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

136: Kun is so big, I don’t know how many thousands of miles it is.That scorching guidance was like an invisible thread, pulling at Zhang Xuanyi’s footsteps.

He did not hesitate in the slightest, bade farewell to the folks in the mining area, shouldered his faded canvas bag, and traveled south along the ancient Yellow River path.

The wind and sand hit his face, but they could not blow away the sharpness in his eyes.

Several days later, with the night as dark as ink, Zhang Xuanyi spent the night in an abandoned cave dwelling in Jinzhong.

Half of the cave dwelling had collapsed, and the cold wind poured in through the gap, stirring up the dust on the ground.

Inside the room, only a half-ruined cold stove remained, pitch black, as if it were a giant mouth that had swallowed countless warmth.

He grabbed some hay from his bag and was just about to spread it on the ground to make do for the night, when a faint warmth suddenly came from his ankle.

His movements paused, and his gaze slowly shifted downward.

That warmth was actually seeping out from the bottom of the cold stove beside his feet.

He squatted down and leaned in for a closer look.

Deep in the soil of the stove’s hearth, a faint glimmer of fire was moving on its own. It did not look like a flame, but rather like the Bloodline of a living creature, pulsing up and down with a certain rhythm.

It did not burn anything, not even the driest grass roots were ignited; it simply infused a gentle, warm energy, slowly and firmly, into the cold soil layer.

Zhang Xuanyi’s eyes narrowed. Calmly, he fished out a bead from his inner pocket that was emerald green in color and shaped like a bean. This was the ”heavenly eye mung beans”, a miraculous object for observing spirits and viewing Qi.

He placed the mung bean under his tongue. A stream of cooling Qi rushed straight to his crown, and the world before his eyes instantly became different.

Three minutes later, he saw the truth.

Deep within the hearth, a nearly transparent fire spirit consciousness was coiled, shaped remarkably like a curled-up lizard.

It was not a physical entity, but rather condensed from the purest fire Qi, rhythmically injecting its own energy into the ground, as if nurturing something.

Even more strangely, whenever faint laughter of children could be heard from the distant village in the middle of the night, the fire spirit’s tail would gently sway, as if resonating with that pure joy.

So that was it.

Zhang Xuanyi understood.

He did not disturb this docile earth fire spirit. Instead, when he stood up, he casually picked up a burnt brick from the ruins, used his fingertips to trace a few rune-like shapes that didn’t form recognizable characters, and gently pressed it onto the stove opening.

”This place has already acknowledged a master,” he whispered, serving as a reminder to any fellow practitioners passing by.

The next morning, Zhang Xuanyi had already left.

Old Man Wang from the village went to his vegetable cellar to get some cabbage. As soon as he lifted the cellar lid, a warm wave of heat rushed toward him.

”Hey, that’s strange!” Old Man Wang was surprised to find that the cellar, which was cold as iron at this time of year in the past, had become warm in winter and cool in summer this year, and the stored vegetables were exceptionally fresh.

Soon, every household in the village discovered this miracle and exclaimed that the Mountain God had manifested, but no one knew that since that ordinary night, the entire village’s earth veins had been quietly nurtured by the fire spirit at the bottom of the stove.

At almost the same time, thousands of miles away, Su Qingzhu was being flooded with private messages pouring in like snowflakes on her phone.

Ever since she live-streamed the phenomenon of ”Golden Smoke Condensing into Characters,” her account had become a gathering place for all kinds of strange phenomena and oddities.

She swiped through the screen quickly, but a private message from the mountainous region in the southwest made her stop her fingers.

The sender was an elementary school teacher, and the message included a photo.

In the photo, an old-fashioned clay stove sat in the corner of a simple classroom.

The private message read: ”Young Miss Su, I don’t know if this is a phenomenon you are interested in. The incense ash in the clay stove at our school automatically rearranges itself into different symbols every morning. They look like ancient seal script, yet are completely unrecognizable; they look more like maps... of emotions.”

Su Qingzhu’s heart skipped a beat.

She set off immediately and went to the location in person.

It was a school built on the hillside, formerly an orphanage for survivors after the ”Fire Hearth Village” disaster decades ago.

Most of the children here had psychological trauma, were introverted, and were often woken up by nightmares at night.

She kept watch in that classroom for three nights.

Finally, at the hour of the Rat on the third night, the cold clay stove began to heat up slightly.

Just at this moment, the sound of a girl’s suppressed sobbing came from the dormitory next door.

The next second, a magical scene unfolded.

The ashes in the stove seemed to be stirred by an invisible hand, moving and stacking spontaneously, eventually forming a pattern resembling an ”embrace.”

Immediately after, an extremely gentle current of heat was released from the clay stove, passing through the wall and drifting toward the dormitory.

The girl’s sobbing gradually subsided, turning into even breathing.

Su Qingzhu’s camera recorded everything completely.

She did not step forward to touch it, nor did she disturb it.

When the fourth ray of morning light shone into the classroom, she saw the ashes in the stove slowly form four clear characters: ”You are not afraid.”

At that moment, Su Qingzhu was in tears.

She left quietly, leaving only a brand-new blank diary on the classroom windowsill, with elegant handwriting on the title page: ”The fire remembers what you said.”

On the other side, Cui Wujiu was strolling through the water towns of Jiangnan.

This ancient town with a thousand-year history now had every household’s doors and windows tightly shut, looking desolate.

For the sake of so-called ”fire safety,” the town had forcibly dismantled all open-flame stoves and replaced them all with induction cookers.

Although the townspeople dared not disobey, they all looked sallow, listless, and often had nightmares at night.

Cui Wujiu frowned deeply.

That night, he silently sneaked into a cluster of abandoned kitchens.

Under the moonlight, more than a dozen old stoves that had been dismantled and scattered began to seep faint red mists from their bottoms simultaneously, like the breathing of a sleeping giant beast, pulsing up and down.

He extended his right hand and placed his palm on the cold ground.

A vast, suppressed collective consciousness instantly flooded into his perception.

The fire spirit consciousnesses nurtured by these old stoves had not perished; they had merely collectively fallen into dormancy under the suppression of modernization, as if waiting for an ancient awakening signal.

Cui Wujiu stood up and came to the century-old well in the center of the town.

He extended three fingers and tapped three times, neither lightly nor heavily, on the stone railing by the well.

Dong, dong, dong.

This was the secret code used by the survivors of the Fire Hearth Village back then to convey ”all is well.”

That night, the ancient town suffered a power outage throughout the entire area without warning.

In the darkness, all the abandoned old stoves silently emitted a faint halo of light at the same moment.

The light was not dazzling, nor did it burn, but it made the cold bricks and stones warm again.

In the dreams of every household, it was as if a familiar bonfire had risen, dispelling the chill and panic of the past few days.

The next day, the town mayor, sporting two dark circles under his eyes, urgently convened a town hall meeting and announced the restoration of some traditional kitchens as a pilot project.

Facing the confused gazes of the crowd, he smiled bitterly and said: ”It’s not that we changed our minds; it’s that last night... all the old stoves in the town heated up on their own.”

Winds and clouds gathered, and behind all these strange phenomena, it seemed as if an invisible hand was pushing them forward.

Seven days later, Zhang Xuanyi appeared in an emerging technology city.

The streets were filled with futuristic ”Smart Fire Control Kiosks,” and huge screens scrolled advertisements: ”Scientifically manage folk fire energy, AI precise temperature control, eliminate all energy waste and fire hazards.”

Zhang Xuanyi watched, a cold smile curling on the corner of his lips.

Just then, in front of a fire control kiosk nearby, a young man who looked like a programmer slammed his fist against the device and roared angrily: ”I’ve tried the command ’Heart needs warmth’ three hundred times, and it just won’t ignite for me! What kind of bullshit intelligence is this!”

Zhang Xuanyi walked over slowly, stopped beside him, and asked in a low voice: ”When your mother used a firewood stove to cook in the past, did the water in the pot always boil before everyone else’s?”

The young man was stunned, turned back, and looked at him in astonishment: ”How did you know?”

Zhang Xuanyi patted his shoulder, his tone calm but containing astonishing power: ”Because you have fire hidden in your palms, brought with you from your mother’s womb; it’s not something a machine can give you.”

As soon as he finished speaking, the young man subconsciously rubbed his hands together.

At the very moment his palms rubbed together, a tiny but exceptionally bright golden spark shot out from his palm and landed precisely on the advertisement screen of the fire control kiosk.

There was no explosion, no burning; the huge electronic screen became like rice paper dripped with ink, with the spark as the center, quickly turning charred black, and then turning into flying ash.

The System alarm resounded through the entire street, and the cold AI voice repeated frantically: ”Warning! Illegal high-level fire source detected! Warning! Detected...”

Zhang Xuanyi had long since turned away, quietly merging into the crowd, hiding his achievements and fame.

Behind him, the crowd had already surrounded the dumbfounded young man, and someone shouted excitedly: ”Quick! Teach us! Is this something you were born knowing how to do!”

This series of events eventually converged at the foot of Mount Longhu into a huge wave called the ”Stove Transformation.”

The gas stoves of hundreds of households, without any manual operation, automatically switched to an unprecedented ”firewood mode.”

The flames were no longer flickering blue, but a stable, heavy, golden yellow.

What was even more baffling was that this kind of flame seemed to possess intelligence, only responding to conversational commands between family members.

In the kitchen, a housewife said to her daughter: ”This soup needs to be simmered over low heat to be flavorful.” Before the words had even faded, the flame on the stove automatically shrank, becoming gentle and refined.

If an outsider was curious and imitated the housewife’s tone to issue the same command, the flame would show no reaction, as if it couldn’t hear at all.

Tianshi Mansion immediately dispatched an investigation team, carrying various precision instruments, attempting to extract flame samples for analysis.

However, as soon as the instruments came within three feet of the stove, all the golden flames, like startled living creatures, collectively shrank inward and instantly extinguished.

After the investigators left helplessly, they quietly reignited, as if mocking these believers in modern technology.

That night, the moon was bright and the stars were sparse.

Zhang Xuanyi sat alone on the ridge of a field at the foot of Mount Longhu, leisurely gnawing on a roasted corn cob.

He looked toward the thousands of lights at the foot of the distant mountain and saw that the cooking smoke rising from the chimneys of every household did not drift away with the wind, but slowly intertwined and gathered under the moonlight, forming a blurred passage of scripture in mid-air—looking closely, it was exactly a segment from ”Free and Easy Wandering.”

”The Kun is so great, I do not know how many thousands of li it spans...”

Zhang Xuanyi smiled, tossed the finished corn cob into the bonfire beside his feet, and muttered to himself: ”Before, it was people begging for fire; now, it is the fire choosing who gets to eat.”

Just as he was sighing with emotion, the tattered rag fragment he had obtained from the mining area in his pocket suddenly heated up without warning, hotter than any time before.

A line of brand-new golden characters appeared on the surface of the rag like a brand:

[Unlock Ultimate Item: Nameless Fire]

[Acquisition Condition: Witness the first cluster of fire that no one ignited, yet never extinguishes.]

Zhang Xuanyi’s pupils contracted sharply.

No one ignited, never extinguishes... Is there really such a fire in this world?

While he was pondering, his old-fashioned mobile phone, which had not been turned on for a long time, suddenly vibrated in his pocket.

It was an encrypted text message from an unknown number, the content so brief it was startling.

”Coordinates: Wild mountains of Southern Anhui. The fire here has no roots.”