By the time they found Sky’s body in the morgue, I had already stopped believing in coincidence.

Not because I was brave. Not because I was clever.

Because too many things had begun to fit together in the ugliest possible way.

Luna had collapsed at her computer, eyes wide open as if she had looked at something that had reached through the screen and chosen not to blink back. The police had brushed it off as a medical mystery. My coworkers had spoken in lowered voices. The hospital had smelled like bleach, panic, and the bureaucratic boredom that surrounds catastrophe when nobody can explain it fast enough.

Then Detective Zhang called me in.

He was one of those men who made every room feel smaller simply by standing inside it—tall, deliberate, built like someone who trusted evidence more than emotions and disliked both when they got theatrical.

“Miss Lan,” he said, “we found a body in the municipal morgue this afternoon. No one can explain how it got there.”

He watched my face carefully as he spoke, the way policemen do when they’ve learned that surprise tells the truth faster than speech.

“We identified him from his wallet and phone,” he continued. “The name on the ID was Hao Sky. Your number was the only one stored in the device.”

For a moment I couldn’t speak.

Sky.

Not a username anymore.

Not a green icon on QQ.

Not a smart mouth hiding behind typed sentences.

A body.

The detective must have seen something shift in me, because his voice softened just slightly.

“You knew him?”

“Online,” I said. “Only online.”

“That’s not the same thing as not knowing him.”

No, I thought. It isn’t.

But I wasn’t ready to admit what that meant.

I asked to see him.

He looked surprised.

Most women, he said, did not volunteer to go into a morgue.

Most women, I thought, had not spent the last week being hunted by their own reflection.

⸻

The morgue was colder than fear and quieter than sleep.

Rows of steel drawers. Harsh overhead light. The stale metallic chill that never quite leaves places where the dead are kept waiting for paperwork.

When Zhang pulled open the drawer, I saw only the shape beneath a white sheet.

Then he folded it back.

I understood instantly why Sky had seemed so careful online.

His face, even in death, was thin and watchful, the kind of face that might once have looked forgettable if you hadn’t spent enough time studying it. But his eyes—

His eyes were gone.

Not damaged.

Not swollen.

Gone.

The sockets had been emptied so cleanly it looked less like violence than selection.

I made a noise then. Not a scream. Something smaller and much more helpless.

Zhang replaced the sheet.

“We think the eyes were removed after death,” he said. “No signs of robbery. No obvious connection to the girls who have been collapsing.”

He paused.

“Unless you know one.”

I didn’t answer immediately.

Because in that frozen room, I finally understood what Sky had meant when he wrote:

Don’t answer anyone who looks like you.

He hadn’t been warning me away from a person.

He had been warning me away from a hunger.

And that hunger liked eyes.

⸻

When I got home, the apartment already felt wrong.

The lights were on, but in that strained over-bright way rooms acquire when someone terrified has been leaving them on simply to keep shape and shadow from negotiating with each other.

Rainwater had dried in faint tracks near the entrance.

My younger sister Yulu was sitting in her room wrapped in a blanket, knees pulled to her chest, pretending she was fine with the bad acting of someone too frightened to stop trying.

The moment she saw me, she stood and clutched my arm so hard it hurt.

“There was someone outside.”

My whole body tightened.

“What do you mean?”

“In the living room. I heard him walking. Then the bathroom handle started turning.” Her voice shook so badly the last word nearly vanished. “I pushed the door shut and held it. I swear I did. I know how it sounds, but I heard him.”

I believed her immediately.

That was the worst part.

Because disbelief would have been a comfort.

I walked to the bathroom door and saw it there on the tile near the threshold: a damp little smear tapering into the vague suggestion of a footprint.

Too small for an adult.

Too defined to be random water.

It looked, impossibly, like the foot of an infant.

I called the building guards up just to hear someone else tell me I was overreacting. They squinted at the mark, shrugged, and said it could be anything. Water leakage. Dirty mop residue. My imagination.

But Yulu and I both knew better.

Later, when the guards had gone, she admitted something else.

She had taken the disk.

The game.

Soul Snare 2.

Not to keep it safe. To play it.

“I only wanted to try it,” she said, almost apologetically. “It’s really addictive.”

I wanted to yell.

Instead I heard myself asking the only thing that mattered.

“How far did you get?”

She looked confused.

“I don’t know. A little? There’s this part where you follow someone through a hospital. Then the screen goes black and you hear breathing. It’s actually kind of amazing.”

I closed my eyes.

Hospital.
Breathing.
Missing girls.
A dead boy with no eyes.

A line was forming. I just still couldn’t see the full pattern.

⸻

That night I didn’t sleep.

I sat in the living room with the disk case on the coffee table and the television off, as if darkness in one reflective surface could somehow make up for the others.

Around three in the morning, my phone rang.

Not a number I knew.

When I answered, all I heard at first was breathing.

Then, faintly, a girl’s voice.

Not Luna.

Not Yulu.

Not anyone I knew.

But familiar in exactly the wrong way.

“You’re late,” it said.

The line went dead.

I called back.

No such number.

I checked the recent calls twice just to be sure I hadn’t dreamed it. The record was there. The number wasn’t.

By dawn, the sky outside had gone the color of dirty milk and I had made three decisions:

I would not let Yulu stay alone.
I would not allow that disk back into a machine.
And I would go back to Detective Zhang.

All three turned out to be mistakes, just in different directions.

⸻

Zhang listened more seriously than I expected.

Not because he believed me. Not yet. But because he had the expression of a man who was already tired of evidence behaving like folklore.

He asked for the disk.

I gave it to him.

He asked about Sky.

I told him everything I had not wanted to tell a policeman: the QQ messages, the hospital meeting, the reflection that had smiled with my face and said not yet.

To his credit, he did not laugh.

He only wrote for a while, then asked, “And you still went home afterward and let your sister use the disk?”

“Yes.”

The single syllable sounded so guilty in the office that I wanted to strike it out of the air before it reached him.

He leaned back and studied me.

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think someone built a very efficient chain of bait.”

That chilled me more than if he had called me crazy.

He tapped the edge of the evidence bag holding the disk.

“Whatever this is—game, file, image sequence, subliminal garbage, cult material, I don’t know—it’s moving through people. Through curiosity first. Then through resemblance.”

“Resemblance?”

“The girls. Similar age. Similar faces. Similar eyes.”

I looked down.

“Mine too,” I said quietly.

“Yes,” he replied. “Yours too.”

That was the first time anyone had said it aloud without trying to soften it.

He told me to keep my sister away from computers for a few days. Keep the curtains shut after dark. Call him if anything unusual happened. The last instruction would have been comforting if “unusual” hadn’t already lost all practical meaning.

Before I left, I asked him one thing.

“What happens if it chooses someone?”

He didn’t answer at once.

Then he said, “I’m hoping you’ll help me find out before it finishes.”

That was not the reassurance he seemed to think it was.

⸻

It finished faster than either of us expected.

That evening Yulu was calmer, almost cheerful.

Too cheerful, actually.

She ate without complaint. Did homework without prompting. Even laughed at one of my bad jokes. If I had been less exhausted, I might have recognized the danger in that at once.

Terror leaves a shape behind when it passes.

People do not snap back from it neatly.

At around nine, she told me she was going to shower.

At nine-fifteen, the bathroom light was still on.

At nine-twenty, the water was still running.

At nine-twenty-one, I knocked.

No answer.

I opened the door.

She was standing in front of the mirror in her pajamas, hair dry, toothbrush in one hand, not moving.

Not brushing. Not speaking. Just standing there with her head slightly tilted, looking into the glass as if someone on the other side had almost finished introducing themselves.

“Yulu?”

No response.

I stepped closer.

Her eyes were open too wide.

Then her mouth moved.

What came out was not her voice.

It was the bright sweet voice I had heard on the phone at three in the morning.

“You took too long.”

I screamed then.

Not because it was brave or useful.

Because some sounds leave the body as proof you were still inside it when horror arrived.

Yulu blinked hard, once, and collapsed.

I caught her badly. We both hit the floor.

By the time I got her to the hospital, she was unconscious.

Three beds down from Luna.

Exactly where I had feared this would end.

⸻

After that, the days blurred.

Hospital corridors. Forms. Questions. Nurses who had learned how to speak kindly to people standing at the edge of panic. Detective Zhang appearing at intervals with worse and worse news.

Two more girls had been admitted.

Another reflection incident had been reported.

Someone in forensics said the inside of Sky’s phone had been wiped too cleanly to be accidental.

And the disk—my disk, Yulu’s disk, Luna’s disk—contained nothing illegal, nothing overtly supernatural, nothing a courtroom could hold. Just damaged game files, fragments, hidden video assets that shouldn’t have been there, and one recurring image buried in the code:

A female face half obscured by hair.

One eye visible.

The other socket dark.

No one could explain why that still frame caused three technicians to become physically ill during review.

Zhang looked older every time I saw him.

At last, on the fourth night, he admitted the thing police hate most.

“We may be dealing with a pattern we can describe,” he said, “but not one we can stop by ordinary means.”

I laughed at that.

Too sharply.

He didn’t take offense.

“Do you know what it wants?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Eyes.”

He held my gaze.

“And after eyes?”

That I did not know.

And that terrified me more.

⸻

Yulu woke at dawn on the sixth day.

Luna did not.

Yulu remembered almost nothing—only a girl in a hospital corridor holding my face in both hands as if deciding whether to wear it.

When Zhang heard that, he closed his notebook and said, very softly:

“It still hasn’t chosen, then.”

I realized then what had been haunting all of this from the start.

Not random sickness.

Not a chain of attacks.

Selection.

A search.

For the right face.
The right eyes.
The right door.

Mine.

That night I went home alone and smashed every mirror in the apartment.

Bathroom mirror.
Hall mirror.
The cheap compact in Yulu’s bag.
Even the television screen.

It made no difference.

At midnight, the black window over the kitchen sink reflected me anyway.

And behind me, just for a moment, another girl stood in the dark with my exact face and someone else’s patience.

When I spun around, the room was empty.

But the glass had fogged from the inside.

On it, written in one long drag of a fingertip, were three words:

Soon it’s you.

⸻

FLUX 封面 Prompt

这篇更适合做成 early-internet urban horror / hospital curse / reflection doppelgänger 的封面。

主推版

Prompt：

A cinematic supernatural horror book cover set in a cold hospital corridor at night, a terrified young woman stands outside a ward while her unconscious younger sister lies on a hospital bed in the background, and in a reflective window behind her appears a ghostly girl with the same face and one dark empty eye socket, cold fluorescent lights, atmosphere of cursed media, doppelganger terror, and urban supernatural dread, photorealistic, moody lighting, dramatic composition, premium paperback cover, no text, no watermark

更强调“镜中同脸女鬼”版本

Prompt：

A haunting cinematic horror cover: inside a dim hospital hallway, a young woman stares in fear at reflective glass where her identical double appears behind her with a hollow dark eye socket and an unnatural smile, unconscious girls visible in ward beds beyond, early-2000s urban atmosphere, cursed game media horror, photorealistic, elegant and disturbing, premium horror novel cover, no text, no watermark

极简版

Prompt：

Hospital doppelganger horror, young woman facing identical ghost double in reflective glass, unconscious sister in background, cursed media, photorealistic, cinematic, horror book cover, no text

Negative Prompt

Negative Prompt：

cartoon, anime, cheerful hospital, bright daylight, comedy horror, cyberpunk neon overload, low detail, blurry, extra limbs, bad anatomy, text, logo, watermark

继续的话，我下一条就接着给这个新文件的下一篇真正新故事。