130: Fire

The noise and warmth of the tavern were left behind him; the night wind, carrying the chill of the mountains and wilderness, made his sleeves flutter and snap.

Zhang Xuanyi did not ride the wind, nor did he use any technique to shrink the distance; he simply walked down the winding mountain path step by step, like the most ordinary traveler returning home at night.

His pace was neither rushed nor slow, as if he were using his own two feet to remeasure this land that was undergoing a drastic transformation.

Upon reaching the mountainside, a dilapidated Earth Temple blocked his path.

The temple was tiny, its lintel crooked, and the carved words "Blessing the Neighborhood" were long since blurred and illegible.

A moss-covered incense burner lay overturned on the ground, and between the shattered pottery shards, the offering table was piled high with thick layers of dead branches and withered leaves.

This place had clearly been forgotten for decades; wild grass grew madly from the cracks in the stone steps, almost swallowing the entrance.

Just as Zhang Xuanyi was preparing to bypass it, the corner of his eye caught something unusual.

Right at the bottom of the overturned stone incense burner, a faint red light was seeping out from the gap between the burner's base and the ground—it was extremely thin, yet exceptionally scorching.

The light was not static; it moved slowly between the stone cracks like a living creature, resembling a trapped fire snake.

He stopped his steps and crouched down.

He did not touch it immediately, but instead hovered his palm three inches above the ground.

A startling wave of heat rushed toward his face, and the skin of his palm felt a stinging, burning pain, far exceeding that of ordinary charcoal fire.

What was even more bizarre was that the red light in the stone crack began to flicker in rhythm with his breathing, its frequency perfectly synchronized with his heartbeat.

This was a resonance, a most primal rhythm of life.

Zhang Xuanyi did not take out any Talismans, nor did he use those fragmented means remaining after the System collapsed.

He simply watched the light quietly, then leaned down and blew a gentle breath toward the crack.

What he blew out was not magical power, nor was it true essence; it was just the most ordinary breath of air from a Mortal's chest.

"Burn as you wish; I won't stop you," he said in a low voice, as if speaking to a newborn creature.

The moment his words fell, that faint red light seemed to have received some kind of permission and suddenly surged!

A scorching tongue of fire burst from the stone crack, but instead of burning upward, it spread crazily in all directions, clinging to the ground.

Wherever the flames passed, the soil did not turn charred black; instead, it was baked into a magnificent crimson color, quickly outlining a huge and complex web-like pattern that covered the entire foundation of the dilapidated temple.

The pattern flickered and undulated, like the living meridians beneath the skin of a giant beast, filled with boundless vitality.

Zhang Xuanyi stood up, watched quietly for a moment, then turned and continued down the mountain.

The next morning, villagers who went up the mountain to cut firewood were surprised to find that the soil within a ten-zhang radius around this Earth Temple, which had been abandoned for who knows how many years, had become warm day and night.

Even in the biting cold of early spring, the ground here was as warm as a heated bed.

Someone tried sowing a few spring vegetable seeds, and within days, they sprouted, growing vigorously.

As the news spread, the villagers no longer viewed it as a desolate temple; instead, they spontaneously brought stones to build a low stone altar around that warm patch of land, reverently calling it the "Self-Burning Ground."

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, Su Qingzhu, who had returned from the North, was walking through a night market at the edge of the city and countryside.

The cold was biting, and she had intended to find a stall to eat a bowl of hot noodle soup to warm herself up.

Before she could get close, a burst of intense arguing attracted her attention.

An old man selling noodles was surrounded by two urban management officers. One of them, holding a law enforcement recorder, sternly reprimanded him: "How many times have I told you! You are not allowed to use this uncertified fire source! Can you take responsibility if there's a safety hazard?"

Su Qingzhu curiously moved closer and saw a ball of flame quietly burning in the old man's stove.

The flame was unique, presenting a rare pale cyan color, burning extremely steadily without a wisp of smoke.

Even more peculiar was that as the old man went through the motions of boiling noodles and adding soup, the flame could adjust its size and temperature out of thin air, without needing any bellows or valves.

The water in the pot would boil when needed and stay warm when required, as precise as if controlled by a computer program.

This strange sight attracted many passersby to stop and watch, discussing it animatedly.

Su Qingzhu's heart stirred; she quietly stepped back a few paces and raised her phone, attempting to film it.

However, a bizarre scene occurred.

Through her phone's lens, the pale cyan flame could not be focused at all; it could only record a blurry, flickering phantom image, as if that flame did not belong to the reality of this dimension.

She put away her phone, walked up to the stall, and softly asked the old man.

The old man gave a bitter smile and wiped the sweat from his forehead: "Miss, what would I know about Qi or techniques? It's just that a while ago, I was scrolling through a video on my phone where a young man was rambling about how you can create fire if you 'think about warmth in your heart'... I'm poor, and gas is expensive, so I'd lie on my bed every night before sleeping and ponder it. I tried for over ten days, and hey, it actually worked!"

Before he finished speaking, the pale cyan flame in the stove suddenly leaped up on its own without warning, detached from the stove, and nimbly traced a crooked character "Faith" in mid-air.

The character hovered for a moment, then returned to the stove and silently extinguished.

Su Qingzhu stood frozen in place, her heart trembling violently.

She understood instantly: the old gods were dead, and those objects of faith that required complex rituals and Bloodline legacies to communicate with had already collapsed.

However, faith itself had not disappeared; it was growing wildly from the bottom of every ordinary person's heart in a more feral, more primal, and more direct way.

Meanwhile, on a dried-up riverbed further south, Cui Wujiu was awakened from his sleep by a strange rustling sound.

He sat up from the leeward side of a sand dune, and the scene before him made his pupils shrink.

Right on the vast sandy ground in front of him, dozens of slender lines of fire were winding and crawling; they resembled scarlet snakes, weaving through the shallow layers beneath the ground. When they encountered boulders, they nimbly bypassed them, and when they met weak water vapor seeping from damp spots, a wisp of white smoke would rise from the tip of the fire line.

He flipped up and silently tracked one of the thickest fire lines.

Following it upstream, the final source left him somewhat amused and helpless—it was the remnants of a simple bonfire made by a few shepherd boys with dead branches while playing during the day.

They clearly hadn't completely extinguished the embers when they left, and a few sparks fell into the sand layer, which was rich in some special minerals, and actually took root and sprouted like seeds, extending on their own into a vast network of underground fire veins.

Just then, a seven or eight-year-old shepherd boy came running back, carrying a lantern, shouting about the slingshot he had left behind.

He didn't pay attention to his feet and stepped right onto the intersection of some fire lines.

Hum—

The entire sandy ground lit up instantly!

An incomparably huge, spiderweb-like red pattern, centered on the shepherd boy's feet, instantly illuminated the riverbed for hundreds of meters around, magnificent and spectacular.

The child was so scared he sat down on the ground, and the red light lasted for nearly half a minute before slowly fading back beneath the sand.

Cui Wujiu stood on a distant sand dune, staring at the patch of sand that had returned to darkness. After a long while, a mocking smile curled at the corners of his mouth: "In the past, we knelt on the ground and begged for fire; now, it probably finds us Mortals to be in the way."

Several days later, Zhang Xuanyi's figure appeared at a vocational and technical school on the outskirts of a county town.

He came here because he had heard that strange incidents had been occurring frequently in the students' training workshop, which the school authorities called "spontaneous combustion accidents."

Electric welding machines that were not powered on would have their welding torches spontaneously spray ghostly blue arc flames; in the boiler room where no one was operating, the water temperature would automatically rise to the boiling point, startling the alarms to wail all night.

The school authorities were overwhelmed and invited two young Daoist priests who claimed to be "dispatched from Tianshi Mansion" to perform rituals and exorcise evil spirits.

Zhang Xuanyi mingled among the onlookers, watching the two Daoist priests busily hang Talismans and stick incantations with great seriousness for an entire day.

But he keenly noticed that the edges of those yellow paper sheets, painted with complex Talisman runes, began to char and curl the moment they were stuck onto the metal walls of the workshop, as if they were being roasted from the inside by a red-hot branding iron.

Zhang Xuanyi calmly reached into his robes, took out a pellet the color of emerald green and the size of a mung bean, and put it into his mouth.

This was the trial version of "Heavenly Eye" that he had exchanged using the last of his permissions from the System, which could only last for three minutes at a time.

Three minutes later, the world in his eyes was completely different.

Inside the steel frame, metal pipes, and even every cold machine tool of the entire training building, there flowed a layer of extremely fine yet incredibly scorching fiery Qi current.

The source of these Qi currents was not some evil spirits or ghosts, but the emotions and willpower accumulated and settled by hundreds of students in this school as they swung hammers, operated lathes, and practiced welding day after day, year after year.

That was not evil fire; it was the fire of collective will born from sweat and focus during thousands of repeated labors.

That night, Zhang Xuanyi did not disturb anyone.

Outside the school wall, he found a road-rolling stone, pressed a sheet of paper with a complete "Don't Fear the Dark" Talisman drawn on it underneath, and then turned and left.

Seven days later, on the outskirts of Mount Longhu, the Spring Sacrifice Ceremony jointly held by the thirty-six villages arrived as scheduled.

According to the old custom passed down for hundreds of years, the main sacrificial torch had to be lit by a high-ranking Daoist priest specially dispatched from Tianshi Mansion using the "True Fire" taken from the ancestral court.

On the day of the ceremony, there was a sea of people.

On the high platform, the Daoist priest, who was the focus of everyone's attention, solemnly opened an ancient, sealed fire box amidst the anticipation of the crowd.

Inside the box, a small cluster of golden-red flames was quietly flickering.

However, the moment he used a fire-starter to receive that so-called "True Fire from the ancestral court," the flame, upon touching the outside air, extinguished instantly without even a wisp of smoke.

The whole audience was in an uproar; the Daoist priests on the high platform turned pale, at a complete loss.

Just at this awkward, deathly silent moment, an old man with simple clothing and calloused hands walked out silently from under the platform.

People recognized him as the old craftsman from a nearby village who had spent his whole life firing kilns.

He said nothing, simply walked up to the torch, clasped his hands—which were covered in cracks and burn scars—together, and rubbed them gently in front of his chest.

A ball of fist-sized, stable, and scorching crimson flame rose from his palms out of thin air.

The old craftsman held up this flame he had rubbed into existence with his own hands and steadily reached toward the torch.

Whoosh!

The torch ignited with a roar, the flames soaring into the sky, illuminating everyone's faces in red.

The entire venue was silent, with only the huge tongues of fire crackling in the wind.

In a tea pavilion on the mountainside in the distance, Zhang Xuanyi was sitting across from Su Qingzhu, who had arrived at some unknown time, drinking tea and gazing from afar at the firelight shooting into the sky below the mountain.

"Do you think... all of this is happening too fast?"

Su Qingzhu asked softly, her eyes holding both shock and a trace of confusion.

Zhang Xuanyi picked up his teacup, gently blew away the floating tea foam, and his gaze was as deep as an ancient well: "It's not fast; it's three hundred years late."

The tea steam rose in wisps, blurring his profile.

A mountain breeze blew past, fluttering his cuffs, and a small crack silently opened, revealing a corner of a long-faded rag inside—it was the last remnant of the myriad laws street vendor system after it had disintegrated.

At this moment, that rag was slightly hot, as if responding to the call of some new force between heaven and earth, or perhaps trembling for some more distant and intense resonance.

Zhang Xuanyi put down his teacup, his gaze passing over the torch at the foot of the mountain and looking toward the cloud-shrouded southwest direction.

There, he felt countless newborn "Fire Seeds" being ignited at an astonishing speed, but their auras were not in harmonious coexistence; instead, they were like countless beasts fighting for territory, crashing into and biting each other, filled with primal, untamed fanaticism and opposition.

When wild fires burn, there must always be a distinction between primary and secondary, a struggle for dominance.

He slowly stood up and said calmly to the bewildered Su Qingzhu: "Let's go; it's livelier over there."