Chapter 666: Reflection

To be fair, the room at the end of the second-floor corridor at 66 Wutong Road had seen so many bizarre occurrences that Yu Sheng was pretty much used to it by now. He wouldn’t have been surprised by anything appearing in that room—not even if opening the door revealed snow falling inside, or even two magnetic field powerhouses going at it with Darth Vader. As long as they cleaned up afterward.

But even if two magnetic field powerhouses really did fight Darth Vader in that room, the impact on Yu Sheng wouldn’t have matched the sight of that single crack on the mirror.

The crack was very thin and shallow, set against a pitch-black background. It was so hard to see with the naked eye even up close that only from a specific angle could you notice the thin line running from bottom to top across the entire mirror.

Yu Sheng thought back to the loud crash he’d heard downstairs a moment ago.

Could that have been the sound of the mirror cracking?

Hu Li came up beside him to look at the mirror, her pointed ears twitching slightly in the air. When she spotted the crack, the fox-girl’s golden-red eyes showed tension and seriousness for the first time. “Ah, benefactor, the mirror is cracked… What do we do?”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled a small knife from his pocket—one made from Luna’s blade, used for bloodletting.

He cut open a wound on his palm, then pressed his hand against the mirror.

Ai Lin and Hu Li watched nervously.

The blood spread across the black mirror’s surface, like something thrown into a solution. Ripples of dark red formed in the darkness, and then faint noise emerged at the edge of hearing.

Yu Sheng’s vision blurred. Before he could make out the sounds, everything around him went dark—his surroundings vanished, and he seemed to be falling into an endless void. This “fall” lasted an unknown time, then he felt control over his body return and the descent stop.

The dizziness faded. Yu Sheng shook his head and looked around.

He saw distant, distorted starlight—the darkness wasn’t empty. Far, far away, countless stars blazed, giving the sensation of being in space. But those stars were so distant they seemed embedded in a curtain at the edge of the world, and all of them were twisted, stretched, trailing distorted, swirling afterimages like an unreachable vortex, like the “convergence” of the entire world.

At the same time, all that starlight gathered behind Yu Sheng. He turned and saw the “convergence vortex” formed by the stars. In front of him was only endless darkness.

Frowning, Yu Sheng instinctively reached out toward that darkness.

The next second, he realized it wasn’t endless darkness at all.

It was a high wall—a “barrier” as smooth as a mirror, infinitely tall and wide in all directions.

This should have been an overwhelmingly oppressive sight: a nearly infinite “wall” standing before him, while all the starlight of the universe swirled and converged on its far side. A tiny individual would undoubtedly feel suffocating pressure. But at that moment, Yu Sheng instead felt a strange… inexplicable comfort and ease rising from the depths of his heart.

He felt as if he had come home, lying in a familiar, eternal, peaceful “resting place.”

He couldn’t help stretching lazily, actually “lying down” before that infinite wall. He gazed contentedly at the darkness, then turned his head to look at the vortex of starlight.

He saw streams of light flowing among the stars, saw shadows like flames burning and moving through the galaxy. Stars were being born, stars were being corrected, new parameters were being injected into the cosmic background radiation, then revised.

After an unknown time, he saw some “reflections” begin to appear on that infinite “wall”—certain “knowledge” seeped into his mind, letting him understand what was happening.

Some new laws of physics had taken effect. In the cosmic order, the mapping of information was gradually being completed.

From those reflections, Yu Sheng saw something familiar—it was the “information megastructures” he had glimpsed at the bottom of the world when the *Exotic Traveler* first entered warpspace during a superluminal jump. These structures, whose scale was staggering, supported the operation of the real universe. The Creator’s Equation recorded the footnotes left by this world’s creator for the stars.

“A bug is a bug, a bunch of bugs can work…”

“If this runs, don’t touch it… There’s room to cram two more balls here…”

“//Ask me how much sorrow I have, a lone guy here making the universe”

“What the hell is that noise outside?”

Yu Sheng “sat” up abruptly, as if jolted awake from an eternal, peaceful dream. His scattered thoughts coalesced back into a complete self-awareness. He stood before the “wall,” somewhat bewildered by what it showed.

The information megastructures supporting the real universe were still reflected on that wall. The laws governing the stars operated within the trajectories defined by those megastructures. But Yu Sheng’s mind was full of the creator’s comments he had just “seen” in his daze, especially the last one.

He instinctively approached the wall, as if trying to see more from the torrent of information reflected there. But in that instant, the torrent dissipated entirely, and endless darkness covered the curtain again.

Yu Sheng blinked, then slowly backed away a few steps. In the darkness, he saw something new reflected on the “wall,” but it was too blurry to make out.

He backed away further.

It was a hazy silhouette—his own shadow, reflected in the “mirror.”

A strange sense of alertness rose from his heart. Yu Sheng instinctively kept backing away.

The blurred reflection disappeared from his sight.

Then he continued backing away without pause, getting farther and farther from that “mirror wall.”

After retreating several times in succession, Yu Sheng suddenly noticed a slight curvature at the edge of the “wall.”

The curvature gradually became a distinct spherical edge.

Yu Sheng felt his heart pounding. He realized then that it wasn’t a “wall” at all, but a perfectly smooth spherical surface—it was just so huge, and he had been too close to it before.

He kept backing away rapidly, as if trying to see the full shape of the sphere. Behind him was the converging vortex of stars.

His rapid retreat seemed like he was actively falling into that vortex formed by the stars.

After an unknown time, he stopped at some equilibrium point between the stars and the darkness.

He stood at the edge of the convergent vortex of stars, quietly watching the spherical object suspended in endless darkness—

A Black Star.

Or rather, a certain “projection” of the Black Star in his conscious world.

“…What the hell are you…”

Yu Sheng frowned, muttering to himself as he stared at that pitch-black star.

But the Black Star made no response. The pure black sphere just hung silently in the infinite void, bathed in the starlight of the entire universe, keeping all its secrets in silence.

A falling sensation suddenly hit him. Yu Sheng felt he had lost control of his body, beginning to fall backward into the endless starlight.

But the moment the feeling of losing control came, countless golden threads appeared at the edge of his vision—golden “strings” materialized out of nowhere, wrapping around him instantly, accompanied by Ai Lin’s noisy voice: “Oh crap, can’t you ever go one time without something going wrong?! I told you not to mess with that creepy thing… You’re so heavy!”

The next second, the perception of the real world crashed down. The surroundings instantly returned to the familiar room. Yu Sheng stumbled in the snow, but just as he was about to fall, a warm, soft sensation enveloped him—he leaned back into a pile of fluffy tails.

Then came the feeling of the little puppet fussing over his hair: “Are you awake? Are you awake? Are you awake…”

Yu Sheng frantically batted at the little thing’s claws: “I’m awake, I’m awake. Don’t pull—I’m a writer, I lose hair easily as it is…”

“Who are you kidding? You spent three hours squeezing out two lines and then deleted half of one,” Ai Lin said, patting Yu Sheng’s head with her little paws. “And you get an ingrown toenail and you’ll just give up treatment and kill yourself to restart, so why are you afraid of losing hair?”

Yu Sheng knew he couldn’t win against the little thing on his shoulder, so he muttered something vague and ignored her, then turned his gaze to the mirror on the wall.

The previously pitch-black surface had returned to normal. After the darkness receded, the room’s reflection now appeared normally in the mirror—and the thin crack had healed.

“Benefactor, it recovered the moment you pressed your hand on it,” Hu Li said, watching him with some concern. “But you stood still the whole time, like you were spacing out. Then Ai Lin sensed something wrong and pulled you out…”

“How long was I out?” Yu Sheng rubbed his forehead and asked casually.

“Five or six seconds? At most,” Ai Lin counted on her fingers. “Mainly, your consciousness suddenly vanished… Well, not exactly vanished. Your consciousness seemed to still be there, not brain dead. But I felt like your mind had run off to a very, very distant place.”

Yu Sheng frowned slowly. “…As far as the end of the world and time?”

Ai Lin thought for a moment. “What do you mean?”

Yu Sheng didn’t explain. He just looked up thoughtfully.

With the mirror restored, the snow in the room had stopped. Only the remaining snowdrifts were left, and the cold air filled the room. It was unclear when it would fully dissipate.

“…I saw the Black Star,” he said suddenly.

Both Ai Lin and Hu Li were taken aback, then said in unison, “Huh?!”

“The Black Star, but likely just a projection in my mind. It was floating at the edge of the universe, and somehow, when I was near it, I felt… unusually familiar and at ease. I almost fell asleep there.”

Ai Lin: “…Holy crap!”

(End of chapter)