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

171: Everyone is a little fairyThe winds of spring plowing swept across the hills of Southern Anhui, carrying the scent of freshly turned soil, yet lacking the moisture of years past.

The ridges of the fields were like chapped lips, opening up on the parched earth; the creek beds were exposed, the stones bleached white as if licked over and over again by tongues of fire.

In previous years at this time, the area in front of the ancestral hall should have been filled with swirling incense smoke and the sound of gongs and drums, with villagers kneeling with fire altars to pray for rain, but now it was strangely quiet.

No drums or music, no incantations, only a line of figures moving through the morning mist.

They carried wooden buckets on shoulder poles, filled with a grayish-brown warm liquid, walking steadily toward the newly dug seepage ditch at the edge of the field ridges.

This was the ”Ash Water Team” — a rotating team spontaneously formed by the young and old of the village, daily mixing the plant ash cleared from household stoves with warm water, then filtering and injecting it into the ground to use the ash to absorb moisture and retain water.

No one mentioned ”praying for fire” anymore, nor did anyone wait for a miracle to descend.

They only believed in the bucket of water in their hands and the piece of land beneath their feet.

Zhang Xuanyi walked into the village at this moment.

He carried a tattered cloth bundle on his back, wore old cloth shoes, and had his trouser legs rolled up to his calves, looking like an idle Daoist visiting relatives.

Passing by the field, several old men burying pipes glanced at him, saying nothing.

He knew these people were no longer accustomed to seeking help from outsiders.

He smiled, took a small package of mung bean powder wrapped in oil paper from his bundle, and handed it over: ”Add some sweetness, you’ll have more strength to work.”

The old man hesitantly took it, smelled it, and actually took it back to mix into his drinking water bottle.

Someone asked: ”Aren’t you going to ask about the drought? Aren’t you going to urge us to go to the fire altar?”

Zhang Xuanyi sat down against the field ridge and looked up at the sky: ”If I asked, you would still have to do this work; if I urged you, the rain wouldn’t come any faster.”

”Then what are you after?”

”Just wanting you to have a drink of sweet water.” He grinned, revealing two rows of neat teeth, ”Besides, who relies on the heavens for food now? It is people who nourish the land, not the land waiting for people.”

On the third morning, dark clouds gathered at some point, pressing low over the mountain ridges.

A fine rain, like needles, fell silently, hitting the cracked mud and sending up rings of light smoke.

Someone rushed out of their door, face upturned to catch the rain, shouting excitedly: ”The fire has manifested! The fire has answered us!”

A young boy with pigtails nearby shook his head, still clutching a piece of bamboo pipe for diverting water: ”It’s not the fire, it’s us who saved the water ourselves. The ash holds the night dew, the ditches hold the rainwater — I said last night, it would definitely rain today!”

The crowd was silent for a moment, then burst into even louder laughter.

This time, it was no longer awe of the divine, but trust in each other.

And the figure who had once been pursued by thousands had long since quietly departed.

Meanwhile, in a high-rise building in a city thousands of miles away, Su Qingzhu sat under the dim desk lamp, her fingertips hovering over the keyboard for a long time.

On the screen was the notice of the cancellation of the chronicles of vows column.

The final email from the editorial department read: ”Public attention has shifted to the spiritual energy stock market and the auction of strange treasures; your content... is too simple.”

She did not reply to the email, but simply opened the backend of her personal channel and uploaded an untitled video.

No title, no cover, no trailer.

Thirty field recordings played in sequence —

A mother’s voice, gentle yet firm: ”Daughter, remember, good ash is loose, light, and carries a bit of silver light; inferior ash clumps and turns black, that’s from burning plastic, which harms the land.”

An old man coughed twice, then continued: ”The night of the winter solstice two years ago, the flame in my stove suddenly turned blue, so I immediately woke up the whole family to add quilts — the next day, a blizzard indeed sealed the mountains.”

Finally, a nursery rhyme sung by a group of children, the tune crooked but filled with innocence:

”Stove fire red, ash must be returned, If the ash isn’t returned, Heaven shows no pity, One scoop to the soil, three inches of rain, Everyone is a little immortal —”

The video ended abruptly.

The screen went black, and a line of white text appeared, simple and unadorned:

When fire no longer needs explanation, it is truly alive.

She closed her computer and began to organize all the data on her hard drive — System logs, ley line maps, live stream recordings, interview audio... categorized, backed up, and encrypted one by one.

This was all the evidence of her three years of tracking the Myriad Laws Street Stall and the ”grassroots fire-lighting movement.”

She prepared to seal them away, like burying a time capsule.

Just as she turned off the last light, the doorbell rang.

The courier left a palm-sized package, unsigned, with a blurred return address, only writing ”Important item, please check immediately.”

She opened it; inside was an old digital recorder, its casing severely worn, with scorch marks on the corners.

Pressing the power button, the screen flickered, showing the battery still had power.

She stared at that faint light, her heart skipping a beat for no reason.

This model... was too familiar.

It was the model used when first recording the ”fire altar phenomenon,” long since discontinued.

And this one seemed to have been lost in an explosion accident — the very night the Broken Contract Array collapsed.

She slowly raised her finger, hovering over the play button.

The night wind passed through the window cracks, blowing a yellowed photograph on the corner of the table — it was the back view she had first captured at the foot of Mount Longhu: a person standing alone at the edge of the square, palms facing the sky, moonlight shining obliquely, with what looked like golden patterns flowing beneath the skin.

In the silence, the indicator light of the recorder flashed, bright, then dim.

Chapter 172 Where the Ash Does Not Fall, the Wind Knows

Su Qingzhu’s fingertips remained on the play button of the recorder, the lingering sound had long since faded, but that sentence ”Look over there —” was like a thin thread, tangling around her heart, tightening more and more.

The room was so quiet that the sound of dust falling could be heard.

The desk lamp was dim, illuminating the diary open on the table — she had ultimately not written a word, only drawing a circle with the character ”Ordinary” in the middle: ordinary fire, daily Dao, no need for miracles, and no need to deify.

But she knew that behind this ”Ordinary” character was three years of tracking, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of trekking, and witnessing life and death hundreds of times.

She had chased Zhang Xuanyi’s back from the foot of Mount Longhu to the Western wilderness, from the noisy marketplace of the Myriad Laws Street Stall to this silent, spreading grassroots movement.

He had once been the ”Master of Talismans” fought over by thousands, the ”living immortal” whom the Old Ancestor of Quanxing knelt to beg for a chance at survival, and the ”source of strange treasures” hunted in secret by the Under Heaven Society.

But now, he didn’t even leave a farewell, only a recording, a light laugh, and a voice pointing ”over there.”

”What exactly do you want me to see?” She asked in a low voice, as if to the recorder, and as if to that person who had long since gone far away.

The night wind outside suddenly rose, blowing out the desk lamp.

In the darkness, the recorder’s indicator light flashed one last time, then went out completely.

The next morning, Su Qingzhu packed all the data, burned it into seven encrypted hard drives, and sent them to the National Archives, the Folk Culture Protection Association, three university folklore departments, and a retired editor, respectively.

The last one, she kept with her, carrying it on her person.

She deleted all updates on her personal channel, closed the server for chronicles of vows, and only left one line on the homepage:

”The story has returned to the soil, the spark is among the people.”

Then, she bought a train ticket to the Northwest.

Not to find him.

But because she suddenly understood — Zhang Xuanyi had not disappeared; he had dismantled himself into thousands of grains of ash, scattering them into the smoke and fire of this world.

Several months later, in a border town in Longnan, in a primary school with only eight classrooms, the children had their first ”Life Dao Class.”

Written on the blackboard was: ”The Story of Fire and Ash.”

The teacher read softly: ”In the past, people prayed for rain at fire altars, waiting for the gods to respond. Later, someone discovered that burnt plant ash could retain night dew, and ditches could store rainwater... So, they no longer knelt and waited for fire, but learned to nourish fire, return fire, and pass on fire.”

A little girl raised her hand and said crisply: ”Teacher, my family ’returned fire’ yesterday! Grandpa Li was coughing, so I gave him my hand warmer!”

The whole class burst into laughter, nodding vigorously.

The teacher also smiled: ”Right, helping others is the truest ’fire-lighter’.”

The camera slowly pulled back, the spring breeze outside the window brushed over the hillside, wild flowers emerged from the crevices of the rocks, petals trembling slightly, shaking off a grain of fine ash — that ash carried residual warmth, drifting with the wind, not high, nor far, gently falling under the eaves of the next house.

There, a bowl of clean water sat quietly on the windowsill, waiting for dawn.

The wind stopped, the ash fell, and the stove smoke rose.

And in the depths of the Northwest Gobi Desert, thousands of miles away, on a wasteland eroded by wind and sand for a hundred years, a bitter well stood alone.

The well rim was mottled, and a line of text was carved on the stone slab, the characters deeply incised, as if carved one stroke at a time with a knife:

”The debt is cleared, with thanks beyond words.”

The wind and sand licked at this line of text day after day, yet it could never wipe it away.

A few days later, a shadow quietly swept across the dunes, alarming no one.

The person was dressed in old cloth clothes, carrying a tattered bundle, wearing cloth shoes, stood by the well and watched for a moment, then turned and left.

A few days later, at a remote railway station in Longxi, the morning mist was thick.

A slow green-skinned train neighed into the station, the doors opened, and there were few passengers.

In the corner of the platform, an old man squinted at the end of the tracks, muttering:

”That person... changed paths again?”