Chapter 1: Prisoner in the MirrorUntitled Episode
The night rain in Marina Bay lashed against the glass curtain wall, its briny scent seeping through the cracks. Lin Jingxin’s eyelashes fluttered twice, the blue light from the surveillance monitors refracted into stardust in her pupils. Her fingertips absently brushed the bronze-green debris in the evidence bag—the only trace left by the stolen Tang Dynasty Jiangxin Mirror in its display case.
"Dr. Lin, the surveillance footage has been restored."
The intern Ajay’s voice snapped her back to reality. She pressed the debris against her right eye. Her bionic lens buzzed—in her quantum vision, the patina transformed into flowing stardust, outlining the intruder’s fluttering hem as they breached the infrared grid.
"Rewind to three minutes and seventeen seconds." Her voice tightened. "Zoom in on the suspect’s left wrist."
When the grainy metallic glint filled the screen, her nails dug into her palms. After twenty years, the scratch on that Longines HydroConquest diver’s watch matched the one her father had worn the day he vanished.
Beep—
The quantum detector screeched. Jingxin stared at the pulsating spectrogram, her breath catching. "This isn’t ordinary oxidation... It’s a Bose-Einstein condensate formed by quantum tunneling!"
"What does that mean?" The security director’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
"It means..." She poured the debris into a petri dish, where azure fluorescence erupted. "Someone quantum-entangled the entire mirror using a high-energy magnetic field."
Before she could finish, white-hot pain seared her right eye. Jingxin staggered against the workstation as spectral lines twisted into silver arrows midair. The clang of Persian scimitars rang in her ears until her skull struck the bulletproof glass display.
826 AD · Yangzhou Port
Salim Zaghul rolled off the deck as the mast splintered, the Jiangxin Mirror in his arms clashing with Persian scimitars. Sparks scorched his jaw. Twelve corpses floated by the hull, their blood staining his ivory robes.
"Still don’t understand, Your Highness?" The assassin’s Tang dialect carried a Lingnan accent. "Your betrothed in Chang’an is worth more than the Arabian throne."
Salim wiped blood from his lips, fingers covertly twisting the mirror’s lotus-shaped knob. The twenty-eight lunar mansions engraved on its gilded back shifted, refracting moonlight into coded constellations—a distress signal only mirror-language scholars of the Maritime Silk Road could decipher.
As blades flashed again, Salim froze. Instead of his reflection, the mirror now showed a short-haired woman aiming a firearm. Her black tactical gear revealed bare shoulders, the gilt seal of "Singapore Heritage Bureau" shimmering under moonlight.
"Mirror demon?" Salim cursed in Arabic, drawing a blood-seal on the glass. The mirror shuddered violently, cracks spiderwebbing across the reflected woman’s neck.
"Dr. Lin!"
Ajay watched in horror as Jingxin collapsed, crimson sigils blooming on her neck. The quantum solution boiled in its dish, projecting eerie star maps onto the glass.
"Call an ambulance! Wait—" The security director recoiled. "Look inside the case!"
Where the mirror should’ve been, a translucent silhouette flickered in quantum flux. Its surface reflected not the ICU ceiling, but Tang Dynasty warships aflame and a fading Arabic rune.
ICU · Next Dawn
The sting of antiseptic roused Jingxin’s senses first. Someone was dabbing her right eye with velvet, as gently as polishing relics.
"Ms. Mo, the patient needs—"
"My daughter’s eye carries Tang-era quantum dust. Your lasers would fry the lens." Her mother’s Nyonya-accented voice chilled the air. "Set the surgical lights to moonlight mode."
Jingxin forced her eyes open. Her mother’s coconut-fiber puff daubed indigo medicine—a mirror embroidery tonic from her grandmother, now mending quantum lesions.
"You knew about the mirror’s secrets." Jingxin gripped her wrist. "Why tell me Dad drowned?"
Mo Suqing’s hand steadied, but the rosewood vanity clicked open. She retrieved a double-fish jade pendant, its eyes inlaid with Jiangxin Mirror fragments. "The night he disappeared, your father said when quantum fluctuations breach Planck scale..."
Monitors shrieked. Jingxin watched her spiking brainwaves crystallize into mirror patterns midair. The crescent outside matched last night’s surveillance footage perfectly.
"He’s in a temporal loop." She tore off the oxygen mask. "The thief isn’t Father—it’s his projection trapped in a time paradox!"
Yangzhou Port · Dawn
Salim studied the cracked mirror. The "demon’s" face faded with morning mist. Captain Najib knelt nearby, holding gilt letters from Chang’an.
"The Minister of Works’ daughter chooses a suitor in three days." Najib hesitated. "Must we indulge this farce..."
Salim traced the bloodstained cracks. As dawn pierced the lotus knob, luminous threads wove a hologram of the woman gasping in a hospital bed.
Now he saw the double-fish pendant at her chest—its motif mirrored his royal Arabian seal. Stranger still, when she convulsed in pain, his own heart spasmed.
"Investigate three things." Salim snapped his bloodied hair tie. "First, whether the mirror’s smith was surnamed Mo. Second, if such pendants appeared in Chang’an these twenty years. Third..."
He gripped the heating mirror, watching sigils pulse on her neck. "Ask the Imperial Astronomers—do mirror demons haunted by blood curses dream of their captors?"
Marina Bay Police HQ · Noon
Jingxin tugged her collar over the sigils. The quantum analyzer still decoded last night’s data. When holograms revealed the mirror’s entanglement trajectories, she finally understood her father’s scribbled "Möbius strip" in his journals—this mirror was a four-dimensional Klein bottle, infinite timelines colliding within.
"Dr. Lin, intel on the underground auction." Ajay burst in. "The black market claims to showcase a 'living artifact' tonight at ten."
Jingxin clasped the titanium necklace holding her pendant, tucking an EMP gun into her waistband. As she turned, the glass wall flickered with Salim drafting missives in vermillion ink—each stroke synced to her necklace’s crimson glow.
