The line between dream and waking life blurred with every passing hour.
Kaito no longer trusted the light in the morning. It was too bright, too silent. The birds no longer chirped near his window. Even the breeze had gone stale. The world still looked normal—but it felt wrong, as though the colors had been painted by a hand that didn't understand reality.
After the nightmare in the mirror room, Kaito woke up drenched in sweat. The whisper still echoed in his head: "You chose the wrong one."
The sentence circled his thoughts like a vulture. Was Takashi truly the one marked? Or was the reflection pointing to someone else?
He texted the group chat—code words they'd created after their first haunting. "Crow feathers are falling. Meet in the Hollow. Urgent."
Within the hour, they gathered inside an abandoned subway station beneath the town—an old hideaway from their middle school days, before any of them knew what real fear felt like.
The room was cold and echoing, lit only by flickering battery lanterns. Rust dripped down concrete walls like old blood.
Kaito paced. "I had another dream. The same mirror. But this time… I was inside it. Watching us. Watching me. It said: 'You chose the wrong one.'"
Megumi's eyes widened. "You think Takashi's not the marked one?"
"That's what it meant," Sora murmured, flipping through her journal. "Or worse, we never had the right one to begin with."
Takashi sat on the edge of a broken bench, silent.
"I've felt it too," he said, finally. "Like something inside me… stirring. But not controlling me. Like it's waiting."
Airi stepped forward. "If it's not Takashi… then who else?"
Haru crossed his arms. "We're all haunted in some way. Hell, Megumi still sleepwalks. Sota hears whispers through his music. You," he pointed at Sora, "literally track ghost lore like it's your religion. And Kaito… you've been off since the mirror."
Kaito froze.
"Are you saying—"
"I'm saying we can't rule anyone out."
Sora raised her journal again. "There's a ritual. An old one. From the texts I found on The Mirror's Echo. A way to determine if someone's soul has been stained by a revenant."
Sota narrowed his eyes. "Define 'stained.'"
Sora hesitated. "Marked. Touched. Infected. Whatever this thing is… it doesn't just haunt. It inhabits. It's subtle at first. A shadow in the corner of the eye. A thought you can't remember having. But eventually, it roots itself—until the host becomes a doorway."
Takashi's voice was hollow. "A doorway to what?"
Sora looked up.
"To the other side."
The ritual required preparation: a silvered mirror, a drop of blood from each participant, and a spoken incantation at the hour of absolute silence—3:00 a.m.
They set it up in Sora's basement, a place already steeped in their ghost-hunting experiments. They formed a circle around the mirror, candles casting warped shadows on the walls.
Each of them offered a single drop of blood, collected in a glass vial. Sora recited the incantation in a language older than any of them recognized. The mirror shimmered.
Then it darkened.
Each of their reflections flickered.
Kaito leaned closer. His reflection smiled. He didn't.
Suddenly, a scream tore from Megumi's throat.
Her reflection… was gone.
Only an empty space stared back at her. Her outline, a hollow void.
The mirror cracked—just once, down the center. The circle shattered as the room was flooded with freezing wind.
When it cleared, Megumi had collapsed.
Kaito rushed to her side. "Megumi! Say something!"
She opened her eyes slowly.
And whispered, "It's not Takashi. It never was."
They stayed at Sora's house that night.
None of them spoke much. Megumi sat curled on the couch, drawing obsessively in her sketchbook—dark shapes, crow-winged silhouettes, a face with no eyes.
The next morning, she didn't remember drawing any of it.
Kaito, however, couldn't stop thinking about what they'd seen. If Megumi was marked—why hadn't she shown symptoms earlier? Was the haunting dormant in her until now? Or had someone… something… transferred it to her?
A terrifying theory began to form in Kaito's mind:
What if the ghost never died?
What if, during his final battle… he hadn't destroyed it.
What if he'd passed it on?
He needed answers.
Kaito skipped school and visited the Seika Historical Archives. The town had hundreds of years of urban legends—some too twisted for the public libraries.
He combed through case files of unexplained disappearances, dream-induced psychosis, mass memory loss. Each case pointed back to the same symbol: a bleeding mirror.
One entry chilled him to the bone.
April 11th, 1985. Seven children rescued from a collapsed school basement. All claimed to have faced a "mirror spirit." One child disappeared a week later. His last words? "I chose the wrong one."
Kaito stood up too fast, the paper trembling in his hands.
It was happening again. A cycle.
A curse.
And unless they found the true marked one… it would happen again.
Back at the Hollow that night, Kaito shared the file.
"This ghost isn't just a fragment. It's a repeating pattern. It finds a group, it latches onto trauma, and it plays them like puppets."
"So what now?" Haru asked. "Do we run? Do we fight?"
Kaito looked at Megumi, pale and shivering.
"We find its origin. Its heart. And we tear it out."
Sora nodded. "There's one place we haven't gone yet. One place the original blueprints mention, but the school never acknowledged."
Airi's voice trembled. "Where?"
Sora turned a page in her journal, revealing a map.
"Beneath the forbidden wing… is a sublevel. A hidden floor. Sealed off since 1985. It's called—"
She hesitated.
"—The Reflection Vault."
And the chapter ends.
To be continued...