That grinning reflection in the large mirror—smirking wide without a shred of empathy—continued to move outside the control of the laws of nature. Arya’s heart pounded wildly, nearly bursting out of his ribcage. He wanted to step back, to put distance between himself and that cursed mirror, yet his feet remained bolted to the concrete floor as though rooted by the dense terror.

Right before his dilated, horrified eyes, the mirror reflection's hand—wearing that tattered black coat—reached into the coat's pocket. Its movements were agonizingly slow, hypnotic, and heavy with lethal menace. The shadow's emaciated fingers gripped something inside the pocket, then pulled it out slowly.

A thin, yellowish object emerged from behind the fabric.

And what made Arya's blood freeze solid instantly: the old handwritten note held by the mirror reflection suddenly pierced through the surface of the mirror glass, floated right out across the dimensions, and glided softly down to land right before Arya in the real world.

Plop.

That old note landed upon the cold concrete floor.

Arya startled, stumbling two steps backward with ragged breaths. He looked back and forth between the mirror—where his reflection now stood tall once more with a cold smirk—and the faded paper lying on the floor. The underground laboratory suddenly felt suffocatingly tight, heavy with the reek of past dust and a terror creeping across his skin.

With severely shaking hands and a curiosity mixed with horror, Arya slowly knelt onto the floor. He extended his bleeding fingers, then picked up the old note.

The paper felt fragile, yellowed with age, yet the handwriting remained sharply legible beneath the red glare of the safelight. The moment his eyes recognized the ink strokes across the paper, Arya's breath caught in his throat.

It was the handwriting of the late Grandfather Haris.

With tear-filled eyes and a heart pounding wildly with dread, Arya read every line of the sentence inscribed on that note:

"If you are reading this note, it means the cycle has claimed its new prey. Do not blame yourself. I know you thought this studio was a family inheritance passed down from our ancestors through generations. But that was all a lie. Decades ago, I was not the true owner of this studio—I was merely a naive young man like you, a foolish photographer trapped in this room, photographing that entity, and forced to surrender my soul to become the next guardian of the veil. The Grandfather Haris you knew is not the creator of this curse; I was merely a prior captive enslaved by the camera's lens to find my own replacement..."

That grand revelation unspooled from the note struck Arya's head like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. The entire foundation of reality he had trusted all this time shattered into pieces.

Grandfather Haris was not the creator of this curse. His grandfather was not someone who intentionally passed down the horror studio as a form of family wealth. The old man was merely a prior victim—a wretched captive trapped within the same vicious cycle decades ago, who ultimately had to sacrifice his own grandchild to prolong the entity's eternity within the lethal catalog.

"No... impossible..." Arya whispered hysterically, tears pouring profusely down his cheeks. He crushed the note tightly in his fist, his chest feeling as though struck by an iron sledgehammer. "Grandfather lied to me... grandfather deliberately let me come here... grandfather threw me to that monster!"

His subconscious filled with fear and anger fusing into a single knot. The betrayal dealt by the person he respected and loved most inflicted an inner wound far more agonizing than any physical terror. He had thought he came to inherit family memories, but the reality was he came to be sacrificed yet another time within that supernatural chain of enslavement.

With ragged breaths, Arya stared once more toward the very bottom of his grandfather's note. He hoped for a concluding sentence offering a glimmer of hope, an escape route, or an apology.

Yet what he found at the tail end of his grandfather's note successfully crushed the last fragments of sanity left inside his skull.

That closing sentence was no longer written with ordinary black ink, but scribbled using dried, blackened blood, with handwriting that appeared to have shaken violently as it was penned:

"And your grandfather before me... and his grandfather before him... and on it goes, spinning backward without a beginning, all the way to the very first subject who ever created this gateway to hell."