Chapter Fourteen – Seven Minutes Earlier

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The address on the repair order pointed to an old street called "Cherish Alley," where the bluestone pavement had been worn smooth and glossy by the passage of time. On both sides stood rows upon rows of antique and miscellaneous shops.

Shen Mo pushed open a creaking wooden door. A clear chime of wind bells startled a cloud of dust into the air.

In the depths of the shop, a small, slender man wearing bifocals was carefully polishing a snuff bottle with deer leather. This was Old Zhou, the shop owner listed on the repair order.

Old Zhou looked up, a flicker of subtle alertness flashing in his cloudy eyes.

Without beating around the bush, Shen Mo stated his purpose plainly and described the carved wooden framed mirror.

“The mirror?” Old Zhou set down the snuff bottle and slowly removed his glasses. “Oh, I remember it a bit. Just an ordinary old item. The frame is a bit unique. When I got it, it was already in bad shape. The customer took it away for repairs themselves. What’s wrong with it?” His tone was as indifferent as if discussing a worthless shard of porcelain.

Shen Mo stared quietly at him and took from his briefcase a sealed bag containing a small piece of charred wood.

“This sample was taken from the mirror frame. The analysis report shows it was not naturally decayed but subjected to intense heat, deeply carbonized, approximately thirty years ago.”

Old Zhou’s eyelid twitched, but he still denied it stubbornly: “It’s been so long; who knows what kind of fire it might have been through?”

“The fire happened at the Yuying Orphanage.” Shen Mo’s voice was low but struck like a stone cast into still water.

Old Zhou’s hand trembled as he lifted his teacup, scalding tea spilling onto the back of his hand. Yet he remained oblivious, his face suddenly pale as death.

His defenses completely collapsed.

He slumped in his chair, his throat dry as he croaked out, “How… how do you know…”

Silence fell over the small shop, broken only by the ticking of an old wall clock.

After a long while, Old Zhou spoke in a voice almost like a sleepwalker’s murmur.

“Thirty years ago, when the Yuying Orphanage site was demolished, I followed the demolition crew to collect old goods, looking for bargains.” He recalled with a gaze drifting into emptiness, filled with terror. “That mirror was picked up then. It had been buried in the ruins’ mud, the frame blackened by fire, but the glass… the glass was untouched, shining eerily.”

He swallowed hard and continued, “I took it back to the shop, cleaned it, and hung it on the wall. That very first night, I had nightmares. In the dream, a group of children with indistinct faces surrounded me, crying out hoarsely, ‘Teacher, save us from the fire! Teacher, save us from the fire!’ I woke drenched in cold sweat. The same dream came the second night. By the third night, I couldn’t bear it and got up in the middle of the night to put the mirror away. But when I stood in front of it, I saw my reflection… with its back turned to me.”

Old Zhou’s voice trembled uncontrollably. “I was clearly facing the mirror, but the ‘me’ in the glass always showed only its back. I was terrified, grabbed a cloth to cover it, turned it to face the wall the next day, and never dared touch it again, let alone sell it.”

Hearing this, the thread of “clues” in Shen Mo’s mind was thoroughly plucked.

“Do you still have the original transaction records? I want to see them.”

Old Zhou’s face showed resistance, but under Shen Mo’s calm and resolute gaze, he yielded.

From a hidden compartment at the bottom of the counter, he shakily took out a yellowed hardcover ledger, its pages emitting a musty scent from moisture and age.

He flipped through it for a long time before finding a page with a thin piece of paper tucked inside.

It was not a transaction record but a faded, yellowed old photograph.

The background showed the ruins of the orphanage, broken walls casting ghostly shadows in the sunset.

At the center stood the carved wooden framed mirror, unnervingly upright, its glass clear.

A man in a teacher’s uniform knelt before it, engulfed in blazing flames. His expression was one of agony and distortion, yet he held tightly a book raised high toward the mirror, as if making a sacrifice.

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Shen Mo’s heart skipped a beat. He immediately took a photo with his phone and zoomed in.

The man’s face was blurred, but the book’s cover was strikingly clear.

The title read: "Yiji Hall Substitute Language Manuscript," and the distinctive pattern of interlocking curves on the cover instantly struck a chord in Shen Mo’s memory.

This pattern was identical to the “artifact corrosion mark” recorded in a Qing Dynasty branding tong restoration file he had reviewed in the Bureau’s archives!

A terrifying thought took shape in his mind: the obsession of the “Substitute Language Studio,” that kind of spiritual contamination capable of infecting objects, was not limited to the penal instruments buried in the dry well.

It had long since seeped and spread to other items.

This mirror was the only one of the “Seventh Residual Echo Carriers” from that ritual that had escaped burial!

Returning to the lab, an unprecedented urgency gripped him.

He placed the mirror inside a controlled environment chamber made of special materials, designed to block most electromagnetic and unknown energy interference.

A high-speed camera focused on the mirror’s surface, while a precise EEG monitor connected to his own temple.

He first donned specially made dark sunglasses and stood before the mirror.

Minute by minute passed. After ten minutes, all instrument readings were stable, showing no abnormalities.

He stepped out, took a deep breath, swapped the sunglasses for the lab’s standard clear goggles, and reentered the chamber.

This time, he forced himself to look directly into the mirror, meeting his own eyes reflected within.

One minute, two minutes… a full three minutes passed. On the brain monitor connected to his visual cortex, a cluster of faint but distinct abnormal discharges appeared.

Shen Mo remained still, continuing to gaze.

At six minutes and twenty seconds, a strange event occurred.

In the mirror before him, the identical reflection blinked once without warning.

Yet Shen Mo himself did not move a muscle.

His heart clenched sharply, and he almost immediately turned and exited the chamber.

Standing outside, he looked in through the observation window. The reflection inside did not vanish immediately as he left but lingered about half a second before dissipating like ripples on water.

The mystery was solved.

“Gazing” was the sole trigger condition, and it had to be naked-eye reception of the unattenuated light information reflected by the mirror.

The sunglasses filtered out specific wavelengths, severing this connection.

Shen Mo immediately wrote his model hypothesis on the whiteboard—“Cognitive Displacement.”

The “teacher” in the mirror was neither a ghost nor a physical entity; it was a high-dimensional information virus.

When one gazed into the mirror with bare eyes, the mirror acted as a portal, implanting this “virus” into the observer’s brain through reflected light.

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It precisely attacked and hijacked the human self-recognition system, gradually overwriting the observer’s original personality with a fixed, resentment-filled persona.

Ultimately, everyone who looked into it became that “perpetrator forgotten by the world.”

To test this model, he recruited two volunteers for a strict double-blind experiment.

One wore the same dark sunglasses he had used before; the other wore regular, clear eyeglasses.

Both were asked to observe the mirror in turns.

As expected, the volunteer wearing sunglasses showed no effects after fifteen minutes, while the one with ordinary glasses showed clear memory confusion and personality shifts by the seventh minute. He became restless, muttering fragmented sentences, insisting, “Those children were disobedient,” claiming, “I used to teach at the orphanage.”

The experiment was immediately halted.

Shen Mo finally understood that combating this mirror was not a matter of using peach wood swords or talismans, nor violently smashing it — that might release something even more terrible.

The only method was to sever its “cognitive channel.”

That very night, an alarm suddenly blared in the police evidence storage room.

When Shen Mo arrived, he saw Lin Xiaoya being firmly held by two officers. She looked frantic, her eyes fixed on the mirror wrapped in special fiber cloth and sealed with numerous tags.

“Let me go! That’s my brother’s!” she cried hoarsely. “He fixed it before he died! He wanted someone to see it! You can’t hide it!”

Shen Mo gestured for the officers to release her and calmly approached, his gaze as still as a deep pool.

“Your brother wasn’t killed by it.”

Lin Xiaoya froze.

Shen Mo’s voice dropped low, icy as a frost: “He was killed by being ‘seen.’ And now, you are about to complete the unfinished ritual for him.”

The color drained from Lin Xiaoya’s face in an instant. She stood dumbfounded, unable to grasp the meaning of his words.

Shen Mo no longer looked at her but turned to the “evidence” sealed layer upon layer, as though he could see through the cloth the smooth and deadly surface of the mirror.

He whispered, as if speaking to himself and declaring war on the unseen “it”:

“We have to make sure… it can never reflect a human shadow again.”

Night deepened. Shen Mo stood by the window, clutching an urgent proposal.

The title read: “Proposal for Constructing a High-Specification Sealed Environmental Testing Chamber,” with the target location being the long-abandoned biological laboratory on the city’s outskirts.

He knew that to solve this problem once and for all, he needed an absolutely isolated, absolutely controllable stage.

A stage where the mirror could “perform” to its fullest but never escape.