123: Homeward Journey

Above the abyss, the daylight pierced through the clouds, outlining the collapse zone like a hideous scar on the earth.

Zhang Xuanyi's cloth shoes crunched on the ground mixed with gravel and coal cinder, the rustling sound sounding exceptionally abrupt in this absolute silence.

The traces left by the miners with the last warmth of their lives last night had not yet been blown away by the wind; those huge "Fire" characters painted with blood and charcoal on the ruined tunnel walls seemed to still be shouting silently, accusing the darkness of devouring them.

He had already decided to head south, find a quiet mountain village where no one knew him, and completely forget the turbulent waves he had stirred up over these past three years.

But just as he was about to bypass these ruins, a burst of childish noise made him stop in his tracks.

On the other side of the ruins, a group of ragged children were huddled together.

They didn't look like they were playing; it was more like they were performing some solemn and clumsy ritual.

They had picked up broken wooden stakes and sharp stone shards, imitating the most primitive movements, drilling wood and rubbing them over and over again.

This wasn't play; every small face carried a kind of stubborn seriousness.

One particularly thin little girl had already worn her palms raw, the seeping blood mixing with wood shavings to form a dark red mud.

Yet she was completely unaware of the pain, her small face taut, muttering a vague phrase repeatedly: "The teacher said, if there is light in your heart, your hands can shine... If there is light in your heart, your hands can shine..."

That voice was like an invisible needle, precisely piercing the softest part of Zhang Xuanyi's heart.

He walked over silently, squatted to the side, and watched for a long, long time.

These children didn't even know what Spiritual Qi was, or what a cultivation method was; they had simply learned a most simple belief from the adults, from those legends of survivors.

This belief was more real and more scorching than any Talisman he had sold under Mount Longhu back then.

He didn't make a sound to disturb them, just reached into the bosom of his washed-out Daoist robe and fished out half a piece of burnt-black Talisman paper.

That was the first "Don't Fear the Dark" Talisman he had casually drawn at his Myriad Laws Street Stall three years ago; he had thought it was long lost, never expecting this fragment to still remain.

He stood up, walked behind the girl, and while she wasn't looking, gently tucked the half-Talisman into her tattered pocket.

After doing all this, he turned and left, his figure merging into the wilderness under the morning light.

In the wind came a very faint chuckle from him, carrying a bit of relief and a bit of self-mockery.

"These days, I don't even need to sell Talismans anymore."

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in Lingnan, in the basement of an old library hidden deep in the mountains, Su Qingzhu personally closed the last heavy iron door.

Outside the door was the inscription she had carved stroke by stroke with a chisel: "From now on, no one needs to stand up and tell you how to light a fire."

The final draft of "Fire-Lighting Path," along with all her research notes, would be forgotten by the world along with this basement.

She had completed her mission, returning the theory of the fire seed to theory, and leaving the real flame to the world.

Just as the iron door locked with a "clang," the phone in her pocket emitted a slight vibration.

It wasn't a private call, but a grassroots news push automatically captured by the System based on her information bubble.

The headline was unremarkable: "Northern Border Nursing Home Loses Power for Three Days; Elders Look Out for Each Other, Create Ancient Method to Keep Warm."

She intended to swipe it away, but her fingertips stopped when she saw the accompanying picture.

In the photo, several white-haired Elders sat in a circle; without firewood, they had actually drawn a rough Bagua formation on the floor with chalk, and then extended their withered fingers, rubbing the old wooden floor with a specific rhythm.

In the center of their palms, a stable and warm flame burned quietly, illuminating their wrinkled, smiling faces.

In the report's interview, an old lady said happily to the camera: "When I was young, a fire-juggling troupe came to the village; the performer loved to gesture like that before lighting the fire. It looked fun, so I remembered it."

Su Qingzhu's pupils contracted sharply.

She violently pulled up the encrypted cloud video library on her phone; it was the footage she had recorded three years ago during her first live stream at the Myriad Laws Street Stall.

In the frame, the first man to swallow the fist soul candy made an instinctive preparatory posture before his power exploded; that series of complex and exquisite hand gestures, when broken down, actually bore a seven or eight-part resemblance to the Elders' motion of rubbing the floor in the news photo!

She suddenly understood something, and her blood seemed to flow backward at this moment.

She stared at the photo for a long time, then whispered to herself, her voice trembling with a hint of trance: "So... we were already teaching it, it's just that no one knew that was also a fire seed."

Meanwhile, on a high slope in the southwest, a heavy rain had just stopped.

Cui Wujiu sat cross-legged on the damp soil, the air filled with the fresh scent of grass and trees.

In the distant village, wisps of cooking smoke rose from every household's fire pit; those flickering lights had once been the clearest beacons for his internal fire pulse sensing.

But now, that connection to the fire of the earth was becoming weaker and blurrier by the day, as if the whole world no longer needed him, the guide.

He exhaled a breath of turbid air and prepared to get up and leave this place he had watched over for several months.

The moment he exerted force with his legs, the ground beneath him suddenly trembled ever so slightly.

Immediately following, a warm red light emerged from deep underground without warning, dyeing the entire hillside with the magnificent colors of a sunset.

Cui Wujiu's expression changed; he immediately leaned down and pressed his palm firmly against the ground.

A strange yet ancient rhythm surged through his palm and straight into his Divine Sense.

It wasn't any kind of man-made fire intent he was familiar with; it was more like... a heartbeat.

One beat, two beats, steady and powerful, with a distinct rhythm.

Its source was precisely the Fire Memory Bead he had personally buried under the Foundation of the Tianshi Mansion main hall on Mount Longhu!

He closed his eyes, his Divine Sense sinking deep into the earth's veins, carefully tracing that heartbeat-like rhythm.

Gradually, an expression of unbelievable astonishment appeared on his face.

He had seen the frequency of this rhythm!

Just three years ago, outside Mount Longhu, when that stray child he had casually saved from human traffickers was holding a piece of rotten wood on a cold night, using all his strength to rub the wood to create fire, the frequency of his body's instinctive trembling was exactly the same as the rhythm of the Fire Memory Bead at this moment!

"Is it imitating humans... or are humans inheriting it?" Cui Wujiu muttered to himself, the shock between his brows slowly turning into a rough smile. "Damn it, at least it's alive."

Time flowed, and Zhang Xuanyi's figure appeared in front of an abandoned Daoist temple.

This had once been a small branch of Mount Longhu, but now the roof had long since collapsed and the statues were covered in dust.

He had only intended to find a place to shelter from the wind and rain and stay the night, but upon pushing open the ajar hall door, he saw a scene that left him both laughing and crying.

In the corner of the main hall, there were all sorts of crudely made "imitation Magical Artifacts": Talismans cut from tin, prayer beads strung from glass beads, and even a "Zhang Tianshi statue" made of mud with distorted facial features.

Several half-grown teenagers were gathered around a campfire, practicing gestures with great seriousness, shouting formulas they had seen in some street-stall literature: "Three circles to the left, three circles to the right, think of the sun as round in your heart!"

One of the teenagers had sharp eyes and saw Zhang Xuanyi at the door; he was stunned for a moment, then recognized him and pointed, shouting: "You... aren't you that Daoist who sold mung beans at the foot of the mountain?"

Zhang Xuanyi waved his hand, walked into the ruined temple, and sat down by the fire on his own.

"The mung beans are long gone," he said calmly, "Now, it's all up to yourselves."

The teenager seemed a bit unconvinced, puffing out his chest and saying: "We don't care! We don't have money to buy your things, but we can still make fire ourselves!"

Hearing this, Zhang Xuanyi didn't refute him, just raised his eyes, pointed to his own chest, then pointed to the weak sparks jumping on the teenagers' palms from their practice, and asked an inexplicable question: "Then whose money are you burning now?"

The teenager was stunned on the spot.

He stared blankly at the hard-won flame in his palm, then looked at his companions' equally confused faces, and suddenly, as if he had figured something out, he grinned and revealed a brilliant smile.

That night, in this ruined temple that had been forgotten for who knows how many years, a night-watch fire was lit for the first time without guidance or supervision, bright and warm.

Late at night, in the real Mount Longhu, deep in the main hall of the Tianshi Mansion.

The surface of the red jade bead buried deep under the Foundation of the hall suddenly had a faint light flowing like breathing.

The night-watch Elder had profound cultivation and sensed this anomaly immediately, leading his Disciples to investigate at once.

However, they dug three feet into the ground and retrieved the jade bead, only to find it as warm and smooth as usual, with no signs of any Spiritual Qi fluctuations.

Everyone had to give up, attributing everything to the Elder's illusion.

No one noticed that after the jade bead was returned to its original place, a crack almost invisible to the naked eye opened in the ground directly beneath it, and wisps of warmth seeped out, merging into the Foundation of the Tianshi Mansion.

A young Disciple responsible for sweeping passed by yawning, and unintentionally stepped on that crack.

In an instant, he felt a warm current rush from the Yongquan point on the sole of his foot straight to his crown, his entire body feeling indescribably comfortable, and in a trance, he briefly touched the threshold of the Innate realm.

But he himself was completely unaware of this, just rubbed his eyes and muttered: "Strange, why is the floor so hot under my feet today?"

The night-watch Elder stood in the center of the empty main hall, his hands behind his back.

He recalled the warning left by the Ancestral Master three hundred years ago: "The fire seed cannot be monopolized; monopoly leads to self-immolation." He looked out of the mountain again, and in the human world in the distance, tiny, spontaneously generated lights lit up in countless villages and towns.

For a long time, he ultimately did not give the order to seal the main hall, just turned around silently and closed the heavy hall doors.

A thousand miles away, on a wilderness, Zhang Xuanyi stopped.

He had traded for a piece of pitch-black coal core from a descendant of a miner he had met by chance, and it was now lying quietly in his palm.

He looked up at the starry sky, and those starlights seemed never to have been so clear.

For a long time, he whispered: "It's time to go back and see."

The return journey was no longer hesitant.

He crossed the plains and rivers, and the familiar outline of the mountain finally appeared on the horizon again.

Mount Longhu was still as majestic as ever.

The town at the foot of the mountain was also more prosperous than it had been three years ago.

Relying on his memory, he walked step by step toward the starting point where he had once stirred up all the waves.

His gaze passed over the bustling crowd, through the noisy market, and finally, fixed on the place where an old locust tree should have stood.

However, his footsteps stopped abruptly at that moment.