The hum of the Bronze Inquisitor Mirror rose rapidly in hum. It climbed from a deep drone into an ear-splitting, high-pitched metal shriek.
Elder Song channeled a steady stream of Foundation-stage spiritual energy into the bronze base. The golden aura across the mirror’s face condensed with terrifying speed. It formed a clear, pencil-thin beam of pure soul-probing heat wave that locked onto the bridge of Lin Tao’s nose with total sharp-angled posture.
The air in the path of the beam grew scorching hot in a split second. It smelled of ozone and spark-charged dust.
To an ordinary mortal laborer, facing this beam meant immediate psychological disintegration. The sight heat wave bypassed the physical eye entirely. It projected directly into the pineal gland and the mental centers of the brain. Any try to hide a thought or speak a falsehood would create an energetic flow pushback mismatch. It reflected the beam back into the brain cortex with enough heat violence to boil the brain tissue.
Lin Tao didn’t try to lie. He didn’t try to resist the beam with sheer willpower.
In his mind, the sacred Mirror of Nine Truths was not a divine judge of old family virtue. It was a sight test transceiver with an unprotected photodiode array and an infinite while-loop hardcoded into its proof logic.
The mirror emitted light from the exact same focal sky-slit through which it received the reflected mental response.
If the emitted beam was reflected directly back into the receiving lens with zero angular scattering, the mirror’s sensor would read its own raw output signal as an incoming response.
The incoming value would feed into the amplification circuit. The amplification circuit would multiply the output. And the boosted output would instantly reflect right back into the input sky-slit.
An infinite sound feedback whistle, carried out at the speed of light.
Lin Tao calculated the sight angles with icy care.
The brass canteen at his hip was three inches in width, pressed from high-copper brass and polished smooth by years of rubbing against coarse hemp cloth. The curve of its rounded cap formed a catadioptric retro-reflector—a convex metal mirror capable of reflecting incoming parallel rays back along their source vector over a broad acceptance angle.
With his uninjured right hand, he casually adjusted the dented brass water canteen hanging from his hemp belt.
He didn’t lift it from his hip. He simply rotated the polished convex curve of the canteen’s brass cap by three tiny fractions of an inch, aligning its curved metal surface with the incoming golden beam.
Reflect.
The physics of catadioptric retro-glow was total and unforgiving. A convex ball-shaped surface with high specular reflectance scatters light in all directions, but when placed at the exact focal convergence of a curved emitter, the center-line rays are returned along their precise normal vector.
The pencil-thin golden beam didn’t merely light up the brass cap. It struck the crystal-smooth metal with thirty thousand watts of clear magnetic energy per square tiny fraction of an inch. The brass didn’t melt because the heat fading away into the cold well-water inside the canteen absorbed the first heat flux.
The returning beam entered the mirror’s sky-slit with zero milliradians of angular error. Inside the mirror’s receiving sensor, the silver-pearl alloy lattice suffered total capacitive overload. The electrons, stripped from their core shells by the violent feedback cycle, created a tiny star-fire arc inside the sealed bronze casing.
The pencil-thin golden beam struck the polished brass cap at an incident angle of ninety point zero degrees.
The beam didn’t penetrate the metal. It bounced straight back along its own flight path. It walked into the mirror’s central sky-slit with zero loss of focus.
The mirror’s internal test processor met the loop.
For one-tenth of a second, the hall went dead silent. Then, the low drone of the mirror suddenly pitched up into an ear-splitting, glass-shattering screech that blew out every baked-clay oil lamp in the pavilion.
Elder Song’s eyes widened in sudden, confused horror as the bronze base beneath his palm began to vibrate with violent, clockwork convulsions that shook the marble dais.
“What’s—” Song gasped, trying wildly to tear his hand away from the activation plate.
He couldn’t. The intense magnetic field generated by the feedback loop had locked his palm to the bronze as if welded with molten iron.
The golden light on the mirror face turned from a calm amber into a blazing bright, blinding violet-white. The heat of the bronze disc spiked by four hundred degrees in two seconds. The polished pearl-alloy surface began to ripple and boil like melting animal fat.
SNAP-CRACK.
With a sound like a naval cannon firing inside a cellar, the three-foot bronze mirror fractured diagonally from corner to corner.
A blinding flash of violet bright purple heat wave erupted from the crack, blasting backward directly into Elder Song’s face. The bone-shaking sight blast wave threw the elderly bureaucrat off his marble throne, tossing him backward into the silk curtains in a smoking heap of tangled purple robes.
The bronze mirror fell from its stand, crashing onto the marble dais and breaking into three glowing, smoking shards that hissed as they scorched deep black scars into the stone.
The judgment hall dropped into total, scared pandemonium.
The eight armored guards stumbled backward, their hands clamped over their iron masks, blinded by the violet flash. The junior scribes dove beneath their bitter pine-resin desks, clutching their heads and screaming prayers to the Ancestral Patriarch to spare them from the wrath of heaven.
Lin Tao stood in the center of the hall, his hand resting calmly on his brass canteen.
His left eye cataloged the aftermath. The mirror was destroyed, Elder Song was rolling in the scorched curtains smelling of singed beard hair. The hall was plunged into smoky twilight.
Tie Shan looked at the smoking shards of bronze, then glanced down at Lin Tao’s canteen.
The young giant’s scarred lips twitched in the gloom.
“Mirror was cracked,” Tie Shan whispered softly. “Glass was cheap.”