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

98: The most primitive desire and the most resolute actionThe light of the hearth fire reflected in Su Qingzhu’s eyes; there were no flames within them, only a bottomless, icy pool.

This chill climbed rapidly up her spine, making her feel a bone-piercing cold amidst the humid, warm night breeze of Lingnan.

The disappearance of Tan Huo Yao was not an act of forgetting; it had been replaced by a colder, more realistic logic.

The flame of belief was being extinguished from the depths of people’s hearts.

She rushed almost instinctively toward the next market, which had once been the corner with the most vigorous hearth fires in the entire city.

However, before she even drew near, an aura of deathly silence rushed towards her.

In over a dozen stalls, the charcoal in the hearths was burning bright red, yet not a trace of heat radiated out, and the light appeared hollow and powerless.

Under her uncertain and fearful gaze, the dancing flames in the central oven faltered without warning, as if throttled by an invisible hand. They didn’t gradually shrink; instead, in an instant, all their vitality was drained away, turning into a barely perceptible wisp of blue smoke before vanishing completely.

No wind, no rain, no one touched it.

This was the ”self-extinguishing” phenomenon mentioned in the internal reference report.

Su Qingzhu’s heart raced as she stepped forward quickly, taking a brocade pouch from her bosom and carefully pinching out the last scorched-leaf mung bean shell.

This was a secret fire-starter of Mount Longhu, capable of resonating with every flame in the world.

She held her breath and pressed the bean shell close to the hearth, which still retained some warmth.

One breath, two breaths, three breaths.

The bean shell remained cold as before, with no reaction at all.

Su Qingzhu’s expression changed completely.

This proved that the flame had not died out; it was still here, it was just... refusing to burn.

Like a living person whose heart had died, refusing to breathe.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away at the Central Plains Academy, Cui Wujiu was shocked by a completely opposite scene.

He had originally come to investigate the reason for the precipitous drop in the study rate of the ”Spirit Communication Talisman” at the academy, but instead, he saw a scene he had never imagined.

The children who once clamored to draw ”Flying Fire Dragon Talismans” were now quietly gathered around a small copper stove.

The hearth fire was not vigorous, but warm, reflecting on faces that were pure and focused.

A girl was carefully turning the roasted chestnuts in the stove with a fire poker, while another boy lowered his voice, telling a supernatural story he had heard from a storyteller.

”Why aren’t you practicing Spirit Communication anymore?” Cui Wujiu’s voice broke the tranquility.

The girl telling the story looked up. In her clear eyes, there was no awe for the powerful, only a hint of matter-of-fact confusion: ”Teacher says fire is for warming hands, not for flying. Flying... makes your hands cold.”

Cui Wujiu was stunned at first, then burst into loud laughter, his laughter tinged with a bit of self-mockery and relief.

He was right; wasn’t the goal of a Mortal’s cultivation simply for the most basic warmth?

He turned to leave, but the ground beneath his feet transmitted a faint vibration.

This vibration did not come from the earth’s crust, but originated from the Earth Qi!

Streams of pure Earth Qi, like iron filings attracted by a magnet, were spontaneously and docilely converging toward that small copper stove.

He suddenly squatted down, his gaze locked tightly onto the ashes at the bottom of the stove.

There, without knowing when, naturally formed Talisman patterns had emerged!

The patterns did not look like they were carved by human hands, nor were they driven by a Formation; they were like the roots of an old tree, deeply anchored between the stove ashes and the earth, greedily yet harmoniously absorbing the energy of the earth’s veins, and then feeding it back to that tiny flame that existed only to warm the children’s hands.

Cui Wujiu’s breathing almost stopped. He muttered to himself, as if speaking to an unseen old friend: ”I was wrong... we were all wrong. Fire doesn’t rely on teaching, nor on seizing; it... it finds its own way.”

In a remote mountain village further south, Zhang Xuanyi had been sitting on the threshold of a household for three days.

The family’s stove had also been extinguished for three days.

He did not move, did not speak; he only listened quietly to the conversation inside the house.

”Dad, the fire is gone, are we not going to eat?” The childish voice carried a hint of unease.

A hoarse male voice responded, weary but filled with a stubborn determination: ”Silly boy, what nonsense are you talking about? If the fire is gone, we’ll just start another one. Do you think we have to kneel and beg the heavens for it?”

”But... I don’t know how.”

”I’ll teach you.” The father’s voice grew firm. ”Remember, fire is lit by people, not given by gods.”

That night, the moonlight was sparse.

Zhang Xuanyi saw the skinny little boy, truly in the courtyard, using a dry wooden stick and a wooden board, imitating the ancients, clumsily rubbing the wood to make fire.

His movements were without method, eager and forceful. Soon, blood blisters formed on his tender palms, and bloodstains dyed the wooden stick, dripping onto the ground mixed with sweat.

One hour, two hours...

The boy’s movements grew slower and slower, his eyes nearly drowned in despair.

Just at the moment he was about to give up, a faint, almost invisible spark finally burst forth from the intense friction.

It worked!

Zhang Xuanyi’s mouth curled into a smile.

He did not appear, nor did he use magic to help. Only after everyone was asleep did he quietly walk to the corner of the courtyard and casually insert half a withered grass root into the soil.

The next morning, when the family pushed open the door, they were stunned by the scene in the courtyard.

The spark from last night, which seemed so weak it might extinguish at any moment, had now turned into a flame half a person tall, burning quietly in the center of the courtyard.

The flame presented a gentle cyan color, without a trace of harsh heat, resonating faintly with the earth beneath, as if it had grown from this land itself.

Su Qingzhu compiled the images from the three locations and her own observations into a shocking internal reference report.

She did not submit it; instead, she took all the materials and returned alone to the old, long-abandoned stall site at the foot of Mount Longhu.

This was the source of Tan Huo Yao, and the place where everything began.

She stood in the center of that cold stone circle, tossing all the manuscripts and image materials into it, page by page.

There were no flames, yet the paper silently turned into flying ash.

A drizzle began to fall, though no one knew when, yet it strangely did not wet her clothes.

Droplets of rain hung suspended in mid-air, like crystal-clear lenses, reflecting not the old scenes of the market, but scenes from the ancient past—in the primordial wilderness, human ancestors rubbed wooden sticks with their hands, struck stones to create sparks, and gathered sunlight with smooth copper mirrors... There were no Talismans, no incantations, no prayers, only the most primitive desire and the most resolute action.

Tears streaked down Su Qingzhu’s cheeks. She trembled and wrote a new conclusion on the last sheet of paper before it turned to ash: ”Fire has never relied on divine bestowal; it only waits for someone willing to take action for themselves.”

The moment her words fell, deep within the Earth veins of Mount Longhu, the old turtle that had slept for who knows how many years slowly opened its eyes.

It opened its mouth and exhaled the last breath of Dragon Qi it had accumulated for three hundred years, unreservedly into the main vein of Huaxia.

Immediately, its huge eyelids closed slowly, and the profound patterns on its tortoise shell gradually merged with the mountain, returning completely to the earth.

At the very last moment before its consciousness dissipated, it perceived it.

The 370,000 newly born cyan flames spread across the country all trembled at the same moment.

That was not resonance, and even less was it obedience; it was ”self-ignition.”

Each flame was like an independent life, possessing its own heartbeat, throbbing vigorously according to its own rhythm.

Under the eaves of a southern town, Zhang Xuanyi stood with his hands behind his back, looking at the ten thousand lights instantly illuminated before him, like a brilliant sea of stars reflected in the human world.

His lips moved slightly, his voice so soft that only he could hear: ”This time, I’m truly not needed.”

He turned around and walked into the bustling night market crowd without a trace of reluctance. With a few flickers of his figure, he completely merged into the Mortal World fireworks he had guarded for so long.

When Su Qingzhu arrived, following that familiar aura, she only picked up a grass root about to be trampled into the mud beside a stall where a new fire had just been kindled.

On the grass root, there was no longer the owner’s aura.

She looked up, gazing at the warm and vivid hearth fires throughout the city, and suddenly laughed softly.

”When the fire arrived, you were there... but now, the fire is here on its own.”

The camera slowly pulled back, and the city lights spread out boundlessly like a sea of stars.

That scrap of tattered cloth, once believed in by countless people and representing the authority of fire, had long since disappeared without a trace.

It no longer needed to float above any specific flame, because it had turned into the wind, into light, and into that instant of resolute heat that rose in the heart of every Mortal when they took action to light a hearth fire.

Su Qingzhu stood in the crowd, feeling the pulse of this new power, but the smile on her face faded little by little.

She keenly sensed that in this seemingly harmonious and unified rhythm of life, there was a trace of extremely faint dissonance.

She focused her gaze, and at the edge of her vision, among the thousands of dancing flames, the breathing rhythm of one cluster of light seemed... different.

This new era of fire, jointly birthed by will and the earth, might be far more brilliant than the past.

But likewise, it was also far more unpredictable than imagined.