Chapter Fifteen: The Eye in the Shattered Mirror

Deep within the abandoned laboratory building, a completely repurposed room glowed with stark, white light. This was the ultimate stage Shen Mo had prepared for the mirror.

The walls had been demolished, replaced by an array of ten thousand individual LED bulbs capable of instantly boosting the room’s light intensity from pitch black to a level that could sear the retinas. The mirror was firmly secured to a metal frame in the center of the room, like a prisoner awaiting judgment.

Shen Mo stood before the control console, while Su Wangying stood beside him, clutching a file with a grave expression.

"Light Interference Containment protocol, test initiating," Shen Mo’s voice echoed through the empty room via the microphone, calm and devoid of emotion. He pressed the start key, and the LED array on the surrounding walls ignited instantly, light surging toward the mirror in the center like a tidal wave.

Light intensity: 1,000 lux.

Within the mirror’s surface, a figure wearing a dated teacher’s uniform slowly emerged, stiffly repeating the motion of pushing a door, seemingly oblivious to the external light.

3,000 lux.

The "teacher’s" movements in the mirror began to show a slight lag, each push of the door appearing as if it were sinking into viscous air.

5,000 lux.

The light was now too blinding to look at with the naked eye, and the image on the monitor screen had turned white from overexposure. Yet, the figure continued to struggle, its door-pushing motion becoming frantic and futile.

"Increase intensity to 8,000 lux." Shen Mo pushed the control lever again.

With a hum, the entire room felt as though it had been plunged into molten steel. On the monitor, the image of the "teacher" let out a silent shriek. The entire figure appeared like a painting dropped into boiling oil, violently twisting, stretching, and fragmenting, until finally, after a burst of high-frequency flickering, it collapsed completely, regressing into a blurry, writhing shadow deep within the mirror’s surface.

"The critical threshold is 8,000 lux." Shen Mo quickly recorded the data, a hint of satisfaction flashing in his eyes. "High-intensity strobe light can indeed disrupt the continuity of its cognitive projection. This standard can serve as a physical guideline for handling similar 'reverberation artifacts' in the future."

"The physical approach is effective, but it is still there." Su Wangying pointed to the shadow on the screen that refused to dissipate. "The obsession is the root. We only interrupted its 'performance'; we did not weaken its 'script'." She opened the file in her hands and pushed it toward Shen Mo. It contained a photocopy of the original manuscript of the *Yijitang Mortuary Records*, which she had unearthed from the dusty archives of the municipal records office.

It was a few lines of scribbled calligraphy: "I am not the arsonist. I tried to push the door thirty-seven times but could not get out. When the fire started, the students were already unconscious. I carried their bodies to the door, but it was locked. The world remembers my name, but believes I am the evildoer."

A few sparse words captured the final grief and resentment of a soul misunderstood to death.

"Try 'memory confrontation'," Su Wangying suggested. "Use the truth to strike at the obsession built on lies."

Shen Mo pondered for a moment before agreeing. He printed the text on an A0-sized sheet of paper and used a robotic arm to slowly affix it directly in front of the mirror.

The moment the text made contact with the mirror’s surface, the shadow on the monitor, which had previously only been writhing, suddenly began to shake violently! It seemed to see something of extreme horror or rage, slamming madly against the mirror, attempting to re-coalesce into the form of the "teacher," only to fail time and time again.

Shen Mo stared intensely at another screen displaying data streams, which recorded the delay in the mirror’s actions.

"The lag has increased from 0.3 seconds to 1.2 seconds," he whispered, a hint of surprise in his tone. This meant that the covered-up truth was fundamentally shaking the cognitive core of the "teacher" reverberation, weakening the intensity of its obsession.

"Effective, but not thorough enough." A scholar's fanatical light gleamed in Shen Mo’s eyes. "It is trapped in a linear memory of 'failing to save people by pushing the door.' Then we shall use a logic it cannot comprehend to completely destroy its cognitive loop."

He proposed a bold hypothesis—the "Infinite Reflection Paradox."

Soon, a second double-sided mirror was precisely positioned in the room by the robotic arm, facing the antique mirror that held the "teacher" reverberation. When the system was activated, an infinitely recursive reflection channel was formed between the two mirrors.

On the monitor, a bizarre scene unfolded. Inside the mirror, the shadow finally re-coalesced into the form of the "teacher." It looked ahead blankly, then began its eternal action once more—pushing the door.

The first reflection was pushing the door, the second was pushing the door, the third, the fourth... extending to the limit of visual perception, countless "teachers" performing the same desperate action at the same time.

When all reflections reached the seventh synchronized repetition of the door-pushing motion, the reflection in the deepest layer—the smallest, most blurred "teacher"—suddenly paused.

Following that, as if dominoes were being tipped over, this pause quickly propagated forward. The sixth, fifth, fourth reflections... their movements began to show minute differences; some slowed by half a beat, others froze prematurely. The entire infinitely extending queue completely lost synchronization within a few seconds.

Eventually, all levels of reflections, whether clear or blurred, seemed to have been pressed with a pause button, collectively stiffening in place, each in a different pose, like a row of instantly petrified sculptures.

"Success." Shen Mo watched the footage captured by the high-speed camera and reached his final verdict. "This 'reverberation' relies on a single, linear memory projection. It cannot process infinitely nested self-reflections; this logical paradox is an incomprehensible, unexecutable dead loop for it."

The mirror had become an ordinary piece of glass. At least, according to all instrument readings, it had.

To completely eliminate any potential risk of diffusion and to demonstrate to the public the official resolve in handling such incidents, Shen Mo decided to publicly destroy the mirror.

The destruction ceremony was held under the cordon of the city police, with the lenses of several media outlets aimed at the center of the venue. Shen Mo put on a pair of specially made dark polarized goggles and, with a solemn expression, held a long-handled rubber mallet as he walked toward the mirror, which had been removed from the laboratory. It was fixed vertically on a stand, the surface so clean it reflected the blue sky.

Under the gaze of countless cameras and eyes, Shen Mo raised the rubber mallet high.

"Bang!"

A crisp shattering sound echoed across the square. The mirror shattered on impact, turning into countless shards of various sizes that scattered like diamonds, falling onto the black velvet cloth.

Applause and cheers of relief erupted from the surrounding crowd. It seemed as though everything was over.

Staff members began to carefully clear the glass shards from the ground, sweeping them into sealed disposal boxes. Shen Mo stood to the side, supervising the entire process, his expression as calm as ever.

However, just as the final shard, roughly the size of a fingernail, was about to be touched by the broom, Shen Mo caught something in his peripheral vision. He glanced over subconsciously.

In that tiny fragment, his own face was clearly reflected.

In that lightning-fast moment, "he" in the reflection winked at him—gently and independently.

Shen Mo’s heart felt as if it had been gripped by an icy hand, but his face remained impassive. He bent down and, under the bewildered gazes of the crowd, personally used tweezers to pick up the shard of glass, citing the need for sampling and research, and placed it alone into an opaque evidence bag.

Returning to his laboratory, he locked the door and placed the fragment on the stage of a high-magnification microscopic camera. He replayed the moment he had just captured, magnifying the image to the limit.

Confirmed.

The winking action was independent of any behavior of his own, and it clearly occurred after he had shattered the mirror with the hammer.

A chill rose up his spine. He immediately pulled up surveillance footage of all his activity areas over the past seven days, especially the segments where he was near the mirror or discussing "mirror images" with Su Wangying. He analyzed his facial expressions frame by frame.

Soon, he found it.

In several inadvertent moments, when he thought he was merely deep in thought, the corners of his mouth would curl into a subtle, fleeting arc. It was not a smile belonging to Shen Mo, but a cold sneer, mixed with pity and frigidity, as if a god were looking down upon ants.

He abruptly shut down all the monitors, and the room plunged into darkness. Only a desk lamp remained lit, illuminating the notebook spread out before him.

He picked up his pen and, beneath the page recording the success of the "Infinite Reflection Paradox" experiment, wrote the final line of notes with a slightly trembling hand:

It was not eliminated... It just changed hosts.

Outside the window, the clouds over the city had cleared at some unknown point, and the sunlight was bright. But at this very moment, the glass curtain walls of the skyscrapers lining both sides of the street seemed to have been struck by an invisible stone, simultaneously rippling with a strange, water-like reflection.