The shower curtain was hung around the bathtub on an oval-shaped rail. The bottom was light blue in color and had darker floral pattern. Feng Bujue normally did not use this thing, but based on his exceptionally memory and his observation skills, he noticed something different about it.
“The color and shape of the pattern are different,” Feng Bujue mumbled and pulled open the curtain to inspect it. He examined for a long time, but still, he could not work out what it represented. Even though he knew it was different from his memory, regarding its hidden message, Feng Bujue was baffled.
“Could it be the angle of observation is wrong?” Feng Bujue murmured, but his hands had not stopped moving. He turned the curtain around and around, folding it inside different shapes, but it was no use. “Wait… observation angle!”
Suddenly, a light bulb lit up above his head. He took out the flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. Then he walked to the door and turned off the light in the bathroom.
“When I arrived, the light was already on. Normally, no one would walk to turn off the lights,” Feng Bujue said as he shone the flashlight at the curtain. “So… I have missed this.”
At that moment, on the light blue curtain, the pattern turned into an obvious green, and some white lines started to appear. So, the clue had always been before him, but he could not ’see’ it. The message on the curtain could only be seen under certain conditions. When the white light of the bathroom was on, the clues would not be soon. But the yellow light from the flashlight successfully lit up the letters with green body and white trim.
“M… D… D… M… I… I… R…” Feng Bujue found many letters on the curtain. He thought they would form a word, but he realized that was not the case because most of the letters were repeated, and there was no logic to its arrangement. After he checked the entire curtain, he scratched his chin, “Hmm… There are seven letters in total, A, D, I, K, M, O, R. They appear in different frequencies and sequences. What is…”
He took several steps back and studied the curtain.
“Could it be related to XY axis? Or is it a 3d image? Or… Oh!”
Then he saw the solution. He took out the notebook and pen and wrote down the letters on the curtain in a more rigid format. Several minutes later, the puzzle was solved.
“So, one only needs to arrange it and then eliminate the rest through match-pairing…” Feng Bujue looked down on the difficulty of this puzzle, and he got the correct answer easily. It did not take long for him to solve it. All the Ds, As, and Ks had been removed, and the remaining letters… if he ignored their horizontal position, lining them up according to the X axis, with them spaced one coordinate across from each other, they formed a word—mirror.
“So, all that just for me to turn to the mirror…” He returned to the sink, placed his flashlight at the side, and focused on the mirror. But he stood for one minute, and nothing happened. “I stared at the mirror like this earlier, and I didn’t see any hint or trigger any event. But now that I’ve solved the puzzle, how come… Hmm, could it be that?”
He seemed to have an idea again. He took up the notebook and looked at the letters that he had wiped away.
“The letters that I’ve lost are D, A, and K… If I add that with the letter that appeared the most, R, then…” Feng Bujue chuckled. “Hah… So, that is what it meant.”
The next second, he switched off the flashlight. Other people would have hesitated before they did this. After all, they were inside a cramped space alone, and there was an evil spirit outside the door. One needed courage to allow himself to be swallowed by darkness in this situation. But Feng Bujue felt no pressure. He switched off the flashlight once the thought came into his mind. It was just standing before the mirror in the dark. What danger could there be? At most, an extremely scary image would appear, combined with a hair-raising sound effect, and then what? Could that scare people to death?’
“What could it be?” Feng Bujue said before the mirror. Even though it was dark all around him, he kept his eyes glued to the mirror. Five seconds later, something did happen.
An eerie blue glow appeared on the mirror, and a human face floated up. This face looked like Feng Bujue, but it was not a reflection because when Brother Jue saw this face, he turned his neck and made several ghastly facial expressions, but they were not reflected by the face in the mirror. The face looked into Feng Bujue’s eyes through the mirror and revealed a faint smile. One would be spooked seeing this, but Feng Bujue only studied his ’reflection’ quietly, waiting for the next change to come. This continued for ten seconds until the ’Feng Bujue’ in the mirror showed a smile and started to speak. “My name is Feng Bujue.”
Even his voice was identical to Brother Jue’s…
“I am a novelist who obsesses over bizarre and terrible things.” Whenever he finished a sentence, he had to pause. “I live in a house alone. I write grotesque stories every day. The sunset from here is nothing but a sea of blood in hell. I can clearly see the dead who moan in pain inside it. The ditch in front of my house changes color every day. Like a river in hell, its color is a horrible rainbow—blood red, pus green, yellow like bile. The noise of the factories echoes from the bottom of the earth, and the stench, it smells like the vomit of a giant beast.
“I wonder, perhaps I am not in the human world but in hell. Am I insane?”
After the ’Feng Bujue’ stuttered over all of this, the face returned to silence. He looked at Feng Bujue as if waiting for an answer.
“Hahaha hahahaha…” Feng Bujue started to laugh, and then he mimicked the voice and tone and started to sing in a poem. “Fall, fall, the darkness of hell is infinite. Fire attack, water attack, half dead, people come and fall down… They died just like the way I imagined; they died for real!”
When he heard this song, the face in the mirror was flustered.
“What? You want me to continue?” Feng Bujue sang some more. “Fall, fall, come fall down to the bottom of hell. Sea of blood, mountain of needles, can’t you hear the groans of the dead?”
“Enough.” The face in the mirror stopped him.
Feng Bujue scoffed. He calmly said, “I read Lullabies from Hell when I was nine. At the time, I was young, and I was disturbed for three days. But I have already forgotten that memory. The impression of fear is still there though. It is not a bad strategy that you have used to elicit that sense of fear. Unfortunately…”
He shook his head with sadness. “The current me, under your guidance, can only remember the scenario and words from the comic clearly, but the fear has already disappeared.”
After hearing that, the face in the mirror started to change. He turned into the image of a bald, beardless middle-aged European man with a long brow. The strangest thing about this face was that his skin was a greenish white, like it had been soaked for too long in formalin.
“Alright, I’ve heard enough.” The face’s voice changed, too. “You have passed the second test.”
“Second?” Feng Bujue asked. “So, the letters on the curtain were the first test?”
“Yes,” the man replied. “Of the three tests, ’intelligence’, ’courage’, and ’benevolence’, you have…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa… wait.” Feng Bujue cut him off. “I haven’t finished my questions. Don’t go running off with the setting just yet. You at least have to answer my first question—can I turn the light back on?”
“Hmm… Yes,” the face in the mirror replied.
Feng Bujue sought his way to the door and switched on the light. Then he returned to the mirror to ask, “Okay, who are you? Zordon?”
“Huh?” The face was confused. “Who is Zordon?”
“The alien Zordon,” Feng Bujue said matter-of-factly, “The commander of the Power Rangers, the face in the glass tube.”
Despite Feng Bujue’s explanation, the face was still baffled.
“Er… I have no idea who you’re talking abo…” the face stuttered.
“Then forget it.” Feng Bujue cut him off impolitely again. “It’s fine if you have not seen it. The theme song is incredibly catchy. You won’t get it out of your mind that easily.”
“Er… I am the boss’ assistant, the magic mirror.” The magic mirror did not know how to face Feng Bujue, so he tried to lead the topic back.
“Oh, so your actual body is the face inside the mirror and not the mirror itself,” Feng Bujue concluded.
“I suppose you can say that…”
“Say… what is your relationship with Cang Jing Ren[1]?”
“Who is this Cang Jing Ren?”
“You can read my memory, but you don’t know the Power Rangers and Cang Jing Ren?” Feng Bujue asked suddenly. All that nonsense was actually a probe.
“I can only see limited pieces of your memory and not all of your memory,” the magic mirror answered.
“Oh, okay.” Feng Bujue got the answer he wanted and calmed down a lot. He said with a smile, “Now, you can continue telling me about the third trial.”
[1] One of the three main characters from a Taiwanese puppet show.
