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

103: Blood leads to fireGranny turned her head, her cloudy eyes filled with the unique kindness of an old person. Seeing Su Qingzhu standing, she tremblingly picked up a bowl: ’Girl, you’re awake? Drink a bowl of sugar water; the mornings in Lingnan are quite damp.’

Su Qingzhu thanked her, but her gaze remained locked tightly on the charcoal stove.

Just as Granny turned around, the gentle orange flame in the stove hearth stalled without warning, then began to spin at an eerie angle.

The charcoal ash inside the stove was stirred, yet not a speck of dust rose. Instead, it was as if an invisible hand had lightly brushed over it, outlining a circle of dense, intertwined patterns on the surface of the ashes. The shape looked exactly like the deep-buried, tangled roots of grass.

An ordinary person seeing this would only think it was a coincidence caused by the wind.

But Su Qingzhu’s breath suddenly hitched; she had seen these patterns before!

In her father’s tattered manuscript titled ’Spontaneous Fire,’ a corner had been drawn with a vermilion brush, with the annotation, ’The root of all fire, its form is like grass.’

She took the sugar water calmly, but her fingertips quietly pinched a dried blade of grass from the cloth bag she carried with her.

This blade of grass was no ordinary object; it was something she had plucked from beside an alchemy well at the old site of Mount Longhu. It was said that the grass there was naturally capable of drawing close to all the fires in the world.

Under the guise of drinking the sugar water, she gently extended the tip of the grass blade toward the stove ash.

There was no contact, only proximity.

That withered yellow blade of grass, which had long since lost all vitality, seemed to be infused with a warm current; it grew slightly hot, and the outline of its veins became clear for an instant, as if resonating with the patterns in the stove ash.

Just as expected!

Su Qingzhu’s heart was in turmoil, but her face remained as calm as water.

She did not make a scene, but silently finished the sugar water. While Granny was clearing the bowls and chopsticks, she quickly used a piece of oil-absorbing paper to take an impression of the patterns on the stove ash, carefully folded it, and tucked it into the interlayer of the ’Spontaneous Fire’ manuscript.

That night, the rain in Lingnan tapped against the banana leaves, pitter-patter.

Under the lamp, Su Qingzhu spread out the manuscript and the paper with the ash-pattern rubbing.

In the flickering candlelight, the originally static grey-black patterns on the paper seemed to come alive and began to spread silently.

Slender lines grew out from the main pattern, crossing the boundaries of the paper, casting a phantom image in the dim yellow light that pointed tremblingly toward the north, eventually coalescing into a dotted line that wound all the way south from Mount Longhu, reaching directly to the South Sea.

At the same moment, in a fishing village in Southern Fujian thousands of miles away, the salty sea breeze carried humidity, making the door panels of every household creak.

Zhang Xuanyi, wearing a washed-out Daoist robe, squatted in the corner of a household’s wall like a lonely ghost.

He had been watching this family’s stove fire for three days; the color of the fire was dim, orange with black, and no matter how much good firewood he added, it wouldn’t burn with that prosperous vigor.

Even more sinister, the family’s three-year-old child would cry out in terror every night, heart-wrenchingly.

He listened all night, and finally, at the moment the Hour of the Rat arrived, he caught something unusual.

At the base of the dim flame, a wisp of black Qi, thicker than the night itself, seeped out silently, carrying a pungent smell of rust, and like a thin snake, it burrowed into the cracks under the stove and disappeared.

Zhang Xuanyi’s eyes narrowed; this was no longer an ordinary infestation of filth, but something ’eating’ the fire!

He fumbled in the bosom of his tattered Daoist robe for a long time before pulling out the last small scrap cut from a photocopy yellow paper.

This was a photocopy of his sect’s secret Talismanic Incantation paper; the original had long been exhausted in one demon-subduing battle after another, and now the last trace of magical power in this scrap was his final trump card.

He rolled the paper scrap into a thin, long paper wick, and under the cover of night, quietly snuck into the family’s woodshed and stuffed the wick into a bundle of firewood at the very bottom of the stove.

In the second half of the night, a storm raged, and thunder rolled.

A bolt of lightning tore across the sky, and almost simultaneously, in the family’s stove hearth, the paper wick stuffed into the woodpile spontaneously ignited without fire, rising with a faint but exceptionally bright golden light!

The rust-smelling black Qi that had burrowed into the ground cracks seemed to be locked onto by a natural enemy; it surged back out from the ground violently, twisting and condensing painfully in mid-air, actually forming half a blurry and indistinct incantation: ’Blood... inducing... fire... source...’

Before the words faded, a wisp of cyan smoke as thin as a thread broke through the air from the southern horizon without warning, as if crossing endless space, and struck the black Qi with precision.

The black Qi vanished instantly without even letting out a cry of agony.

Zhang Xuanyi looked up sharply, staring toward the direction the cyan smoke came from, his eyes flashing with intensity as he muttered to himself, ’What a tyrannical method... someone is actually using the ’fear-of-cold heart’ of a living person as a sacrifice to extract the source of ordinary fire!’

Meanwhile, in a more distant southwestern border town named ’Zhenhu’, Cui Wujiu was chewing on a blade of thatch, looking boredly at the newly erected stone tablet at the town entrance.

The tablet was named ’List of Fire Starters,’ and it was densely engraved with three thousand seven hundred names, each one written with powerful strokes that dug deep into the stone’s marrow.

He sneered and was about to walk around it, but the corner of his eye caught a scorched black mark at the base of the tablet.

His footsteps paused, and he crouched down. It was a piece of Talismanic Incantation paper burned to only its edges. Although the patterns on it were incomplete, he would never forget them even until death—it was the base talisman of the ’Burning Wish Grand Formation’ that had swept through the Daoist world years ago but ultimately failed at the last moment!

Who is it? Who dares to resume this old trade here?

Cui Wujiu casually picked up a piece of piping hot charcoal from a nearby roasted sweet potato stall and used the ash to draw an incomplete circle at the base of the tablet. Speaking as if to a ghost, he whispered, ’Idiots, the deeper the name is carved, the lighter the fire becomes. This is trading one’s life for a moment of warmth.’

That night, the stone tablet silently cracked with a thin fissure running from top to bottom.

The next morning, the townspeople discovered with horror that the three thousand seven hundred names on the tablet had been covered by a thick layer of moss overnight, making the writing blurry and unclear.

Only at the very bottom of the stone tablet, someone had used a pebble to scratch a line of immature new marks, crookedly writing: ’My grandma says, fire is something we borrow from Heaven.’

In Lingnan, Su Qingzhu overlapped the dotted line map that had spread out with the South Sea weather charts from the past three months. A shocking fact surfaced: for every record of large-scale stove fires being extinguished without cause in the seven coastal markets marked on the map, the timing perfectly coincided with the arrival of cold ocean currents from the frigid deep sea!

She flipped open her father’s notebook violently. Beside the phrase ’The root of all fire, its form is like grass,’ there was another fragment written in blood: ’Fire seeds return to the source, only blood can initiate it.’

A terrifying thought instantly connected all the clues: someone was utilizing the extreme cold of the deep sea to trigger the coastal people’s fear of the cold, and then, using this as a lure, was secretly extracting the Power Of Will from the stove fires of thousands of households through some kind of Formation!

Those names engraved on the stone tablet were likely the sacrifices!

Su Qingzhu did not write this discovery into a manuscript. She found a copper plate and, with the fastest speed, precisely engraved the route map from Mount Longhu to the South Sea and the ocean current map onto it. She sent it overnight to three old schools in Southern Fujian, the Southwest, and the capital, attaching a note with only one sentence:

’Check the coastal and border areas immediately; whose children have suddenly stopped fearing the cold.’

Late at night, on a desolate island deep in the South Sea, in the stove of an abandoned fishing village, a solitary cyan flame was burning quietly.

It emitted no light and produced no heat; it seemed like nothing more than an illusory shadow.

Suddenly, at the base of the cyan flame, a rich, rusty red appeared. The flame seemed to have a life of its own, slowly sinking downward and burrowing into the icy ground.

At the same time, thousands of miles away beside the alchemy well at Mount Longhu, the root grass that Su Qingzhu had plucked moved without wind.

At the tip of a newly grown, tender leaf, a crystal-clear dewdrop oozed out.

The dewdrop rolled off, and the moment it touched the ground, with a soft ’boom,’ it spontaneously ignited out of thin air, transforming into an imperceptible cyan line of fire that hugged the ground, pointing unwaveringly toward the vast South Sea.

The camera slowly pulled back, crossing mountains and rivers, crossing towns, and finally hovered above the shimmering sea surface.

A tattered fishing boat was sailing slowly through the night, and the seawater around the hull seemed darker and colder than elsewhere.

In the depths of the hold where no one could see, an old fisherman wearing a straw raincoat was using the faint light of an oil lamp and a burnt black charcoal stick to focus on drawing something on a huge wooden chest.

What he was drawing was not a Talismanic Incantation, nor was it a Formation.

It was a pair of hands, a pair of hands with veins bulging and trembling violently from the cold and the exertion.

Those hands were desperately... rubbing wood to make fire.