The cage of ten thousand mirrors can only be traversed

m1zushi: sorry⁠‌‌​‌‌​⁠‍⁠‌‍‌⁠​​‍‍‍‌​​‍‌ for the late chapter!

The second air wall had already shattered, but Qin Zhilu didn’t let everyone immediately proceed to the next level.

The team returned to the cafeteria to rest for the night. Fengjian did his best to max out everyone’s health, then collapsed onto a narrow wooden chair and fell asleep. Jiang Xiao found a quiet corner to recuperate his mental strength, while Pat and Slade spoke in low voices by the door, discussing techniques for coordinating with An Yu’s space manipulation.

While recording combat data, Qin Zhilu listened to the crunching sound behind him, which resembled a small animal gnawing on bark.

He turned his head.

An Yu was stuffing a biscuit into his mouth with one hand and holding his terminal in the other. He stared intently at his health bar and refreshed it endlessly.

Qin Zhilu said, “Your survival anxiety is truly severe.”

An Yu looked up and the anxiety made him appear somewhat cold. “The sealing target for the third mirror shard should be 30%. If that also counts against me, then my upper limit will only be 41%.”

Jiang Xiao was basically useless. Fengjian’s healing was slow, and he had been secretive about his health-locking mechanism, so it likely had its own limitations.

An Yu never entrusted his life to things that were unknown.

Qin Zhilu’s tone was calm. “I said I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“Mm,” An Yu said, lowering his eyes. “Thank you, sir.”

His hair fell over his face, concealing the doubt in his eyes.

The Commander was indeed powerful enough, but that couldn’t give him an absolute sense of security.

He took a hard bite of the biscuit and said, “I’m going to sleep.”

In the early hours of the morning, the small team was fast asleep.

An Yu, who had been lying with his eyes closed, sat up silently.

He took out the two mirror shards. Both reflective surfaces showed his own face, but it didn’t look like a normal mirror image. Instead, it felt as if he were looking at the part of himself that was sealed within the mirror.

The longer he stared, the louder the noise in the depths of his mind seemed to become.

An Yu endured the irritation and looked at the half-eaten biscuit left on the table.

The terminal continued to count time second by second, following the flow of the objective world. However, time began to accumulate at a hyper-speed on the biscuit, until a patch of mold finally grew on its surface.

The timer showed 14 seconds.

An opened, saliva-contaminated compressed biscuit would normally take about seven days to grow mold. This meant he could now spend two seconds to push a target’s time forward by one day.

This efficiency was much higher than when he was healing his teammates, but it was still far from enough.

An Yu closed his eyes again and his focus shifted from the single biscuit to the entire cafeteria.

He imagined all the food in the cafeteria, gritted his teeth, and held his breath until the noise in his mind grew more and more intense. Only then did he snap his eyes open.

“Sir?”

Qin Zhilu was standing in front of him. “Not sleeping properly and you’re torturing yourself again.”

An Yu asked softly, “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“I woke up.”

“Woke up?” An Yu glanced at the time in surprise.

“Mm. I only sleep two hours,” Qin Zhilu said, casually picking up the moldy compressed biscuit to examine it.

An Yu couldn’t help but ask, “Since when?”

“As long as I can remember.”

An Yu suddenly understood a little why the Commander had things to talk about with Jian Xing. He didn’t know whether to be envious or to think the Commander’s situation was tragic.

Qin Zhilu reached out and pressed a hand on his head. “Don’t engage in pointless self-torture. After we enter the third level, we will very likely face many battles. Save the learning and practice for then.”

An Yu thought for a moment. “Did you see something from A-Ji’s perspective?”

“Mm.”

In her coma, A-Ji heard Bai Jing whisper in her ear: That thing will protect everything for me, unless it breaks its promise, otherwise I will sleep with you and never wake up again.

Hearing this, An Yu asked hesitantly, “Did A-Ji know that Bai Jing was her brother?”

Qin Zhilu nodded. “Their mother showed her photos of Bai Jing when she was very young. In the archives, she had already recognized her brother, but she didn’t know that he could also recognize her. She had planned to hint at it bit by bit, but unfortunately, there was no time.”

An Yu’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

He looked up at Qin Zhilu as if in a daze. Those golden eyes were still vacant, yet they also seemed to finally hold some substance.

“You seem unusually motivated on this mission,” Qin Zhilu said suddenly. “In District 53, there was an invisible gun to your head. But on this mission, there hasn’t been anything that required you to master time acceleration, yet you seem to be in a great hurry.”

An Yu looked down at his own fingers.

“I just keep thinking about 019,” he said softly after a long silence. “In a sense, 019 was the one who gave me life. But he lost his mind because he couldn’t accept the eight-year time discrepancy and was silently disposed of. The orphans here were sealed away with aberrants for ten years, and now they have to live in the bodies of children to return to human society. They must be in a lot of pain too.”

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When you return to order with a chaotic body, the noise outside stops, but the noise inside your heart grows more and more intense.

An Yu’s thoughts were a bit jumbled. He wasn’t good at thinking about these things. He just felt that his abilities were worth looking forward to.

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“Give District 53 back to Ling Qiu,” he said softly.

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After passing through the second layer of air wall, the view was covered with a layer of frost. When it cleared, the gray-and-white building of the orphanage had dispersed along with the frost.

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Jiang Xiao said softly, “Is this space distortion?”

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“The space is actually quite regular…” He suddenly stopped. “But it’s like a giant cage.”

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An Yu looked at a building a few steps away. “Go touch that door over there.”

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Fengjian stared blankly. “How do you know?”

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Jiang Xiao watched the air around them warily. “Hidden space? It seems it wants to kill intruders through trickery.”

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Slade asked in surprise, “The Mirror can also replicate aberrants?”

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It let out a deafening roar, and a large amount of viscous fluid splattered from its mouth.

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Pat fired a grappling anchor, embedding it into the monster’s slimy, fleshy limb, but it produced a hard, crisp clang!

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An Yu suddenly understood.

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Immediately, a new circle of orphans stepped out of the air, gathering towards the center with expressionless faces. They advanced step by step and massive creatures seemed to pull free from their slender bodies.

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Jiang Xiao’s mental power alarm rang incessantly, but his red pupils grew colder. He decisively retracted the poppies in his palm, and countless snake tails emerged from beneath him, like octopus tentacles, but with sharper scales than tentacles, lashing out at the monsters!

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He was drenched in blood and charged into hordes of aberrants with his mortal body. He could only beg his Commander to shoot them when he could no longer bear it.

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Shimmering dandelion seeds floated in the air. A fine, velvety thread extended from Fengjian’s fingertip, wrapping several times around An Yu’s wrist.

“Health defense at 2.5%,” Fengjian said. “As per your instruction.”

An Yu nodded slightly.

He was surrounded by giant aberrants towering like mountains. He stood in the protective center of his teammates and quietly perceived the world with his eyes closed.

The mirror spaces around him, like countless stars in the sky, flowed through his consciousness.

If he wasn’t mistaken, A-Ji’s mirror coffin was within one of those mirrors and it was likely the only mirror that didn’t contain an aberrant.

His consciousness scrolled through those folded spaces in the void, as if he had opened his eyes to look down, and he flipped through the spines of the books on the bookshelf one by one.

A violent shattering sound suddenly erupted, violently pulling An Yu back from his search!

Jiang Xiao’s eyes were bloodshot. His snake tail had just split an aberrant from top to bottom. The aberrant exploded, and countless shattered mirror fragments rained down, not only cutting countless wounds into the snake tail but also almost hollowing out An Yu’s brain with the shattering sound.

An Yu instantly fell to his knees, clutching his head tightly.

So noisy…!

The depths of his brain felt like they were being carved by a knife, a pain more terrifying than the gene induction test.

Jiang Xiao said in a panic, “An—”

But the person kneeling on the ground suddenly looked up.

An Yu’s breathing was chaotic, but those red-tinged pupils contracted very slowly and powerfully. Each contraction made Jiang Xiao feel a violent disorientation and his body seemed as if it were being torn apart, yet also as if it were being reshaped.

In his peripheral vision, his entire body’s wounds simultaneously and rapidly transformed—those covered by dandelions began to heal, while those exposed instantly burst with blood.

The same situation was happening to his other teammates.

Fengjian Tianyu immediately reacted, and endless dandelion seeds radiated from his body, softly covering every wound on them.

Pat was already drenched in blood, but he merely stared blankly at An Yu’s red pupils from the side, daring not to look directly.

Just a side glance was enough to chill him to the bone.

“Global time acceleration,” Qin Zhilu said thoughtfully. “It seems the shattering sound on the third level is particularly effective.”

An Yu didn’t react.

The thunderous roar deep in his consciousness had made him completely deaf to others’ voices.

Not just the Protectors, but all wounded aberrants had their injuries simultaneously accelerated to rupture, and the clamor of shattering mirrors rose and fell.

His mind was filled with thunderous rumbles and it was now impossible to block it.

Fengjian Tianyu was soaked in sweat, gritting his teeth. “I can’t keep up! Stop close-quarters attacks! Don’t get yourselves hurt anymore!”

No reminder was needed. Everyone had already ceased their attacks. They stood back to back, shielding An Yu, who was half-kneeling on the ground.

The air in front of them fluctuated more violently. Wave after wave of aberrants exploded and died, and more orphans stepped out of the air, approaching them while transforming into giant mirror monsters. The intensifying mirror ruptures caused An Yu’s ability to continuously lose control. The mirrors were spawning monsters faster and faster. The orphans were almost pushing each other, approaching them expressionlessly.

“An Yu.” A black tentacle from behind An Yu hooked his wrist and gently tugged.

After a long pause, An Yu slowly looked up with his cold red pupils cold and stared at the Commander.

Qin Zhilu took out his terminal and placed it in front of him. His other hand rested on An Yu’s head, gently pressing twice as if to comfort him.

The terminal displayed the combat log page. On the blank page, there were only four words: One mirror, one monster.

An Yu’s pupils flickered.

The air fluctuations in front of him appeared chaotic, but each fluctuation coincided precisely with the death of a mirror monster. There was only one mirror monster in each folded space. When a mirror monster died, the corresponding invisible mirror would disappear, and the next mirror would take its place.

Mirrors were not creators. Even a cage of ten thousand mirrors would eventually reach its limit.

A-Ji’s mirror coffin, even if hidden in the deepest part, would eventually move to the front.

Only traversal is possible

Time rushed by at an accelerated speed, causing the aberrants, along with the mirrors containing them, to perish together.

A click echoed as Qin Zhilu loaded thermal bullets in his magazine. An Yu looked at the dirty things that were gradually forcing them into a small circle and his red pupils burned. In an instant, the mirror monsters and orphans from all directions seemed to be grabbed by an unseen hand and gathered in front of Qin Zhilu.

Bang!

A thunderous gunshot tore through all the surrounding noise.

An Yu, who had been trying his best to endure, was shocked.

But immediately after, a rain of shattering mirror sounds erupted, one after another. The thermal bullet blew up a mirror monster, and the immense kinetic energy caused hundreds of surrounding mirrors to shatter as well. Even Jiang Xiao and the others understood the air fluctuations—several rows of invisible mirrors vanished, and new mirrors took their place.

An Yu struggled to gasp for air. The gunshot seemed to echo, reverberating repeatedly in his mind.

An Yu feared guns, and he feared gunshots. Qin Zhilu looked down at him for a moment, then gently covered his ears with his white-gloved hands. Although he knew An Yu couldn’t hear him, he still whispered, “I’m sorry.”

An Yu, however, suddenly replied, “It’s alright, Commander.” He closed his eyes. A new batch of aberrants stepped out of the air. In an instant, they were folded together by him once more.

An Yu suddenly opened his eyes and although his red pupils still trembled from the gunshot, his voice was chilling and resolute. “Again. Until they’re all dead.”