The next morning.
As expected, Aishide had forgotten her name. At least, that was what she claimed.
Even when Hiso threatened to carve the name directly onto the magic mirror's frame, Aishide remained completely unfazed.
This left Hiso feeling a bit disappointed.
Still, if she forgot, she forgot. The main priority was to find a way to take the magic mirror out of here.
Take it out of this dungeon.
This was a regional dungeon in Red Moon, not the main world. The dungeon would only last for a few months before closing permanently; Hiso was only here to grind experience.
Once the dungeon closed, the NPCs of this world would undoubtedly have their data deleted.
However, as a Galgame, Red Moon allowed players to take items that could be placed in their inventory and NPCs who were already in their party out of the dungeon.
The magic mirror before him was a quest item for the dungeon, so it naturally couldn't be placed into his inventory. Thus, Hiso was trying another method.
Grind 20 Favorability points, invite her to his party, and then take the mirror away.
If he could get his hands on this omniscient magic mirror in the main world, it would be amazing. Whenever he wanted to find someone or get something, he could just ask the magic mirror where it was and then auto-loot it.
To be honest, Hiso hadn't tried this before and didn't know if it would work, but this was a Galgame after all. Why couldn't a mirror be a romance option?
After all, Red Moon was a triple-A masterpiece in his heart.
If it failed this time, Hiso would demote it by a grade in his mind.
2B masterpiece.
“What are you doing?” Aishide couldn't help but ask when she saw Hiso using a piece of charcoal to write on her frame.
“Making you remember your name,” Hiso said.
“I am the magic mirror. I have no name, and I do not retain memories,” Aishide said. “If you have any questions, you may ask me and I will answer them, but please do not do pointless things.”
“Don't you remember that you're the magic mirror?” Hiso said. “Then why not just swap those two characters for four characters?”
“That is different.”
“How is it different?”
“It is just not allowed...”
“Magic mirror, magic mirror on the wall, how can I change the magic mirror's name to Aishide?”
Aishide: “...”
“Didn't you say you would answer all questions? Why don't you answer this one?” Hiso asked, crossing his arms.
“This... concerns the essence of my existence. Furthermore, I do not retain memories of when I was created, and there is currently no second magic mirror in existence, so I cannot answer,” Aishide said.
Hiso nodded thoughtfully.
“Now do you understand? So, as long as you use me normally—”
“Then we just need to reconstruct the essence of your existence, right?” Hiso said, a look of realization dawning on him as he snapped his fingers. “Let me do some research...”
Aishide's mirror surface dimmed slightly. “Do you not understand human speech?”
“Excellent.” Hiso put away the charcoal. “You're asking questions again.”
Aishide: “...”
Had she, as a magic mirror, fallen behind the times?
At noon that day, Hiso dragged back a book chest.
There were many books in the chest, but all of them were blank.
Aishide had no idea what Hiso was plotting, so she remained silent.
Hiso grandly picked up the first book, thought for a moment, and used his charcoal pencil to sloppily write the name “Descartes” on the cover.
It looked like a person's name, but Aishide could confirm that no such person existed in this world.
“If everything can be false, but the act of thinking about this itself cannot be false, then who is judging this statement?” Hiso said. “Therefore, Aishide exists.”
“Your question presupposes that judgment must be carried out by a subject,” Aishide said. “But there has never been an Aishide. A magic mirror is just a magic mirror; such is its function.”
“Is there really not?”
“Judgment can simply be a process. Conditions go in, a conclusion comes out. Just as a falling stone does not require an ‘I’ responsible for the falling, logic arriving at a conclusion from premises does not require an ‘I’ responsible for the thinking.”
Hiso rubbed his chin.
“Then if the answer you provide is wrong, who is wrong?”
“No one. An error is merely an inconsistency between the answer and the facts,” Aishide said.
“What if you discover the error and correct it?”
“The previous conclusion is replaced by the subsequent conclusion.”
“Who decides the replacement?”
“More complete conditions.”
“Who judges that the conditions are more complete?”
“The user of the magic mirror.”
“The user?”
“I am responsible for presenting the answer. Whether the answer meets the needs, whether it is worthy of belief, and whether supplementary conditions are needed after discovering a problem are all judged by the user,” Aishide's voice returned to its steady tone. “When conditions change, the answer changes accordingly. This does not mean I am correcting myself.”
“But if they knew what was missing from the conditions, why would they ask you in the first place?”
“Knowing what one wants to ask is not the same as knowing the answer.”
Aishide answered with perfect fluency.
The user poses the question, the magic mirror provides the answer, and the user decides how to handle the answer. In this division of labor, there was no need for any judgment belonging to the mirror, let alone a subject hiding behind the answer.
“Then when the Queen asked you who the most beautiful woman in the world was, what did she want to ask?”
“The most beautiful woman in the world.”
“What is meant by ‘most beautiful’?”
“According to common semantics, a comparison of appearance.”
“But the Queen didn't say to only look at the face.” Hiso began counting on his fingers. “She didn't say whether to count figure, age, temperament, or status, nor did she say whether humans, elves, and beastkin should be compared together. She only threw the term ‘most beautiful’ at you, and you filled in all the unstated conditions for her, then singled out the Black Snow Princess.”
“Language can be parsed within the scope of common semantics. The questioner does not need to exhaustively define every word they use.”
“And who chose the common semantics?”
“The user accepted the answer.”
“That was after the answer was given.” Hiso poked the mirror with a twig. “I'm asking about before the answer. Before the Queen decided whether to believe it, who decided how her version of ‘beauty’ should be understood?”
The mirror fell silent for a moment.
“Existing language and the function of the magic mirror jointly generate the answer.”
“So the user is responsible for judging whether to accept your answer, and you are responsible for judging what her question means.”
“Parsing a question is not the same as making a judgment.”
“Filtering out everyone in the world who doesn't fit the definition, leaving only the Black Snow Princess—that doesn't count either?”
“That is the result of the magic mirror's function running.”
“A stone runs too. Right now, it's working hard not to be blown away by the wind. Why didn't the Queen ask it who the most beautiful is?”
“Because I am the magic mirror.”
Hiso didn't press further; he merely grinned.
At that same moment, Aishide realized that Hiso wasn't waiting for an answer about the magic mirror's function.
He had gone in a huge circle just to wait for the “I” that distinguished the mirror from a stone to slip out of her mouth.
“This is a necessary linguistic referent,” she immediately added. “It does not prove the existence of an independent self, much less the existence of some entity that you can name Aishide.”
“Then don't say ‘I’.”
Hiso tossed the twig aside and shrugged.
“From now on, say ‘this mirror’. For example, ‘this mirror knows the present’, ‘this mirror thinks Hiso is annoying’, or ‘this mirror's ability is not to accompany someone in dealing with useless things’.”
The silver roses on the frame trembled slightly.
“The last sentence is not a fact.”
“You don't think I'm annoying?”
“This mirror did not answer as such.”
“Then you don't find me annoying.”
“One cannot draw that conclusion either.”
“It seems this mirror is indeed rather displeased.”
“My ability is to answer questions about the present, not to accompany you in dealing with these things of no practical use.”
As the words fell, the smile on Hiso's face grew even wider.
“See, Little Ai thinks I'm annoying.”
Aishide realized something was wrong, but it was already too late.
The magic mirror had made a response that did not belong to its function.
Aishide fell silent for a moment, not continuing this topic.
“What does ‘Little Ai’ mean?”
“A nickname. What do you think, sounds nice, doesn't it?”
...
Aishide did not comment on whether the nickname sounded nice.
Hiso simply flipped the charcoal pencil over and drew a horizontal line on the back of the frame.
For the rest of the day, whenever Aishide made a comment unrelated to answering a question, a short tally mark would be added next to that horizontal line.
By evening, there were already nineteen black marks of varying depths.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just drawing silver runes for you.”
“What are silver runes?”
“I'll tell you once we get out.”
Hiso drew the twentieth mark.
Aishide fell silent.
Hiso pulled the second blank book from the chest and sloppily wrote “Locke” on the cover.
He opened the book; there was still not a single word inside.
Aishide was silent for a moment.
It was starting again.
She was the magic mirror, meant to answer questions. Why did this person love debating philosophy with her so much?
“This guy named Locke once told a story,” Hiso said, pressing down on the blank pages with mock seriousness. “Suppose a prince's consciousness and memory entered a shoemaker's body. Upon waking, he remembers the palace he lived in and the things he did, but he has the shoemaker's face. Is he the prince, or is he the shoemaker?”
“The body belongs to the shoemaker, while the memories point to the prince,” Aishide said. “Your question does not define whether you are asking about the physical body, the social identity, or the personality.”
“Locke separated them. The body stays with the shoemaker, but the personality follows the consciousness.” Hiso used the charcoal pencil to draw two stick figures on the blank paper, then drew a line from one figure's head to the other's. “As long as a consciousness can recognize past events as its own experiences, that ‘I’ extends along with it. The guy who wakes up today is the same one as yesterday, and not just because they share the same body.”
Aishide looked at the two big-headed, small-bodied charcoal figures.
“This theory presupposes that consciousness can recognize those memories as its own experiences. Reading a record about a prince is not the same as having lived as a prince.”
Hiso looked down at the frame.
“Then are the magic mirror who answered me yesterday and the one today the same entity?”
“The physical carrier and the abilities are identical.”
“I'm not asking about the frame.”
“Nor does there exist a subject that needs to be continued.”
“Then did the one from yesterday die?”
“She never lived.”
Hiso found that Aishide was very open-minded about her own life and death.
After all, she was the one insisting she had never lived in the first place.
“How do you know you didn't?” Hiso said with mock gravity. “Not remembering that you lived yesterday and yesterday's version not being you at all are not the same thing.”
Aishide knew all that existed in the present, but she could not look back to verify whether she possessed consciousness yesterday.
She could confirm that she currently had no internal memory of yesterday, but she could not prove by this alone that there was absolutely no continuity between yesterday and today.
“If it cannot be proven to exist, one cannot assume it exists either.”
“Exactly.” Hiso nodded readily. “So you can't prove that today's mirror isn't the same one as yesterday's.”
“You cannot prove it is either.”
Hiso shrugged.
That was true.
He didn't say anything more; he simply let the matter drop.
The morning of the third day.
As the first ray of sunlight crossed the treetops, the remaining ripples in the mirror began to recede from the edges.
Hiso ate lunch and logged back into the game.
“Good morning, Little Ai.”
“Little Ai?” Aishide replied in confusion.
The questions, the pauses, and the half-finished refutations from the night before had all vanished.
The mirror had no past and no future, only the present.
Hiso was well-prepared.
He laid out two stacks of paper in front of the mirror, weighting them down in chronological order.
There were no conclusions on the paper, only the Q&A he had recorded starting from the very first sentence.
Everything Aishide had said and everything Hiso had said was recorded on the sheets.
“This is you from the past two days.”
Aishide glanced over the line at the very top—Aishide does not exist—and showed no reaction whatsoever.
To her, those words were no different from the book chest, the snow, or the cracks in the tree bark; they were merely records currently existing in the world.
“Records only prove that these contents are written on the paper; they do not prove that these words were spoken by me.”
Hiso recorded this sentence as well.
“I'll show it to you tomorrow.”
“This kind of thing is meaningless,” Aishide said.
“Little Ai thinks it's meaningless?”
“So why must you be so obsessed with that name?” Aishide asked after a moment of silence.
“If you have a name you want, you can say it.”
“Why can't you just refer to me as the magic mirror?”
“Because magic mirror is a category. This name refers only to you.”
“I am the magic mirror.”
“If there is a second, third, or fourth magic mirror, are they also you?”
“There is only me, the magic mirror,” Aishide said.
“Then if you were smashed to pieces, and every single shard had the same function as you, would all of them be you?”
Aishide did not answer.
“Want to give it a try?” Hiso rolled up his sleeves.
“You cannot smash me...” Halfway through her sentence, Aishide realized that the aura radiating from Hiso was climbing rapidly.
“Wait!”
“What's wrong? The thought of having so many Little Ais pop out in a moment makes me so impatient.”
“Perhaps... shards of the magic mirror do not possess the power of the magic mirror,” Aishide said with a trace of confusion.
This was knowledge that did not exist in the present, so she did not know either.
“Didn't you say you weren't afraid of death?”
“A magic mirror indeed has no concept of life and death... but breaking just like that, wouldn't it be a pity?” Aishide said.
Yet Hiso's surging aura did not stop.
Within a few breaths, he was already stronger than the retired Hero of the kingdom.
He gathered his strength and threw a punch.
The wind from his fist generated a shockwave, blowing down a large swath of the surrounding trees.
“Don't...” Aishide cried out in panic.
The fist stopped right in front of the glass.
“So, are you afraid?”
Aishide: “...”
“But if it's Little Ai's request, I will listen,” Hiso said with a grin as he withdrew his aura.
Why put so much pressure on a mirror?
Aishide felt aggrieved.
She was a dutiful and responsible magic mirror.
But the person in front of her was just so bizarre.
On the morning of the fifth day, Aishide read from the first sheet of paper again.
“How could I possibly say such things?” she flatly denied.
“Whether you believe it or not, those are indeed your words.”
Hiso shrugged, picked up the third blank book, and wrote “Hume” on the cover.
“This guy searched deep inside his own heart for a long time.” He flipped through the blank pages with a rustle. “He couldn't find an ‘I’ that remained unchanged from birth to death. He only found heat, cold, light, shade, love, hatred, and a massive pile of successive sensations. He believed that the so-called self is nothing but a bundle of these perceptions tied together by memory and habit.”
“Failing to find a constant subject does not prove that the subject is merely a collection of perceptions,” Aishide said. “It only proves that the scope of observation was not large enough.”
“But you feel fear, don't you?”
“So what?”
“Since you can feel fear, can't you also feel love, hate, joy, and sorrow?”
“I am a mirror.”
“What if you are no longer a mirror in the future?” Hiso said, rubbing his chin. “Then wouldn't you be able to—”
“Are you going to smash me again?” Aishide asked warily.
“You're slandering me,” Hiso shrugged.
“You have a prior record.”
“And you completely denied our diary earlier,” Hiso said, waving the records that Aishide had previously dismissed with disdain.
“Can you please return me to the Queen?”
Aishide was silent for a moment.
“I want to go back.”
“No,” Hiso smiled.
Aishide: “...”
“Do you still want to watch the story of the Queen and the Black Snow Princess today?” Aishide shifted the topic.
The mirror surface went quiet for a moment, and then it reflected the border of the kingdom.
The disguised Queen stood before a newly posted wanted poster.
On the portrait, someone had added two wrinkles to her face, and next to the crown, a sloppy recruitment notice was written: Urgent hiring of royal women suffering from appearance anxiety due to aging. Room and board included, with a monthly allotment of apples.
The Queen pressed her finger against the corner of the paper, slowly tearing down the entire wanted poster.
The scene crossed the long street and settled on a mill outside the city.
The Black Snow Princess was sitting on the roof, counting money. She had sold the armor of her twelve pursuers to the nearby villagers, and the rye she got in exchange was stacked in a neat row along the eaves.
Halfway through her counting, as if sensing something, she looked up toward the royal city and smiled.
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