The days blurred into one another after that night.
Hoai Trach tightened security. He stationed his men in and outside the penthouse. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere alone. Not even to the grocery store.
But I didn't argue.
Because deep down, I felt it too.
Something was coming.
And we were nowhere near ready.
"You've read the journal three times," Hoai Trach said one evening, leaning against the balcony door. "You're not going to decode it with just your eyes."
"I know," I murmured, flipping another page. "But it's not about the words."
He raised an eyebrow. "Then what is it about?"
"The pattern," I said. "She left breadcrumbs. In the names, the symbols, the repetition. Look here—every fifth page, there's a phrase repeated: 'The thread is tangled. The thread is red.'"
He frowned. "Like... fate?"
"Or blood," I whispered.
Neither of us spoke for a moment.
Then he stepped closer. "I don't like this, Hoa Tu. You're too deep in her world."
I looked up at him.
"This is my world now."
His eyes met mine, steady and dark.
And I saw it again—that glimmer. That struggle inside him between keeping me safe... and keeping me close.
The next clue came from an unexpected place.
The old caretaker of the Lam family estate called.
She was in tears.
"There was a man," she whispered over the phone. "He came asking for the 'other girl.' He said her eyes weren't the same."
Hoai Trach and I arrived within the hour.
The estate was abandoned, wrapped in ivy and silence. But the caretaker waited in the front garden, holding something wrapped in linen.
"I found it in the old library," she said, her hands trembling. "Miss Lam never let anyone near this section. But after she passed... I started cleaning. And this... this was hidden behind a false wall."
I unwrapped the bundle.
A book. Bound in leather. Old and cracked.
And on the cover: a symbol.
The same door from the journal.
My blood turned cold.
"She knew," I whispered. "She knew I would come looking."
We thanked the caretaker and returned to the car in silence.
Back at the penthouse, I placed the book on the table between us.
Hoai Trach didn't speak for a long time.
Then finally, he said, "We open it together."
Inside were no words.
Only drawings.
A door.
A pair of hands reaching through it.
A mirror breaking.
And a girl standing in a field of glass, staring at two versions of herself.
I turned the pages slowly.
At the end, scribbled in what looked like ink—or maybe blood—were four words:
"You must not open it."
And beneath, a name:
"Project Ouroboros."
"Ouroboros," I murmured. "The serpent that eats its own tail."
Hoai Trach's jaw clenched. "A cycle."
"A loop," I agreed.
I flipped the page again—and a photo slipped out.
Of me.
Before I came to this world.
Wearing the same clothes I wore the night I died.
But the background... it wasn't Earth.
It was here.
This world.
"I've been here before," I whispered.
He looked at me sharply.
"This isn't your first time?"
"I don't think it ever was."
And suddenly, everything made a terrible kind of sense.
Why the memories came in flashes.
Why the people around me reacted like they'd known a version of me before.
Why the man in the raincoat said I wasn't meant to be here.
Because maybe... I had been here.
Again.
And again.
And again.
That night, I dreamed.
I stood before the door in the drawing.
It pulsed like it was alive, breathing.
A voice whispered behind me.
"You opened it before. Do you remember what happened?"
I turned.
No one was there.
But the whisper came again.
"You broke the world."
I woke up screaming.
Hoai Trach held me, no questions asked.
But when I finally calmed, I looked up at him and said:
"I think I was part of something bigger than we realized."
He didn't argue.
He simply said, "Then let's find the rest of it."
We began the next morning.
Investigating Project Ouroboros.
Digging into private labs. Secret research. Blacklisted names.
And we found it.
A hidden facility, long shut down, outside the city limits.
Hoai Trach arranged for an off-the-books entry.
We went at dusk.
It smelled like chemicals and old lies.
In the center of the lab, under a sheet of dust, we found a pod.
And beside it, a monitor that flickered to life the moment I touched it.
A message appeared.
"Subject 07 – Consciousness Transfer Successful."
I gasped.
"This... this is how I got here."
A second message followed.
"Cycle 4 initiated. Memory anchor unstable."
Hoai Trach gripped my shoulder.
"You were part of an experiment."
I nodded numbly.
"More than that. I am the experiment."
And then the door opened.
Not a metaphor.
Not a drawing.
A real door, at the end of the corridor, that groaned open by itself.
Inside, nothing but a mirror.
I stepped toward it.
And in that mirror—I saw her.
The other me.
The original Lâm Hoa Tư.
She smiled.
But it wasn't kind.
And she whispered:
"Welcome back."