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

201: Was the fire stolen?On the third day since the Northwest village primary school resumed cooking fires, the sky was just beginning to brighten, and the mountain wind swirled with wood ash at the village entrance.

A sudden accusation shattered the morning tranquility—a fire had broken out in the Wang family’s granary last night; fortunately, it was discovered early, preventing a major disaster.

The surveillance footage clearly captured it: in the dead of night, a thin, small figure crept into the kitchen, crouched before the stove for a long time, and made strange gestures with their hands. Not long after they left, the stove ignited with a green flame out of thin air, sparks flew out, and the dry grass nearby caught fire.

”It’s her! It’s that little girl who draws talismans!”

”Evil! That fire on the playground the other day was sorcery, and now she’s here to harm people again!”

”Hand over the talisman paper! Burn her!”

The villagers were furious, surrounding the girl tightly on the stone steps in front of the ancestral hall.

She was wearing that faded blue school uniform, her school bag straps still tied with a red string, her hands tightly clutching a charred, curled piece of paper—a fragment of a talisman she had secretly retrieved from the ashes after burning her notebook on the playground three days ago.

She didn’t cry, nor did she defend herself; she just kept her head down, repeating over and over, ”I didn’t steal... I am Repaying the Debt.”

Her voice was very soft, yet the cold morning wind carried it into everyone’s ears.

No one understood.

Until an old jeep crunched over the gravel road and stopped outside the ancestral hall.

The car door opened, and Su Qingzhu stepped out.

She wasn’t wearing a uniform, nor did she bring any police officers; she only carried an old cassette recorder on her back, its casing mottled and antenna crooked, looking like an antique salvaged from some junkyard.

The crowd automatically parted to make a path.

She walked up the stone steps step by step, crouched down in front of the girl, and met her gaze at eye level.

The wind tousled her hair, but her gaze was as calm as water.

”What are you repaying?” she asked, her voice soft but silencing all the noise.

The girl looked up, her eyes as clear as morning dew in the mountains.

”Repaying the fire,” she said. ”Grandpa said that when you use fire, you must remember to return it, otherwise others won’t be able to light theirs.”

After saying this, she pulled a stone from her bosom—it was dark brown, its surface covered in spiderweb-like cracks, and it felt slightly warm to the touch.

Su Qingzhu’s pupils constricted.

Stove Core Stone.

This type of stone only exists in the deepest part of a long-burning stove, having absorbed countless Power Of Will from the firewood, and is the container for the ”Fire Vein” in folklore.

But the one in front of her had cracks that were too dense, almost on the verge of collapsing; it was clearly having endured an overload of energy backlash.

She suddenly recalled the scene on the playground three days ago—the green flame igniting on its own, the pale green ripples appearing on the bottom of the pot; that was the trace of Power Of Will fundamental frequency resonance.

And every resonance leaves behind the hidden danger of frequency tearing within the user’s body, just like a guitar string pulled too tight, eventually snapping.

Ordinary people don’t understand these things.

They only know that the fire has returned and think it’s a miracle.

But they don’t know that someone is using their own essence and Qi to fill that crack.

Su Qingzhu silently took the Stove Core Stone and placed it on the resonance sensor box next to the recorder.

This machine was a prototype device she had dug out from the depths of the archives’ ice cellar; it could capture low-frequency sound wave residues and had once been used to analyze the brainwave frequencies Zhang Xuanyi left behind.

She pressed the play button.

Static—

The noise was like a torrential downpour, mixed with intermittent human voices, the clanging of copper bells, and the tunes of street vendors.

Suddenly, a hoarse but familiar humming pierced through the noise:

”Fire comes uninvited, the heart doesn’t open if it doesn’t move. Who wants to ask where I come from? I crawl out from the palm of your hand...”

It was Zhang Xuanyi.

The ”Kitchen God Doggerel” he had casually composed by a street stall back then had once been published in a local evening paper as a joke.

But at this moment, this melody, carrying a stable frequency of 98.7 Hz, slowly flowed into the sensor box.

Hum—

The Stove Core Stone suddenly vibrated!

From deep within the cracks, a fine, dense light seeped out, like lava flowing beneath rock layers, flickering and rising with the rhythm of the sound waves, as if responding to some long-dormant contract.

The onlookers were all frozen.

Some stepped back, some reached out to draw talismans, and an old person whispered tremblingly: ”The Celestial Master... has manifested?”

Su Qingzhu, however, smiled.

Not with joy, but with thorough realization.

She finally understood why seventeen villages had caught fire simultaneously that night—it wasn’t a System crash; it was because people treated fire as an external object, waiting to be bestowed with it rather than lighting it themselves.

And this child, who understood nothing of magical arts, instinctively knew that ”if you borrow fire, you must return it.”

She was not an arsonist; she was the only one who truly understood that ”all laws return to the heart.”

She used blood to draw talismans, not to control the flames, but to use her own essence and Qi as a guide, attempting to repair the frequency tearing caused by that collective Awakening—she treated burning as a responsibility and the fire seed as a debt.

This is the true, free Dao Heart.

It is not control, but return; not taking, but repaying.

Su Qingzhu slowly stood up, the wind fluttering her clothes like a flag about to be raised.

She looked around, watching faces filled with suspicion and uncertainty, listening to the whispers of ”witch,” ”sorcery,” and ”arrest her” constantly emerging.

She didn’t explain.

She simply reached out and dismantled the casing of the old cassette recorder in front of everyone.

As the screws fell, the circuit board was exposed to the morning light, and a clear gap was visible—it was a damaged part left over from an experimental accident ten years ago that had never been repairable.

She looked down at the Stove Core Stone in her hand.

Then she looked at the gap.

Then, she gently embedded the stone into it.

With a click, it fit perfectly.

The moment the current connected, the entire machine vibrated violently, and the speaker emitted a harsh static sound, as if thousands of troops were galloping and roaring at the end of the passage.

In the next second, an intermittent, hoarse, yet incredibly familiar voice slowly emanated from every loudspeaker, every radio, and even the bottom of every iron pot in the village—Su Qingzhu’s fingers were still resting on the recorder’s casing, the residual heat seeping from the Stove Core Stone, climbing up her palm like a breath that had not yet dissipated.

The wind stopped, and the village fell into a strange silence—not a deathly silence, but a bated, attentive wait, as if someone in the world had just whispered ”It has begun,” and no one dared to blink.

Then, the stoves of seventeen households vibrated slightly almost at the same time.

It was not an explosion, not a roar, just a faint ”click” from the bottom of the pots, like the first crack in frozen earth.

Immediately after, green patterns appeared, spreading like Bloodline vessels across the bottom of the iron pots for three seconds before fading away.

Those patterns had no rhyme or reason: Aunt Wang’s were palm-print-like branches, resembling the wrinkles from years of kneading dough; Old Man Li’s stove pattern looked like the veins of a withered leaf, identical to the pear tree branches he had burned last night; and the little aluminum pot at the little girl’s house revealed a string of crooked pinyin letters—the strokes of the word ”huo” (fire) she had written halfway on her notebook.

No one screamed, no one fled. They were just stunned.

Fire was never stolen.

It had always been hidden in their breath, in their labor, and in that cry of ”Mom, I’m hungry” deep within their memories.

Just in this silence, Zhang Xuanyi’s voice squeezed out from the residual broadcast frequency again, intermittent, like radio waves passing through a sandstorm:

”...Don’t believe in any heaven-sent talismans... What I sold back then wasn’t a treasure, it was courage... The person who dares to strike a match is their own Ancestral Master...”

Before the voice could finish, the current jolted violently, the entire machine exploded in a puff of blue smoke, the speaker ”popped” loudly, and all the loudspeakers in the village went silent at once.

But it was enough.

A child crouched on the ancestral hall steps, clutching the charred paper, and heard it.

An old woman stood before her stove, holding a lighter, and heard it.

The cooking smoke of seventeen villages rose in wisps at the same moment, and they all heard it.

Prejudice collapsed silently.

Some quietly retreated into their houses and secretly tucked the ”evil talismans” they had previously confiscated back into the children’s desks; some old people knelt before their own stoves, kowtowed, and muttered: ”Sorry, Fire King, we were too lazy before.”

Even Wang Laosan, who had reported the granary fire, walked to the girl’s house with half a bag of rice, stuttering: ”Child... come to my stove to heat your food from now on.”

The turmoil subsided not like a victory, but like a belated Awakening.

At sunset, Su Qingzhu sat in a tent temporarily set up by the archives, gently tucking the curled, charred paper into the front page of the chronicles of vows.

The ink on the parchment was not yet dry, and she picked up her pen to write a small line:

”The most orthodox Legacy I have ever seen in this life—a child thought she was Repaying the Debt, but in fact, she was already preaching the Dao.”

She closed the book and looked out the window.

The sunset glow burned bright red, reflecting on the skyline toward the Gobi Desert, like a wildfire about to spread.

That night, she casually drew a simple sketch of a stove in her diary, thinking about going to the next village for research tomorrow.

But just as the pen tip left the paper, the ink suddenly began to snake uncontrollably, automatically outlining the familiar bottle shape—a thin neck, a round belly, and the inscription at the bottom faintly visible: ”Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid”.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Before she could react, the ink lines suddenly blurred and dissipated, turning into gray spots, as if their spiritual nature had been sucked dry by some invisible force.

She stared at the gray spot for a long time, then suddenly smiled. She smiled until the corners of her eyes were slightly damp, yet they were as bright as stars.

Thousands of miles away, beneath a patch of frozen earth deep in the Gobi Desert, the temperature was still slowly rising.

A mung bean remnant, long forgotten by people, was quietly buried in a stratum three hundred meters deep.

It was a residue from a failed experiment three years ago, once marked as an ”invalid sample.”

But tonight, its shell was slightly warm, and from an imperceptible crack, a half-stem of a tender sprout emerged.

The sprout was no longer than a grain of rice, with a dewdrop hanging at the tip, crystal clear, reflecting the starry sky.

What was even more strange was that the surface of the dewdrop synchronized to reflect the stove lights lit in seventeen directions—even though they were hundreds of miles apart, the light points flickered at the same instant, like the collective pulsation of the earth’s nerve endings.

The wind swept across the wilderness, whipping up a handful of dust and sand.

As if the entire land of China was quietly yawning, preparing to wake up and cook a meal.