106: Cold Fire Spreads

The moment his fingertips touched the furnace ash, a deathly cold spread along Zhang Xuanyi's skin.

He did not use any power from the System, but instead used the most orthodox Fire-Starting Technique of Mount Longhu to urge a faint wisp of Qi within his Dantian.

The Qi, like a silk thread, probed into the embers, but it was like a mud ox entering the sea; it couldn't even spark a single ember.

Refusing to believe it, he tapped his fingertip again, urging the Qi more urgently.

Second attempt, no ignition.

Third attempt, still no ignition.

The fire seed in the furnace was not extinguished; it was completely "exhausted," as if it were an old ox drained of all its energy, having lost even the strength to take its final breath.

"Heh." Zhang Xuanyi let out a very faint, cold laugh, the sound appearing jarringly harsh in the empty, abandoned furnace workshop. "It’s not extinguished; it’s been drained of its heat."

He slowly stood up and looked around.

This place, which was once the source of the lifeline for millions of households in the North, was now left with only dead ash everywhere and pipes that wailed as the cold wind blew through them.

He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a bean that was emerald green all over, resembling an eye, and put it into his mouth without hesitation.

The heavenly eye mung beans, a secret transmission of Mount Longhu, could see the Qi veins of heaven and earth and trace the Origin of all things.

The bean melted as soon as it entered his mouth, and a rush of cool Qi shot straight to his crown.

The world before Zhang Xuanyi's eyes instantly changed.

In the previously empty air, countless pale cyan trajectories emerged, rising from the ruins of every extinguished furnace core, like a network of veins covering the land; thin, faint, yet firmly winding toward the same direction—the South.

His gaze followed the "fire vein trajectories," which were as dense as a spider web, crossing the desolate plains and casting toward the distant horizon.

There, even from thousands of miles away, he could "see" a cluster of cities shrouded in false warmth.

"It’s not the pipes that are drawing the fire," he muttered to himself, his voice carrying a trace of cold murderous intent, "it’s the 'Power Of Will Conduction Formation'."

Meanwhile, in the editorial department of the Special Action Team thousands of miles away, Su Qingzhu was facing a wall full of data charts, her eyes bloodshot.

She had been sitting there dryly for forty-eight hours.

On the wall, a massive fire seed fluctuation chart occupied the central position, with red and green lines crisscrossing it, and the extinction points of the fire seeds in thirty-seven northern villages were clearly marked.

Just now, she discovered a strange pattern that everyone had ignored.

Whenever a red dot on the northern chart went completely dark, the energy consumption data of several smart cities in the southern territory, known as "Warm Living New Cities," would simultaneously show an extremely tiny yet absolutely synchronized jump—0.7%.

This number was not large, but its fluctuation frequency perfectly matched the resting breathing frequency of an adult.

One inhale, one exhale.

The fire seeds were "breathing."

She suddenly rummaged through her drawer and found a tattered ancient book, with fragments of "self-salvation" annotated in cinnabar on the pages.

She turned to the last page, her fingertips brushing over the line of blurred, almost illegible handwriting: "Fire nourishes people, people nourish the Power Of Will, and the Power Of Will nourishes the spirit."

Fire, nourishes people. People, nourish the Power Of Will. The Power Of Will, nourishes the spirit!

A terrifying thought struck her mind like lightning.

The residents in those new cities were not passively enjoying floor heating!

Their constant ease, satisfaction, and desire and reliance on warmth were invisibly converging into a massive "Power Of Will," which, through some kind of Formation, was reverse-extracting the most primitive and pure fire seed Origin from the North to feed something unknown!

"They are turning people into furnace cores!" Su Qingzhu exclaimed, grabbing the encrypted communicator on the table, her fingers turning white from the force, and quickly dialed Cui Wujiu's channel.

In Lingnan, within the humid and sweltering underground pipe network, Cui Wujiu was hunched over, disguised as a haggard old scavenger, following behind a sewage disposal team.

The air was filled with the stench of mixed machine oil and rust, but he was completely oblivious.

Taking the opportunity to clean the residue at a copper pipe connection, he flipped his palm imperceptibly, crushed a heavenly eye mung bean that Zhang Xuanyi had secretly given him into an imperceptible powder with his thumb, and mixed it into the lubricating machine oil nearby.

This was a "Fire-Eye Primer," which could allow his spirit to resonate with the Formation trajectories under specific conditions.

That night, Cui Wujiu lay on the hard board bed in the temporary worker shed, falling into a deep sleep amidst the noisy snoring.

In his dream, he was no longer an old scavenger but had turned into a wisp of blue smoke, speeding along the pipes he had tampered with during the day.

In his eyes, the entire pipe was no longer cold metal, but a giant python slightly writhing!

Countless fire flames drawn from the North were pulled into cyan fire lines thinner than a hair, surging within the body of this giant python, and finally converging into the deepest part of the underground vault.

There, a locking Formation with a miniature mountain root as its base stood impressively.

In the center of the Formation, a half-human-sized pottery figurine was floating.

The material of that pottery figurine was extremely strange, its surface covered with dense, barely visible name engravings, as if it had been fired using the signatures of ten thousand people.

All the cyan fire lines finally converged into the center of the "Power Of Will pottery figurine's" forehead, being slowly absorbed by it.

Cui Wujiu's mind was severely shaken; he controlled his consciousness in the dream, approached quietly, peeled off a small piece of pottery the size of a fingernail from the edge of the figurine's base, and stuffed it into the sole of his shoe.

Three days later, a piece of pottery wrapped in photocopy yellow paper was delivered to the hands of Zhang Xuanyi, who was sunning himself at a dilapidated street stall.

Zhang Xuanyi took the pottery piece, did not inspect it directly, but placed it on the yellow paper, and used cinnabar mixed with blood from his own fingertip to gently make a rubbing.

A miraculous scene occurred; the fine, dense patterns on the pottery piece, invisible to the naked eye of Mortals, revealed half of an incomplete pattern on the yellow paper—it was an archaic gourd symbol, with three blurry seal characters next to it: "True Qi Liquid."

Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid!

Zhang Xuanyi's eyes instantly narrowed into a dangerous line.

He understood everything.

Using the fire seeds of the ten thousand people to refine pseudo-Qi, then using this pseudo-Qi to forge Saint Grade tribute items that only a Grandmaster could refine, and finally, under the banner of "Tianshi Mansion reconstruction," using these forged "Saint Grade" items to recruit those desperate Loose Cultivators who craved power!

What a move of "stealing the sky and changing the sun," what a trick of "getting something for nothing"!

The cold sneer at the corner of his mouth grew more intense.

He put away the pottery piece and yellow paper, took out a wooden board from the tattered cloth bag behind him, and used charcoal to write a few large characters on it: Cold Bone Fire Seed Pack, ten spirit coins per pack.

Below that was a line of small text: The colder it is, the more vigorous it burns, specifically for treating Southern Warm Living Syndrome.

Overnight, this seemingly nonsensical "Cold Bone Fire Seed Pack" was sold out in the thirty-seven places in the North where the fire seeds had been extinguished.

Three more days passed.

In the South, several prosperous "Warm Living New Cities" suddenly broke out in a large-scale "Fire Reversal Syndrome" in the middle of the night.

Countless residents, in their sleep, spontaneously ignited everything flammable in their homes as if sleepwalking.

The strange thing was, those flames did not burn upward but were instantly pulled by an invisible force, flowing backward and drilling into the floor heating pipes.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The scorching fire flow burned through the fragile copper pipes, like an angry Dragon, following the path it had come from, rushing straight into the depths of the underground vault.

In the city's central monitoring room, the alarm sounded to the skies.

The technicians were horrified to discover that on the screen, all the trajectories formed by the abnormal fire flows in the underground pipe network had actually pieced together into a huge, twisted, inverted character for "person"!

In the deepest part of the underground vault, on that miniature mountain root locking Formation, cracks spread wildly like a spider web.

The ten-thousand-person Power Of Will pottery figurine at the center of the Formation let out a wail of being unable to bear the burden, and from the two corners of its clay-sculpted eyes, hot ash seeped out, like two lines of black tears.

And in the deeper, heavier bottom of the earth's veins, an ancient remnant consciousness that had been sleeping for who knows how many years slowly opened a turbid giant eye.

Its voice sounded like the friction of the earth's crust, echoing throughout the entire network of earth veins.

"If people do not wish to be cold, how dare the fire escape?"

The chaos caused by "Fire Reversal Syndrome" was quickly suppressed under the strong intervention of the authorities.

However, the seeds of panic had already been sown.

On the internet, questions about the safety of the "Warm Living Plan" were rampant.

To stabilize public sentiment, the promoter of the plan—"Human Living Future Group"—urgently announced that it would hold a large-scale online press conference and open offline community exchange meetings to answer all citizens' doubts.

Inside the editorial department, Su Qingzhu looked at the official announcement popping up on the screen, and all the fatigue in her eyes was swept away.

Her gaze passed over the high-sounding soothing words and locked firmly onto the list of keynote speakers for the community exchange meeting.

A familiar yet strange name made the knuckles of the hand holding the mouse stand out clearly.