novelraw Chapter 130: The Fake in the Mirror
Chapter 130: The Fake in the Mirror
The oval dressing mirror set in a carved frame was no longer an ordinary piece of furniture for grooming in Lin Jie's eyes.
It had become a picture frame, embedding a painting that led into a deep, consuming fear, a painting titled "The Other Me."
Lin Jie rose from the carpet, standing ten feet away from the "fake" in the mirror.
A silent contest of wills, far more dangerous than a bloody brawl, was unfolding in this small inn room sealed by a cognitive barrier.
He instinctively lifted his hand, wiping his sweaty palm across his brow to calm himself.
The "fake" in the mirror made the exact same motion at the same time.
Every detail—from the angle the finger brushed through hair to the curve of the wrist—was identical to Lin Jie's, a perfect mirror image constructed from light and mercury.
But Lin Jie's eyes detected a fatal difference.
The eyes!
When the "fake" in the mirror touched its forehead, the deep black of its eyes did not show Lin Jie's weighty vigilance and concern.Instead, they showed a superior contempt.
That sensation—watching your own body make familiar movements while perceiving from an objective perspective that a strange soul inhabits that body—created a violent split in self-recognition.
Lin Jie's lips quivered as he forced out a questioning voice at the enemy in the mirror, his tone off-key, "What exactly are you?"
The "fake" in the mirror did not answer, but the bizarre smile on its face deepened.
Lin Jie took a deep breath and diverted his gaze from those contemptuous eyes.
He could not keep playing that meaningless staring match.
The opponent's goal was clear: by repeatedly performing subtle differential imitations, it wanted to plant in his subconscious the seeds of doubt—"you are not entirely yourself" and "you cannot fully control your body."
Once that seed took root and sprouted, his mental defenses, which he relied on to resist crises, would collapse on their own.
He closed his eyes and concentrated the little mental energy he had left, beginning to try to link with his most reliable grotesque armament.
A white spiritual halo imbued with serenity and harmonious Zen thought radiated from his pocket and wrapped around him.
This was the mental protective field of the Serene Heart.
It began to act like a warm membrane, effectively isolating and weakening the malicious mental contamination from outside.
Lin Jie felt his pounding heart gradually steady under the halo's comforting presence.
The chaotic thoughts triggered by the cognitive challenge began to regain clarity and order.
Just as he opened his eyes again, ready to perform a "reverse decode," a stronger chill swept through his entire body.
He saw that the "fake" in the mirror, also enveloped in the white halo, slowly raised its right hand toward him.
Then it mimicked a gun-holding gesture.
It placed an "invisible" index finger made of air lightly on an equally "invisible" trigger.
Finally, it formed a silent "bang" mouth toward Lin Jie's brow.
Lin Jie understood.
This was not mere imitation and provocation.
This was a warning.
This was learning.
This UMA was not only mimicking his appearance and movements, it was using an eerie "mirror link" to learn, analyze, and even replicate the abilities he possessed.
Lin Jie's throat went dry;
this could not be allowed to continue.
He could not give this creature any more chances to peek at his cards.
He lunged for the single bed with its neatly spread white sheet, grabbed the sheet, then rushed back to the dressing mirror.
He flung the huge sheet up, covering the damned mirror along with the smiling "fake" inside.
The room dimmed as the mirror's reflective surface disappeared.
The prickling "feeling of being watched" that had chased him dissipated for the moment.
Lin Jie leaned against the wall, breathing hard, as if he had just fought a battle that drained him completely.
"Calm down, stay calm," he kept telling himself in his mind, "now more than ever you can't lose your composure. It wants to see me break, and I won't let it."
Passive defense and avoidance would never solve the problem.
He began to search this cell-like room, shrouded by the UMA's cognitive barrier, for any possible breakthrough that could give him a clue.
His gaze swept every corner of the room.
The bed, the desk, the chair, the painting on the wall—everything still looked normal, matching the Knight's House inn's style.
Finally his eyes fixed on the white postcard lying on the floor by the door—the very item that started it all.
This card was so far the only direct piece of evidence in the room that could be identified as coming from the UMA.
So it had to conceal some crucial secret he had overlooked.
Cautiously, Lin Jie picked up the postcard and examined it carefully under the kerosene lamp.
The back of the postcard showed a finely printed view of Heidelberg Castle.
But Lin Jie's attention wasn't on that;
he was focused on the card's material.
He gently rubbed the card's edge with his fingertip.
He felt that the cardstock's texture differed from ordinary industrial cards;
its rough surface was filled with distinctive plant-vein-like fiber patterns.
He judged that the card came from Heidelberg University's old-fashioned papermaking workshop.
But that conclusion did not help him.
So Lin Jie turned his attention to a more essential question: the handwriting.
The English phrase that matched his penmanship exactly—"I know who you are"—had ink that had dried and fused with the card's fibers.
He brushed his finger over the writing and felt no raised surface or signs of a second writing.
"No..." Lin Jie knit his brows, "this wasn't written."
He recalled that uncanny moment when black ink-like fibers seeped up from inside the paper, emerging and finally reorganizing into letters.
The postcard had been blank when it was slipped through the door, and the words had manifested afterward.
A hypothesis split through the fog in Lin Jie's mind.
He connected it to everything he'd just experienced—the infinite corridor, the mirror that imitated and distorted his actions, and now the postcard whose writing could manifest on its own.
They shared one common feature.
A medium!
They all needed a physical, real-world carrier as a platform in order to project the non-real cognitive force.
The corridor walls and carpet were its "canvas."
The mercury layer on the mirror was its "canvas."
The postcard was also its "canvas."
This UMA was not an omnipotent god;
it could not warp reality from nothing. All its abilities had to rely on existing physical matter in the real world to take effect.
"Then..." Lin Jie's gaze sharpened, "if its ability needs a medium, the information capacity of that medium must have limits."
He thought of the infinite corridor: though the corridor's length was distorted, details like the carpet pattern and wallpaper texture remained unchanged, still matching the inn's original appearance.
Lin Jie immediately turned and dashed back to the desk, grabbed his fountain pen, prepared to record this clue in his investigation notes!
He believed that by pursuing this information warfare line of thinking he could find the single logical loophole.
But when he opened his most trusted diary, he froze.
He found that the latest pages documenting his arrival in Heidelberg bore handwriting that differed slightly from his own.
The difference was minuscule;
without someone like Lin Jie, who retained "pixel-level" memory of everything about his own handwriting, it would be impossible to detect.
The difference was a subtle awkwardness in certain connected strokes that reflected habits from his past life's native Chinese writing—an insignificant but potentially fatal clumsiness.