The print from the sixth roll displaying the shadow of his own hand—though developed from a film reel preserved for decades—still lingered limply in Arya's fingers. That illustrated sheet suddenly felt blistering hot, scorching the skin of his palm until he instinctively hurled it far away onto the concrete floor. The paper drifted in circles before finally landing face down near the chemical bottle stack.

Arya’s breathing came in ragged hitches, pumping a soaring panic straight to his temples. His throat felt parched, like a desert baked under a scorching sun for weeks. His entire mouth tasted bitter, choked with a sharp acidity brought on by saliva production coming to a complete halt.

His whole body was now coated in a layer of cold sweat mixed with dried bloodstains from his scratched index finger. His skin felt sticky, itchy, and freezing cold all at the same time. He felt as though every pore on his body were screaming hysterically, demanding an immediate escape from this room. Yet there was no way out. The wooden door beneath the stairs had been bolted shut from the outside by a massive, unseen weight.

With the last remnants of his drained strength and deeply wobbling knees, Arya dragged his heavy steps toward the corner of the room, where an old sink made of dull copper was bolted against the damp concrete wall.

He needed water. He needed to wash his burning face and ground his consciousness, which was drifting on the brink of madness.

Reaching the sink, Arya gripped the edges of the washbasin tightly with both hands. He panted heavily, gasping before the rust-encrusted ceramic basin. Without a second thought, he cranked the copper water faucet valve, which groaned harshly.

Creak... krrk... ssssshhh!

The sputtering stream of tap water finally broke through, flowing outward though the water spilling into the basin looked murky, tinted brown with the old pipe's rust sediment before slowly turning clear.

Arya no longer cared whether the water was fit to use or not. Cupping both palms, he caught the flowing stream and brought the cold water up to splash directly across his face.

The chilling sensation of water touched his burning skin. Arya squeezed his eyes shut, savoring the fleeting moment of freshness that eased his throbbing head. He scooped up water once more, washed his sweat-soaked neck, and let the tap run heavily to steady his hammering heart.

"Calm down, Arya... calm down. You're just exhausted. This is just normal water," he muttered brokenly to himself, his voice sounding terribly raspy, shaking violently amid the increasingly claustrophobic darkroom atmosphere.

The atmosphere at the sink corner was utterly oppressive. The space around the basin felt compressed; the concrete wall to his right seemed to lean inward, while his own shadow beneath the red safelight stretched and writhed across the sink's ceramic, resembling a foreign entity preparing to swallow his true form.

Yet right after Arya shut off the water valve and drew a long breath to lift his head... the true terror began.

He had to look up. He had to raise his wet face to see his own reflection in the small, rusted mirror hanging directly above the sink.

Yet at that exact second, every survival instinct inside Arya's brain screamed hysterically against it. A fierce biological alarm suddenly tripped in his mind, commanding his eyes to stay squeezed shut and cast downward.

Don't look up! Don't look at that mirror! Something is there! his chaotic inner voice screamed.

The tension between the water slowly dripping from the faucet tip—drip... drip... drip...—and the absolute silence of the room built a chest-crushing pressure. Arya was trapped in a torturous psychological dilemma: he desperately wanted to look up to reassure himself he was still a living human, yet absolute terror paralyzed the muscles in his neck.

And then, the nightmare he feared most occurred.

An invisible force—immensely powerful, cold, unyielding, yet absolute—suddenly clamped onto his nape and chin from the front. That force yanked his head upward by absolute force, compelling his eyes wide open to stare straight into the small, rusted mirror above the basin.

"Noooo!" Arya screamed inside his head. He could not fight that supernatural pull. His neck was forced upward against his own will.

And the moment his gaze pierced the dull glass surface of the mirror, the blood across Arya's entire body froze solid instantly. His heart stopped beating for good.

In the mirror's reflection, the water glistening across Arya's face mirrored an expression of profound, deathly pallor. Yet his face was not the only thing filling the mirror's frame.

Right behind the reflection of his actual back in the real world, inside that very same mirror, stood a towering shadow with grotesquely unnatural proportions—a figure in a tattered suit with corpse-pale skin and pitch-black, hollow eye sockets.

That creature stood hunched in broken, jagged angles behind Arya's back, matching the low darkroom ceiling. And what made Arya wish he could snuff out his own life right then and there: inside the mirror, that horrifying entity flashed a wide, lip-less smile, grinning sickeningly right over Arya's shoulder, while in the real world, absolutely nothing stood there except empty air reeking of the stench of death.