4:30 PM, December 30th, 2995.
Seven hours and thirty minutes remained before the operation began.
Click.
Thunk.
Ron entered the room, lit the oil lamp, then locked the door behind him.
Leaning silently against the doorframe, he raised a hand toward his neck.
RIIIP.
A sound like tearing fabric echoed through the room.
Ron had just peeled part of his own face away.
As casually as someone removing a paper mask.
If Quân had seen him now, he probably would have vomited on the spot.
Ron staggered forward while carrying the strip of flesh in one hand before slowly making his way toward the desk.
The room itself was painfully plain.
Books. Notebooks. An oil lamp. A desk. A chair.
Nothing hung on the walls.
No decoration.
No personality.
The entire place felt as lifeless as its owner.
Ron lowered himself into the old wooden chair and opened one of the drawers beneath the desk.
Inside rested a silver mirror.
The instant his fingers touched it, his hand began to melt.
Not metaphorically.
The flesh softened into something blackened and rotten, like burned meat collapsing apart beneath invisible heat.
Ron didn't react.
Even if the sky itself split open above him, his expression probably wouldn't change.
Assuming he still looked human enough for expressions to matter.
He raised the mirror and looked at himself.
The face staring back was monstrous.
No.
"Monstrous" implied intention.
This looked accidental.
Like something that had gone catastrophically wrong during creation itself.
His entire face was submerged beneath a tar-like darkness that dripped from the top of his skull like melted wax. Thin strands of dying hair clung weakly to the black sludge coating his scalp.
His pale skin had long since been stained by layers of dried black blood.
Most of his nose was gone.
At a glance, it was impossible to tell where flesh ended and decay began.
But the worst part was the worms.
Small pale worms crawled from the holes covering his face, feeding on the thick black liquid leaking from beneath the ruined skin.
They nested everywhere the substance existed.
Like maggots feeding inside a corpse that still refused to die.
On Ron's other hand, the burning flesh had already peeled away enough to expose dark red bone beneath.
He slowly placed the mirror onto the desk.
Then raised a trembling hand toward the hollow remains of his eye socket.
Even the golden iris that once defined him had already begun collapsing into ruin.
And yet Ron did not look disgusted.
Instead, he stared quietly at the countless crimson strands drifting through the room.
Like cracks suspended across reality itself.
An illusion.
One only Ron could see.
For as long as he could remember, the world had always appeared strangely colorless to him.
Dull.
Muted.
Dead.
Only these crimson fractures remained vivid.
Ron watched them silently while covering his mouth with one hand, trying to stop the worms from spilling out of his throat.
No sound escaped him.
His throat had already been eaten away.
Only the wet noise of movement remained.
Slowly, Ron lifted the mirror again and stared deeper into it.
But the longer he held it, the faster his body deteriorated.
Something invisible was burning him alive.
His collapse had already become impossible to stop.
One of Ron's eyes suddenly slipped free from its socket.
The nerves attached to it had already been severed.
The ruined eyeball rolled across his cheek before falling directly into the shredded remains of his mouth.
Tiny holes began opening along his ears.
More worms emerged from within.
Disgusting.
Within minutes, Ron had effectively lost nearly all five senses.
His hair had almost entirely fallen out.
The only thing keeping his body together were the black threads wrapped tightly around him like crude stitches, forcibly holding collapsing flesh in place.
But even that wasn't enough anymore.
Ron still held the mirror.
At least, he thought he did.
He couldn't feel anything.
The fact he could still manipulate mana enough to control those black threads was already the only thing separating him from a vegetable.
His body finally collapsed forward against the desk.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
And still, even then, Ron weakly moved a single black thread toward the mirror.
Just a little further.
Just one moment more.
The thread touched the mirror.
And Ron's entire body convulsed violently, though he himself no longer possessed enough sensation to understand what had happened.
The Demon-Reflecting Mirror had fulfilled its role.
Ron fell completely unconscious.
Like a corpse waiting to decide whether or not it still intended to return.