Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 17 The Man in the Mirror

Old Tie Tou's flashlight flashed twice at the exit of the utility tunnel and then went out. It wasn't that there was no power; he had deliberately turned it off. Su Xinpei stood half a step behind him, his back pressed against the iron door of the tunnel, his eyes not yet fully adjusted to the darkness. The purple light from the crack in the workshop became the only source of light, coldly reflecting on the faded slogan on the opposite wall—"Safety in Production, Constant Vigilance"—the last character "鸣" (ming, meaning "to sound") was cut in half by the purple light, the left half glowing while the right half remained in darkness, like an old newspaper torn in half and then pasted back in place.

"Don't speak." Old Ironhead's voice was extremely low, not a reminder, but a warning. "Look at the crack, look carefully. Don't look at the light, look at the edge of the light. Something is moving there."

Su Xinpei slowed his breathing. The focus he had cultivated through standing meditation was now entirely concentrated on his eyes. He stared at the slowly undulating, heat-wave-like air at the edge of the crack for about a minute. At first, he saw nothing, only a faint afterimage of purple light on his retina. Then he noticed—at the narrowest end of the crack, beneath the old signboard, a wisp of extremely thin, smoke-like substance was slowly seeping out. It wasn't smoke; it didn't spread or rise, but rather, like a frozen black thread, it squeezed out of the crack, twisted in the air, and then collapsed to the ground. After landing, it didn't disappear but began to crawl along the ground, creeping towards them along the cement crack in the workshop floor.

Su Xinpei's left foot instinctively moved back half an inch, and Old Tietou's hand immediately pressed down on his shoulder with the force of a pair of pliers. "Don't move. If you move, it will move faster." The thing crawled to a spot less than two meters from the exit of the utility tunnel and stopped, then, as if lifted from the ground by an invisible hand, slowly unfolded in mid-air.

Su Xinpei saw it clearly.

The person in the mirror.

It wasn't like the one he'd seen in the apartment building. That one was bigger, its outline more fragmented, like a mirror shattered and barely pieced back together. This one was small, about the size of a cat, its surface covered in fine cracks, the gaps between the fragments emitting a pale purple light that mirrored the cracks themselves. It had no limbs, or rather, its limbs weren't yet fully formed; the edges of its body were blurred, like a mass of mercury slowly solidifying. It had no face, not even a clear front or back, but Su Xinpei knew it was watching them. Not with its eyes—every fragment on its body was rotating, the angle of each fragment adjusting extremely slowly until every piece was aligned with the direction of the utility tunnel exit. The feeling of being watched was exactly the same as in the apartment building, like someone pressing cold fingertips against the back of his neck, only this time it was lighter, like a thin layer of ice on his skin, slowly melting.

"The person in the mirror. The juvenile." Old Ironhead's voice was like rough sandpaper scraping against sheet metal, each word so low it was almost drowned out by the dripping water in the pipes. "Just split off, still searching for a host. It can't see you right now—it senses temperature. Your body temperature is three degrees higher than the surrounding ground; to it, you're a moving red blob. So don't move."

Su Xinpei held his breath. His standing meditation skills came into play at this moment—his knees slightly bent, his center of gravity lowered, and his muscles transitioned from the previous alert tension to a relaxed yet unhurried static balance. He wasn't holding his breath; he had adjusted his breathing to the edge of fetal breathing, and his heart rate slowly decreased from its previous accelerated state. He could feel the Guanyuan acupoint, three fingers below his navel, warming slightly. The warmth circulating throughout his body traveled inch by inch up the Ren meridian, splitting into two streams at his chest, flowing along the inner sides of his arms to his palms. His palms were warm, but the backs of his hands were cool—skin quenched in ice water automatically contracted its pores when it came into contact with the chill emanating from the cracks in the air, keeping the coolness outside the skin and preventing it from penetrating.

The larva in the mirror remained in place for about two minutes. The fragments on its body surface, like countless tiny compound eyes, repeatedly adjusted their focus, turning several times, but failed to find the movement of the heat source. Then it slowly retreated along the route it had come from, its body shrinking smaller and smaller as it moved, finally becoming a thin black line again, retreating to the narrowest end of the crack. The process was quiet and smooth, leaving no trace on the ground, only a very faint ozone smell lingering in the air.

Su Xinpei slowly exhaled the breath he had been holding. Old Tie Tou loosened his grip on his shoulder, turned on the flashlight, and shone the beam downwards onto the concrete platform beneath their feet. "A larva. It just split off from the crack. It hasn't learned to target heat sources yet, so if you stand still, it won't find you. But this is just the first one tonight. During the crack's expansion phase, larvae will continue to split off, one every few tens of minutes. By dawn, there will be at least six or seven mature larvae wandering around this workshop."

"Are the mature ones the same as the ones in the apartment building last time? Do they have a fixed range of activity?" Su Xinpei's gaze didn't leave the crack, his eyes scanning back and forth along the wandering trajectory on the workshop floor. The faint ozone smell left in the cement cracks on the ground when the juveniles retreated in the mirror hadn't completely dissipated. He made a mental note of the "rusty and cold fishy" smell near the car window, preparing to compare it with other complainants' descriptions of similar smells in the files when he got back.

"The kind in apartment buildings. This one—" Old Ironhead swept his flashlight along the path the juvenile had retreated, leaving a thin, hair-like black scorch mark on the ground, stretching from where the juvenile had stopped all the way to the root of the crack, "—in a few tens of minutes it will grow to be half a person tall. Right now it's just a pile of shattered glass, but once it learns to piece the fragments together into limbs, it can lock onto you by its body temperature even if you don't move. The mature juvenile's speed and spatial awareness are far superior to the juvenile's; it will use its line of sight—circling around from the darkest area to a blind spot in your perception range, and then approaching at an extremely slow speed."

"So, in the apartment building incident, it was actually already in the hallway, but I just didn't realize it."

"It's not that you didn't feel it. You just don't recognize that feeling." Old Ironhead turned off his flashlight, plunging the workshop back into a dim purple light. "Now you know that 'a chill in the back of your neck' isn't psychological, right? That's because it's rubbing against the edge of your senses. Next time you feel a chill in the back of your neck, don't be afraid, and don't turn around—first, practice standing meditation and release your Qi. If the Qi you release during standing meditation doesn't leave your body by more than two feet, you can sense if something is moving within two feet to your left and right. You haven't even entered the realm of skin refining yet, so your sensitive area for Qi perception is only a little over one foot, which is normal. Later, after your Water and Fire Immortal Robe has been tempered through three layers, you'll be able to sense the angle of something within five feet."

Su Xinpei didn't ask if "five feet is the limit"—Master Chen's approach was a different one. The perception mode of Daoist meditation and the Qi-sensing defense of traditional martial arts are not entirely the same at the mechanistic level. One relies on the inward contraction of the meridians, while the other relies on the outward release of the pores. The two different levels of perception cannot be directly converted. But that will have to wait for later. What he can do now is squat here and memorize the sense of distance and perception boundaries at each contact.

He squatted on the concrete platform at the exit of the utility tunnel, placed his left hand flat on his knee, closed his eyes, and released a breath. The energy he had adjusted during his stance training unfolded in the darkness—he could feel the rusted layer of the iron door on his left carrying a slight temperature difference, water droplets falling from the pipe on his right, and a faint trace of abnormal temperature remaining on the scorch mark on the ground five steps in front of him, where the larva in the mirror had burned, like a piece of moss slowly rebounding after being pressed by a stone. But the crack itself gave no temperature feedback; in his perception, it was just a silent gap, even the airflow that should have been present in the workshop was wiped out when it passed near the crack—not cold, but empty.

He opened his eyes. Old Tie Tou had already turned on his flashlight again and was squatting on the edge of the platform, inspecting the workshop floor one by one with the beam of light. The beam swept over the rusted machine tool bases, the collapsed conveyor belt wreckage, and the scattered shards of glass on the ground, pausing for a moment in the dark corners of the drainage ditches at the base of the walls, before continuing forward. Looking over his shoulder, Su Xinpei saw that at the end of the beam—about ten meters directly below the crack—the ground was covered with a very thin, dark purple, translucent membrane. Beneath the membrane were several irregular bulges, each about the size of the larva from before, like eggs, pulsating gently.

"See that? That's the hatching zone. Ignore it, a whole flock will hatch tomorrow night."

Old Tie Tou raised the flashlight's beam slightly, shifting the beam from the incubation zone to the upper edge of the crack. Near the top of the crack, the air rippled more violently than at the edge—not a slow, undulating heat wave, but a rapid, swirling motion like flowing water, rhythmically expanding and contracting, like a circular valve opening and closing. The rhythm was such that the contraction time was only half the expansion time, and after every three contractions, the next expansion would be much larger. Su Xinpei remembered that the cracks in the bungalow area didn't have this obvious pulsation.

"This fissure has entered the acceleration phase. See that airflow up there? It's sucking things in. Air, temperature, even the carbon dioxide you just exhaled—it's sucking it in." Old Ironhead pointed his flashlight to the most violently swirling area directly above the fissure. "The fissure's expansion isn't uniform; it's a step-like process. Once it's absorbed a certain amount of environmental energy, it jumps, widening the opening significantly. The military calls this the 'active phase.' There's a relatively calm period of energy accumulation before it suddenly expands. The Northern Alliance has been researching this rhythm for years—inserting a seed during the energy accumulation phase, and when the fissure naturally expands, the seed is transported to the other side, which is subspace."

Su Xinpei memorized the rhythm of expansion and contraction. He felt the itch on his left rib starting again, much more intense than before—not the pulling sensation from before, but as if something was vibrating slightly beneath the silver line, responding to the pulsating frequency of the crack. He pressed his left rib, the warmth of his palm pressing down, the itch lessened a little, but didn't completely disappear.

Old Iron Head noticed his movement. "The crack is resonating. Normal. You came into contact with the person in the mirror once, and the crack remembered its frequency. Now this crack's frequency is close to it, so your old injury will recognize it before your eyes." He stood up, took the military water bottle from his waist, and handed it to Su Xinpei. "Take a sip. Calm yourself down."

Su Xinpei took the water bottle and took a swig. The pungent smell of the cheap liquor hit his nostrils, almost making him cough. Old Tie Tou took the liquor bottle and took a swig himself. His Adam's apple bobbed, and he pulled a cigarette from his pocket, putting it in his mouth without lighting it. The workshop suddenly became so quiet that only the dripping of water from the distant sewer and the faint chewing silence between the two men could be heard. Then he suddenly spoke.

"When I was in the army, at the Glacier Fortress, one winter we captured a Northern Alliance sorcerer. That sorcerer had signed a whole row of military talismans, and he was almost dead when he was captured—he had paid the price for his debt, but his body couldn't hold on any longer, and he was on his last breath. Before he died, he said something to us: 'You are blocking the rift, we are blocking the other side of the same door.' At the time, I thought he was talking nonsense. Later, after seeing more, I understood what he meant." He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at the rift, and said, "We are blocking the door on this side, but not everyone on the other side is willing to come. Some are swept over—your grandmaster searched for a long time on the other side before finding the coordinates of AA, and by the time he found it, he couldn't come back. So you have to look at more than just what this thing looks like. You have to see that after this door is pushed open, the other side is not all man-eating creatures."

Su Xinpei listened quietly to the whole story. He didn't ask how long his master had been searching on the other side—Old Tie Tou always told stories about his master's past like this: he'd say a short segment at a time, then stop, without explanation or elaboration. The jug of cheap liquor sat on the cement platform between the two of them, its spout pointing towards the crack.

Old Tietou put the cigarette back in his mouth, and suddenly the crack in the wall trembled violently—the purple light instantly nearly doubled in brightness, illuminating the entire workshop as if it were daytime. The slogans on the walls, the broken glass on the floor, and the rusty nameplates on the machine tools were all coated with the same cold, hard pale purple. Su Xinpei saw a huge, blurry shadow flash past deep inside the crack from the exit of the pipe corridor. The shadow was wider than the crack itself, swaying like a moving curtain on one side of the crack, cut into several sections by the narrow opening of the crack: first the abdomen, then the tip of an extremely long, segmented forelimb, and finally a spine covered with some kind of dense, scale-like structure. The shadow crossed the crack from the other side in less than two seconds. The dust on the workshop floor was pushed back by the air pressure surging from the crack, and a small piece of paint was peeled off the lower left corner of the old slogan sign.

Su Xinpei instinctively took a step back. He could clearly feel a silent push against his chest and shoulder, causing his work ID to bounce and hit his chest. He steadied himself and squatted down.

"That's not the person in the mirror," Old Ironhead said in a very low voice. "The Mirror Lord. It's as big as a cart and can actively warp the surrounding space. It's moving on the other side of the crack. It hasn't passed through the crack yet, but it's already managed to squeeze out a part of it. We're now less than two walls away from that crack—if it squeezes in, space will warp immediately, the north wall of the workshop will be deformed by its spatial field, and even if it just grazes it, the old steel beams overhead will be displaced and snapped."

He patted Su Xinpei's shoulder, harder than before. Su Xinpei didn't move; he had already begun unconsciously lowering his center of gravity and sinking his breath. Seeing that he had lowered his stance and stood more steadily, Old Tietou slightly loosened his fingers on Su Xinpei's shoulder.

"I've been watching for almost ten minutes. Let's go back," Old Ironhead said.

Su Xinpei then realized that he had been standing still, staring at the crack, without moving. Fear gripped him—his palms were sweaty, and his heart was still pounding. But he didn't retreat. Not out of bravado, but because when the juvenile in the mirror shrank back, he had just seen a blurry rectangular outline reflected in the purple light inside the crack. The shadow flickered deep within the crack wall, its shape highly symmetrical, unlike any reflection of a solid fragment. In that instant, his mind wasn't on running away, but on the clivia on the street office desk, and Aunt He's words before she retired: "Know your limits." He wanted to see that shadow again, but it didn't reappear.

Old Tie Tou was already heading back deep into the utility tunnel. Su Xinpei glanced at the crack one last time, then bent down and followed him back through the fence. The two retraced their steps along the sewer network. It was past two in the morning when they reached the surface. The sky over the lower part of Ironthorn City was tinged with a gray-orange hue by the exhaust fumes from the distant factories. The air was even colder than when they had come out at night. Su Xinpei zipped his coat up all the way, and goosebumps rose on the back of his neck in the cold wind—but he could now clearly tell that this wasn't a reflection in the mirror; this was just ordinary cold.

Back at Tiegutang, Old Tie Tou took off his old military boots at the entrance of the storeroom, turned on the tap and splashed cold water on his face. Then he took out the unlit cigarette from his pocket, twirled it between his fingers, but ultimately didn't light it. The radio had stopped, and only the rustling of the fallen leaves from the old elm tree in the corner of the courtyard could be heard in the wind.

"Tonight you saw three things: the larva, the incubation zone, and the shadow of the lord. The larva is still quite naive, only able to sense temperature; the mature one's perception is much more complex, locking onto body temperature, heartbeat, and breathing rate. Next time you practice standing meditation, specifically train your perception in the dark with your eyes closed—distinguish the pulse rhythm behind the buzzing sound, the pressure changes of the airflow squeezed in from the other side of the space by the lord, and the extremely low-frequency fluctuations transmitted from the depths to the soles of your feet when the gaps resonate. This has nothing to do with the experience points recorded on the panel; it's purely your own neural memory."

Su Xinpei took off his coat and draped it over the bench, then took out his notepad from its inner pocket and placed it beside him. Old Tie Tou added, "Go to the Special Meteorological Bureau yourself tomorrow. You know how to explain tonight's events to Ye Xinghe."

Su Xinpei nodded. He knew—the expansion rhythm of the crack's edge, the coordinates of the dark purple incubation zone, the diffusion range of the purple sediment in the puddle on the east wall of the workshop—these were the on-site conditions that the Special Meteorological Bureau's instruments couldn't accurately capture under low light conditions at night, and also the most effective information he could provide to Ye Xinghe. He sat on the bench and hastily jotted these down with a pencil; the handwriting was messy, but each point was clearly distinguishable.

As he left, he glanced back at the courtyard. Old Tie Tou sat in his wicker chair, this time without a radio or cheap liquor, just facing the old elm tree, a cigarette tucked behind his ear, his eyes half-closed. Su Xinpei gently closed the door and headed home. In his backpack was an extra note, recording the location of the incubation zone and the short, contraction-expansion rhythm he had noted in the workshop—the contraction lasting about half the time of the expansion, with each three contractions followed by a larger expansion. This record, along with coordinates, would be submitted to the Special Meteorological Bureau's technical department to calibrate their existing crack activity prediction model.

He was going to write down what he had seen tonight in his report to Ye Xinghe. This wasn't an anonymous letter—this was his formal report as an external consultant, signed by Su Xinpei.