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

96: The fire is out, but the heart is still brightThat scent was cold and viscous; despite it being a summer morning, it made the fine hairs on the back of Zhang Xuanyi’s neck stand up.

It ignored the sweet fragrance of the roasted sweet potato and drowned out the soft stickiness of the glutinous rice cake, coiling like an invisible venomous snake above the warmth of the stove fire, greedily eyeing something.

Zhang Xuanyi’s gaze swept seemingly casually over the flustered youth, finally landing on the handful of newly added charcoal.

The charcoal was good, thoroughly dried, but that wasn’t the key.

The key was the few pieces of aged stove ash beneath the charcoal, acting as kindling.

Deep within the ashes, a trace of almost imperceptible Qi was slowly drifting out, originating from the same source as that abyssal hunger.

This fire had been ”fed.”

The flame in the stove suddenly leaped up, and the blue-tinged golden core twisted into a tiny vortex, staring directly at Zhang Xuanyi like a newborn fledgling, instinctively seeking the embrace of its mother.

This was the purest fire spirit, which had sensed the abyss-like Qi within him and emitted a resonance of submission and intimacy.

The corner of Zhang Xuanyi’s mouth, holding a blade of grass, curled up slightly, revealing a playful, cold sneer.

The thought in his mind—”Fire recognizes people, but people need not recognize fire”—was not arrogance, but a warning.

Because he knew that once one responded to this fire, it meant accepting a Karma.

And this Karma before him was sickeningly foul.

He stood up, handed the leftover glutinous rice cake to the sweating youth, and turned to blend into the crowd.

Just as he turned, from the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a black streak, thinner than a strand of hair, flashing through the ashes at the bottom of the stove as the fire flickered.

That black streak was not a burn mark; it was more like a... living brand.

He didn’t stop, only seemingly unintentionally raising his hand to brush off the corner of his clothes.

A faint gust of finger wind flicked out, precisely brushing across the ground at the base of the stove.

The ashes there were stirred by the wind and swirled gently, and the black streak vanished completely, as if wiped away by an invisible hand.

After doing all this, Zhang Xuanyi’s figure had merged into the bustling morning market crowd, as if he had never appeared.

But that obscure flow of Qi, which he had forcibly cut off and which had been born from the black streak, acted like an invisible fuse, beginning to point toward a distant and definite direction on the map of his spiritual perception.

In a city thousands of miles away, Su Qingzhu was facing a different kind of trial by ”fire.”

”Qingzhu, I’ve read your manuscript.” The editor pushed the printed draft back to her, sounding helpless. ”’Fire Needs No Trial, It Only Recognizes the Human Heart’—the title is impactful, but the content... is too esoteric. What is ’Tan Huo Yao’? What is ’Power Of Will Ignition’? Readers only want to read social news, not folk tales about monsters.”

Su Qingzhu did not argue.

She knew that some truths could not be made public in black and white.

She calmly took back the manuscript and nodded, saying, ”I understand, Editor.”

Leaving the newspaper office, she didn’t go home but instead went to a studio specializing in metal etching.

She refined and encrypted the core content of the manuscript, reformatted it, and engraved it onto three palm-sized copper plates.

The copper plates were cold and heavy, and the characters on them glinted with a hard light under the lamp.

Subsequently, she placed these three copper plates into three inconspicuous packages and mailed them to three addresses—a frontier town in the Northwest Gobi Desert, a school for volunteer teachers in the deep mountains of the Southwest, and a fishing village on the coast of the East Sea.

These places were where ”Tan Huo Yao” was most widespread and where the fire faith was purest.

She believed that someone would eventually be able to understand.

That night, she did not stay in the city but drove alone to the foothills of the former site of Mount Longhu.

This place had long been abandoned, leaving only broken walls and ruins.

She pitched a tent under the starry sky and took out an old police notebook from her backpack.

This was her father’s heirloom.

Three years ago, her father had died in an accident while investigating a serial arson case internally known as the ”Quanxing Case.”

The case ultimately concluded with a few lunatics committing self-immolation, but Su Qingzhu always felt it wasn’t that simple.

She flipped through her father’s vigorous handwriting page by page, when suddenly, her fingertips felt an unusual bump.

She carefully peeled apart the two pages that were stuck together, and a flattened Talisman fell out.

The Talisman had yellowed, and the traces of cinnabar had faded.

This was physical evidence her father had brought back from the last scene of the ”Quanxing Case.” Logically speaking, it should have long since lost all its spirituality and been no different from waste paper.

However, at this moment, under the cold moonlight, this ”dead” Talisman was slightly hot to the touch, as if something was awakening inside it.

Alarm bells rang in Su Qingzhu’s heart.

She immediately took a small oil-paper packet from her portable first-aid kit; inside were a few charred leaves and a few shriveled mung bean shells.

This was a folk remedy her grandmother in the countryside had taught her, specifically for testing evil, sinister things.

She held her breath and gently pressed a charred leaf and a mung bean shell onto the Talisman.

With a soft ”sizzle,” it was as if cold water had been poured into hot oil.

The mung bean shell turned charred black in an instant, then crumbled into dust!

And the Talisman also split down the middle, opening a tiny crack.

A wisp of golden light, so faint it was almost imperceptible, flashed from the crack and vanished.

At the same time, half a sentence of broken ancient seal script appeared in Su Qingzhu’s mind like an imprint: ”...The fire seed returns to its source, only blood can awaken it.”

Blood? Whose blood?

Su Qingzhu gripped her father’s notebook tightly, her heart pounding uncontrollably.

Meanwhile, in an ancient town in the heart of the Central Plains.

In front of the ”Nameless Stove Corner,” Cui Wujiu was surrounded by a group of children.

Each child held a twig, drawing the Talisman runes of ”Tan Huo Yao” crookedly on the muddy ground.

This was an old rule in the town; children had to learn to draw Talismans from a young age, as it was said to gain the protection of the Fire God and ensure a life free from worries about food and clothing.

But today’s fire was not right.

The ”Nameless Fire” in the stove corner, which should have been a warm, bright yellow, was tinged with a hint of agitated scarlet today.

No matter how standard the runes drawn by the children were, they would dissipate at the last moment of formation, unable to ignite a single spark.

A little boy with sweat all over his face was so anxious he was about to cry. He looked up at Cui Wujiu and asked, ”Sir, why can’t my Talisman light the fire?”

Cui Wujiu squatted down, looked at him kindly, and asked, ”When you draw the Talisman, what are you thinking about in your heart? Are you thinking about lighting the fire quickly, or are you thinking about achieving Immortal Ascension soon?”

The child was stunned by the question and shook his head in confusion.

Cui Wujiu sighed softly, took out the half of the roasted sweet potato that was well wrapped in cloth from his bosom, carefully broke off half of it, and handed it to the boy.

The sweet potato was still warm, and a sweet fragrance filled the air.

”First learn to use fire to warm people, then think about lighting fire to communicate with the divine.”

Before his voice had faded, from the other end of the ancient town, a sudden burst of urgent gongs sounded, mingled with suppressed wailing.

Everyone looked toward the sound and saw a white banner hanging high above the lintel of a household.

The townspeople whispered, ”It’s Wang Laosan’s house! His old man was fine last night, how could he just leave like that?”

”That’s not all, look at their chimney, no smoke! The stove fire... the stove fire is out!”

”Good heavens, when a person dies, the fire goes out. This hasn’t happened in our town for hundreds of years! The fire has lost its root; this is a punishment from heaven!”

Panic spread through the crowd like a plague.

Cui Wujiu stood up, tucked the remaining half of the sweet potato back into his bosom, pushed through the crowd, and walked straight toward the house with the white banner.

He bowed deeply to the grief-stricken family, his voice not loud but clearly overpowering all the noise: ”Let me light the last stove fire for the old gentleman.”

Zhang Xuanyi had already reached the desolate mountain cliff.

That obscure flow of Qi finally converged into the three mottled, broken steles before him.

These were the remnants of the steles from the ”Burning Wish Grand Formation” three hundred years ago, which had almost dragged half of the world of outcasts into it.

Now, a deep crack had split each of the three stone steles, as if something had forced them open from the inside.

And embedded in the core of each crack was a pinch of seemingly ordinary ash.

Zhang Xuanyi recognized that ash.

That was the bottom ash from the old stoves of Mount Longhu, one of the purest fire starters in the world.

And two of the pinches still carried a faint, elusive fragrance of sweet potato.

They were the ones Cui Wujiu had given away.

His fingertips gently touched the cold stele stone.

The stone stele trembled slightly, and a whisper that seemed to come from ancient times echoed directly in his mind: ”Fire borrows the human heart, people covet the fire spirit... Reincarnation is not broken...”

”Reincarnation?” Zhang Xuanyi let out a cold sneer, his eyes sharp as knives. ”Just some rats hiding their heads and showing their tails, who have changed to a more insidious way of playing. Three hundred years ago, you wanted to borrow the Power Of Will of ten thousand people to burn the mountains and rivers. Now, you want to use these three portions of pure fire as a guide to trace back to the source and directly burn the ’Source of the Fire Seed’?”

He took out the last photocopied yellow paper from his bosom.

On the paper was a fragment of an ancient Talisman, his only clue in investigating this matter.

Without even looking at it, he rubbed his hands together, and the yellow paper instantly turned into fragments filling the sky, which he scattered with a wave of his hand toward the tops of the three steles.

There was no flame, no light.

The moment the paper fragments touched the stone steles, they transformed into golden Talisman seals, drilling into the cracks like living things, sealing the three pinches of ash tightly.

In an instant, it was as if an invisible giant hand had swept across the land of the Nine Provinces.

From bustling cities to remote mountain villages, across the entire country, those three hundred and seventy thousand blue flames, whether bright or dim, dimmed in unison at the same moment, as if their throats had been throttled, collectively holding their breath once.

Late at night, deep in the earth veins of Mount Longhu, an old turtle that had been sleeping for who knows how many years slowly opened its eyes, spraying two chaotic streams of earth Qi from its nostrils.

It had sensed it.

The three polluted fire sources had returned to their proper positions, and the conspiracy targeting the ”Source of the Fire Seed” had been temporarily blocked.

But this was only the surface.

Deeper in the earth veins, three ”static fire veins” that it had never seen before had already quietly formed.

They did not rise, did not burn; like three dormant venomous snakes, they were gathering insidiously and firmly along the remnants of the long-abandoned ancient Talisman array, heading toward the direction of the ancestral altar of Mount Longhu.

What terrified it even more was that the starting point of these three static fire veins was not some paradise, but the stove of three perfectly ordinary households.

And the only thing the owners of those three households had in common was that they were the pious men and women who had been the first to respond to the call and light their stove fires during the recent ”Nameless Day.”

The old turtle let out a long, low moan, attempting to mobilize the main Qi of the earth veins to break them.

However, it discovered with horror that the main Qi of the earth veins was sending a hint of weak resistance.

It was as if the earth itself was bound and swept up by that ”Power Of Will inertia” gathered from the beliefs of the masses.

It closed its eyes helplessly, and the last whisper dissipated in the empty underground cave: ”Fire burns itself, and also devours itself... This time, who is it that is teaching people to light the fire?”

The camera slowly pulled back, crossing Mount Longhu, crossing the ancient town in the Central Plains, and crossing the lights of ten thousand homes.

The bustling market was still warm, and the noisy human voices were full of the scent of life.

However, in the shadows where some stove fires flickered, those unnoticeable ashes were, contrary to the norm, slowly swirling inward.

That posture was just like eyes that had been sleeping for thousands of years, quietly opening.