113: Let it fly

At the foot of Mount Longhu in the early morning, the iron pot still retained the warmth of last night's embers. Its blackened bottom was overturned on the dirt slope, like a forgotten boundary marker.

Zhang Xuanyi squatted at the site of his former stall, holding half a baked flatbread. He gnawed on it while watching several shirtless children in the distance.

Their mouths were filled with golden syrup—the last vestiges of the fist soul candy's medicinal effects seeping from their tongues into their meridians.

The next moment, the children's nascent Eight Extremities Fist stances erupted: shoulder strikes, elbow blows, stomping steps, and explosive punches. They even conjured tiny flames that crackled in the morning mist, like the first hot breath of a beast awakening.

He merely grinned, saying nothing, just chewing and swallowing the last bite of his flatbread.

Just then, a gray shadow stumbled through the thin forest mist and collapsed with a thud onto the scorched earth.

It was a disciple guarding Mount Longhu. His Taoist robe was caked with mud, his temple bled, and his hands trembled as he presented a gilded letter, his voice shaking: “The Sect Master’s personal letter… inviting you to come and discuss the ‘Orthodoxy of the Primordial Ignition Sites.’”

The air seemed to freeze for a moment.

Zhang Xuanyi glanced at the letter. The gold-powdered script was dazzling in the morning sun, like the last roar of some ancient power.

He didn’t take it. Instead, he slowly stood up and casually stuffed the letter into the stove.

Flames instantly licked at the gold foil, turning it to ash in a flash.

“Orthodoxy?” He spat out the flatbread crumbs, bent down, picked up a piece of charcoal from the bottom of the pot, and scrawled a crooked character for “fire” on the ground. The charcoal marks were rough but exuded a raw vitality. “Three years ago, when I was selling photocopy yellow paper, who decreed that talismans couldn’t be copied? Who said fire could only be enshrined in temples?”

He paused, then kicked over the iron pot.

Boom—

Ashes soared into the air, scattering like a shower of stars, making half his face flicker in and out of view.

“If I go, all the children in the world will have to kneel and beg for sparks tomorrow.” He sneered, clapped his hands, “But fire has never been something bestowed. It burns from within people’s own hearts.”

Before his words faded, a subtle anomaly swept across the southern sky.

A faint tremor emanated from the earth’s pulse (geological veins), as if someone had struck a match deep within the earth.

Zhang Xuanyi paused, his brow twitching—that was a sign of rampant fire energy, not a mundane flame, but the backlash from the intertwining of spiritual vows and earth veins.

He knew who had made the move.

Cui Wujiu had already pushed into the Qinling mountain range’s fault zone.

Almost simultaneously, on the edge of the Lingnan ruins, Su Qingzhu sat on a collapsed stone pillar, her fingertips gently caressing the camera casing.

The screen was already dark—her live broadcast had been forcibly taken down by the platform, the “Wordless Stele” video flagged as “suspected of inciting supernatural ability loss of control,” her account frozen, and messages blocked.

Representatives from Seventeen City had rushed over overnight, surrounding her, their faces anxious.

“They’ve sealed all our exits!” one person growled. “If we don’t speak up, the public will only believe the official narrative of ‘evil flames causing chaos’!”

Su Qingzhu didn’t turn around. She slowly stood up, strapped the camera onto a drone, and entered a preset flight path.

“No need to broadcast anymore,” she said, her voice so calm it was almost cold. “Let it fly.”

The drone hummed and ascended, heading south.

Along the way, miniature projection devices automatically deployed, and the squares of Seventeen City simultaneously lit up with images—tens of thousands of signed terracotta figurines burning in fierce flames, their ashes rising into a crimson mist, as if countless silent souls were screaming.

A cold smile played on her lips: “You delete one shot, and I’ll release a hundred fiery projections. Fire isn’t a word; can it be censored? It burns in people’s hearts. You can suppress it for a while, but you can’t suppress a prairie fire.”

Deep in the Qinling Mountains, in a geological rift valley, Cui Wujiu was climbing along a slippery rock face. His torch flickered, illuminating the wriggling runes in the rock crevices.

These self-healing black stone restrictions were like living things, quietly spreading, seemingly trying to reweave a sealing array to suppress all sources of wild fire.

He took out his last three heavenly eye mung beans, crushed them, mixed them with saliva, and smeared them on his glabella.

In an instant, his eyes opened and closed like blades.

His vision changed dramatically—beneath the earth’s veins, threads of spiritual vows were spread like a spiderweb, each one connected to a hidden Taoist temple in the north, like an invisible umbilical cord, drawing on popular incense offerings to prolong its dying existence.

“Heh…” he sneered softly, bit his finger, and drew a delusion-breaking talisman with his blood on his palm. “Still hoping to cling to life by borrowing the people’s thoughts?”

He lit the tinder, and a faint blue flame dripped from his fingertips, flowing backward along the threads of spiritual vows.

The fire snake silently burrowed underground, following those greedy pulse (meridians), and began to burn.

Just then, a thousand miles away, Zhang Xuanyi suddenly looked up.

The fire energy in the south became chaotic, and the earth’s veins trembled more violently, as if a string stretched to its limit was about to snap.

His eyes darkened. He grabbed his backpack and turned to leave.

Halfway there, passing through a small town, he suddenly saw a crowd gathered in front of the ancestral hall.

Villagers carried statues, set up incense altars, and burned paper money, their expressions solemn, as if performing some ancient ritual.

He paused slightly.

A whisper drifted on the wind:

“…We must ask someone from Tianshi Mansion to light the fire, otherwise, this year will likely be disastrous.” Zhang Xuanyi didn’t stop, but his heart sank.

The fire energy in the south was raging too fiercely—that wasn’t an ordinary geological fluctuation, but a “thought-burning tremor” that only occurred when spiritual vows and true fire clashed.

Cui Wujiu had touched the core of the forbidden zone. He was using heavenly eye mung beans to penetrate the sealing pulse (meridians) and burn back the umbilical cords of residual spirits that were feeding on popular incense offerings.

But once the pulse (meridians) collapsed, the backlash would be enough to ignite the entire Qinling mountain range’s subterranean fire dragon spine.

He couldn’t wait.

Slinging his backpack over his shoulder, Zhang Xuanyi leaped into the dense forest along the mountain path.

His feet lightly touched the ground, Qi flowing through his soles, the Eight Extremities Fist intent propelling him like wind sweeping across the wilderness.

Along the way, grass and trees fell, and dust swirled, as if a fiery tail trailed behind him.

He knew he was being drawn by some greater karma towards Lingnan—the first spark of wild fire he had ignited no longer belonged to him alone.

After half a day of rapid travel, he suddenly saw smoke curling over a small town ahead. Drums and music blared in front of the ancestral hall, incense altars were piled high, and villagers knelt in a tide, bowing to clay statues.

An old priest, adorned in red and festive colors, held a peach wood sword, chanting: “…We invite the Tianshi’s sacred fire to suppress evil spirits from all directions and drive away the wild flame disaster star!”

Zhang Xuanyi paused, a cold smile appearing on his lips.

Here it comes again.

It was the same old routine—treating fire as something that could be bestowed, offered as tribute before ancestral tablets, and locked away in ancient texts as secret lore.

They feared fire, yet they had to rely on it; they revered gods, yet they didn’t know that the gods had long been enslaved by incense offerings, becoming puppets.

He unobtrusively squeezed into the crowd, his hat brim pulled low, his fingertips quietly reaching into his bosom, pulling out half a bottle of unused Pseudo-Three Caves True Qi Concentrate.

This was the only forbidden item in the system’s intermediate store that could temporarily break through the Grandmaster realm, originally saved as a last resort.

But now—

“Since you want to ‘invite fire’?” His eyes flashed. “Then I will give you a true fire that recognizes its master, not a god.”

As the priest raised the wine jar, preparing to sprinkle it as an offering to heaven, his sleeve subtly moved, and the liquid silently slipped out, blending into the ceremonial wine.

The wine immediately rippled with a faint blue hue, then disappeared.

At three quarters past noon, gongs echoed throughout the town.

The old priest lit the fuse, and the flames, following the wine trail, shot into the main altar, erupting into a ten-foot-high blaze—

But the color of the fire was wrong!

It wasn’t crimson, nor golden yellow, but a deep, translucent blue-green flame, like a soul fire crawling out from the earth’s core. It instantly wrapped around the face of the statue, crackling and burning, actually melting spiderweb-like cracks into the clay figure!

“Ah—! Demonic fire!!”

“The statue is crying! The god is weeping!”

The villagers scattered in terror. Some kowtowed incessantly, others tried to extinguish the fire, but were thrown to the ground by the heatwave.

In that chaotic instant, Zhang Xuanyi suddenly stepped forward, his voice like thunder exploding:

“This fire recognizes the human heart, not a clay idol!”

Before his words finished, he slapped a photocopy yellow paper from his palm, firmly adhering it to the ancestral hall’s main beam.

He lightly pinched a hand seal and silently recited the activation command.

Hum—

The entire ancestral hall suddenly shook. Countless intricate fire patterns appeared between the beams and pillars, flowing slowly as if bloodlines were awakening.

As dusk began to fall, looking again, the building seemed to have transformed into a burning star map, shining brightly, illuminating the surrounding wilderness.

The crowd stood dumbfounded, gazing at the wondrous sight that did not belong to the mortal world, unable to utter another word.

Zhang Xuanyi, however, didn’t look back. He turned and walked away, his clothes rustling in the wind, leaving only a lingering sentence:

“Sparks never cross rivers, because they are already burning in everyone’s hearts.”

A thousand miles away, at the edge of Mount Longhu’s protective barrier.

A charred figure crawled forward, his skin cracked and scorched, his breath faint.

It was one of the missing mountain guardian elders, with half a broken bronze token embedded in his chest—the highest martyr’s talisman from Tianshi Mansion.

His lips cracked, and he trembled as he murmured: “…The fire has left the altar, the names on the tablets are burned… Not rebellion, but martyrdom…”

With his last breath, he bit his tongue, activating the remnant spiritual vows within him, and lit the ancestral wish lamp he carried.

The firelight soared, condensing into a blood-red fire talisman that shot south, as if to deliver a final warning.

But just as the fire talisman streaked across the night sky—

A twisted ball of wild fire suddenly leaped from the forest, pouncing on the fire talisman without warning, completely devouring it!

Ashes sifted down, leaving only a carbonized wooden stick, lying quietly in the dirt.

Its shape, its wear and tear… were identical to the stick Zhang Xuanyi had personally used to light the first bonfire at the Primordial Ignition Sites three years ago.

The camera slowly zoomed out.

Above the ruins of Seventeen City, the silently standing “Wordless Steles” simultaneously glowed with an imperceptible crimson light, as if something deep within the earth was awakening.

And at the end of Lingnan, on a hillside outside the Warm Dwelling New City, an allied army of thirty-six small and medium-sized sects stood in formation, banners fluttering.

The leading Taoist priest held a jade tablet, his gaze stern, and his proclamation echoed across the wilderness—