Chapter 198 - 79: Mirror and the Connection Phenomenon

Chapter 198: Chapter 79: Mirror and the Connection Phenomenon

"I’ve heard Yu Xian mention you a lot. He says you’re incredibly skilled and professional."

Yu Xian glanced at Wen Xiao, surprised. ’This girl with the meatball-bun hairstyle is usually so socially anxious. Why is she being so proactive today?’

Yang Yiyi on the other end of the line seemed to pause for a moment, then her gentle laughter came through the phone:

"Hello, Wen Xiao. I’ve heard from Yu Xian, too. He said we have you to thank for cracking that audio file. I just never expected..."

She paused, her tone laced with amusement.

"That the computer whiz would be such a cute girl."

"N-no, not at all..." After receiving Yang Yiyi’s praise, the strange burst of courage Wen Xiao had mustered instantly evaporated. She reverted to the shy, blushing girl she was, shrinking back into the sofa. Perhaps worried the phone wouldn’t pick up her voice clearly, she scooted a little closer to Yu Xian.

Then, she spoke up again:

"About that Logical Anchor Point... I was thinking... a mirror reflection might be a good option."

"Explain. You mean mirrors?" Yang Yiyi’s voice sounded intrigued.

"Yes." Wen Xiao bit her lip and took a deep breath, her voice soft but clear.

"Because... this afternoon, when Yu Xian and I went to an escape room, we happened to encounter a puzzle involving a mirror."

Listening from the side, Yu Xian was taken aback. ’This girl with the meatball-bun hairstyle is pretty sharp,’ he thought. ’She can apply what she learns and draw inspiration from everyday life.’

He remembered the room from that afternoon, "Bloody Ren’ai Hospital: Mirror’s 205 Ward," and the hair-raising "205" room number that was identical in both the Mirror World and the real world.

"The escape room had a set designed to be a ’world in the mirror.’ Everything inside was a mirror image of reality, except for the ’205’ room number. Due to its clever font design, it looked exactly the same inside and outside the mirror. It immediately gave me—us—a strong sense of dissonance." Wen Xiao secretly glanced at Yu Xian before continuing to explain.

"So I was thinking, mirrors are incredibly common. Phone screens, glass windows, puddles of water, even stainless steel spoons... our lives are full of things that reflect. They perfectly fit the conditions of being ’commonplace’ and ’readily available.’"

She pointed a finger at the massive floor-to-ceiling window in the lounge. Although it was pitch black outside, the glass still showed a blurry reflection of the room’s interior.

"In the real world, the laws of light reflection are absolutely stable. But in computer graphics, ’real-time reflection’ has always been one of the most computationally expensive rendering techniques—what gamers often call ’ray tracing.’"

Wen Xiao’s speaking pace quickened, her train of thought perfectly clear.

"If we treat the dream as a real-time rendered game and the human brain as a heavily-loaded graphics card, then I think accurately ’rendering’ a reflection in a mirror, especially one that changes in real-time with your movements, would require a huge amount of processing power. Could that be why in normal dreams, mirrors are either blurry or don’t reflect your image at all?"

"You’re suggesting we use mirrors as the anchor..." Yu Xian’s pupils constricted as he finally understood what she meant.

"For example, we could write a hard rule into the script: in the dream, all mirrors, water surfaces, and glass simply don’t reflect anything?"

"Exactly!" Wen Xiao nodded emphatically, gesturing with her hands.

"We could even take it to an extreme. For instance, whenever you look into a mirror, a specific pattern appears. Wouldn’t that create a strong enough ’sense of dissonance’?"

Both ends of the line went silent for a few seconds.

"A mirror test..." On the other end of the line, Yang Yiyi’s voice held a trace of pleasant surprise.

"That is a truly brilliant idea! In cognitive neuroscience, ’mirror self-recognition’ is a crucial part of self-awareness. If mirror feedback is missing or incorrect, it would indeed trigger a powerful cognitive alarm in the brain."

Yu Xian couldn’t help but add his praise.

"It’s perfect. Mirrors are so common in reality that you wouldn’t even need to actively test for it. It would become a passive Logical Anchor Point."

"Looks like Yu Xian found the right person for the job!" Yang Yiyi said with a laugh.

"Th-thank you..."

Receiving praise from them both, a faint blush crept onto Wen Xiao’s face. The corners of her mouth curled into a small smile. She met Yu Xian’s gaze for a moment before hurriedly looking down to smooth out her pleated skirt and JK shirt.

"By the way," Yu Xian recalled their discussion from yesterday and said into the phone, "Wen Xiao also had a theory about the principle behind the Dream Net’s ’linking’ feature."

"There are two current hypotheses. One treats the brain as a node in a peer-to-peer connection. The other sees the brain as a ’radio’ receiving signals from a broadcast station."

He first raised the issue with the peer-to-peer theory:

"If it’s the former, the connection might utilize the resonance of biomagnetic fields. But there’s a critical problem with that: the connection distance. Such a field should have a limited range, and the experiment report doesn’t mention how far apart the two subjects were."

Yu Xian paused, then brought up the problem with the broadcast model.

"If it’s the latter, the broadcast model, distance wouldn’t be much of an issue. But a new problem arises. Logically, the brain can’t actively transmit ’signals.’ So, Wen Xiao suspects that in a broadcast model, the ’link’ might use a passive feedback mechanism. Like a radar scanning an object, the ’station’ would send out a signal to scan the brain. The changes in the electromagnetic field caused by brain activity would then be reflected back and interpreted by the station, much like how a key card works."

"The experiment report didn’t explicitly state the distance between them at the time, but from what I saw, the labs the two subjects were in weren’t that close to each other." On the other end of the line, Yang Yiyi fell silent for a moment before adding hesitantly:

"But... that doesn’t mean it’s the second scenario you described. Because, from a neuroscientific perspective, that hypothesis... is almost impossible."

"Why?" Yu Xian and Wen Xiao asked in unison.

"Because of the order of magnitude," Yang Yiyi explained.

"The electromagnetic signals produced by the brain, or brainwaves, are extremely weak—usually on the order of picovolts to microvolts. Furthermore, these signals are subject to massive attenuation and diffusion as they pass through cerebrospinal fluid, the meninges, the skull, and the scalp. Even with current brain-computer interface technology, accurately reading brain signals requires implanting electrodes in the cerebral cortex or using high-precision sensors placed directly on the scalp. This kind of long-distance scanning you’re talking about..."

She paused and offered an analogy.

"It would be like standing on Earth and trying to use your naked eye to watch an ant on the moon’s surface crawl left or right. Never mind the technical difficulty; the background noise alone would be enough to drown out any signal. Unless..."

"Unless what?" Yu Xian asked, not ready to give up.

"Unless you had a sensitivity several orders of magnitude higher than what’s needed to detect gravitational waves. And that’s virtually impossible."

Yu Xian and Wen Xiao exchanged a glance. The sliver of hope they’d been clinging to had just been shot down.

But...

If it wasn’t radio-frequency identification, or biomagnetic resonance, or some kind of quantum entanglement...

Then what force could possibly allow two minds, with no physical connection, to enter the same dream and interact in real time?

"It seems the strangeness of all this might be even greater than we imagined..." Yu Xian felt a chill creep back into his heart.

"If existing scientific theories can’t explain it, then there are only two possibilities..."

He analyzed them one by one.

"Either Professor Mo and his team have mastered a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting physical technology that’s ahead of its time... or... the ’linking’ itself doesn’t rely on any kind of physical signal transmission at all."

This was no longer a simple matter of cracking a technology. They might be facing an unknown domain that was completely beyond their comprehension.

"Yu Xian, there’s actually something else... I was originally planning to tell you about it in detail the next time we met."

She paused for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts.

"I’ve been going through the lab’s older reports and logs these past few days. In one report, I found a few notes and remarks that seem to allude to this ’linking phenomenon.’"

"What did they say?" Yu Xian pressed urgently.

"The report was written very vaguely, using a lot of ambiguous terms, but reading between the lines..." Yang Yiyi’s voice betrayed a deep sense of confusion and unease.

"It seems that Professor Mo and his team... never actually figured out the true principle behind this ’linking phenomenon’ either."