One Person: I, the Dragon Tiger Stall King! I Won!

95: The trial of the stall ownerThe biting wind of the Northwest whipped up sand and gravel, blowing across this barren wilderness, yet it could not extinguish the three hundred surrounding fire circles.

There were no high platforms, no Magical Artifacts, and certainly no majestic halls; this was the ’Burning Wish Grand Formation’ initiated by Cui Wujiu.

Representatives of Fire-Bearers from the Northwest, the Central Plains, and the South sat on the ground, silently watching the open space in the center. Everyone’s face was reflected by the leaping flames, their expressions solemn.

The three hundred stove fires were all borrowed from the most ordinary stalls in various city markets. They had once roasted sweet potatoes, baked flatbreads, and boiled tea soup, but at this moment, they had become the only witnesses to this trial.

The heavy sound of iron chains dragging across the ground rang out, and three figures were escorted up.

They were ragged, their hair as withered as grass; these were the three masterminds who had once stirred up monstrous waves and presided over the ’Burning Wish Grand Formation’.

They were not the heinous Devil Heads one might imagine, but three old people who had long since vanished from the world of superhumans.

Seeing them, some of the older representatives even let out low gasps of surprise, recognizing their identities—they were all pitiful people who had been persecuted by the Quanxing evildoers decades ago, ending up with broken families.

The three were escorted to the center of the fire circle, their knees went weak, and they knelt heavily on the ground.

The cold wind blew past, whipping their thin clothes and drying the tear stains on their faces.

The eldest of them spoke, his voice as hoarse as two stones rubbing together: ’We... we never intended to harm so many people. Back then, those animals from Quanxing slaughtered my entire Family just because they coveted our Family heirloom. We were filled with hatred! We hated ourselves for being so weak! We just wanted to become strong, strong enough that no one could ever take anything away from us again... We found the method for the Burning Wish, thinking we could borrow the fire of all people under heaven to forge supreme power...’

His voice choked, and murky, aged tears welled up again: ’But we forgot... we forgot what our Master taught us back then: fire is borrowed from heaven and earth, not snatched from others’ hands.’

As his voice fell, the entire scene was deathly silent.

Only the three hundred stove fires swayed gently, making soft crackling sounds, as if sighing silently.

Anger, hatred, pity, sorrow—all kinds of emotions intertwined in people’s hearts, yet no one spoke a word of condemnation.

Just then, Cui Wujiu stepped out from the crowd.

He did not walk towards the three, but simply asked, his voice calm across the swaying firelight: ’Have you ever lit your own fire?’

The three raised their heads blankly, their eyes full of confusion, and finally, they shook their heads in unison.

They had spent their whole lives practicing the Legacy of their School, borrowing the Cultivation Technique fire of their Family, and finally, they had even delusionally attempted to steal the Power Of Will fire of the people of the world, yet they had never truly lit a single, most ordinary flame for themselves.

Cui Wujiu said no more. From his coarse cloth tunic, he carefully took out three small pinches of ash.

The ash was black with streaks of white, as if it still retained a faint, lingering warmth.

He stepped forward slowly and handed the three pinches of stove ash to the trembling hands of the three people respectively.

This is the ash from the stove under Mount Longhu when Zhang Xuanyi first set up his stall. His voice was not loud, but it clearly reached the entire wilderness. Go back, use it to start a fire, and light a fire in your own stove. Burn it for three days and three nights. You are not allowed to use a single Talisman, not allowed to borrow a shred of Qi, just use the most ordinary dry firewood, use these hands of yours that have snatched and received things, and use your heart—use the desire you still have to live—to light the fire.

The three held that pinch of stove ash as if holding a heavy burden, and also as if holding their last chance at survival. Tears burst forth like a dam, and they wept uncontrollably, kowtowing heavily to Cui Wujiu.

Cui Wujiu turned around, facing all the Fire-Bearers, his voice suddenly rising like a great bell, shaking the wilderness: ’Fire is not guilty! What is guilty is the human heart! From today on, a rule is set—whoever dares to use any means to delusionally seize the fire seed of others, there is no need to report to the government, no need to pray to the gods; the fire in your own stove will naturally extinguish itself!’

As soon as he finished speaking, those three hundred stove fires seemed to understand his words. The flames suddenly surged three feet high, the light blazing, illuminating the entire wilderness as bright as day!

Su Qingzhu stood at the edge of the crowd, her recorder faithfully recording everything. When the assembly dispersed, she returned alone to the abandoned old stall site under Mount Longhu.

She traveled through three regions, collecting sand from the Northwest, soil from the Central Plains, and water from the South, mixing them with the remnants of the three pinches of stove ash, and carefully applied them to the back cover of the last volume of her book, ’self-salvation’.

Afterward, she solemnly buried the book in the center of the stone circle.

That night, a drizzling rain fell once again.

Su Qingzhu stood in the distance, watching the rainwater soak into that piece of land.

A miracle happened. What appeared in the water droplets was no longer that illusory market, but scene after scene of real and warm images: a young girl with pigtails clumsily lighting a small pile of firewood to warm her mother’s hands as she returned late; an elderly person with a wrinkled face roasting the last half of a pancake over a weak charcoal fire to give to a shivering stray cat; a child in a soaked School uniform carefully drying his shoes with a hand-warming stove given by his desk mate...

Scene after scene, all were of the mortal world. Cluster after cluster, all were human hearts.

Su Qingzhu’s eyes moistened. She wiped away her tears and typed a new title on her recorder: ’Fire Does Not Need Judgment, It Only Recognizes the Human Heart.’

Meanwhile, Zhang Xuanyi quietly returned to that southern water town.

The old woman who sold roasted sweet potatoes was gone, and the old stove that had accompanied him for so long was cold and extinguished.

He squatted down, took out the last half of a smooth-worn grass root from his tunic, and gently inserted it into the soil beside the stove, as if saying goodbye to an old friend.

’Young man, you’re back?’ A warm voice sounded behind him.

Zhang Xuanyi turned his head and saw the old woman who had once given him a new stove standing there with a smile, holding a brand-new, smaller clay stove in her hands.

’My good-for-nothing grandson heard your story and insisted that he also wanted to learn ’fire-spreading’, so he made this for me overnight.’

He took the stove, which carried the fragrance of soil and the warmth of its maker, and a soft spot in his heart was touched.

He did not speak, just smiled at the old woman and gently tapped the opening of the stove with his fingertip.

A cluster of flames quietly ignited.

The flame was no longer purely cyan, but cyan mixed with gold, gentle and thick, as if breathing together with the pulse of the earth beneath his feet.

At that moment, Zhang Xuanyi completely understood.

The so-called ’System’ had long disappeared with his exhausted Karma, but the things he had once ignited—those scattered kindnesses and hopes in the human world—had broken free from the shackles of data and begun their own growth.

Deep in the distant Mount Longhu, the Old Earth Vein Turtle, which had slept for three hundred years, opened its eyes that had seen all the vicissitudes of life for the last time.

It sensed that the myriad cyan flames spread across the Divine Land had completely washed away resentment and greed, forming a stable and gentle cycle with the earth’s veins.

It slowly retracted its head into its shell, letting out a satisfied whisper: ’Three hundred years of Seal, originally to suppress the Heart Demon... Now the Demon is not outside, but in the greed for fire in the human heart. Since the fire has purified itself, the mountain... no longer needs to be closed.’

The Old Earth Vein Turtle opened its mouth and spat out the last stream of pure earth Qi, like a golden Dragon, silently injecting it into the Ancestral Master altar of Mount Longhu.

The next morning, the two vermilion gates of the Tianshi Mansion opened slowly with a creak, without any external force.

Sunlight shone on the plaque above the lintel. The original, sweeping characters for ’Tianshi Mansion’ quietly faded away like ink, and in their place were a line of simple yet profound small characters: ’Spreading the Heaven and Earth, Fire Illuminating the Human World.’

Zhang Xuanyi stood on the 108th stone step of the outer mountain, quietly watching this scene.

He smiled, a smile of immense relief.

Then, he turned around, walked down the mountain step by step, and merged into the bustling market crowd that had just awakened at the foot of the mountain.

When Su Qingzhu chased down to the foot of the mountain, she only saw the bustling crowd; where was his shadow?

A gust of wind blew, and a piece of verdant grass leaf drifted down, landing right at her feet.

She bent down to pick it up, placed it to her lips, and also smiled: ’This time, you left on your own.’

The camera slowly pulled back, from the market under Mount Longhu to the southern water town, and then to the Northwest wilderness. The stove fires of thousands of stalls lit up one after another, as if in one night, the stars had fallen to the earth.

And above every cluster of leaping human fireworks, there seemed to be a corner of an invisible, tattered stall cloth quietly floating, protecting that smallest yet greatest light and heat.

The sky lightened slightly, and the southern water town woke up from the thin mist.

Zhang Xuanyi was wearing a coarse cloth short shirt, mixed in the crowded morning market, holding a piping hot fried dough stick just out of the fryer, eating it leisurely.

The mellow fragrance of soy milk, the charred fragrance of fried dough sticks, mixed with the fishy smell of aquatic products and the earthy smell of vegetables, formed the most vivid symphony of the mortal world.

He enjoyed this feeling, just like a drop of water merging into the ocean.

However, just as he brushed past a vegetable farmer carrying a pole, he suddenly stopped, and his chewing slowed down.

His nose twitched slightly, and his eyes instantly became sharp.

In that familiar, warm current of human fireworks, somehow, a trace of an extremely faint, yet abnormally cold, fishy smell had mixed in.

It was not the fishy smell of fish and shrimp, but a kind of... hungry smell that seemed to come from the abyss.