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

127: The moment you burn, it’s brighter than anyone elseThat sheet of letter paper, thin as a cicada’s wing, seemed to carry a scorching temperature, curling slightly at Zhang Xuanyi’s fingertips.

The handwriting was slanted and deeply carved, revealing a desperate panic: ”They want to turn the fire into scripture.”

Scripture meant commandments, meant the right of interpretation, meant high-and-mighty definitions.

A chill flashed across Zhang Xuanyi’s eyes. The fire he had passed down was a struggle in a desperate situation, a roar in the dark night, the first sword a Mortal thrust toward the firmament; how could it be locked into a cage carved from gold and jade?

Following the scent of the special incense ash remaining on the letter, he snuck into a newly completed ancestral hall.

On the plaque were four gilded characters—”Orthodox Heart Fire”—exuding a bluffing air that was eager to announce itself to the world.

Inside the hall, sandalwood incense curled; hundreds of believers knelt on the ground, chanting, but they were not chanting about the Dao following nature, but rather tedious rules on how to ”correctly” ignite fire.

Zhang Xuanyi’s gaze swept across the center of the main hall, and his heart sank abruptly.

There, a row of so-called ”Igniters Through the Ages” portraits were displayed, and in the most prominent position stood a wax statue identical to him.

The wax statue was draped in a ceremonial robe, a dot of crimson cinnabar marked on its forehead, its hands forming a complex hand seal he had never used. The plaque below was engraved with eight large characters: ”Inheritor of Heavenly Fire · True Person Zhang.”

How absurd!

He, Zhang Xuanyi, a Mortal who once relied on a few broken pieces of wood on street corners to trade for a bowl of porridge, when did he become an ”Immortal Master” sitting high on a lotus throne?

High on the platform, the presiding Daoist held a whisk, his voice as loud as a bell: ”Heavenly Fire has descended to the world; it cannot be obtained by those without affinity, nor transmitted by those who are not orthodox! Only by taking refuge in our Orthodox Heart Fire, chanting day and night, and cleansing your Mortal heart, can the fire seed last forever without extinguishing!”

Upon hearing this, the believers kowtowed even more piously, their foreheads colliding with the cold bluestone floor tiles, making dull thuds.

Zhang Xuanyi watched coldly from the sidelines; there was no anger in his eyes, only a bottomless sorrow.

He saw the fanatical faith in those people’s eyes, but the object of that faith was his own shadow, twisted and enshrined.

Taking advantage of the gap while the young Daoist changed the incense and candles, the crowd shifted slightly, and Zhang Xuanyi drifted to the front of the offering table like a wisp of blue smoke.

He bent his fingers like a knife and quickly carved a line of small characters under the heavy mahogany table.

The handwriting was light, yet it seemed to carry the weight of a thousand jun.

After doing all this, he quietly faded into the shadows, as if he had never appeared.

The ceremony ended, and the believers filed out, their faces bearing the satisfaction of having been ”purified.”

Only one raggedly dressed youth, with a hint of suspicion in his eyes that did not match his age, lingered and did not leave.

He sneaked behind the wax statue, and while no one was around, carefully scraped a little bit of crimson lacquer from the wax statue’s hand-sealing fingers with his fingernails.

Returning to his dilapidated house with nothing but bare walls, the youth opened his palm; that speck of red lacquer was exceptionally glaring in the dim light.

He stared at it intensely, as if it were some sacred Magical Artifact.

Then, he picked up two ordinary dry sticks and, imitating the way he had seen at the ceremony—which he had never been able to succeed at—began to rub them together clumsily.

Once, twice, ten times... Sweat soaked his bangs, his arms ached as if they were splitting, but the wood still showed no reaction.

The youth felt a bit discouraged, and just as he was about to give up, he inadvertently glanced in the direction of the offering table.

He remembered the only figure standing straight in the crowd of kneeling people, and remembered the barely visible carved line under the True Person Zhang wax statue.

”I never asked you to kneel.”

The youth’s heart shook, as if a bolt of lightning had split the Chaos.

He fiercely wiped away the speck of red lacquer from his palm, no longer thinking about any ”orthodox” hand seals or ”pious” hearts; only the most primitive desire remained in his mind—he needed light, he needed warmth.

He gritted his teeth and poured all his strength, all his unwillingness and anger, between his palms.

”Sizzle—”

A tiny wisp of flame emerged tremblingly from the contact point of the wood.

Weak, yet incomparably tenacious.

The youth’s eyes widened, and then he burst into a shout of wild joy, his voice hoarse yet loud: ”So it recognizes the hand, not the statue!”

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Su Qingzhu was sitting in an ocean made of virtual data streams.

Her fingertips danced rapidly across the light screen, lines of complex code flashing by like a waterfall.

The ”True Fire Certification” platform she was investigating indeed had the shadow of the Longhu Mountain Tianshi Mansion behind it.

This platform not only used its massive computing power to deliberately suppress the ignition data uploaded from all remote areas, marking the most sincere efforts of countless Mortals as ”invalid noise,” but more insidiously, it also launched a scoring System called the ”Fire Seed Stability Index.”

This index was being adopted by local governments everywhere, becoming a new type of social credit credential.

Those with a high index found everything convenient; those with a low index could not take a single step.

They not only wanted to define fire, but also wanted to use fire to define people.

Su Qingzhu’s eyes were as cold as ice.

She did not choose to forcibly destroy the System; that would only alert the other party.

She disguised herself as an Advanced maintenance worker and silently accessed the System’s core model library.

She did not upload a new virus, but instead retrieved the most original and precious video footage she and Zhang Xuanyi had recorded when they first traveled across the land—”The Road Lit by Fire.”

She used this raw data, which contained countless failures, struggles, and tears, to conduct reverse training on that cold, arrogant certification model.

At the end of the training, she implanted a set of brand-new, highest-priority special tags: ”trembling hands,” ”teary smiles,” ”bitten lips.”

That late night when the System updated, tens of thousands of ordinary people who had once been judged as ”invalid records” and deprived of their ”Fire Seed Stability Index” scoring qualifications received a notification that their certification had passed at almost the same time.

There were no complex explanations, no flowery language, only a short sentence in the postscript:

”The second you burn, you shine brighter than anyone.”

Meanwhile, at the center of the storm, inside the underground palace of Mount Longhu, Cui Wujiu’s figure flashed by like a phantom.

Feeling the turbulence of the red jade resonance in the air, he confirmed his worst conjecture.

The samples taken by the archaeological team had already disrupted the delicate balance of the underground palace.

But he did not choose to directly destroy those precision experimental instruments; that would be too easily discovered.

Under the cover of night, he sneaked into the Tianshi Mansion’s medicine storage pavilion.

He did not alert anyone, precisely taking away the three core medicinal ingredients for refining ”Fire-Suppressing and Mind-Calming Powder,” and then took a pottery jar from his bosom, replacing the dark red powder inside.

That was powder ground from pottery shards he had obtained from the side of a fire pit of an ancient tribe on the southwestern frontier.

That fire pit had been burning for a thousand years, and every grain of pottery clay was soaked with trace amounts of the purest fire soul factors.

This item would not harm anyone, but it could, in the most direct way, awaken the most primitive memories and awe of fire hidden within the human body.

The next day, all the scholars and Daoists participating in the red jade research fell into the same eerie nightmare.

They dreamed that they were naked, their bare feet stepping on scorching earth, running frantically in an endless, blazing wheat field.

In their ears, a crisp and eerie children’s singing voice echoed constantly.

The project leader, a highly respected old professor, woke up from his dream in a cold sweat.

Looking at the red jade sample covered in runes before him, for the first time, fear deep into his bones appeared in his eyes.

He screamed and ordered the experiment to be terminated, and personally burned all the research materials.

He thought he had destroyed a dangerous piece of data, but he did not know that the pottery powder that had drifted through the ventilation System to the entire Mount Longhu was the beginning of everything.

A storm was coming.

A grand ”Orthodox Fire Cultivation Conference” was being held in the main hall of the Tianshi Mansion.

The chief lecturer was eloquently expounding on the ninety-nine rules and commandments of ”cleansing the heart,” ”fasting,” and ”bathing” before igniting fire.

Just at this moment, a figure walked slowly against the flow of the crowd to the center of the main hall. It was Zhang Xuanyi.

He looked directly at the chief lecturer, his voice not loud, but it clearly spread throughout the entire main hall: ”You say, one must first cleanse the heart for three quarters of an hour before one can ignite fire?”

The chief lecturer frowned: ”This is the Righteous Path; with a cluttered Mortal heart, how can one trigger the pure Yang fire of heaven and earth?”

”I insist on burning it right now.”

Before the words had finished, Zhang Xuanyi pulled a pitch-black coal nugget from his bosom; it was the most lowly, dirtiest fuel.

He placed it in his palm, gripped it fiercely, and rotated!

His finger bones rubbed against the coal nugget, making a teeth-grinding sound; blood spilled out between his fingers, splashing everywhere mixed with black coal dust.

Amidst the gasps of the entire hall, a ball of pure, smoke-free, and extremely pure blazing fire suddenly rose from his bloody, mangled palm with a boom!

The whole place was in an uproar!

The Tianshi Mansion Sect Head’s face was ashen, and he was about to make a move to suppress this ”evil heretic,” but was firmly held down by an old, white-haired Elder beside him.

The Elder stared intensely at the flame in Zhang Xuanyi’s palm, his voice trembling: ”Sect Head, no! This fire... this fire is not stained with a single bit of turbid Qi, it is actually... actually the legendary pure Heart Flame!”

Zhang Xuanyi flicked his hand, and the blazing fire extinguished in response.

He raised his bleeding hand, pointing at the shocked faces throughout the hall, each word, like a thunderclap:

”What you fear is not Chaos, it is that people can learn it without being taught!”

As soon as his words fell, the weather outside the hall suddenly changed, a fierce wind rose, and a torrential rain poured down.

Immediately after, a strange phenomenon suddenly occurred!

From the coast of the East Sea to the snow-capped mountains of the Western Regions, seventeen fire pits in cities that had once been ignited by Zhang Xuanyi’s own hands shot up columns of fire dozens of zhang high at the same moment!

The columns of light converged in the sky, and under the thick dark clouds, they projected a huge, boundless reflection, precisely reflected on the resplendent glazed tiles of the Tianshi Mansion main hall.

It was one character—”Release”!

Let go, delegate power, return to heaven and earth!

At dawn, at the ancestral altar of the Tianshi Mansion, the ”First Generation Tianshi Fire Bowl” that had been enshrined for three hundred years, under the terrified gaze of the old Daoist guarding the altar, its last wisp of flame quietly extinguished.

No matter how he injected True Qi or chanted spells, the fire bowl was like a stubborn stone, with no reaction whatsoever.

And just at this moment, in a wasteland outside the gate of Mount Longhu, a ragged homeless man, in order to keep warm in the cold wind, picked up a pair of broken bamboo chopsticks and began a futile rubbing against an abandoned plastic bottle cap.

Suddenly, a weak but incredibly bright spark was born out of thin air.

That was the first cluster, a fire without a source in the true sense.

The old Daoist guarding the altar stumbled out of the ancestral altar, looking into the distance at that little glimmer of light, two lines of clear tears flowing from his turbid old eyes, murmuring to himself: ”It’s not that it can’t burn... it’s that it no longer wants to burn for the rules.”

The entire world was completely overturned on this night.

The old order was collapsing, and new flames were reborn in the wilderness.

Zhang Xuanyi stood on the peak of the Tianshi Mansion, overlooking the thousands of lights below the mountain; they were no longer uniform, but had become scattered and flickering, full of wild vitality.

This great fire was ignited by his own hands.

But when the clamor dispersed and the wind and rain ceased, what surged in his heart was not the heroism of victory, but an inexplicable sense of emptiness.

He remembered the initial starting point, that noisy street corner, himself, who, for the sake of a bite of food, clumsily demonstrated the first wisp of flame to the world.

Where exactly did that prairie fire start?

He suddenly really wanted to go back and take a look. Just one look.