A sheer white cloth instantly enveloped Xu Hui, plunging him into a darkness where dust mingled with the scent of mildew, immediately assaulting his nostrils. A jolt of panic seized him. Outside the suffocating blackness, he felt as if a hand had clamped around him, shaking him violently. Furniture crashed against him repeatedly. Amidst the chaos, he thought he sensed something attempting to press against his neck.

Almost instinctively, Xu Hui shielded his head with his hands, flailing desperately to avoid blows to vital areas while his mind raced to formulate a defense.

At that moment, what felt like the leg of a desk struck his own. He felt a sharp knock, and a flash of clarity illuminated his mind. His hand shot into his trouser pocket, drawing out a folding knife.

Xu Hui had a fondness for collecting various blades, and this knife was one of his prized pieces: a classic Browning model, featuring a brass handle inlaid with red sandalwood and a blade forged from Swedish Sandvik stainless steel. If not for concerns about practicality, he would have carried a Kukri for self-defense.

This would have to suffice for now. He flicked the knife open, gripping it in reverse, and gently jabbed and sliced at the cloth covering him. The fabric instantly tore open with a wide gash.

Holding the knife steady, Xu Hui pushed himself out from under the cloth. The air immediately felt fresher. He held the blade horizontally before his chest, cautiously scanning his surroundings, only to see that more than half of the white cloth had been cut into two pieces and fluttered to the floor. Beside the disarrayed furniture, there wasn't a single soul in sight.

Even without looking in a mirror, Xu Hui knew his expression must be utterly grim. He glanced back at the discarded cloth on the ground. Though the room was dimly lit, his eyes had adjusted enough to discern a pattern of black handprints covering the fabric. Judging by their size, they did not appear to belong to an adult’s hand, which immediately brought to mind the small dried corpse that Kuang Feifan had once mentioned.

Given the situation, whatever had attacked him had vanished again. Xu Hui surmised that whatever the entity was, it disliked direct confrontation. He spat a mouthful of dirt onto the floor, decisively sheathed his knife, and moved to the door. After checking it, he confirmed the door was indeed made of wood. Gritting his teeth, he drew his pistol.

He backed up several paces, raised the gun, and fired three rapid shots directly at the lock. The sound of the gunfire was exceptionally loud in the desolate room. Shaking his head slightly, he looked closely at the door, and a creeping dread began to surface: there wasn't a single mark around the lock where the bullets had struck.

Unwilling to accept it, Xu Hui retreated two more steps, raised the gun, and emptied the entire magazine into the door. The deafening echoes of the shots reverberated through the room. As soon as the firing ceased, he rushed the door and slammed his shoulder against it. The wooden door felt harder than steel against his body.

After several more attempts, he knelt down again, unwilling to give up, and meticulously ran his hands around the lock area, eventually tracing the entire surface of the door, searching desperately for a bullet hole. But the result was utterly disheartening: not only was there no sign of a bullet impact, but he couldn't even feel the gap between the door and the frame.

Xu Hui, nearly losing control, raised the pistol and violently smashed the butt against the lock. The thud-thud-thud of the impact echoed monotonously in the room. After an unknown number of blows, he ceased this near-manic activity, turned, leaned back against the door, and slowly slid to the floor. An intangible sense of fear involuntarily washed over him.

He didn't know Kuang Feifan’s current situation. Frankly, aside from the corner talisman, he possessed nothing to ward off spirits or defend himself. What if Kuang Feifan didn't realize he was in trouble? Now that even the gun was useless, what means did he have left to escape this room?

These two questions alone sent a chill down Xu Hui’s spine. He suddenly understood the terror Kuang Feifan and the others must have felt when trapped in the small building previously. He now believed definitively that this building harbored not just ghosts, but ghosts of an unimaginably formidable caliber.

However, the barrage of blows against the door had vented a significant portion of the fear that had consumed him. That initial surge of terror had stemmed from encountering a force he could not possibly fight. Having vented it, he felt himself start to relax.

Xu Hui slowly ejected the empty magazine, slipped a fresh one in, and used the moment to consider his next move. Driven by an inexplicable sense of trust, he firmly believed Kuang Feifan would notice something amiss. As soon as he realized Xu Hui was missing, Kuang Feifan would surely devise a way to find him. Moreover, with all the ghost-repelling artifacts Kuang Feifan carried, rescue seemed possible.

Viewed this way, his best course was to remain inside, strive to deal with whatever unknown entities were trying to harm him, and hold out until Kuang Feifan arrived to save him. There was a real chance he could escape this small building after all.

Sometimes, it is like that; once a clear objective emerges, confidence immediately returns. At least Xu Hui’s emotions had largely stabilized. His goal was now to counter whatever the entity threw at him with patient resistance, waiting to see how the thing in the room would proceed against him.

He tucked the gun back into its holster, preparing to stand up and retrieve the flashlight from the vanity table. The moment he stood, he heard a sharp, grating sound of an object dragging across the floor. He froze, his gaze instantly snapping toward the noise. The desk was hurtling toward him at incredible speed.

Startled, Xu Hui leaped desperately to the side. The desk scraped past his flank and slammed into the door. Before he could regain his balance, a chair shot out of the darkness with a whoosh of displaced air. He ducked and rolled sideways—crash—the chair smashed against the wall, and with a snap, one of its legs broke instantly.

Before he could rise, another chair floated up from the floor, as if being lifted by an invisible hand, and swung violently toward his head.

"Damn it all..." Xu Hui cursed, executing an ungraceful 'lazy-donkey roll' to narrowly evade the chair crashing down from above.

These few moves showcased his agility, a testament to his rigorous past training. As he sprang back to his feet with a 'carp jump,' he found himself facing the vanity table. Under the beam of the flashlight, he clearly saw the terror etched on his reflection’s face, and behind him, a figure was raising a chair to strike again.

In that instant, he saw the attacker’s appearance and the savage contortion of their face. Xu Hui’s eyes widened in horror: he knew the person behind him intimately, for it was himself.

The moment he recognized the attacker, Xu Hui’s mind went blank. However, years of military training meant his body reacted faster than his conscious thought. He instinctively lunged forward, rolled onto the ground, drew his gun, and aimed with both hands behind him.

It was as if time had paused. He held the gun aimed backward, but his finger refused to pull the trigger.

It wasn't that his body was being controlled; it was the realization that the attacker was his exact double—or rather, that it was him. How could he shoot himself?

He hesitated, unsure if he should fire. The flashlight beam reflected off the mirror, allowing Xu Hui a clear view of his own twisted face and the sinister grin curling his lips.

Xu Hui’s mind was utterly blank, cold sweat beading on his forehead. The sweat stung his eyes as it trickled down, causing him to instinctively close them. In that moment, however, his finger tightened on the trigger.

The instant the bullet fired, the figure attacking him vanished into the darkness beyond the flashlight’s reach. The raised chair dropped to the floor mid-air, its sound reaching Xu Hui just after the gunshot.

He fired only one round before raising the muzzle toward the ceiling. He reached up and rubbed his eyes. Although he hadn't witnessed the moment the figure disappeared, he had a distinct feeling: it was still in the room, yet invisible to his eyes.

Mechanically, Xu Hui pushed himself up from the floor, feeling entirely drenched in cold sweat. His inner shirt was saturated and clinging to his skin, making him feel chilled.

He walked automatically to the vanity, bracing his hands on the surface, breathing heavily. The preceding scene was burned into his mind, refusing to dissipate.

He raised his head to look in the mirror. Beyond his own ashen, deathly pale face, there was no shadow behind him. Xu Hui swallowed hard, producing a loud gurgle that startled himself.

He turned his head to scan the room. Silence had returned, so complete that he could hear the sound of rain striking the windowpane outside.

Xu Hui let out a breath, turned back to his reflection, and raised a hand to wipe his face. Suddenly, he felt an icy blast sweep across his cheek. His hand, frozen mid-motion, remained suspended in the air. He watched in the mirror as his reflection’s face and all visible skin rapidly withered, shriveling until it looked like a skeletal old man. Viscous, crimson blood began to stream down from the top of the head, sliding over the eyes and continuing downward. The eyes instantly sunken, becoming two bloody hollows, staring out at the real Xu Hui as if they possessed bloodshot eyes.

As the blood dripped past the nose and mouth down the chin, the mirror surface began to twist and warp. The pure white flashlight beam quickly turned a deep, sanguine red. A crack shot down the center of the reflection's face. With a sharp crack, the mirror surface and his reflected face split simultaneously in two.

Xu Hui jumped back a step, hands raised in front of him, shuddering involuntarily. The shock jolted him into awareness: the mirror was intact. Everything, it seemed, had been a hallucination.

His nerves were stretched taut. He cautiously surveyed the room. He was certain that near his body, something was observing and mocking him.

He wanted to mock himself. Back in Sichuan, he had accompanied a special unit tracking rumored 'walking corpses.' He had encountered actual moving cadavers, yet he hadn't felt fear. He had even angered a mysterious individual possessing arcane arts, who had threatened him with a curse, which he had dismissed with a laugh, and nothing had happened.

Yet here, today, Xu Hui was enduring a sequence of bizarre experiences in a small building, thoroughly terrified and nearly on the brink of collapse. And he was planning to wait for Kuang Feifan to rescue him?

Xu Hui forcefully slapped his own cheeks, trying to force composure. He snatched up the flashlight with one hand and leveled his pistol steadily with the other, pointing it directly at the mirror.