This Mirror Is So Scary

Twenty-year-old Lin Ye thought he was destined to spend his whole life cooped up in a rented room in an urban village, fretting over rent and a future he couldn’t see. Then a wooden box engraved with his name and today’s date appeared, and he realized some debts can’t be escaped, even after ten years.

A silver ring hides a talking shadow. Unfamiliar text messages predict danger with uncanny accuracy. A hand wearing an identical ring reaches out from the depths of his wardrobe. And in a photo taken when he was seven, there lies a wooden box exactly like the one he has now.

“Once you can see ‘them,’ you’re no longer an ordinary person.”

A mysterious man in a trench coat is always hovering downstairs. The Old Quarter’s Lost and Found Pavilion holds answers reaching back ten years, while dreams of a city among the clouds haunt him again and again. As the dates from two different time periods overlap, Lin Ye is forced to face the summer he forgot: the diary his grandmother burned before she died, the broken mirror that vanished beneath the locust tree, and the black markings that mysteriously appear in his palm whenever he wakes in a fright.

“Don’t trust anyone, not even your own eyes.”

But when the real “them” step out of the shadows, Lin Ye realizes that the one he should be most wary of might be the seven-year-old version of himself, who always smiles at him in his dreams.

This is a game of hide-and-seek spanning ten years, and he is both hunter and prey.