When Zhen Liu ripped off the cloth covering the mirror, both he and cousins assumed nothing would happen.
This assumption didn't arise from the fact that they thought the mirror the was broken or because it was actually a red herring, rather, this assumption was due to Zhen Liu's cultivation and in-born issues.
[Chaos] was infamously able to resist, ignore and outright cancel anything remotely related to aether.
Attacks would fizzle out, traps would fail to properly activate and defenses would get torn to shreds as [Chaos] disrupted the flow of aether in devastating ways.
While there were exceptions to this outcome, they were normally quite rare.
On top of that, Zhen Liu had no aether channels to begin with, so any aether based clones would be created with those same problems and wouldn't be able to do anything.
However, this didn't turn out to be the case.
