135: Ocean Fire Riot

The owner of those pupils did not disturb the world in the slightest, merely watching the changes quietly occurring on this land in silence, like observing a game of chess already set in motion.

Meanwhile, Zhang Xuanyi appeared in a small mining town in the north, famous for its coal.

The atmosphere in the town was as oppressive as a waterlogged coal seam, ready to collapse at any moment.

From the sighs of the owner of a small roadside restaurant, he learned that the town's largest mine had been sealed for nearly a week.

The reason was bizarre in the extreme—"spontaneous combustion light bands."

According to the workers, whenever they were exhausted and mentally dazed from working in the deep tunnels, wisps of warm orange light would seep out from the cracks in the rock walls.

The light was neither hot nor dazzling; it was like a hearth fire in winter, making people feel sleepy just by looking at it.

The light bands usually lasted for several hours and would quietly fade away before the dawn shift change.

Experts from the safety department had exhausted their instruments but could not detect any excessive gas or geological abnormalities, so they ultimately could only classify it as a "dangerous precursor to gas explosions or spontaneous combustion of rock strata" and issued the highest-level mine sealing order.

After hearing this, Zhang Xuanyi's eyes lit up.

He walked straight toward the mine office, ignoring the layers of obstruction, and said only one sentence to the distraught mine manager: "Let me go down and take a look; I can solve it."

He ultimately went down, alone, carrying a simple tool bag.

Deep underground, a thousand meters down, the cold and damp air seemed to seep into the marrow of his bones.

He turned off his headlamp and stood still in the darkness.

Thanks to the residual efficacy of that heavenly eye mung beans, his vision was not completely swallowed by the darkness; instead, he could see energy flows that ordinary people could not perceive.

The truth slowly unfolded before his eyes.

Those so-called "light bands" were not geological phenomena at all, but groups of extremely weak, nearly dissipated fire-elemental spiritual consciousness.

They were like the lowliest fireflies between heaven and earth, having lost their home, only able to instinctively search for desperate people whose life fire was about to burn out, drawing close to them, attempting to use their last bit of faint light to dispel a trace of chill for the other party, and also to absorb a bit of warmth for their own survival.

Zhang Xuanyi found the coldest corner, curled up and sat down, deliberately slowing his breathing to make himself look like a miner exhausted from overwork.

Sure enough, after less than a quarter of an hour, a wisp of faint warm light poked its head out from a rock crevice, cautiously approaching him.

Immediately after, the second, the third... dozens of streams of light, like shy fish, slowly gathered, and finally gently wrapped around his arm.

The temperature was slightly higher than body temperature, carrying a gentleness that soothed the heart.

He did not move, merely whispering in a volume barely audible: "You... were abandoned too, right?"

The points of light wrapped around his arm trembled violently, as if startled, yet also carrying a resonance of grievance.

The next morning, Zhang Xuanyi returned to the surface.

Facing the mine manager and a group of worried miners, he did not explain complex theories of spiritual consciousness, but instead proposed a simple plan—the "Warm Tunnel Shift System."

He announced that those light bands were harmless, and even beneficial.

He proposed that every night, two volunteer miners be sent to "work a shift" in the tunnel where the light bands appeared most frequently, needing to do nothing but quietly coexist with the light for an hour, and the mine would pay the full subsidy.

At first, the workers were half-skeptical, but under the high subsidies and Zhang Xuanyi's unquestionable aura, some bold people still signed up.

A wonderful thing happened; the first batch of miners who returned from their shift were refreshed the next day, and even their long-standing chronic cold legs felt much warmer.

As the news spread, more and more people signed up.

In less than half a month, the entire dead, silent mine seemed to come alive.

Those fire-elemental spiritual consciousnesses were no longer flickering ghost lights, but had formed a stable symbiotic network in the fixed "warm tunnels."

The workers rested in the warm radiance, and the spiritual consciousnesses also gradually stabilized due to the nourishment of human vitality.

The accident rate in the mine plummeted to zero, unprecedented.

Just as Zhang Xuanyi lit a "heart lamp" for the miners in the north, a thousand miles away in the Nanshan forest area, Su Qingzhu was facing a more thorny "fire epidemic."

The villagers in the remote mountain village had palms that would become scorching hot without warning, and anything flammable they touched would instantly catch fire, as if everyone had become a walking matchstick.

Panic spread like a plague, and some even proposed isolating and burning the patients to prevent future trouble.

Su Qingzhu, dressed in tight-fitting gear, rushed to the scene.

She quickly discovered that all the "patients" shared a common identity—they had all participated in a joint operation half a month ago to extinguish an "illegal bonfire" in the mountain forest.

Following this clue, Su Qingzhu found the charred clay altar deep in the forest.

Scattered at the scene were some stone slabs with words written in charcoal.

After an in-depth investigation, she pieced together a heartbreaking truth.

It was not an altar for some evil cult, but a "self-study fire altar" built by a group of homeless teenagers.

They had no home, and could only grope for the most primitive fire-control techniques from fragments of ancient books and hearsay, just to have a cluster of warm flames in the cold night.

That day, the forest rangers viewed this as feudal superstition and a fire hazard, and without a word, used high-pressure water hoses to extinguish the children's only hope.

Su Qingzhu gathered all the villagers and forest rangers in the square at the entrance of the village, and publicly played a video of the scene that she had restored using special equipment.

Under the night sky, a dozen ragged children sat around a bonfire, the firelight reflecting on their young but earnest faces.

They recited the "Vow of Fire" they had written themselves in unison: "Do not hurt people, do not show off, only to warm hands and warm hearts. Respect heaven and earth, respect the faint light, may this heart fire shine forever."

As soon as the words fell, the bonfire seemed to understand their vow; the flames surged, turning into a firebird spreading its wings in the air, circling once before slowly dissipating.

After the video finished playing, the whole place was dead silent.

Su Qingzhu's cold voice rang out: "Do you still think such a fire should be extinguished?"

The crowd was silent for a long time.

An old forest ranger who had participated in the firefighting operation walked up trembling, took off his forest ranger badge, threw it hard into the iron stove in the center of the square for heating, and said hoarsely: "Burn it, burn it clean." What he burned was the prejudice and guilt in his own heart.

And in the even more distant East China Sea coast, Cui Wujiu stood on a reef, looking at a group of fishermen who had collectively gone on strike and were gloomy.

The water temperature near the coast had risen abnormally, the schools of fish had all fled to the deep sea, and even more bizarrely, the fishing boat engines frequently spontaneously combusted, no matter how they were repaired, it could not be stopped.

The expert group sent from above had been busy for half a month, and in the end, could only attribute it to the ethereal "Ocean Fire Vein Uprising."

Cui Wujiu did not say much, diving into the scalding seawater with a splash.

He was like a Dragon in the deep sea, ignoring the boiling water current, diving straight into a rift in the seabed.

There, he saw a huge, slowly wriggling red crystal cluster, like a living coral.

It emitted astonishing fire Qi, yet it was not tyrannical, but a kind of deep grief and indignation.

The moment Cui Wujiu's hand touched the crystal cluster, endless images flooded into his mind: shipwrecks swallowed by giant waves on stormy nights, floating oil burning on the sea surface after oil tanker leaks, the painful wails of countless marine creatures strangled by discarded fishing nets... This was the anger and cry for help that this ocean had accumulated over thousands of years, now erupting all at once through the underground fire vein.

He surfaced, his face grave.

He did not preach, but persuaded the fishermen to abandon the roaring motors and switch to the most primitive bamboo rafts and manual fishing.

Furthermore, he set a rule that on the first day of every month, all fishermen must hold a "Fire Returning Festival"—sincerely scattering the ash from their own stoves into the sea, to show their awe and feedback to the ocean.

At first, the fishermen were half-skeptical.

But after the first month's "Fire Returning Festival," a miracle happened.

The seawater began to cool down at a visible speed, and the missing schools of fish gradually returned to the coast.

And the phenomenon of fishing boats spontaneously combusting also completely disappeared—except for those vessels that were still secretly discharging waste oil and sewage into the sea at night.

Three seemingly unrelated events were quietly converging like three streams into the same river called "Change."

Not long after, a high-level "Traditional Fire Art Revival Forum" was held in the capital.

Zhang Xuanyi received an invitation, but the organizers seemed to intentionally or unintentionally arrange his seat in the corner of the last row.

On stage, a prestigious Grandmaster of Fire Art was speaking generously, his voice like a bell: "Fire is the authority of heaven! Only those with orthodox Bloodline and strict precepts can carry this supreme heavenly fire! Those deviant paths among the folk are merely the light of fireflies, how dare they compete with the bright moon!"

Before the words fell, an anomaly suddenly occurred!

The gorgeous crystal chandelier on the ceiling of the venue flashed violently, and in an instant, all lighting equipment, along with the sound System, fell into dead silence.

The entire venue was shrouded in sudden darkness and silence.

What was even more shocking was that in the center of the podium, the "eternal" Fire Seed Glazed Bottle had its inner flames extinguished suddenly, as if pinched out by an invisible giant hand!

Panic brewed in the darkness.

Just then, in a corner of the auditorium, a tiny bit of light lit up.

It was a little girl who, seeing her mother was scared, drew a small flame on paper with a crayon, which was carefully held in her mother's palm.

The drawn flame actually emitted a gentle faint light.

Immediately after, as if by prior agreement, the second, the third points of light lit up... dozens, hundreds of attendees took out the "Living Fire Seed" they had saved from their own homes.

It was a hot water bottle filled with hot water, an ember brought from the kitchen stove in their hometown, or even the flame lit by the last drop of residual oil in a lighter.

Little by little, cluster by cluster, faint yet firm rays of light kept lighting up, eventually converging into a warm orange ocean.

The entire pitch-black hall was illuminated by these Mortal fires from thousands of households, like a galaxy falling into the human world.

The Grandmaster and the host on stage were already dumbfounded and speechless.

In this brilliant galaxy created by Mortals, Zhang Xuanyi, sitting at the end, slowly stood up, patted the dust on his sleeves unhurriedly, his voice not loud, but clearly spreading throughout the venue.

"Look, the fire had already chosen its own master."

After this incident, the anomalies in the fire veins of the world became increasingly obvious.

On the night of the first full moon after Qingming, many places across the country reported incredible phenomena: whether in bustling cities or remote villages, as long as there were families that insisted on making fires to cook, the stoves in their homes would spontaneously ignite at the hour of Zi (midnight), automatically heating up.

The flames were no longer the usual red, but presented a warm and peaceful pale gold.

The food cooked with these flames had an aroma that could drift for miles, and those who smelled it, no matter how much irritability they had in their hearts, would instantly become peaceful in mind.

Even more strangely, the blue smoke rising from the chimneys of some houses would condense and not disperse after rising into the air, and under the moonlight, it slowly spelled out the same clear ancient seal script—"Xiao" ( Xiao).

Far away in the Northwest Gobi Desert, Cui Wujiu, who was tracking a dried-up fire vein, looked up at the huge "Xiao" character formed by the cooking smoke of countless villages in the sky, his mouth curling into a relaxed chuckle.

Su Qingzhu directly set up her equipment and livestreamed this scene in front of the camera to countless netizens who were paying attention to the matter, her voice slightly choked with excitement.

And Zhang Xuanyi was currently sitting on the ridge of a field in a small village in the north, watching the lights of ten thousand homes in the distance merge into a warm golden glow, muttering to himself: "Alright, I don't need to teach anymore."

Just as his voice fell, the tattered remnant of the System cloth he had obtained from a street stall in his bosom suddenly became violently hot, almost setting his clothes on fire!

A new line of scorching hot characters appeared in his mind:

[System Task Update: Witness One Million Homes of Spontaneous Combustion]

[Current Status: Completed 98%]

Zhang Xuanyi's pupils contracted slightly.

The task was about to be completed, but he felt no joy in his heart, but instead, a sense of unprecedented vigilance arose.

After returning from the mining area, he had originally intended to stay here for a while, to comprehend the brand-new changes in this human world's smoke and fire.

But at this moment, the scorching heat on the tattered remnant had not yet completely faded, and a certain guidance contained within it was clearly pointing to the south, pointing to that rushing mother river.