The Reflection

A bright white nondescript room greeted Alex as he cautiously peer from the doorway. Nothing inside except four white walls.

He turned around and found himself in the middle of the room. Fuxi had vanished without a trace, along with the mysterious hall. The silence was deafening. No noise. Nothing.

Alex touched the walls with his fingers, trying to see if there was a hidden door elsewhere. The unappealing idea of being trapped for an eternity in this room sounded like the Void, which Fuxi described.

He heard a buzzing noise behind him and swung around to face a holographic monitor crackling to life, affected by a static interference which distorted the display.

Alex moved his finger to touch the screen, only to get zapped by an electrical current. Then the room blacked out in total darkness. Alex couldn't even see his fingers.

"Fuck my life," he cursed loudly.

"Fuuuck my liiiife," an echo repeated in his own voice.

"What the —"

"Wwhat ttheeee—" the echo repeated his words again.

A shimmer from the corner of his eyes made him turn to the side. He stretched out his hand blindly in the dark while walking ahead. Then his hand felt something cold and smooth as ice. He stepped back and a soft glowing circular mirror, the height of the room, slowly came to life, illuminating part of the room.

In the mirror, there were ancient scripts rotating around it, not any language Alex knew. Not even the bone oracle. Each script was a logogram or a hieroglyph. The carving was too crude to be like the Egyptian ones, yet it also resembled ancient bone carvings. He poked through the script and realised that it was a hologram.

Alex studied the mirror. He could barely make out his face in the reflection, let alone his body. An eerie feeling crept over him as he stepped away from the mirror, wary of it. His gut instinct told him not to touch the mirror again.

The entire setting was like those haunted house theme parks with the darkness and one large mirror. Alex glanced around, wondering what would pounce out of the darkness. The mirror's light grew stronger as though attempting to catch his reflection.

Should he, or should he not, move up closer to the mirror? He huffed. It didn't matter. Everything that can go wrong in the hidden dimension had gone wrong for Alex all the way so far.

With his fist clenched, he stepped towards the mirror and gaze into it. To his surprise, his reflection changed to the clothes Chongli wore when they first met. Alex pulled his lip up to reveal his canine tooth. So did his reflection. He stuck his tongue out, and the reflection stuck one back at him.

What can the mirror possibly do? Alex glanced down, rubbing his chin in deep thought. A resounding smack on his head made him jump and stare at the reflection, who stared back at him.

"YOU!" Alex pointed at his reflection, who pointed back.

"Yyouuu", the echo went.

"Chongli - is that you?"

"Ccchongggli - is that yyyyouuu?"

Alex frowned. His reflection frowned back at him. Then a creepy smile grew on his reflection's face, causing Alex to reel back.

"What's wrong? I am part of you."

"What do you want?"

"What do you want?"

"I asked you first," Alex snapped at his reflection. "Besides, you are Chongli."

"I was part of Chongli, but not Chongli. I am part of you now. Part of the energy wave that makes up your soul," the reflection sneered.

Whatever this energy wave was, Alex sensed something sinister about it. Fuxi mentioned a seal on it. Was there another reason for the seal to be placed on it?

When Alex first met Chongli in the soul realm, his personality appeared different. Even in Fuxi's memory, the Chongli Alex knew seemed like a far cry than the reflection in front of him behind the mirror.

"You want to control me, but you can't. You are weak," his reflection proclaimed with smugness. "Weak. WEAK. WEAK."

Has Chongli's personality done a 180-degree turn somewhere? The reflection stretched his arms out and moved his neck from side to side, like it was preparing to spring.

"You don't seem to be like Chongli at all," Alex blurted out as panic set in.

The reflection smirked and fluttered his eyelashes at him in mockery. "The Mirror of Truth shows the truth. Everyone, including primeval beings, has a dark side. I am Chongli's darkest side, the wave he abandoned to a lowly human because he didn't want me found."

"I wouldn't want you found too," Alex muttered.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?" The reflection banged so hard on the other side of the mirror that the mirror vibrated.

That's one nasty piece of work, any harder and the mirror may crack, Alex thought. What happens then? What was he supposed to do? Nothing was turning out right in the hidden dimension since his arrival.

Then he thought of his other six energy waves. If a soul has seven components, why aren't the six others reflected in the mirror but only this one?

Doesn't a mirror always show the flipped image? Right reflected left and left was right. Wait, no, that's wrong, Alex thought. A mirror works on specular reflection and the reason for any flipped image was the one before the mirror which is himself. Was he the one projecting the image of the mirror?

If he removed himself from the presence of the mirror, the reflection would disappear by logic. In the room's darkness, he couldn't make out the size of the mirror enough to find out if it was as wide as the room.

Alex walked unsteadily to the left side in the darkened room while his eyes watched the reflection following him with a smirk planted on its expression.

His reflection's eyes glowed with flickering reddish flames, consuming its eyeballs into a pair of flaming eye sockets. With the flames came light and with light came hopelessness.

The mirror was as big as the room. No space spared for any escape possibility. Trapped like a rat, with no chance of victory.

"What do you want with me?" Alex asked, standing his ground.

"Fun and games. It doesn't matter to me if your soul breaks apart. I will be off to a new soul."

The all-too familiar sharp prickly searing sensation overcame him and Alex yelped as he saw his own body beginning the process of immolation. What a ridiculous way of having his soul sheared to pieces?

The anger deep within his depths swelled rapidly into an unbearable threshold as he felt his soul burn in such intolerable pain that he clenched his fists, shut his eyes tightly, and gritted his teeth. His knees collapsed on the hard floor as he screamed in agony.

Was he going to go through life in the hidden dimension, passive like in his human life?

The images of the boys dunking his face into the urinal at school, their sneering faces, or the time in high school when the more athletic boys jumped him in the schoolyard to give him a bashing when he smart mouthed them. More of his memories came flooding back. Repeating the hundreds of bullying incidents he had endured in middle and high school.

Nothing was worse than watching his own mother insulted by other parents in school when she tried to complain about Alex's bullies. All because of her ethnicity.

Just when he thought life was going to be better in university, his life ended because of Chongli. Yes, Chongli killed him and thrown him on his own to deal with a repeat of his early life again.

He shouldn't be the one on fire. The one who should immolate is in front of him. Alex tightened his fist as the anger bubbled to the surface. The burning sensation didn't hurt anymore. Nothing can hurt him anymore.

If he is going down, he will take Chongli with him. Mirror or no mirror, Alex got up unsteadily and staggered forward.

"Trying to fight back? You are WEAK."

"Oh-h n-no," Alex gasped. "If I am g-going… d-down… s-so a-are… you."

With every ounce of energy and the overwhelming fury left within him, Alex dashed towards the mirror, towards his reflection. He lunged forward, expecting a crash into the mirror.

The crash never came. Instead, the room with the mirror changed into a valley before his eyes, as his foot pushed from the rock, launching him into the air with a sudden weightlessness, sending Alex soaring towards the skies.

"WeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK," his voice shrieked like a shrill eagle's call.

The words he wanted to say were 'what the hell?'. Alex looked downwards and found himself several feet above a canopy of the trees.

He flapped his arms to hear a strange flapping noise. Turning his head, he saw in place of his arms were long, strong, flaming wings. Shaken by the transformation, he stopped flapping, only to stall mid-air, sending him into a rapid descent, and finally a nose-dive into the canopy.

The ground got closer and closer. Alex could make out the details of the tree down to the leaves and he clammed shut his eyes, waiting for the moment, only to hear a sharp shattering of several glass pieces.

"OUCH, OUCH, OWWWWWCH, PUT OUT THE FIRE!"

That voice sounded like Qinguang. Alex's eyes snapped open only to be greeted by the sight of Qinguang's sleeves burning while Kanghui's open palm was channeling a spray of water, drenching Qinguang.

"Welcome back," Kanghui said.