The old folks said,
Never look in a mirror at midnight. You would see things in it that you should never see.
Mirrors in people's homes often shattered inexplicably in the middle of the night because something was trying to come out.
If you happened to be looking in the mirror when it shattered, your soul would be sucked into its cracks.
If you held a mirror and faced it toward another mirror, you would see countless versions of yourself.
Every face of yours in the mirrors would be different. However many faces you saw, remember the thirteenth: that would be your face in death.
There was a mirror in Qingmu's studio.
This mirror had originally been used to train Crow to recognize his own appearance, but it had gone unused for a long time and was covered in dust.
Mo Yu stood before it, studying herself in the mirror.
Qingmu smoked a short distance behind her, the smoke spreading through the cramped studio.
Boss Coal had returned to his perch and closed his eyes, seemingly asleep.
Bi Shenghua and Xiao Qi sat on the sofa. She had originally told Xiao Qi to go home first, but Xiao Qi had insisted on staying. They did not know what Qingmu intended to do. When Mo Yu woke up and asked to look in a mirror, Qingmu had brought her before this large one.
The mirror was so dusty that her reflection was hazy and gray as well.
The hands of the clock were approaching twelve.
Mo Yu began telling the story of herself and mirrors.
She said she had heard many strange tales about mirrors since childhood, but had never believed them.
She had thought a mirror was just a mirror. It could reflect beauty and ugliness, and that was all.
Only after she met the charming young gentleman Situ and heard his many stories about mirrors did she believe they were magical things. She fell in love not only with looking in mirrors, but also with staring into them.
Young Master Situ said he had graduated from MIT. He was a science and engineering man through and through, yet he loved music.
Mo Yu, too, thought he had been born into the wrong life and chosen the wrong major.
His voice was elegant and magnetic, his words refined and humorous, his features exquisite and sensual. His every gesture carried a dashing charm, like intoxicating spring sunshine.
As soon as he appeared at the music conservatory, he and Tushu had the girls there utterly spellbound.
Mo Yu was often dragged along by her roommate Li Qian to events where Situ would be present.
The girls liked to tell Situ the strangest stories they had ever heard, and Situ always explained the mysteries behind them with his rigorous scientific knowledge and romantic artistic sensibility, leaving the girls enthralled.
"Don't dismiss the advice of your elders. Mirrors are the most magical things in the world," Situ said.
"If you place two parallel mirrors facing each other, you get an endless series of images of mirrors within mirrors. This is a classic example of the Droste effect. Do you know what the Droste effect is?"
The girls were clearly more interested in ghost stories than mirrors, and they all shook their heads.
"The Droste effect is a visual form of recursion," Situ said. "It means a part of an image is identical to the whole image, creating an infinite loop."
"For example, suppose I'm holding a phone right now, and there's a photo on its screen showing this very scene." He and Tushu took out their phones and waved the screens as he explained. "I'm holding a phone, and on its screen is a photo of me holding a phone. If you enlarge that photo, the phone in my hand in the photo still shows that same photo, continuing in an infinite loop."
The girls only half understood, but kept listening.
"Now let's return to mirrors. You all know mirrors reflect light. When you shine a beam of light perpendicular to a mirror's surface, it bounces back."
"If we have two parallel mirrors and emit a beam of light between them, the light will keep bouncing between the mirrors forever. Do you know what that means?"
The girls shook their heads.
"It means we've captured light. We've trapped it in a space created with two mirrors. In the entire universe, only black holes can trap light, yet we humans have accomplished something so magical with just two mirrors."
"Wow..." The girls understood now, and found it amazing.
"But what's the point? Capturing light is something only physicists need to do," one girl asked.
"Not just physicists. This experiment means even more to those who study souls. Mirrors don't only reflect visible light; they also reflect electromagnetic waves. In fact, they can reflect anything that exists in wave form."
"You have to understand that as long as we're alive, we're constantly emitting these things called waves. Our bodies emit infrared radiation, and we give off brain waves when we think. There are also forms of energy dissipation that we still can't comprehend. We call all of these biological waves."
"And when we look in a mirror, we don't actually need a second mirror. The Droste effect already occurs naturally."
"Because our eyes are mirrors."
"When you stand before a mirror, you're in the mirror, the mirror is in your pupils, and you're in that mirror again, in a repeating cycle. Our biological waves bounce back from the mirror, then bounce back again from our eyeballs, oscillating repeatedly between us and the mirror."
"And the new biological waves constantly emitted from your body join this oscillation, gradually gathering into a form of energy. This energy keeps increasing between you and the mirror. Given enough time and enough accumulated energy, something resembling a soul will form."
"So, girls, remember: never look in a mirror for too long, because after a while, there'll be an extra 'person' between you and the mirror," Situ said with a smile. "Of course, you don't need to be too scared, because that extra person is actually you."
Only then did the girls begin to find it interesting, admiring Situ's learning all the more.
"Then why do all the legends say it happens at midnight?" They were always eager for something more supernatural.
"The legends aren't without reason," Situ said. "In the middle of the night, people's minds tend to relax, and soul energy can escape from your body more easily then. At the same time, it's easy to lose track of time when looking in a mirror late at night. If you look for too long, something unexpected may happen."
The girls were all eagerly awaiting Situ's answer, but he went no further, only warning them, "If you spend a long time looking in a mirror at midnight, remember: whatever you do, don't let the mirror break."
After that gathering, Mo Yu never saw Situ again. She heard he had returned to MIT for a master's degree.
From then on, the girls became far more curious about mirrors. Whenever they met, they would ask one another, "Hey, did you look in a mirror last night?"
Strangely enough, from then on, the sound of shattering glass and girls screaming was often heard in the women's dormitory in the middle of the night.
Mo Yu, too, occasionally looked in the mirror at midnight. She paid particular attention to her eyes, because it was her eyes and the mirror that created the Droste effect.
After looking for a long time, she would imagine whether there was an extra "person" between her and the mirror.
Though it was a little creepy, she could not help being curious.
Late one night, she was looking in the bathroom mirror when a dark shape appeared behind her in the reflection.
Just as Mo Yu was about to turn around and look, the mirror suddenly shattered.