Chapter 41 Mystery in the Ancient Mirror

Fatty was right. At this time, the basic knowledge I had learned before was very critical. If you didn’t understand basic physics, then many people would only pay attention to how the building appeared in the mirror. But I knew that the strangest part of this mirror wasn’t here at all.

Mirrors needed light sources to reflect things. When there wasn’t a light source, then mirrors wouldn’t have any reflection points.

But the ancient building in the mirror was shrouded in a miserable blue light. This light wasn’t our light source, but the light from the ancient building itself.

It was coming from inside the mirror.

In other words, as long as I turned off the flashlight, the only light source in the whole cave would be the blue light passing through the mirror and making the place look dark.

But when we first came in, the cave was dark and there was no light from the mirror.

“Turn off the lights,” I said to Fatty, immediately turning off my own flashlight.

The whole cave instantly darkened. According to normal physical conditions, the blue light in the mirror should have become the main light source.

But now the whole mirror was dark and the cave also became pitch black. The only thing shining was the fluorescent logo on Fatty’s flashlight.

“Click!” The flashlight was turned on again.

Looking in the mirror again, the contents were exactly the same as what we had seen before. The bleak ancient building was as quiet as a fossil.

Fatty asked me what I was doing and I gave him a rough idea of my theory.

He didn’t fully understand, but he got the gist of my experiment and said to me, “Get to the point, Mr. Naïve. Don’t be so polite to illiterate people like me.”

“This shows that this phenomenon has nothing to do with the propagation of light. As long as there’s a light source shining on the mirror surface, the mirror will start to display images. But as far as I know, there was no photosensitive technology in ancient China. There are records of the use of light to turn on mechanisms, usually using the phototaxis (1) of animals. They’re short-acting mechanisms, usually just handicrafts for amusement,” I said. “It’s good that ancient China didn’t have this technology; otherwise, we would have to fight in the dark in ancient tombs. Even a little light would trigger the mechanism and kill us.”

“That’s not helpful.” Fatty touched his chin. “You’re basically telling me that this mirror is amazing, but you don’t understand why?”

“It’s different. I made some deductions about the principle of the matter, so I can rule out a lot of wrong theories. Let me think about it. I believe that the great proletarian warriors won’t be defeated by strange forces and will overcome this confusing mystery. All phenomena have their natural principles behind them.” I was a little irritated by what he said, so I told him not to talk anymore.

“Stealing my lines,” Fatty grunted. “Well, while you think about it, this fat master will go have a smoke.” As he spoke, he retreated to the stone beam and lit a cigarette.

I finally got Fatty to shut up for a little bit! I smiled and thought about looking at the mirror again.

To be honest, I really thought that this mirror was too amazing. But with my understanding of some ancient Chinese technology, I had to learn how it worked.

In ancient China, the craftsmanship of some skillful craftsmen had reached an uncanny level. But they were still craftsmen and wouldn’t become real gods and ghosts. So, what our eyes would conceive as a miracle would really be called “deceptive ingenuity” when the truth was revealed.

The first thing to consider was: if I were to make such a mirror myself, what method would I use? I pointed my flashlight at the mirror and looked at the light sources, suddenly recalling an untested method my teacher had mentioned when doing experiments before.

A phenomenon had to have a starting and ending point. Sometimes the points themselves weren’t even important. What mattered was how the starting point reached the ending point. As long as the parameters were constantly changed and the changes were carefully observed, many clues could be revealed.

I raised my hand and began to twist the aperture of the flashlight. Before, we had only two parameters—bright and dark—but now I wanted to see how this mirror changed from the brightest setting to the darkest setting.

Fatty turned off his flashlight to cooperate with me. I slowly dimmed the flashlight and immediately found that the blue light in the whole mirror was also slowly darkening. Moreover, the rate was exactly the same as my own flashlight.

I slowly turned the flashlight on, and the blue light in the mirror also appeared slowly.

I couldn’t help but smile as my previous overestimation of this mirror technology disappeared. I immediately said to Fatty, “Look, it’s not that amazing. The blue light in this mirror is coming from our flashlights. When our flashlights are bright, it’s bright inside the mirror. When our flashlights are dark, it’s dark inside the mirror.”

Fatty could also see it clearly from his position on the beam and nodded, “Our flashlights’ light energy passes through this mirror and shoots into this building?”

I shook my head. Although our flashlights were “Wolf-Eye” flashlights and could blind people, it was impossible to use them to illuminate such a large building.

I couldn’t fully speculate on the real situation, but since the light problem in this mirror was so simple, I didn’t think the other situations would be too difficult.

Uncle Two had taught me that everything depended on a purpose. And from that purpose we could infer many aspects that couldn’t be speculated on otherwise. This was the most useful thing I had learned from the older generation. I felt my legs tingling from the cold water and asked myself, what’s the purpose of this mirror here?

“Do you think this mirror has anything to do with feng shui?” I asked Fatty.

“Some Yangzhai feng shui masters use eight divinatory trigram mirrors, but this is too big,” Fatty said. “If this mirror was hung on the balcony, it could bring planes down. You could just fucking watch the planes fall out of the sky from the balcony all day long. It would be really noisy to lose an Airbus today and a Boeing tomorrow.”

“Just how much do you fucking hate airplanes? We don’t have time for this, think seriously.”

Fatty finished smoking his cigarette, pinched the butt, and threw it into the water before lighting another one, “I would have thought of it if I could have. I would have blasted my way into the ancient building and saved them all. We could be eating roast duck in Beijing, but I’m here eating this cigarette butt instead. You think more. Don’t rely on me.”

“Aren’t you a great feng shui master? Why are you asking me?” I retorted.

He shook his head, “I’m sure I can’t do anything about it with my profound knowledge. Besides, you didn’t know anything at that time, so I could talk nonsense. Now that you’ve made some progress, I’ll have to keep an eye on it.”

Fuck, so you really were talking nonsense. Fatty continued, “I don’t think it’s useful for you to think about feng shui. If you want to understand feng shui, you would understand it at a glance. If you don’t understand it, you won’t be able to even if you’re blind. If you really want my opinion, I can tell you that my first reaction at that time was that it was a reflection. But look overhead—” he pointed the “Wolf-Eye” flashlight above his head. This cave was very tall, and I could see that it was all rocky, but the details weren’t very clear.

I pulled out a cigarette, grabbed the one from Fatty’s mouth to light my own, and then shoved it back into his mouth. Fatty’s flashlight swung back and forth overhead.

“It’s nothing but rock. That’s why I think this building is in the mirror.” Fatty stepped on the mirror. “If the image in the mirror was reflected from there, I would definitely block the image if I walked on top of it. But that’s obviously not the case. Although I’m not cultured compared to you, a college student, I still understand this basic truth.”

I looked at the rocks above and then at Fatty posing on the mirror. After looking back and forth several times, I started to think that Fatty was right, but I couldn’t help feeling that something was strange.

Maybe it was because I had experienced too many deceptions and schemes around me recently, so I had a sensitive intuition when it came to the flaws of things. I suddenly felt that this cave was insufficiently compact.

It was like a magic trick. And when it came to magic, the most powerful kind was street magic, where magicians performed in front of you without any kind of disguise. Magic experts often gave people the feeling that they had special powers, which was a very powerful experience.

The second kind was stage magic. Many of the most basic tricks required cloth coverings or boxes. The principle of stage magic lay in the fact that the use of cloth coverings and boxes couldn’t change the impossibility of this matter. But because we know that magic is mostly illusions and traps, wise people immediately realize that the mystery must be behind the cloth or inside the box. It’s just that the cover is very clever and we can’t see it.

My gut feeling right now was that it was stage magic. If the designers here wanted to put the Zhang family’s ancient building in the mirror, then they would have looked for a shorter cave so that we would look up and know that it was impossible for it to be on the ceiling.

But the ceiling of this cave was too high and some parts couldn’t be seen clearly. Even though we had basically determined that there was probably nothing but stone up there, the cave’s height had me feeling that if there was even a one in ten thousand chance, then the mechanism would surely be hidden up there. Especially because the situation around us was too obvious and there was no possibility of a mechanism being anywhere else.

That meant it had to be somewhere we couldn’t—or hadn’t—seen.

Of course, this could only be my momentary illusion. If someone told me that I had to break through the stage magician’s tricks or lose my friend, the first thing I would do, of course, is to kick over the magician’s box to see if something was inside.

“We have to climb up and take a look,” I said to Fatty.

<Chapter 40> <Table of Contents><Chapter 42>

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TN Notes:

(1) Geh, science. Phototaxis is the bodily movement of an organism in response to light, either toward the source of light or away from it.

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Updated 3/7/2021