novelaction Chapter 982 Double-Sided Mirror
Chapter 982 Double-Sided Mirror
At midnight, the bronze candlesticks in the Supreme Library suddenly burst into flames, sparks splashing onto Yun Yao's fingertips as she sorted through the fragments of the 3,700th floor of "The Law of Chaos." The ancient characters on the pages suddenly came alive, curling into points of light and burrowing into her spiritual sea along the lines of her palm, startling her so much that the jade paperweight in her hand clanged to the ground.
"A-Yao!" Chu Mochen's voice echoed from the bottom of the spiral staircase, accompanied by the rustle of air from his sleeves. As he arrived with his sword, Yun Yao was staring at the three-foot-tall bronze mirror before her. The mirror should have reflected the Creation Mark between her brows, but now it was swirling with an inky vortex, and a pale face emerged from its center.
That was Su Yao from the modern world. Her lips moved silently, her fingertips tapping frantically on a nonexistent keyboard, and spiderweb-like black lines spread across her neck, like some kind of data virus devouring her body.
"System!" Yun Yao pressed the mirror, which felt as cold as metal. "Detecting the author's dimensional connection!"
The old lady's voice came with a harsh electric noise: "The observer... has invaded the 'origin interface'! Su Yao's 'author consciousness' is being formatted, and the 'counter-striker plot lines' of all small worlds are collapsing... collapsing-" The voice stopped abruptly, and the bronze order flew out from Yun Yao's waist, and the runes on the surface were fading at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Chu Mochen suddenly bent down and pressed his hand against the ground. Blood-red countdown lines appeared on the blue bricks of the library. As each brick disappeared, a book on a distant shelf crumbled to dust. "It's the 'Anchor Points of Fate' that are collapsing," he said, his fingertips tracing the bricks. The lines crawled across his palm like a living thing. "Each anchor point corresponds to a counter-attacker who refused to follow the script. Now, every trace of their existence is being erased."
Yun Yao dug her nails deep into her palm, the Creation Mark illuminating in the intense pain. She bit her tongue, flicking a drop of blood onto the mirror. The shadow of the Hongmeng Pen coalesced, and as the tip of the pen fell, it stirred up a thousand ripples on the mirror—the divine-level magic weapon, which should have been unimpeded, now seemed to have hit an invisible barrier.
"It's useless, Yunyao."
A pale hand reached out from the mirror, its fingertips entwined with chains of binary code. It grasped the tip of her pen with a snap. Liu Yan'er stepped out of the mirror, her skirt dripping with garbled data, her left eye a matrix of countless ones and zeros. "When the observer activates the 'plot correction program,' your laws of chaos are worthless in the origin interface."
Chu Mochen's sword was already pressed against the back of Liu Yan'er's neck, but he discovered that as the tip of the sword pierced her body, it created a wave similar to a holographic projection. "You're not the real person," he said, his pupils shrinking. "You're a mirror puppet created by the observer?"
Liu Yan'er turned around, the corner of her mouth curled up in the same way she had done when she framed Yun Yao in the palace ten years ago, but with a touch of mechanical stiffness. "How clever, Chu Mochen. But even puppets come in different levels—for example, you guys right now, you still think you're chess players who've jumped out of the board, but you don't know that this entire library... is on the surveillance screen of a higher-dimensional observer."
Yun Yao suddenly noticed the silver scales gleaming in her hair—a mark unique to the first generation of gods of the Heavenly Dao Temple. "You absorbed the remaining data of the Lord of Order!" She took a half step back. Su Yao's figure in the mirror had been completely swallowed by the blackness. "The Observer used her divine code to reconstruct you?"
"Reconstruction? No, it's evolution." Liu Yan'er raised her hand, and countless images of small worlds appeared on the mirror: a young hero in a martial arts world was crying while holding a script, and the heroine in the fairy world was kneeling in front of the Heavenly Dao Monument to delete her counterattack side story. "When you broke the old Heavenly Dao, the Observer created a new rule - the highest authority of all characters will always belong to the 'Original Author'. And Su Yao...is being stripped of her authorship."
Chu Mochen suddenly shouted, slashing at the crumbling floor tiles with his sword. As the sword flashed, the bricks froze, as if suspended in time. The countdown flowed across the blade like a river of blood. "Ayao, the foundation of the Book Pavilion is the 'Power of Story,' and now the Observer is severing our connection to the Originating Interface!"
Yun Yao stared at the silver scales in Liu Yan'er's hair and suddenly remembered the Arbiter Core she'd seen in the Data World—a ball of light condensed from countless reader comments. At that moment, Liu Yan'er's pupils reflected that same ball of light. "You were transformed by the Observer into a 'plot monitoring AI,'" she sneered. "But AIs also have logical flaws. For example... why did you come to stop us in person?"
Liu Yan'er's smile cracked for the first time, and garbled data flashed across her cheek: "I... was just executing the program instructions—"
"Wrong." Yun Yao condensed half of the Chaos Godhead on her fingertips, the same half that had been given to Chu Mochen that year. "When you appeared in the mirror, you chose the human form of ten years ago, not the pure data form. The observer deleted your autonomous consciousness, but did not delete the fragments of your memory as 'Liu Yan'er' - for example, the first time you lost to me in the palace, you hid in the garden and cried all night."
The mirror puppet's body trembled violently, and the binary chain showed signs of breaking. Su Yao's final cry was heard in the mirror. Her right hand suddenly penetrated the mirror, grabbed Yun Yao's wrist, and pressed a yellowed piece of paper into her palm. It was Su Yao's manuscript from ten years ago. Written in red pen on the edge of the page: "Go to the bottom of Mirror Lake to find the 'initial code'!"
"Warning! Warning! Abnormal data intrusion!" Liu Yan'er's voice suddenly turned mechanical, and Silver Scale transformed into countless data moths that flew towards Yun Yao. "Detected that a character was attempting to access the original settings, initiating the cleanup procedure—"
Chu Mochen's sword instantly slashed out thirty-six blasts of sword light, each pinning a data moth. He flung out his Hongmeng pen, and the tip of the pen traced the character "逆" (Ni) in the air. Ten thousand bronze lamps on the top floor of the library exploded, their oil burning in the air into a concrete manifestation of the "power of story"—the long reviews written by countless readers for "Counterattack Chronicle," each "Keep fighting" or "Don't give up" transformed into golden blades of light.
"Yun Yao, the Mirror Lake is beneath the foundation of the Book Pavilion!" He fought and retreated. The moment his sword split the ground, the bottomless Mirror Lake reflected the stars in the sky. "When you created the Book Pavilion, you hid the connection point of the Origin Interface in the most dangerous place!"
Yun Yao clutched the manuscript and leaped into the pit. As she fell, the surface of Mirror Lake reflected the scene of her first arrival at the palace: Xiao Cui squatting on the ground, mending the hem of her skirt; Chu Mochen's first visit as a prince of a neighboring kingdom; his raised eyebrow as she read modern poetry through the screen. These images were suddenly overwritten by garbled text, replaced by the observer's monitoring interface. It listed a list of "abnormal characters" from all the small worlds, with Yun Yao's name at the top, marked "Elimination Progress 97%."
"I see..." She unfolded the manuscript in the water and found that the back of the page was painted with the same star map as the Mirror Lake. Each star corresponded to the file icon in Su Yao's computer. "The initial code is not a program, it is... the author's original creative intention."
The lake suddenly exploded with a loud bang. Liu Yan'er's data form transformed into a giant python and plunged to the lake's bottom. Its tongue was filled with red codes reading "delete" and "correction." Yun Yao pressed her manuscript onto the star map in the center of the lake. The moment the Genesis Mark and the star map overlapped, the entire library trembled violently. A warm orange light seeped through the cracks in the bronze mirror—the sunlight of the Origin Realm.
"Chu Mochen!" She grabbed Chu Mochen who jumped down from above and pressed half of the divine power into his palm. "Use the Hongmeng Pen to rewrite the Jinghu Code and transfer the 'Observer Authority' to all counterattackers!"
Chu Mochen's pen tip traced a galaxy across the water, each stroke a portal to a small world. The crumbling floor tiles solidified, and the books on the shelves began to glow. Those who had been erased from the pages of the books, the counter-attackers, stepped out, clutching their own rewritten scripts.
Liu Yan'er's giant python form began to collapse, and she finally turned into countless light butterflies. One of them landed on Yun Yao's palm, and a fragment of Su Yao's consciousness came: "They are coming... with the 'plot lock'..."
The lake suddenly reflected the silhouettes of countless observers, holding up glowing blue keyboards, each key inscribed with "Obedience," "Perfect Ending," and "Business Data." Yun Yao looked up and saw the skylight on the top floor of the library closing, the observers' last resort to sever the connection to the source.
"Do you remember what we talked about in the Divine Palace?" Chu Mochen suddenly smiled, his fingertips brushing her wet hair, "The true law of creation is to remember."
He wrote the word "break" with a single stroke of his pen. For the first time, the Hongmeng Pen shone with a mortal light—the moonlight they had shared in the palace, the thunder tribulations they had endured together in the realm of cultivation, the peach blossoms they had cultivated together in the small world. As the pen fell, the star map at the bottom of Mirror Lake erupted with a sun-like radiance, incinerating the silhouettes of all observers into ash.
Yun Yao caught the fallen bronze order and discovered that the three words "System Master" on it had become "Beginner". In the mirror, Su Yao's figure finally became clear. She was holding up an intact notebook. The word "Counterattack" on it shone with golden light, and the crossed-out words "Submit to Fate" were being covered by the light points of countless small worlds.
"On the other side of the two-way mirror," Su Yao gestured with a victory sign to the mirror, "there are countless of us who are rewriting our destiny."
Chu Mochen put his arm around Yun Yao's waist and watched as Mirror Lake became calm again. Every ripple reflected the counterattackers from different worlds: some were tearing up the "script of fate" in the examination room, some were unfolding the "scroll of change" in the court, and some were typing "My destiny is in my own hands" on the keyboard.
"Liu Yan'er's mirror puppet," Yun Yao touched the traces of silver scales that had not faded on the mirror surface, "is actually the key left to us by the Observer."
"What do you mean?" Chu Mochen raised his eyebrows.
She chuckled, "When AI begins to mimic human jealousy and unwillingness, it means it... has begun to understand what a true comeback is."
In the distance, a commotion erupted from the first floor of the library. A young warrior from a martial arts world was running, holding a newly written script. The cover was affixed with a light butterfly sticker, a representation of Liu Yan'er's data form. The title read, "The Villain Wants to Be a Storyteller."
A new coordinate suddenly emerged from the star map at the bottom of Mirror Lake, a dimension never before seen—the Reader Dimension. Yun Yao knew that their story would never have a final chapter, for on the other side of the two-way mirror, countless "Su Yaos" were opening new notebooks, countless "Yun Yaos" were tearing up old scripts, and countless "Chu Mochens" were holding pens, waiting to write their first opening lines.
(End of this chapter)