The world reformed around Lin Feng not as a place, but as an absence of one. He stood in a seamless, featureless, and infinite expanse of pure, white light. There was no floor, no ceiling, no horizon. It was a place outside of physics, a silent, sterile void. An arena for the soul.
He stood, his body clad in his GAC combat suit, his senses on high alert, waiting for the enemy. He did not have to wait long.
From the white nothingness before him, a figure began to coalesce. Light and shadow wove together, forming a perfect, one-to-one duplicate of himself. Same height, same build, same suit, same hard, disciplined lines of his face. It was like looking into a perfect, three-dimensional mirror.
But the eyes were wrong.
Lin Feng's own eyes, which he had seen reflected a thousand times, held the weight of his history. They held the weariness of a hundred battles, the cold, banked fire of his rage, the phantom shadow of a betrayal that had defined him.
The eyes of the being before him were empty of all of it. They were perfectly calm, perfectly serene. They were the placid, untroubled surface of a frozen lake. They held all of his strength, but none of his pain. It was the face of a soldier who had never been wounded, a weapon that had never been scarred.
The Mirror did not speak. It did not waste a single, superfluous moment. It attacked.
Its movements were a perfect, fluid execution of his own fighting style, the Northern Star Fist he had spent a lifetime perfecting. Every block, every strike, was a textbook model of efficiency and grace.
Lin Feng met the assault, his own body moving with the ingrained instinct of a master warrior. Their first exchange was a silent, blurring storm of blows, their limbs meeting with sharp, cracking sounds that were the only violation of the void's absolute silence. They were perfectly matched. A stalemate of impossible speed and skill.
Then, the Mirror raised its hand. A perfect, stable sphere of violet Annihilation Fire pulsed into existence in its palm.
Lin Feng's blood ran cold. He countered, summoning his own fire. The two spheres of power met in the space between them, erupting in a silent, violent implosion of purple light that threw them both back.
The battle escalated. It became a duel between two gods in a white heaven. But Lin Feng, for the first time in his life, was on the losing end.
Every technique he used, the Mirror used a fraction of a second faster, a fraction of a degree more perfectly. Every weakness he tried to exploit in his own style, the Mirror had already countered.
The truth of the trial began to dawn on him, a horrifying, creeping realization. The Mirror was not just a copy. It was an ideal. It was him, stripped of all the things he thought made him strong. It had his power, but not his rage. It had his skill, but not his grief. It had his memories of combat, but not the emotional scars they had left behind.
He poured his anger into a blow, the memory of his team's sacrifice fueling a furious surge of power. The Mirror met the blow effortlessly, its own power flaring to match his, and its counter-strike was faster, colder, and more precise, leaving a smoking, painful gash across his armor.
The more fury he used, the stronger the Mirror became. The more he relied on the pain that had always been his fuel, the more effortlessly the Mirror defeated him. He was fighting a perfect, passionless engine of war, and his own human emotions were nothing but a liability, a flaw in his own design that his opponent did not share.
He was not just fighting a mirror. He was fighting the perfect, untroubled, and unbeatable soldier he could never be. And for the first time, Lin Feng, the unbreakable sword of the GAC, began to understand what it felt like to be truly, utterly outmatched.