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

100: Whoever is afraid of the cold will light the fireThe rainy season in Lingnan arrived silently. In the damp alley paved with bluestone, a humid smell—a mixture of earth and old wood—permeated the air.

Su Qingzhu held up an oil-paper umbrella and stopped in front of the familiar sweet soup stall.

Everything had changed.

The blue flame that had once hovered like a ghostly fire beneath the small pot was gone.

In its place was a pitch-black, old-fashioned charcoal stove, its mouth spewing ordinary, warm, red light.

The blind Granny was hunched over, reaching out with withered, twig-like hands to feel the temperature of the stove wall. Relying on a sense of touch deeply etched into her bones, she carefully added a small piece of pitch-black charcoal.

The charcoal crackled, sending sparks flying, only to be instantly extinguished in the damp air.

”Granny, is it not troublesome to use this?” Su Qingzhu asked softly, her voice almost drowned out by the sound of raindrops dripping from the eaves.

Granny did not look up. The deep wrinkles on her face smoothed out slightly under the firelight, like a blooming dried chrysanthemum.

She smiled, her voice hoarse but gentle: ”Silly girl, trouble is what’s real. That fire from before, it burned on its own; I didn’t know what it was thinking. This fire now, I added the wood one piece at a time. I know who it’s meant to warm when it burns.”

Su Qingzhu’s heart felt as if it had been gently nudged by something.

The night deepened, and the rain did not cease.

From deep within the alley came the sound of a child crying, suppressed and thin, calling out with a sob: ”Mother, my hands are cold...”

Before the words faded, Granny had already shakily scooped up a bowl of steaming sweet soup and reached out to hand it over.

The child took the bowl, holding the warm porcelain with small hands, and the sobbing gradually ceased.

The fire in the charcoal stove burned brighter, casting dancing shadows on the mottled walls. The outline of those shadows was no different from the quiet blue flame of the past.

Su Qingzhu closed her umbrella and let the cold rain fall on her face.

She returned to the inn, and under the dim lamp, she carved a line of words onto a copper plate with force: Only those who are cold are worthy of lighting a fire.

Thousands of miles away in the Central Plains, snow was falling across the sky.

Cui Wujiu was wrapped in a thick sheepskin coat, standing outside the fence of a school, like a withered tree.

In his memory, at this time in previous years, the children in the school would be gathered around a never-extinguishing blue flame, dipping their fingertips into the stove ash to draw those mysterious Talismans on the ground. Whoever drew them most accurately would receive the teacher’s praise.

But now, the courtyard was empty, and the furnace that had been nurtured for a hundred years was as cold as iron.

All the children had rushed into the snow, in groups of three or five, using the most primitive method—drilling wood to make fire.

One of the most stubborn children, his little face frozen red, moved his small hands so fast they seemed to be flying, drilling vigorously into a wooden board with a dry stick.

His ten fingers had already developed fine beads of blood, mixed with wood shavings, staining everything in a mess. Yet, he seemed not to feel the pain; his eyes held only that tiny bit of smoke about to rise.

Cui Wujiu walked over slowly and took out half a roasted sweet potato wrapped in oil paper from his bosom; it was steaming hot.

He squatted down and smiled: ”Does it hurt?”

The child didn’t even look at him, staring fixedly at the wood in his hands, his teeth chattering, squeezing a few words out from between his teeth: ”Not painful! Only when it hurts do I know this fire... is real!”

The moment the words fell, a tiny wisp of flame ”popped” up from the wood shavings!

The children let out a heaven-shaking cheer, rushing over one after another, carefully cupping their hands around it as if it were not fire, but the most precious treasure in the world.

Cui Wujiu watched the child’s soot-covered but smiling little face and suddenly burst into loud laughter, the sound carrying far into the wind and snow.

He stood up and, from the deepest part of his bosom, fished out the last piece of scorched green bean husk.

This was his last attachment, the last ember of that era.

He did not light it, nor did he destroy it. He simply walked to the high threshold of the school and gently placed it there.

The husk did not burn, nor did it turn to ash.

A little girl with pigtails passed by on her way home from school, curiously picking it up and examining it for a long time. Thinking the patterns on the withered leaf husk were very special, she carefully tucked it into her dog-eared textbook.

Cui Wujiu watched her hopping and skipping figure as she walked away, murmuring softly: ”So that’s how it is... the fire seed is not in the ash, but in the pain.”

The morning market in the southern town was always the place where mist and human voices were most abundant.

Zhang Xuanyi wore a set of washed-out coarse cloth clothes, chewing on a grass root he had pulled from somewhere, mingling in the crowd like the most ordinary street loafer.

He sat by the stall of the old woman’s grandson every day, buying nothing, just watching.

The new stove that had once made the youth proud, the one capable of automatically generating blue flames, had been discarded in the corner of the courtyard, covered in dust and cobwebs.

The youth now used the ancestral mud stove in the corner of the kitchen, which had been passed down for who knows how many generations.

He got up before dawn every day, squatting in the courtyard, taking two rough flints and striking them again and again.

”Click... click, click...”

Sparks flew and fell. The youth’s fingers were worn rough, and his fingernails were full of black dirt.

Zhang Xuanyi watched silently, watching that face—once bloated and numb from comfort—gradually gain contours and Life Qi from this day-after-day striking.

Those eyes, too, changed from murky to bright, as if there were a fire burning inside.

That night, a rainstorm suddenly arrived.

The strong wind whipped bean-sized raindrops down, and the entire market instantly plunged into darkness; all the lights were extinguished.

Amidst the exclamations and curses, only that courtyard had a glimmer of light.

The youth, as if protecting his own life, blocked the mud stove with his body, letting the rainstorm soak him to the bone.

But the wind was too strong, and the flame flickered, on the verge of going out.

A flash of determination crossed the youth’s eyes. He took out the last flint from his bosom, aimed at the only remaining tinder in the stove, and struck with all his might!

”Click—!”

A crisp sound, exceptionally clear in the gaps between the thunder.

A spark the size of a grain of rice landed precisely on the dry grass.

The next moment, with a roar, a cluster of blue flame shot into the sky!

That flame was no longer docile, no longer quiet, carrying a savage, primitive wildness, instantly igniting the entire stove!

But that wasn’t all. An invisible wave spread out from the mud stove, and in an instant, the stoves of ten neighboring households—regardless of whether they were new or old, regardless of whether there was firewood inside—all spontaneously ignited at the same moment!

The blazing fire pierced through the rainy night, illuminating half the market as bright as day.

Zhang Xuanyi stood up slowly, letting the cold rain wash over his cheeks.

Looking at this myriad of household fires, which had no Talisman or incantation but had become a prairie fire, his mouth curled into a wide arc, and he said softly: ”This fire is much wilder than the one I set back then.”

Su Qingzhu put the engraved copper plate into an envelope. Just as she was about to seal it, her gaze inadvertently swept over her father’s thick notebook.

On the blank space of the last page, there was an extra line of small text, appearing from who knows when.

The handwriting was unfamiliar, yet carried a sense of familiarity that pierced through the paper.

”Fire is not afraid of being extinguished; what it fears is no one feeling the cold.”

Her heart gave a violent jolt.

A wild conjecture surged into her mind.

She immediately dug out all her old drafts, the observations she had written down after traveling across the country, flipping through them one by one.

Finally, she discovered a clue.

Beside every paragraph mentioning the three words ”Zhang Xuanyi,” there was an extremely faint, subtle indentation, as if left by the tip of a grass root. Those marks formed an unrecognizable pattern, like some ancient totem.

So that was it, so that was it!

Su Qingzhu could no longer hold back; she slumped over the table and burst into loud laughter, laughing until tears streamed down.

”So you never left; you were hiding in the hearts of everyone who wrote about you.”

That night, Mount Longhu.

In the center of the stone ring at the old stall, the forgotten, tattered copy of ”self-salvation” had long been soaked by the continuous drizzle.

The pages were rotting, the ink melting, but beneath the back cover, stained by the ashes of the three lands, a tiny, extremely delicate sprout had broken through the soil.

The leaf of the grass was shaped like a grass root; the stem of the grass was as tough as stall cloth.

It stood quietly in the rain, swaying gently with the wind.

It did not ignite, nor did it make a sound, but the moment it broke through the soil, within a hundred meters, the flames in all the stoves, regardless of size, all warmed up simultaneously, and the flames jumped up by an inch.

Su Qingzhu was already standing in the rain, though she didn’t know when she had arrived. She looked at the nameless grass from afar, and as if speaking to an old friend, said softly: ”Next time I write about you, I won’t call you Zhang Xuanyi; I’ll call you... the one who lights the fire.”

Amidst the wind and rain, the camera slowly pulled back, crossing Mount Longhu, crossing rivers, crossing plains.

Across the land of China, in thousands of towns and billions of markets, the lights were as brilliant as a sea of stars.

Looking closely, beside every flickering, warm flame, there seemed to be a blurred shadow crouching.

That shadow was chewing on a grass root, neither speaking nor moving, yet it had never left.

The human world’s smoke and fire had been reborn from this moment.

Su Qingzhu packed her luggage and set off on the road south once again.

She was going to a remote town to collect stories. She heard that the children there were huddled around a newly born stove fire for late-night talks, and the stories they told were no longer about those high-and-mighty immortals.