Chapter 14: Seven Minutes Ago |
The address on the repair order pointed to an old street called "Xi Wu Xiang" (Cherish Objects Alley). The bluestone road was worn smooth and shiny by the years, flanked by a dense row of antique and curio shops.
Shen Mo pushed open a creaking wooden door. A wind chime tinkled, stirring up a cloud of dust.
Deep in the shop, a small, thin man wearing reading glasses was polishing a snuff bottle with a piece of deerskin. He was the shop owner on the repair order, Old Zhou.
Old Zhou looked up, a flicker of imperceptible vigilance in his cloudy eyes.
Shen Mo didn't beat around the bush. He stated his purpose directly and described the carved wooden-framed mirror.
"A mirror?" Old Zhou put down the snuff bottle and slowly took off his glasses. "Oh, I have some impression. Just an ordinary old thing. The frame was a bit special. It was in tatters when I got it. The customer took it to be repaired himself. What's wrong with it?" His tone was as flat as if he were talking about a worthless piece of porcelain.
Shen Mo looked at him quietly and took out a sealed bag from his briefcase. Inside was a small piece of charred wood.
"This is a sample taken from the mirror frame. The test report shows that it's not natural decay, but has been burned at a high temperature. The degree of carbonization is very deep, and the time is about thirty years ago."
Old Zhou's eyelids twitched, but he remained stubborn. "It's old. Who knows what fire it's been through."
The hand Old Zhou was using to lift his teacup trembled violently. Scalding tea splashed on the back of his hand, but he didn't seem to notice. His face instantly turned deathly pale.
His defenses had completely collapsed.
He slumped back into his chair, a dry sound coming from his throat. "You... how did you know..."
Silence enveloped the small shop, with only the ticking of the old wall clock.
After a long time, Old Zhou finally spoke in a tone that was almost like sleep-talking.
"Thirty years ago, when the land of the Yuying Orphanage was being demolished, I followed the demolition team to collect old goods, just to get a bargain," he recalled, his eyes drifting into the void, filled with fear. "That mirror was from then. It was buried in the mud of the ruins. The frame was burned black, but the glass... the glass was completely fine, so bright it was creepy."
He swallowed and continued, "I brought it back to the shop, cleaned it, and hung it on the wall. As a result, I had a nightmare the very first night. In the dream, a group of children with blurred faces surrounded me, crying and shouting at the top of their lungs, 'Teacher, put out the fire! Teacher, put out the fire!' I woke up in a cold sweat. The next night, it was the same dream. On the third day, I couldn't take it anymore. I got up in the middle of the night, wanting to put the mirror away. But as soon as I walked in front of it, I saw myself in the mirror... with my back to me."
Old Zhou's voice trembled uncontrollably. "I was clearly standing facing the mirror, but the 'me' in the mirror always showed me only its back. I was scared out of my wits. I grabbed a cloth and covered it. The next day, I turned it around to face the wall and never dared to touch it again, let alone sell it."
After listening, the string named "clue" in Shen Mo's mind was completely plucked.
"Are the original transaction records still there? I'd like to see them."
Old Zhou's face was full of resistance, but under Shen Mo's calm and determined gaze, he finally gave in.
From a hidden compartment at the very bottom of the counter, he tremblingly took out a yellowed hardcover ledger. The pages exuded a musty smell from the dampness and age.
He flipped through it for a long time before finding the page with a thin piece of paper tucked inside.
It wasn't a transaction record, but an old, faded yellow photo.
The background of the photo was the ruins of the orphanage. The broken walls cast ghostly shadows in the setting sun.
In the center of the picture, the carved wooden-framed mirror stood bizarrely, its surface clear.
A man in a teacher's uniform was kneeling in front of the mirror, his body engulfed in flames. His expression was pained and twisted, but his hands were tightly clutching a book, holding it high towards the mirror, as if making a sacrifice.
Shen Mo's heart skipped a beat. He immediately took a photo of the picture with his phone and enlarged it.
The man's face was blurry, but the cover of the book was exceptionally clear.
The title of the book was "Yiji Hall Proxy Speech Drafts," and a unique pattern of looping curves on the cover instantly struck a chord in Shen Mo's memory.
This pattern was identical to the "Object Corrosion Mark" recorded in the conservation file of a Qing Dynasty finger-branding clamp that he had consulted in the main bureau's archives!
A terrifying thought formed in his mind: the obsession of the "Proxy Speech Studio," that spiritual contamination that could infect objects, was not limited to the torture instruments buried in the dry well.
It had long since infiltrated and spread to other objects.
This mirror was the "seventh echo carrier" that had escaped and was not buried along with the others in the ritual back then!
He returned to the lab, a sense of unprecedented urgency gripping him.
He placed the mirror in a controllable environmental chamber made of special materials. The walls of the chamber could block most electromagnetic and unknown energy interference.
A high-speed camera was aimed at the mirror surface, and a precision EEG synchronous monitor was connected to his own temples.
He first put on a pair of special dark sunglasses and stood in front of the mirror.
Time passed, minute by minute. After ten minutes, all instrument readings were stable, with no abnormalities.
He walked out of the chamber, took a deep breath, put on the standard transparent goggles of the lab, and walked back into the chamber.
This time, he forced himself to look directly at the mirror surface, directly into his own eyes in the mirror.
One minute, two minutes... at exactly three minutes, on the monitor connected to his brain, the waveform graph of the visual cortex area showed a faint but clear cluster of abnormal discharges.
Shen Mo remained motionless and continued to stare.
At six minutes and twenty seconds, a bizarre scene occurred.
In the mirror before him, the reflection that was identical to him, without any warning, blinked gently.
But Shen Mo himself had not moved a muscle.
His heart contracted sharply. He almost immediately turned and retreated from the environmental chamber.
He stood outside the chamber, looking at the mirror inside through the observation window. The reflection in the mirror did not disappear immediately with his departure, but lingered for about half a second before dissipating like a ripple in water.
The mystery was solved.
"Gazing" was the only trigger condition, and it had to be the reception of light information reflected from the mirror surface by the naked eye, without attenuation.
The sunglasses had filtered out light of a specific wavelength, cutting off this connection.
Shen Mo immediately wrote down his model hypothesis on the whiteboard—"Cognitive Displacement."
The "teacher" in the mirror was not a ghost or a physical entity. It was a high-dimensional information virus.
When a person looked at the mirror with their naked eyes, the mirror acted as a port, implanting this "virus" into the observer's brain through the reflected light.
It would precisely attack and hijack the human self-cognition system, gradually overwriting the observer's original personality with a solidified, resentment-filled personality data.
Ultimately, it would turn everyone who looked at it into that "forgotten perpetrator."
To verify this model, he requested two volunteers for a strict double-blind experiment.
One wore the same sunglasses as he had in the previous experiment, and the other wore ordinary plain glasses.
The two were asked to take turns observing the mirror.
The results were as expected. The volunteer wearing sunglasses felt nothing after fifteen minutes, while the volunteer wearing plain glasses showed obvious symptoms of memory confusion and personality shift at only the seventh minute. He became anxious and restless, repeatedly muttering fragmented sentences, insisting that "those children were disobedient" and saying that he "used to teach at the orphanage."
The experiment was immediately terminated.
Shen Mo finally understood that the way to fight this mirror was not with a peach wood sword or a talisman, and certainly not by simply smashing it—that might release something even more terrifying.
The only way was to cut off its "cognitive channel."
Late that night, the alarm in the police bureau's evidence storage room suddenly blared.
When Shen Mo arrived, he saw Lin Xiaoya being held tightly by two police officers. She looked frantic, her eyes fixed on the mirror, which was wrapped in special fiber cloth and covered with seals.
"Let me go! That's my brother's thing!" she cried, her voice hoarse. "My brother died right after he fixed it! He must have wanted someone to be seen! You can't hide it!"
Shen Mo waved for the officers to release her and walked up to her, his gaze as calm as a deep pool of water.
"Your brother wasn't killed by it."
Lin Xiaoya was stunned.
Shen Mo's voice was very low, with a hint of icy coldness. "He was 'seen' to death. And now, you are about to complete the unfinished ritual for him."
The color drained from Lin Xiaoya's face. She stood there, stunned, unable to understand the meaning of his words.
Shen Mo no longer looked at her. He turned his head to look at the "evidence" that was sealed in layers, as if he could see through the cloth to the smooth and deadly mirror surface.
He added in a low voice, as if to himself, and also as if declaring war on the unseen "it."
"We have to make it... so that it can no longer reflect a human figure."
The night was deep. Shen Mo stood by the window, holding an emergency application.
The title of the application was "Proposal for the Construction of a High-Standard Closed Environment Test Room," and the target location was the long-abandoned biological laboratory building on the edge of the city.
He knew that to completely solve this problem, he needed an absolutely isolated and absolutely controllable stage.
A stage where this mirror could "perform" to its heart's content, yet never escape.
(End of Chapter)