Chapter 345: Xi Zhao

September 10, 2018, 22:49 at night.

“It’s almost eleven. Why hasn’t Miss Mei Lin returned?” Ning Zhe rolled up his sleeve and glanced at his watch, asking Besang: “Mr. Besang, can you find a way to contact her? She’s been gone so long—could something have happened?”

Besang shook his head. “She’s already in a different world from us. Even determining each other’s location is difficult now, let alone making contact.”

No sooner had he spoken than Besang frowned inwardly: “Why am I telling him this?”

This man is merely an ordinary mortal who stumbled into this strange event and was dragged into the gambler’s wager. Why should I reveal such secret information to a mortal?

The more Besang thought about it, the more uneasy he felt. Yet no matter how confused he was or how many inconsistencies he noticed, he never doubted whether this man’s claimed identity as a mortal was true or false.

Jue Yuan forbade him from entertaining such doubt.

Ning Zhe’s expression shifted, troubled. “Then what do we do now? We don’t know Miss Mei Lin’s location, and we can’t contact her. Are we just stuck here with the gambler?”

“Hmm…” Besang lowered his gaze to the wine glass before him, his face clouded with hesitation, as if weighing something.

Five wine glasses sat on the table, belonging to Mei Lin, Ning Zhe, the gambler, Besang, and “Fen Wu,” whom Ning Zhe had erased of all memory and reduced to a walking corpse.

The bottoms of the glasses before Mei Lin, Ning Zhe, and Fen Wu were damp, their wine spilled over the rims—each of them had lost the wager. They were all losers.

Only Besang’s and the gambler’s tabletops remained dry. They were the last two players in the game; the wager would not end until a winner was decided, and none could leave.

Besang turned his head slightly, studying Ning Zhe’s ordinary face with thoughtful eyes.

“For individual losers, the game has already ended. Losers have, in truth, gained freedom—but they remain bound by the game’s principle of fairness. Until the final winner is decided, even the free players cannot leave the casino.”

“Those still in play face even stricter constraints. I am not merely forbidden to leave the table—I must be cautious in every action. A single ambiguous gesture could be judged as cheating, resulting in immediate defeat…”

With the current situation clarified, Besang’s eyes grew even more troubled.

Studying Ning Zhe’s ordinary face, he finally made up his mind: “Though I don’t know how this mortal survived after losing, I have no choice but to rely on him.”

“Can you help me?” Besang asked.

“What do you need me to do?” Ning Zhe replied immediately. “You and Miss Mei Lin saved my life. Whatever you ask, I will do my utmost.”

“Perfect.” Besang nodded. “I’m trapped in this game, but you’ve already escaped it—you have a degree of freedom. So I need you to leave the casino and find Mei Lin.”

“Huh?” Ning Zhe frowned. “But you just said you can’t determine Miss Mei Lin’s location—and I can’t leave the casino either…”

“Listen first,” Besang interrupted. “If I say this, I have confidence it will succeed.”

“Alright, go on.” Ning Zhe nodded. Besang inclined his head and continued: “Before you were pulled into the wager, you must have explored the opera house. Have you ever experienced this?”

“—People you could just see and touch would vanish the moment you turned a corner or opened a door, leaving only an empty corridor and you alone.”

Ning Zhe nodded. “Yes. I had several companions searching for the opera house’s exit, but one by one, they disappeared during our exploration. I found no trace of them—they seemed to have entered another world.”

“Not seemed. They did.” Besang said. “They entered another world.”

“What does that mean?” Ning Zhe played along, his expression blank, eyes wide with surprise.

“This world is layered.” Besang reached into his coat and pulled out a phone, then extended his hand to Ning Zhe. “Give me your phone.”

“Alright.” Ning Zhe complied obediently. “What do you mean by layered world?”

“Look.” Besang placed both phones face-to-face on the table, their screens now reflecting each other. “What do you see?”

“Uh… the black screens act like mirrors, reflecting the other phone’s image,” Ning Zhe replied honestly.

“Now look inside the screen’s reflection. What do you see in that reflection?” Besang asked again.

Ning Zhe paused, then understood: “The reflected phone’s screen is itself a reflective surface—it contains another reflection inside it!”

“Correct.”

Besang snapped his fingers, returned the phone to Ning Zhe, and said:

“Phone screens have low reflectivity, so this is just a demonstration. If two ordinary mirrors were placed face-to-face, light would refract endlessly between them, generating infinite nested reflections—this is the physical phenomenon known as ‘Tong Guang Mirror.’”

“This is a strange rule called ‘Xi Zhao.’ The Saint Gloria Opera House now lies under its influence. Whenever someone passes through the space between two mirrors, their existence is captured by ‘Xi Zhao’ and falls into this infinite layered mirror world.”

“The layer we currently occupy is one of those infinite mirror worlds—the prison sealed by the Golden Clan to contain the Gambler.”

Besang slipped his phone back into his pocket and continued:

“The spirits imprisoned within the Xi Zhao realm are not only the Gambler. After all, the mirror world’s layers are ‘infinite’—each layer can hold one spirit. Theoretically, it could imprison every ghost in the world. But theory is theory.”

“Exactly how many spirits have been sealed within the Xi Zhao prison over the years—only the Golden Clan knows.”

No sooner had he spoken than Besang whirled his head, his eyes locked on Ning Zhe’s ordinary face beneath its dark hair. The faint smile on Ning Zhe’s face was matched by a creeping terror that slowly spread across Besang’s own face:

“Why… did I say all that?”

(End of Chapter)