any way to temporarily seal it off?"

"Cover it with a red cloth and press copper coins into the four corners, but it will only last for three days. After three days, the source must be dealt with."

Chen Mo took out a red cloth and copper coins from his Yin-Yang bag. These were old items left by Shen Mo. The two of them worked together to cover the mirror and then pressed copper coins with runes engraved on them at the four corners. The image in the mirror finally disappeared and the normal reflection was restored.

Liu Fengchun's three items are a mirror, rouge, and tears. The clue about the mirror is in Zhou Wenyuan's hands, but there is still no clue about the rouge and tears.

"We'll split up today," Chen Mo said. "Xiaoyu, go check the records of Liu Fengchun's opera troupe from back then, and see if any descendants or old opera fans are still alive. The key is the first audience member. I need to know who was the first person sitting in the audience during that play called Peony Pavilion in 1949."

"Okay, what about you, landlord?"

"I'm going to meet the kind person who gave me the mirror."

At nine o'clock in the morning, Chen Mo arrived at Tingyu Teahouse in the west of the city, as agreed upon by Zhou Wenyuan over the phone the night before.