110: Black Hand Picking Stars

Beneath the rapid rubbing of Zhang Xuanyi's hands, the withered tree at the village entrance emitted its first trace of insignificant blue smoke.

The smoke was acrid, like a cough suppressed for a hundred years.

Immediately, he rolled his eyes back and fell straight backward, his movements so precise it was as if he had rehearsed them a thousand times.

Amidst the villagers' gasps, a snow-white "Fire Energy Recovery Center" ambulance glided over silently, its efficiency chilling to the bone.

The moment he was lifted onto the stretcher, Zhang Xuanyi's eyelids twitched almost imperceptibly.

The place he was being taken to was none other than the brainwashing prison used by the old faction to imprison thought.

Cold—this was the first impression the Recovery Center gave him.

The air was filled with the scent of disinfectant and a strange, sweet, fishy odor, and the walls were as white as dead men's bones.

On the wall, a massive "Fire Worship Correction Curriculum" dominated everyone's line of sight, with everything from "History of Fire Hazards" to "Quiet Qi Therapy" arranged in an airtight schedule.

The patients here, or rather "prisoners," all had hollow eyes and sluggish movements, like puppets whose Soul had been extracted.

Every morning, nurses would push carts around, injecting each of them with the so-called "Quiet Qi Agent."

Zhang Xuanyi obediently extended his arm; as the cold liquid entered his veins, a heavy drowsiness instantly swept over him.

In the dreamscape forcibly dragged into by the drugs, he was compelled to watch carefully curated slides: homes burning in raging fires, children crying in the flames, loved ones burned to charcoal... These images played on a loop, aiming to brand the fear that "Fire is disaster" into everyone's subconscious.

But he was not one of them.

The secret arts of Mount Longhu had long since made him immune to all poisons; this bit of psychedelic agent was merely scratching the surface.

On the third day, when a young nurse was absent-mindedly changing a medicine bottle, the opportunity arrived.

A fragment of photocopy yellow paper, smaller than a fingernail, slid out of Zhang Xuanyi's sleeve; it was a rubbing talisman he had refined using secret arts.

In the split second the nurse turned around, his fingertips touched the label of the glass medicine bottle as lightly as a dragonfly skimming the water.

On the yellow paper, a line of dense molecular structural formulas slowly emerged, twisted and bizarre.

Zhang Xuanyi sneered inwardly.

Three Caverns True Qi Liquid is the orthodox Spirit Medicine of the Dao sect for refining the Divine Soul, while this thing before him was merely a degraded product—"Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid"—with several key nodes tampered with and all spirituality removed, leaving only nerve-numbing effects.

"Using a fake to suppress the masses as a divine medicine—these rats hiding behind the scenes have truly lost all sense of shame."

Meanwhile, Su Qingzhu was standing in the monitoring room of a funeral home, the air thick with the smell of formalin and the decay of death.

She had visited seven provinces and reviewed archives from over a hundred hospitals; in the records of all patients with "Fire Blindness," there was an inconspicuous supplementary agreement for the "Warm Home Project."

And the signatories of these agreements all ultimately died suddenly and mysteriously.

On the screen, a video was playing.

A stiff corpse was wheeled out; eerily, at his chest, a cluster of cyan flames, colder than ghost fire, was flickering slightly, as if it were a heart unwilling to stop beating.

Two staff members in lead-gray uniforms walked up expressionlessly, and one of them used a massive copper clamp to forcefully "extract" that cluster of cyan flames from the corpse's chest!

The flame emitted a silent wail as it was forcibly stuffed into a metal canister, then injected into the abyss through a pipe connected to the underground.

Su Qingzhu's nails dug deep into her palms.

Taking advantage of the cover of night, she snuck into the morgue and found a forgotten handwritten logbook in an inconspicuous hidden compartment.

Opening a page, the handwriting was sloppy and cold:

"Fire Source No. 108, extraction successful. Vital signs stable, activity level A+, has been sent to the 'Star Cellar' for storage according to protocol."

Star Cellar!

They were not extinguishing fire; they were stealing fire, storing fire!

Su Qingzhu bit her lip hard, and the taste of blood spread in her mouth.

This world had become one giant lie.

Deep in the Qinling Mountains, Cui Wujiu was trekking across a hundred-mile-long broken belt of fire veins.

This place should have been a land of surging earth fire, but now it was lifeless and filled with Death Qi.

The ground beneath his feet felt not a trace of warmth.

He closed his eyes and pressed a plump mung bean to the center of his brow.

This was the "Heavenly Eye" passed down by his sect, capable of glimpsing what was invisible to ordinary people.

His vision suddenly cleared.

He saw that deep underground, an invisible net composed of countless runes was acting like a precision butcher's knife, cutting the entire surging Dragon fire vein into pieces.

At the end of every severed fire vein segment, a head-sized black boulder was buried, with runes flowing on the stones, emitting a suffocating chill.

Cui Wujiu pushed the power of his Heavenly Eye to the limit, his gaze penetrating the black stones.

He saw that inside every black stone, a tiny creature the size of a fist, composed of pure flame—a Fire Spirit—was imprisoned.

They were painfully colliding and struggling in the cramped space, emitting silent wails.

He pinched a pinch of grayish-white powder from his pouch; it was the old furnace ash that had accumulated in the Pill Furnace he had guarded for thirty years.

He sprinkled it gently onto a black stone, his lips moving as he spat out a few ancient syllables: "Fire does not recognize a master, it only recognizes the heart."

The moment the words fell, the pinch of furnace ash seemed to come alive, seeping into the gaps of the black stone's runes.

In an instant, deep underground, three black stones simultaneously emitted a dull explosion, and the indestructible runes shattered inch by inch!

The imprisoned Fire Spirits turned into three streams of fireflies, and without a moment's hesitation, they resolutely escaped into the depths of the earth and disappeared.

Feeling the faint warmth coming from the ground beneath his feet, Cui Wujiu muttered to himself: "Fire will flee. As long as... someone is willing to open a door for it."

In the deep of night at the "Correction Center," everything was deathly silent.

Zhang Xuanyi sat up from his bed like a "sleepwalker," his eyes tightly closed, but his fingers formed a profound magic seal in front of his chest.

The secret "Formless Attraction" of Mount Longhu could mobilize the most minute energy in heaven and earth.

Though the fire seed within him was suppressed, it had not been extinguished; at this moment, it was being guided by this power, turning into a stream of heat thinner than a hair, silently injected into a corner of the mattress through his fingertips.

A cluster of flame, smaller than a bean, lit up.

It had no smoke, no heat, and not even the form of an ordinary flame; it was just a stubborn point of light, yet it burned tenaciously and persistently.

"Fire!" The patrolling guard finally noticed the anomaly, roared sharply, rushed over, and stomped down hard.

The point of light went out.

He spat in disdain and was about to turn around, but discovered with horror that the same point of light had actually appeared on the sole of his own shoe!

He stomped his feet frantically, but the flame was like a maggot on the bones, seeping out from his pant legs and igniting from his companion's hair.

They did not know that the moment he activated the "Formless Attraction," Zhang Xuanyi had already used his breath to disperse that faint fire seed into every inch of air in the building.

Panic began to spread.

The entire building began to experience "spontaneous combustion hallucinations," with flames flowing on the walls and blooming on the ceiling, yet touching nothing.

All the patients were awakened, and for the first time, emotions called "fear" and "confusion" appeared in their dull eyes.

In the chaos, an old man in a corner tremblingly reached out his hand, seemingly wanting to touch the illusory flame, and from his cracked lips, he squeezed out a few broken syllables: "Fire... Fire... is it back?"

Three days later, in the north, at the funeral home that Su Qingzhu had investigated, at the stroke of midnight, the morgue erupted into a raging fire without any warning.

The monitoring center was dead silent; all circuits and oil lines were intact, and the source of the fire remained a mystery.

But the only night watchman that night swore an oath that he had seen with his own eyes a corpse that should have been cold suddenly open its eyes, and the cluster of cyan residual flames on its chest, which had been determined to be extinguished, roared and surged, burning through the heavy copper coffin!

The cyan flame, like a spirit snake with a life of its own, spread wildly along the drainage pipes in the corner, accurately finding the "Quiet Qi Agent" delivery pipeline buried deep underground.

The inferior agent became the best accelerant, and an unprecedented underground fire traveled along the veins of the Empire, surging against the current in all directions!

The camera pulled back infinitely; across the vast territory of the Empire, seventeen top-secret strongholds known as "Star Cellars" shook violently at the same moment.

On the surface of those black stones used to seal the fire seeds, the first subtle cracks quietly appeared.

On an unnamed mountain peak in the south, Zhang Xuanyi stood facing the wind, the night breeze blowing his robes.

He gazed into the distance at the faint, yet incredibly stubborn, flicker of fire in the northern sky, a faint smile curling the corners of his lips.

"No matter how deep you hide, you cannot smother a heart that wants to burn."

The first cluster of fire in the north was merely a signal, the first cry of a newborn.

It announced the existence of fire to this cold world, yet it could not teach the world how to embrace it again.

For those Souls who had shivered in the darkness for too long, what they needed was not a miracle in the distant sky, but a warmth they could grasp with their own hands, a light they could ignite themselves.

A new kind of fire seed needed to be sown. A kind that could take root in the human heart.