107: The terracotta warriors shed tears, and the fire burned in their hearts

Tianshi Mansion's ghostwriting Daoist.

This name, long since struck from the records and even nailed to the pillar of shame of the supernatural world, pierced into the depths of Su Qingzhu's memory like an ice-tempered steel needle.

Three years ago, this organization was jointly annihilated by major factions for suspected 'soul theft and Luck snatching'; its members either died or had their cultivation crippled, disappearing completely into the crowd.

Their most notorious method was to forge the handwriting of living people, creating fakes so convincing that they could sign contracts involving Karma on behalf of others, invisibly stealing their Luck and even their lives.

An organization that had already been destroyed, a group of people who should have been cripples—why would they appear here?

Su Qingzhu's breathing tightened suddenly. She forced herself to calm down, her fingertips tapping rapidly on the keyboard, bypassing several firewalls to directly hack into the server backend of the 'Warm Dwelling Project' signing center.

It wasn't the contracts themselves she was looking for, but the environmental data at the time of signing.

Soon, electronic files labeled 'Voluntary Fire Offering Agreement' were retrieved, each accompanied by the GPS location and timestamp of the signing site.

When she entered one of the coordinates into a satellite map, the actual location that popped up on the screen made her feel like she had fallen into an ice cellar.

That was not a community service center or a promotional office at all, but the side door of a city funeral home. The three characters 'Hall of Rest' on the doorplate appeared particularly glaring in the dim street view photo.

She tremblingly clicked on the coordinates of another agreement; it was the morgue entrance of another funeral home.

The third, the fourth... all randomly selected agreements, without exception, pointed to the final destination for processing corpses!

The time the agreements were signed matched exactly, down to the second, the time these funeral homes received unidentified corpses or bodies that families had abandoned claiming.

An absurd and terrifying thought exploded in her mind.

Forging handwriting, funeral homes, fire offering... these clues connected together, pointing to a truth that made her scalp tingle.

Su Qingzhu stood up abruptly from her chair, not even noticing that she had knocked over her water cup.

She stared intently at those bright red signatures on the screen, as if she could smell the scent of decaying corpses through the electronic display.

'They aren't signing names; they are signing away corpses.'

The biting north wind, carrying snowflakes, whipped against Cui Wujiu's bronze-colored cheeks.

He crouched in front of a nearly abandoned old stove in a northern village. In the stove, a few sweet potatoes were being roasted until piping hot, sizzling and exuding sweet oil.

However, his attention was entirely on an inconspicuous piece of a clay figurine deep inside the stove.

The fragment was buried by him in the hottest old furnace ash. As the tongues of fire licked it, the invisible rune patterns on it were being activated bit by bit, emitting a faint and scorching Aura.

The aroma of roasted sweet potatoes was the bait, drawing in the smoke and fire of the human world; and this residual fire in the stove was the key to igniting the truth.

In the dead of night, everything was silent.

Cui Wujiu sat cross-legged in front of the furnace, closing his eyes to enter a state of meditation.

His Divine Sense, like a wisp of light smoke, was suddenly pulled in by the increasingly strong suction from the clay figurine fragment.

The scene before his eyes changed instantly.

He found himself in a dark, lightless hall, surrounded by countless kneeling ordinary people.

With piety and hope on their faces, they pressed their hands onto unfired clay blanks, chanting words.

'May I offer this faint fire of my body, praying for eternal warmth in the world.'

'I possess nothing of value, only my residual warmth to offer.'

'Please accept the fire of my heart, to bless every home with light.'

Each simple and sincere prayer converged into a massive torrent of Power Of Will, surging into the clay blanks beneath their hands.

When these people finished 'praying for blessings' and left with satisfaction, Cui Wujiu saw that those clay blanks, having absorbed the pure Power Of Will, were not sent to temples for worship, but were emotionlessly thrown into another, much larger furnace by figures in black robes.

Inside the furnace, it was not molten iron that churned, but heart-palpitating blood-colored flames.

Countless broken Talismans, shattered Magical Artifact swords, and incomplete Daoist secret records floated within, being refined together with those clay blanks.

Finally, clusters of liquid metal shimmering with an eerie luster were extracted from it.

A hoarse voice echoed in the hall: 'The new batch of 'Power Of Will alloy' has been refined. Send it to the Lingnan base immediately to be forged into the final Power Of Will core.'

Cui Wujiu's Divine Sense felt as if it had been struck by lightning; he understood.

This was not a prayer for blessings at all, but a complete and utter scam!

What these ordinary people were offering was not 'residual warmth' at all; it was clearly the purest spark of their life's Origin!

Fury exploded in his chest, and his Divine Sense instantly returned to his body.

Cui Wujiu opened his eyes abruptly, his gaze filled with raging flames. He clenched his iron fist and smashed it hard against the furnace wall in front of him!

'Bang!'

The piping hot furnace wall was dented slightly from the impact, sending sparks flying everywhere.

'What you are worshipping is not a god, but a furnace for refining humans!'

At the same time, in a night market thousands of miles away in Lingnan, Zhang Xuanyi was spitting as he enthusiastically promoted his new product.

'Take a look, everyone! 'reverse fate altering compass - Cold Region Special Edition'! Feel like your Luck has been too good lately and you're afraid of being targeted by the Heavens? Buy one! Feel like good Luck is coming too fast and you're feeling uneasy? Buy one! Buy one get one free, helping you freeze your good Luck firmly in place—steady and long-lasting is the way to go!'

A passing auntie was amused by him: 'Young man, is there anyone who thinks they have too much good Luck?'

Zhang Xuanyi gave a mysterious smile and lowered his voice: 'Auntie, you don't understand. Fortune and misfortune are interdependent; prosperity leads to decline. This compass of mine is designed to help you tap the brakes when your Luck is at its peak, to prevent joy from turning into sorrow!'

As he spoke, he picked up a palm-sized brass compass and spun it skillfully in his hand.

In the very moment he was bantering with the auntie, his thumb flicked lightly against an extremely hidden scale on the back of the compass.

No one noticed, but after the compass needle trembled imperceptibly, the magnetic pole it pointed to shifted silently, creating an eerie resonance with those thirty-seven ancient furnace fires in the distant north that served as energy nodes.

That night, in the underground energy core vault of the Lingnan 'Warm Dwelling Project,' a piercing alarm siren shattered the silence.

The duty staff in the monitoring center watched the giant electronic sand table in horror.

On the sand table, hundreds of light bands representing the city's energy supply were currently fluctuating and flickering violently.

What they couldn't understand even more was that several of the purest cyan flame streams, as if they had gained life, brazenly broke away from the preset pipelines and flowed against the current!

Their target was precise and singular, heading straight for a certain household in Building A of the third phase of the Warm Dwelling New City.

'Mom, Mom, look!'

Inside the house, a child who had just been awakened rubbed their eyes, pointing a small finger at an empty corner, their voice filled with a hint of childish fear.

'The fire is crying.'

An encrypted email reached Cui Wujiu's temporary terminal almost the instant the alarm went off.

The sender was Su Qingzhu.

The content was just a photo of a funeral home and a single line of text.

'They are using dead people's fire seeds to nourish a fake Tianshi.'

Dead people's fire, human refining furnace.

Cui Wujiu's mind instantly connected the two clues together.

He did not hesitate for a moment; his figure transformed into an afterimage, rushing to Lingnan overnight.

According to the clues provided by Su Qingzhu, he quickly found the giant blast furnace used to refine 'Power Of Will alloy' deep inside an abandoned thermal power plant.

Although the furnace body was cold, the air still retained a fishy, sweet scent, a mixture of resentment and incense.

Cui Wujiu reached into his bosom and pulled out a mung bean that looked like a snack, tossing it into his mouth.

This was the 'heavenly eye mung beans' secret to his sect, which allowed for a brief glimpse into the trajectories of energy.

The next second, his world changed.

Countless pale golden threads spread out from the bottom of the blast furnace, like a giant spider web connecting to all corners of the city.

The thickest ones among them led, shockingly, to those municipal funeral homes.

He 'saw' clearly how an underground 'signature delivery chain' secretly controlled by the remnants of the Quanxing operated—they specialized in collecting the 'last breath' of supernaturals before they died, using special Magical Artifacts to capture their unwillingness to dissipate. This breath contained the supernatural's lifelong cultivation and obsession, which was then fused with the dead people's fire seeds stolen from corpse contracts and sent into this blast furnace, refined into the evil core that drove the entire Warm Dwelling Project!

So that's it.

No wonder this fire was so cold and sinister; because at its root, it was born from Death Qi and resentment.

Cui Wujiu pulled another colorful candy from his pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and tossed it into his mouth.

fist soul candy, which could triple his physical strength for one minute.

He took a deep breath, his muscles bulging all over his body, and an overbearing, peerless Aura soared into the sky.

He did not use any fancy Moves; he simply gathered all his strength into his right fist and punched the giant furnace core!

'This fire is not yours to refine!'

Boom—!

The indestructible furnace core shattered upon impact, countless energy fragments surged backward, and the entire thermal power plant trembled violently under his punch.

At the very moment the furnace core shattered, in the Lingnan underground vault center, the last intact Power Of Will clay figurine cracked with a 'click' in the center of its chest, opening a fissure.

A cluster of deep blue cyan flames, like a butterfly that had broken free from its cage, drifted slowly out of the fissure.

The flame twisted in mid-air, actually transforming into a face identical to Zhang Xuanyi's.

The flame face scanned its surroundings and whispered in a voice that only a very few could hear: 'Fire does not recognize a master, it only recognizes the heart.'

As soon as it finished speaking, it burst into flames, and the fire intensity surged instantly.

The deep blue flames burned in reverse along the copper pipe energy network connected to the clay figurines at an incredible speed, and wherever they passed, all energy nodes were completely annihilated.

A hundred miles away, in the three newly completed Warm Dwelling New Cities, all the lights went out instantly, plunging them into dead, silent darkness.

The scene cuts to the depths of the earth veins of Mount Longhu thousands of miles away, where the residual consciousness of an ancient turtle that had been sleeping for who knows how many years slowly raised its head.

In its turbid eyes, the cyan flame returning to the Origin of Heaven and Earth was reflected.

'The fire has returned,' the ancient voice echoed underground. 'This time, it burns the heart.'

The noise of the night market gradually dissipated. Zhang Xuanyi packed up his stall and sat leisurely on a small stool.

He pulled the last photocopied yellow paper Talisman from his bosom; on it, a complex array pattern that ordinary people could not understand was drawn in cinnabar, which was the key to triggering the resonance between the northern and southern furnace fires.

He flicked his finger, and the Talisman paper fell into a charcoal brazier about to go out near his feet.

The firelight devoured the last of the cinnabar on the paper, reflecting a flickering void in his calm, unruffled eyes.