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

151: Wait a momentThe night in the Northwest was cold enough to slice through skin.

When Zhang Xuanyi pushed open the rusted-shut iron door, the wind poured into his collar like a knife.

The abandoned weather station curled up deep in the Gobi Desert, drafty on all sides, the wall plaster peeling like scales, tables and chairs toppled in the dust, as if gnawed away bit by bit by time.

He shook his backpack, snow grains falling with a rustle, and walked with steady steps toward the old stove built of adobe bricks in the corner.

”Start a fire,” he muttered to himself. The voice was not loud, but it struck an echo in this deathly silent space.

His left hand reached toward the furnace, preparing to draw out ashes to light a fire—but the moment his fingertips touched the cold ash, his palm trembled violently!

A golden pattern emerged from beneath his skin, winding like a pulse, warm but not scorching; it was the Fire Consciousness mark that had once resonated with his Bloodline.

But the next second, that golden light retreated on its own as if startled, as if it had sensed something it could not approach, rapidly shrinking back into the depths of his meridians and disappearing.

Zhang Xuanyi froze.

He looked down at his hand, the corners of his mouth slowly curling up—not in anger, nor in loss, but in a smile that bordered on relief.

”Heh... even you don’t recognize me anymore?” he said softly, ”Or is it that what you recognize now is something else?”

Three years ago, he was the owner of the Myriad Laws Street Stall; a single photocopy yellow paper could save a dying extraordinary human, and a single Heavenly Eye mung bean could break the defense of a Grandmaster-level expert for three seconds.

Back then, the Fire Consciousness would ignite and extinguish at his will, obeying his every command.

But now, this flame consciousness that once coexisted and shared life with him had quietly evaded him after jumping in his palm for a fleeting moment, as if keeping him at a respectful distance.

He was not annoyed; instead, he laughed.

”I am no longer the Daoist who sells talismans,” he murmured, ”And you are no longer just a wisp of fire that listens to my orders.”

He no longer forced it, simply taking out the last bag of furnace ash from his bosom—that was the residue left over from the street stall back then, mixed with talisman paper scraps, incense Power Of Will, and the obsessions left behind by countless people when they came to buy.

He had once treated it as a treasure, but now he poured it gently into the iron stove.

”If you don’t recognize me, you should at least recognize this home.”

Before the words fell—

A ball of flame rose without warning inside the furnace.

There were no sparks flying, no crackling of firewood; that fire was born from nothing, its color strange, neither gold nor red, almost translucent, and its shape was like a tattered cloth, fluttering in the air for three breaths, just like the street stall he had set up at the foot of Mount Longhu in the past.

Immediately, the flame turned into a thin stream, rising straight up along the chimney, piercing through the iron roof, and shooting directly into the firmament!

Zhang Xuanyi looked up.

The night sky was clear, the galaxy churning.

The Big Dipper spanned the horizon, and the seventh star—Alkaid—flickered slightly at that moment, as if someone had gently responded from beyond the nine heavens.

Silent, yet deafening.

He stood where he was, remaining motionless for a long time.

The fragments of the Fire Vein spike in his backpack trembled again, clearer than before, as if echoing some kind of global awakening.

He knew this was no coincidence.

The fire no longer belonged to anyone; it was no longer a tool, not a power, and not a commodity.

It was returning home.

And in a mountain village in Southern Anhui, thousands of miles away, the bonfire of the Cold Stove Festival was slowly dying out.

Su Qingzhu crouched among a group of children, teaching them to draw firebird totems on stone slabs with charcoal sticks.

This was the theme of the study tour camp she had initiated: ”Reclaiming the Forgotten Warmth.”

No one knew where these symbols came from, but for the past month, the phenomenon of spontaneously drawing similar patterns had appeared in many places across the country, which the media called ”dream contagion.”

A six-year-old girl suddenly stopped her pen and tilted her head to look at the withered locust tree at the entrance of the village.

”There is fire crying there,” she said.

The crowd laughed, dismissing it as childish talk. Only Su Qingzhu’s heart skipped a beat.

The little girl broke free from her mother’s hand, ran over, and knelt beside the tree roots. After digging with her bare hands for a few minutes, she actually unearthed a charred piece of wood, its edges cracked in a lightning pattern, faintly revealing a trace of weak golden light.

She held it and whispered: ”Don’t be afraid, we will warm you.”

At midnight that night, the roots of the entire old locust tree seeped out extremely fine golden threads, which burrowed into the ground like living things, spreading along invisible veins.

The stoves of seventeen households inexplicably warmed up again, and the next morning, nine of them found a faint brand condensed on the bottom of their pots—shaped like a firebird spreading its wings, with half a blurred ancient seal script hidden where the tail feathers curled: Xiaoyao.

Su Qingzhu did not take photos, nor did she publish a report. She only recorded a sentence the little girl said before going to sleep:

”Fire is not a thing; it is a person returning home.”

Meanwhile, in an underground substation in North China, the alarms were silent.

Zhang Xuanyi snuck to the main cable junction area; the infrared scanner showed an abnormal heat flow here—the temperature was maintained at 78.3°C year-round, which neither caused a trip nor significantly improved transmission efficiency.

Experts called it ”benign overload,” but could not find the source.

He crouched down, pried open the insulation, and was shocked to find a crystal mass wrapped around the outside of the copper core—gray-black, with a texture like glaze, fused from furnace ash, resin, and some unknown organic matter, warm to the touch, and seemingly pulsating.

As soon as his fingertips touched it, a scene exploded in his mind:

Three years ago, an electrician fell in a maintenance pit with a broken steel bar piercing his chest.

In his hand, he tightly clutched an empty tube, with a label that read ”Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid (Remnant).”

Before he died, he bit his finger, mixed the last drop of blood into the medicinal dregs, and buried it in the transformer base with his own hands.

”Don’t waste it... let it live...”

The scene ended abruptly.

Zhang Xuanyi withdrew his hand, stood up, and looked at the power grid running through the city, suddenly understanding.

The fire seed had long used furnace ash as a medium, using Power Of Will as a guide, quietly weaving veins along the most dense energy network of humanity.

It was not in the sky, not in the Secret Realm, but in the current of the lights of ten thousand homes, behind every socket that had never been extinguished.

It had learned how to survive on its own.

He turned and left, his steps light and slow.

The monitoring screen behind him flickered on and off, finally fixing on a line of automatically appearing text:

Thank you for not selling it as medicine back then.

The wind passed through the corridor like a whispered farewell.

And at this moment, a classified file was quietly circulating to a conference center in West Beijing.

The cover was marked: Top Secret · Energy Anomaly Analysis.

Appendix 1 attached a map titled ”Distribution of National Abnormal Thermal Energy Nodes.” The seventeen hot spots marked on the map connected into lines—spreading wings, head and tail echoing each other, strikingly forming a firebird about to take flight.

It was just that no one knew whether this bird flew out from the ground, or... walked out from the dreams of millions of children.

In the underground conference hall of the National Energy Administration, the temperature and humidity were constant, and the air floated with the cold fragrance of disinfectant and metal coolant.

The projection beam cut through the dimness, slowly spreading a heat map in front of the thirty experts—seventeen abnormal nodes, connected like stars, outlining the silhouette of a firebird about to take flight, wings spread, head and tail connected, the trajectory so precise that it bordered on divinity.

”This cannot be a natural phenomenon.” The director of the Thermal Energy Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences pushed up his glasses, ”We have screened all geological, electromagnetic, and nuclear radiation sources, and none match. But it has indeed improved the power grid efficiency of seven provinces nationwide, with an average energy saving of 14.6%, and zero accidents.”

”I suggest immediately initiating the ’Fire Control Hub’ project.” The military representative’s voice was low, ”Such a large-scale energy network, if guided with malicious intent, would have unimaginable consequences.”

Everyone nodded, their pen tips rustling on the documents.

Just then, the door opened a crack.

Su Qingzhu walked in, unwashed from her travels, but with sparks settled between her brows.

She did not sit in the designated seat but walked straight to the projection, taking a pinch of ash from her old canvas bag—that was the furnace ash she had brought back from under the old locust tree in Southern Anhui, mixed with scraps of talisman paper, children’s palm prints, and the warmth that had not extinguished all night.

”Wait a moment,” she said. Her voice was not loud, but it made the silence in the room freeze.

Everyone froze.

She raised her hand and scattered the furnace ash toward the projector lens.

The moment the beam passed through the ashes, a strange scene occurred.

A three-dimensional phantom appeared in the air—the Xiaoyao Token.

Neither gold nor jade, it seemed to be engraved from flame, ancient seal script flowing, shaped like an open palm holding the fire seed, with fine runes engraved on the edges; it was exactly the totem of will transformed from the tattered cloth on Zhang Xuanyi’s street stall back then.

It floated quietly for seven breaths, then turned into specks of golden light, dissipating into nothingness.

The entire room was deathly silent.

Only outside the window, the streetlights along the entire street suddenly flashed three times in unison—not flickering, but pulsing, as if ten thousand lamps were breathing at the same time, the light bending into a posture of holding up, like worship.

”What you want to control,” Su Qingzhu looked around at everyone, her gaze as clear as snow-washed blades, ”is not fire, but whether human hearts can believe in miracles one more time.”

No one refuted.

Someone looked down at the ”Fire Control Protocol” they had just written, and a blot of ink seeped out from the pen tip.

The meeting ended early; no one kept her, and no one stopped her.

She walked out of the building, the night wind blowing on her face, the city lights like an ocean.

Just at the end of the steps, her footsteps paused.

A pair of shoes was placed there.

Faded work cloth shoes, the toes worn out, the edges still stained with the yellow mud of Mount Longhu.

They were the pair Zhang Xuanyi wore when he squatted at the street stall selling talismans back then—she had taken a picture of them in the report ”Myriad Laws Street Stall: A Daoist and One Hundred Wishes,” and the photo was now locked in the deepest drawer.

On the shoe upper, a withered bamboo leaf was placed.

She crouched down, her fingertips touching the shoe upper, and suddenly smiled, but her eyes welled up with a glimmer.

”You are still that sharp-tongued Daoist...” she said softly, ”But the fire no longer listens to you.”

On the twenty-first night after Qingming, at the eastern foothills of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, at an abandoned post station.

Zhang Xuanyi sat cross-legged by the fire pit, adding firewood for the old man guarding the temple.

The old man was over ninety, blind and deaf, knowing only that every year, twenty-one days after Qingming, someone would come to light the fire for him.

”How much longer do you think this fire can be passed on?” the old man asked, his voice like wind blowing through a dry well.

Zhang Xuanyi watched the sparks rise, the fragmented light reflected deep in his pupils, like the galaxy flowing backward.

”It’s not being passed on,” he chuckled, ”It’s learning to walk on its own.”

Before the words fell, a twig ”clicked” and broke.

At the break, a flash of golden light—a phantom of a miniature bronze pillar appeared, no more than an inch high, with golden dots flickering inside like a heartbeat, which was the Origin mark of the ”Myriad Laws Street Stall System”!

He had once relied on it to unlock exotic treasures, exchange for spirit coins, and defy the heavens to change his fate.

But at this moment, the phantom only trembled slightly, then quietly faded away, as if it were just passing by, not returning to its owner.

His pupils shrank, and then he felt relieved.

The System was not dead, but it no longer belonged to anyone.

It had merged into the Fire Vein, becoming a part of the world’s shared perception—like rain falling into the ocean, no longer distinguishing between you and me.

He blew out the oil lamp, looked at the boundless night outside the window, and whispered as if seeing someone off:

”Old friend, now it’s your turn to be the stall owner.”

On the distant mountain ridge, a golden line quietly lit up.

Winding like a pulse, beating like a heart.

That is the fire walking, and also the Dao breathing.