Daomu Biji Volume 8 Chapter 41

Fatty was right. At this time, the basic knowledge I learned before was very critical. If you didn't understand basic physics, many people would only pay attention to how the building appeared in the mirror. But I knew that the strangest part of this mirror wasn't here at all.

Mirrors need light sources to reflect things, and where there's no light source, mirrors won't have any reflection points.

However, the ancient building in the mirror was shrouded in a miserable blue light, and this light wasn't our light source, but the light from the ancient building itself.

It was coming from inside the mirror.

That is to say, as long as I turned off the flashlight, the only light source in the whole cave was the blue light which pa.s.sed through the mirror and made the place look dark.

But when we first came in, the cave was dark and there was no light from the mirror.

“Turn off the lights.” I said to Fatty and immediately turned off my flashlight.

The whole cave darkened. According to normal physical conditions, the blue light in the mirror should become the main light source.

But now the whole mirror was dark and the cave also became absolutely dark, with only the fluorescent logo on Fatty's flashlight shining.

“Pa!” The flashlight was turned on again.

Looking in the mirror again, the inside was exactly what we saw before. The bleak ancient building was as quiet as a fossil.

Fatty asked me what I was doing and I gave him a rough idea of my theory.

He didn't understand, but he got the purpose of my experiment and said to me: “Get to the point, Mr. Naive, don't be so polite to illiterate people like me.”

“This shows that this phenomenon has nothing to do with the propagation of light. As long as there's a light source shining on the mirror surface, the mirror will start to display images. But as far as I know, there was no photosensitive technology in ancient China. There are records of the use of light to turn on mechanisms, usually using the phototaxis of animals. (TN note: geh, science. Phototaxis is the bodily movement of an organism in response to light, either toward the source of light or away from it). They're short-acting mechanisms, usually just handicrafts for amus.e.m.e.nt." I said, “It's good that ancient China didn't have this technology, otherwise we would have to fight in the dark in the ancient tomb, and a little light would trigger the mechanism and kill us.”

“That's not helpful.” Fatty touched his chin. “You're basically telling me this mirror is amazing, but you don't understand why?”

“It's different, I made some deductions about the principle of the matter so I can rule out a lot of wrong theories. Let me think about it. I believe that the great proletarian warriors won't be defeated by strange forces and will overcome this confusing mystery. All phenomena have their natural principles behind them." I was a little irritated by what he said, so I told him not to talk anymore.

“Stealing my lines.” Fatty grunted, “Well, while you think about it, this fat man will go have a smoke.” As he spoke, he retreated to the stone beam and lit a cigarette.

Finally, I got Fatty to shut up for a little bit! I smiled, thinking about looking at the mirror again.

Truthfully, I really thought this mirror was too amazing, but with my understanding of some ancient Chinese technology, I had to learn how it worked.

In ancient China, the craftsmanship of some skillful craftsmen had reached an uncanny level, but they were still craftsmen and wouldn't become real ghosts. Therefore, what our eyes would conceive as a miracle, would really be called “deceptive ingenuity” when the truth was revealed.

The first thing to consider was, if I were to make such a mirror myself, what method would I use? I used a flashlight to shine on the mirror and looked at the light sources, suddenly recalling an untested method my teacher mentioned when doing experiments before.

A phenomenon must have a starting point and an ending point, and sometimes the points themselves weren't important. What mattered was how the starting point reached the ending point. As long as the parameters were constantly changed and the changes were carefully observed, many clues could be revealed.

I raised my hand and began to twist the aperture of the flashlight. Before, we had only two parameters—bright and dark—but now I wanted to see how this mirror changed from the brightest setting to the darkest.

Fatty turned off his flashlight to cooperate with me. I slowly made the flashlight go dark and immediately found that the blue light in the whole mirror was also slowly darkening, and the rate was exactly the same as that of my flashlight.

I slowly turned the flashlight on, and the blue light in the mirror also turned on slowly.

I couldn't help but smile as my overestimation of this mirror technology just now disappeared. I immediately said to Fatty, “Look, it's not that amazing. The blue light in this mirror is coming from our flashlights. When our flashlights are bright, it's bright inside the mirror; when our flashlight is dark, it's dark inside.”

Fatty could also see clearly on the beam and nodded: “Our flashlight's light energy pa.s.ses through this mirror and shoots into this building?”

I shook my head. Although our flashlights were “Wolf-Eye” ones and could blind people, it was impossible to use it to illuminate such a large building.

I couldn't fully speculate on the real situation, but since the light problem in this mirror was so simple, I didn't think the other situations would be too difficult.

Uncle Two taught me that everything depended on a purpose, and from that we could infer many aspects that couldn't be speculated on otherwise. This was the most useful thing I learned from the older generation. I felt my legs tingling from the cold pool and began to think, what was the purpose of this mirror here?

“Do you think this mirror has anything to do with feng shui?” I asked Fatty.

Fatty said: “Some Yangzhai feng shui masters use eight divinatory trigram mirrors, but this is too big. If this mirror was hung on the balcony, it could bring planes down. You could just f.u.c.king watch the planes fall out of the sky from the balcony all day long. It'd be very noisy to lose an Airbus today and a Boeing tomorrow.”

“Beating and shaking the airplane, your f.u.c.king airplane is going to fall off, yeah? We don't have time for this, think seriously.” (TN note: probably butchered this d.i.c.k joke, sorry!)

Fatty finally smoked his cigarette, pinched the b.u.t.t, and threw it into the water. He lit another one: “I would've thought of it if I could have, and then I would've blasted my way into the ancient building and saved them all. We could be eating roast duck in Beijing, but I'm here eating this cigarette b.u.t.t instead? Think more and don't rely on me.”

“Aren't you a great feng shui master, why are you asking me?” I retorted.

He shook his head: “I'm sure I can't do anything about it with my profound knowledge. Besides, you didn't know anything at that time, so I could talk freely. Now that you've made some progress, I'll have to keep an eye on it.”

f.u.c.k, it turned out you were talking nonsense. Fatty continued, “I don't think it's useful for you to think about feng shui. If you want to understand feng shui, you would understand it at a glance. If you don't understand it, you won't be able to even if you're blind. If you really want my opinion, I can tell you that my first reaction at that time was that it was a reflection. But look at the top—” He pointed the “Wolf-Eye” flashlight above his head. The height of this cave was very tall, and it could be seen that it was all rocky, but the details weren't very clear.

I pulled out a cigarette, grabbed the one from Fatty's mouth to light my own, and then shoved it back into his mouth. Fatty's flashlight swung back and forth overhead.

“It's full of stones and nothing else. That's why I think this building is in the mirror.” Fatty stepped on the mirror. “If the image in the mirror was reflected from there, I would definitely block the image if I walked on top of it, but that's obviously not the case. Although I'm not cultured compared to you, a college student, I still understand this basic truth.”

I looked at the rocks above and at Fatty posing on the mirror, looking back and forth several times. I thought Fatty was right, but something strange occurred to me.

Perhaps it was because I had experienced too many deceptions and designs around me recently, so I had a sensitive intuition about the flaws of things. I suddenly felt that this cave was insufficiently compact.

It was like a magic trick. And when it came to magic, the most powerful kind was street magic, where magicians perform in front of you without any disguise. Magic experts often give people the feeling that they have special powers, which is a very powerful experience.

The second kind was stage magic. Many of the most basic tricks required cloth coverings or boxes. The principle of stage magic lay in the fact that the use of cloth coverings and boxes couldn't change the impossibility of this matter. However, because we know that magic is mostly illusions and traps, wise people immediately know that the mystery must be behind the cloth or inside the box, but the cover is very clever and we can't see it.

What I was feeling right now was that it was stage magic. If the designers here wanted to put Zhang Jialou in the mirror, they would look for a shorter cave so that we would look up and know that it was impossible for it to be on the ceiling.

However, the ceiling of this cave was too high and some parts couldn't be seen clearly. Although we basically judged that there was probably nothing but stone up there, because of its height, I felt that if there was a one in ten thousand chance, the mechanism would surely be hidden up there. Especially because the situation around us was too obvious and there was no possibility of a mechanism being anywhere else.

That meant it must be somewhere we couldn't, or hadn't, seen.

Of course, this may only be my momentary illusion. If someone told me that I must break through the stage magician's tricks or lose my friend, the first thing I would do, of course, is to kick over the magician's box to see if something was inside.

“We have to climb up and have a look.” I said to Fatty.

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