109: Backfire Seed

Zhang Xuanyi ignored the dissipating sound of the wind and did not cast his gaze toward the door crack that only allowed one person to pass through sideways.

He simply stood quietly on the ashes that still held some warmth, his bare feet feeling the faint, almost imperceptible pulse coming from deep within the earth beneath the snow.

He did not push the door; that was not his style of doing things.

Forcing his way in was the act of a brute, and what he intended to do was to make this door open for him on its own.

He slowly sat cross-legged, ignoring the bone-piercing chill, and from the bosom of his washed-out old Daoist robe, he fished out a bean that was entirely emerald green, as if it had condensed a thousand years of morning dew.

The heavenly eye mung beans could glimpse the truth that ordinary people could not see.

He placed the bean into his mouth, and a cool, herbal Qi instantly surged from the root of his tongue into his crown.

In an instant, the world before his eyes changed dramatically!

The entire Mount Longhu was no longer a mountain, but a mysterious black giant tortoise; the trend of the mountain range was the pattern of the tortoise shell, and the cyan earth fire wandering deep underground was clearly the endlessly flowing Bloodline within the giant tortoise's body!

This magnificent and vast scene was enough to make any cultivator lose their composure.

And the Tianshi Mansion was situated right on the head of the giant tortoise, serving to suppress the eye of the Dragon vein.

His gaze pierced through the heavy mansion gates, passed through layers of courtyards, and reached the deepest part of the Zhengyi Hall.

There, there was no Celestial Master in seclusion seeking the Dao as legend claimed, only an extremely dim, almost transparent human-shaped afterimage.

That afterimage was also sitting cross-legged, hands forming an ancient and complex seal—the Fire Sealing Seal!

A wisp of Qi, even weaker than a gossamer thread, emanated from the afterimage, barely maintaining the mountain-sealing Formation that enveloped all of Mount Longhu.

That was not a living person, but more like a wisp of obsession, a brand of Divine Soul forcefully left behind.

Zhang Xuanyi narrowed his eyes, the outline of that afterimage reflected in his pupils, and he muttered to himself, his voice carrying a trace of cold mockery: "So it's not seclusion... it's someone acting as a stake inside, using their own life to keep the last breath of this Formation going."

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Tianshi Mansion, within the Scripture Pavilion that had long since turned into ruins, a nimble figure shuttled between the broken walls and debris.

Su Qingzhu, wearing tactical gloves, carefully unearthed an Incomplete Manual of the "Fire Administration Records" that had been charred black by smoke and fire from beneath a pile of scorched wooden beams.

Using the light from her phone screen, she compared the text on the Incomplete Manual word for word with another ancient book she had brought, "self-salvation".

Suddenly, her finger stopped on a line of text.

This page of the "Fire Administration Records" had obvious traces of being heavily crossed out with a vermilion brush, but at a certain angle, the handwriting underneath could still be identified: "In the year of Guiwei, the 72nd Generation Celestial Master imprisoned himself in the main hall, using his body as a key to suppress the 'Seed of Inverted Fire'."

Seed of Inverted Fire!

Su Qingzhu's heart skipped a beat.

She immediately dug out an old voice recorder from her backpack; it was a keepsake from her father.

Pressing the play button, after a burst of noisy static, a weak, aged male voice came through intermittently. It was the final words her father had recorded from a dying Elder when he was investigating the corruption case in the Outsider World years ago: "...Fire... Fire cannot belong to one person... cough cough... they... they want to make the Fire recognize a master..."

"Using body as a key", "make the Fire recognize a master".

Two seemingly unrelated clues suddenly connected at this moment!

Su Qingzhu jerked her head up, looking toward the main hall of Tianshi Mansion shrouded in darkness in the distance. What bullshit reconstruction of Tianshi Mansion; this was simply a huge scam that had been going on for decades!

Those old fogies of the Old School didn't want to reopen the sect at all; they wanted to take advantage of the weakening of the earth fire to create a new "Fire Master" who could absolutely control that "Seed of Inverted Fire"!

The river surged, and a small skiff drifted downstream.

Cui Wujiu sat at the bow of the boat, with a small charcoal stove placed in front of him.

He had already visited six of the thirty-seven "Places of First Ignition".

Every time he arrived at a place, he would buy a few local sweet potatoes and roast them at the village entrance using the cyan flame stove fire there. He appeared leisurely, but in reality, his eyes never left the dancing flames in the stove.

The cyan flames in the first six villages, though varying in strength, all had a rhythm to their flickering that carried a natural, breathing-like cadence.

But in the seventh village, he discovered something unusual.

The cyan flame in the stove was burning extremely vigorously, even more intensely than the previous places, but the rise and fall of the flames lacked any "heartbeat," instead resembling a programmed machine, with every surge and ebb being terrifyingly precise.

He frowned and took out a heavenly eye mung beans from his bosom, but instead of putting it in his mouth, he gently crushed it with two fingers and sprinkled the emerald green powder into the stove fire.

"Hum—"

Illusions suddenly emerged!

He saw countless translucent threads, finer than hair, extending from the soles of every villager's feet, converging into a single stream that pierced through the earth and extended straight toward the distant south.

Those were not earth fire, nor were they spiritual Qi, but human "Power Of Will," the most fundamental essence and spirit!

A cold arc curled at the corners of Cui Wujiu's mouth. He gave a cold snort, the sound not loud, yet it made the boatman shiver violently: "Couldn't extract the fire, so you switched to extracting people? A fine method, this is called boiling the soul in warm water."

In front of the Tianshi Mansion, Zhang Xuanyi withdrew his gaze.

He took out an empty glass bottle from his bosom, on which was still a label that read "Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid".

He pulled out the stopper, pointed the bottle mouth at the snow in front of him, and began to quickly draw a complex and eerie Formation diagram.

That was not some profound Daoist technique, but an ancient "Anti-Fire Induction Formation" that mimicked the resonance of the earth's veins.

Once the Formation diagram was finished, he pressed his fingers together like a sword and lightly slashed his wrist; bright red essence blood dripped down, instantly dyeing the core of the Formation red.

Using his own essence blood as a conduit, he simulated the unique frequency of the thirty-seven earth fire stoves in the north, attempting to create a false resonance with the earth veins of Mount Longhu.

In an instant, a slight tremor came from the ground beneath the entire snow-covered area!

Inside the mansion gates, deep within the main hall, the fingers of the human-shaped afterimage acting as the "stake," which were forming the Fire Sealing Seal, trembled imperceptibly.

The Fire Sealing Seal loosened by just half an inch!

It was this half-inch loosening that allowed a wisp of smoke, blacker than ink, to silently seep out from the cracks in the main hall floor.

The black smoke ignited upon touching the ground; it had no temperature, yet it emitted a teeth-gritting "sizzle," instantly transforming into a scorched, withered phantom hand, carrying an aura of dead silence that devoured everything, and it lightning-fast grabbed toward Zhang Xuanyi's throat!

Zhang Xuanyi did not dodge or avoid it, a provocative smile even hanging on the corner of his mouth.

He rooted his feet, exerted force from his waist and back, his whole body like a fully drawn bow, not retreating but advancing, and met it head-on with a fierce and unparalleled Eight Extremities Mountain-Clinging Strike!

Within the wind of his punch, it carried a wisp of untrammeled true intent; that was his own Dao, free and unrestrained, breaking all laws!

"Boom!"

With a muffled thud, the phantom hand of scorched black was shattered by the punch, turning into wisps of black smoke that dissipated unwillingly into the air.

Zhang Xuanyi withdrew his fist, brushed off the non-existent dust on his robe, and sneered at the tightly closed mansion gate: "Guarding the gate is fine, but don't live your life as a lock."

The night had finally deepened.

Just past the hour of midnight, the cyan flame that had been stubbornly flickering in the crack of the Tianshi Mansion gate for three hundred years suddenly extinguished without warning.

Immediately afterward, as if receiving some kind of instruction, all the earth fires flowing like Bloodlines deep within the entire Mount Longhu range simultaneously extinguished, as if their breath had been brutally cut off by an invisible giant hand.

A thousand miles away, Su Qingzhu was organizing data in the editorial department. She suddenly looked up; on the computer screen in front of her, the monitoring chart representing the energy fluctuations of fire seeds across the country saw all light points instantly drop to zero in the same second, turning into a dead, pitch-black void.

On the small skiff in the middle of the river, Cui Wujiu, who had been resting with his eyes closed, suddenly opened his eyes. The torch in his hand, which had been burning continuously, puffed out and extinguished on its own in the windless environment.

At the foot of Mount Longhu, on the snow, Zhang Xuanyi slowly stood up.

He gazed at the mansion gate that had completely plunged into darkness, was silent for a moment, then fished out the last fist soul candy from his bosom, unwrapped the candy paper, and put it into his mouth.

This time, it was not for the upcoming battle, but for the sake of burning.

The candy melted in his mouth, and a warm current surged through his limbs and bones.

He whispered softly, as if speaking to the world itself: "The fire is out? No, it's that someone is afraid of it... it's too bright."

After speaking, he turned around, no longer looking at the dead-silent Tianshi Mansion, and cast his gaze toward the village at the foot of the mountain where smoke curled from chimneys.

In the darkness, the corners of his mouth curled into an inscrutable, meaningful smile.

A new game of chess had begun.