146: Who is lighting the lamp for the sky?

The seventh star of the Big Dipper was still trembling, and the faint light of the Alkaid star pierced into Zhang Xuanyi's eyes like a needle.

The mouthful of coarse tea he had gulped down had long since gone cold, but a fire burned in his chest—not the surging of Qi, nor the backlash of a Talismanic Incantation, but a burning sensation bordering on fate.

Thousands of miles away, Su Qingzhu's fingers hovered over the keyboard, her fingertips trembling.

The firewall of the Ministry of Education's archive was a hundred times stronger than she had anticipated, but relying on her status as the editor-in-chief of the chronicles of vows and a forged national security investigation warrant, she finally pried open that door.

The screen scrolled rapidly, and thousands of scanned kindergarten art assignments flashed by like a tide: crayon doodles, crooked suns, chaotic lines... until the artificial intelligence image recognition System emitted a soft sound.

Match successful: 2147 cases.

Su Qingzhu held her breath.

On the projection wall, the patterns drawn by more than two thousand children were automatically categorized and superimposed—a bird-shaped outline, about to take flight, gradually emerged.

Its head hung low toward the ground, its wings raised high, with a broken chain entwined in the middle.

The composition was childish and the proportions were off, but the divinity that hit her face made her spine chill.

Even more bizarre was the distribution heat map.

Thirty-six red dots landed precisely on the map, overlapping perfectly with the ruins of the Thirty-Six Fire Shrines recorded in the ancient book Records of Mountain and Sea Shrine Offerings, with an error of no more than fifty meters.

Impossible... she muttered to herself, The youngest of these children is only four years old, they can't even hold a pen steadily, how could they possibly draw the same picture?

Just then, the screen suddenly went black.

A blue screen flashed, and characters slowly appeared, as if someone had written them stroke by stroke on the screen with blood: [These children have never learned to draw; it was the fire that taught them.]

Su Qingzhu's heart shook violently, and her finger slammed the USB drive eject button.

It was too late.

A wisp of golden flame rose from the USB port, silent and soundless, and the plastic casing turned into ashes and drifted down.

In the air, a faint scent of sandalwood permeated—the smell of inferior incense sticks mixed with old stove ash, the kind of street stall goods that cost five yuan for three bundles.

Her pupils contracted sharply. Zhang Xuanyi...?

Meanwhile, in the deep mountains of Western Hubei, the night fog was like gauze.

On the grain-drying field outside the Tujia village, torches swayed, and the sound of people was deafening.

A fifteen or sixteen-year-old boy was tied to a wooden stake, his face covered in bruises.

The villagers held hoes and iron forks, their roars rising and falling: Evil fire demon child! You are the one who burned down the old Li Family house!

I... I didn't mean to start a fire... the boy's voice was hoarse, his eyes bloodshot, but golden lines faintly wandered in his palms, like living snakes crawling under the skin.

Lying with your eyes open! Yesterday, when you passed by that house, the roof started smoking!

Amid the argument, a lazy figure pushed through the crowd and walked in.

His black Daoist robe was washed until it turned white, his left foot was dragging a worn-out shoe, and his right hand was carrying a rusty aluminum lunch box.

Yo, ganging up on a minor? Zhang Xuanyi grinned, revealing a mouthful of white teeth, In a civilized society, let's be reasonable.

Get lost! You, a Daoist, dare to interfere? a villager roared.

Zhang Xuanyi was not annoyed; he squatted in front of the boy and reached out to touch his wrist.

A trace of subtle Qi flowed in, and in an instant, his brows jumped—this was not ordinary fire evil entering the body, nor was it an Awakening, but a will actively surging outward within the body, as if some sleeping thing was trying to speak through this physical body.

Do you feel it? he asked in a low voice.

The boy nodded, his eyes cloudy but firm: It... insists on coming out of my mouth... If I don't let it out, it burns my heart.

Zhang Xuanyi smiled, a somewhat bitter smile.

That night, on the barren slope, the moonlight was like frost.

He had the boy face the open ground and took a deep breath.

The next second—Hoo... A mouthful of golden mist sprayed from the boy's mouth, and upon landing, it did not dissipate, but instead condensed into a half-image of a rune, with eternal golden flames burning at the edges.

The incomplete character Xiao appeared on it, identical to the command token from his dream.

Zhang Xuanyi was silent for a long time, then suddenly sighed up at the sky. So it wasn't choosing a host... he muttered to himself, It was creating a Light Bearer.

The fire no longer relied on people, but began to find its own way of expression.

Before dawn the next day, he buried a pinch of stove ash under the roots of the thousand-year-old ancient tree at the entrance of the village, clapped his hands, and turned to leave.

Before leaving, he looked back at the still-sleeping village and said in a low voice: Wait until you learn to dream for yourselves.

Meanwhile, in the Northwest Gobi Desert, a storm was brewing.

Cui Wujiu's broken pulse Talisman residue, which should have perished along with the master's Divine Soul, suddenly trembled simultaneously in many places seven days ago—Qinghai herders dug up a charred copper piece under a sand dune, Sichuan hunters found a blood jade fragment embedded in the handle of a hunting knife, and a half-piece of carved bone fell from a collapsed wall in an old Gansu Daoist temple...

These fragments were unrelated, yet they released a faint golden wave at the same moment.

As a result, a Northwest Grandmaster who was in seclusion attempting to reach the Great Grandmaster realm was suddenly invaded by fire evil, his Meridians scorched and cracked. Thinking it was revenge from a Quanxing expert, he furiously chased the innocent herder carrying the fragment for three hundred miles.

At the critical moment, the copper piece suddenly erupted with a ring of golden waves.

The fire evil was instantly purified, dead grass within a ten-mile radius turned green again, hot springs seeped out from under the yellow sand, and wild rabbits jumped out of their burrows in droves, as if the entire dead land had been injected with vitality.

The news spread like the wind.

Several Great Grandmasters came to survey the site, but all instruments failed. Only to the naked eye could a huge network of golden lines be seen emerging underground, winding like Meridians, pulsating like a heartbeat.

One of the old men who had studied ancient Formations knelt on the ground, tears streaming down his face: This is not a remnant of a Magical Artifact... it is something alive breathing.

It is... reconnecting this land.

The night wind blew, rolling up a wisp of dust and sand, and the sand grains briefly arranged themselves in the air into a single character—Xiao.

Chapter 147: Wires Have Fire, People Under the Lamp

The substation on the edge of the city was like a sleeping steel behemoth, with iron towers standing tall and cables hanging down like a spider web.

When the night wind passed through the high-voltage lines, it made a low humming sound, like the lingering echo of some ancient incantation.

Zhang Xuanyi wore a faded electrician's uniform, his hard hat tilted on his head, holding a pair of insulated pliers in his hand—of course, they were fake.

He was not an electrical maintenance worker at all, but had come following a red task prompt that had suddenly popped up on the myriad laws street vendor system: [Abnormal Heat Flow Tracing · S-Class] [Clue: Modern conduction medium has been contaminated by the fire seed] [Reward: Unlock Innate Magical Artifact · Heart Lamp Guide].

He squatted at the bottom of the high-voltage tower, his fingertips sliding across the ground.

A barely perceptible warmth seeped out from the cement cracks, as if the earth were running a fever.

Something's not right. He narrowed his eyes, Electricity doesn't generate heat on its own, unless... it wants to shine.

Memories from three years ago suddenly flooded his mind—that oil-stained power worker, clutching crumpled banknotes, hesitated for a long time in front of his stall before finally buying a bottle of Pseudo-Three Caves True Qi Concentrate, saying it was to emergency-repair the main control line.

At that time, he had laughed at the man for being stupid: You're using fairy water to fix wires? Aren't you afraid of blowing up the whole city? The other party smiled bitterly and said: The higher-ups want political achievements, we can only fill it with our lives.

But who could have imagined that the drop of residual liquid that should have dissipated into the air had actually been smelted underground with stove ash and copper filings for seven years, becoming this crystalline object glowing with golden patterns?

Zhang Xuanyi put on rubber gloves and gently dug open the surface concrete.

A fist-sized black crystal was revealed, its surface covered with fine cracks, but inside flowed light pulses like molten gold, just like a heart that was still beating.

He just reached out to touch it—Every photocopy yellow paper you sold back then hides a bit of fire that refuses to go out.

A voice sounded in his ear without warning, hoarse, exhausted, yet so familiar that his whole body stiffened.

Cui Wujiu!

But Cui Wujiu was dead.

In that fire vein riot in Western Hubei, he had detonated his own residue artifact and Divine Soul, just to cut off the fire seed's erosion of the children.

Not even ashes were left.

But at this moment, the voice slowly overflowed from the crystal, as if thousands of threads of fire consciousness were reorganizing memories through some unknown method.

Zhang Xuanyi's breath hitched, and countless images exploded in his mind: the street stall three years ago, the sold Talismans, the residue of the Magical Artifact that flowed into every corner of society... The things he once thought were disposable after use had actually taken root quietly in the dark, spreading like seeds along the blood vessels of human civilization—power grids, communication towers, subway tracks...

The fire seed was not looking for a host.

It was building a temple.

Using the entire city as a foundation, humans as firewood, and steel as bones, weaving a new network that connects heaven and earth.

Damn... he cursed in a low voice and pulled his hand back, stepping backward.

But it was too late.

The crystal suddenly heated up, and golden light sprayed out from the cracks, rushing up his arm to his shoulder.

In an instant, his vision was dyed crimson-gold—he saw that under the entire city, countless threads of light were interwoven into a net, and every node was a place where he had once set up his stall.

Just then, his phone vibrated.

An anonymous MMS downloaded automatically: In the photo, Su Qingzhu was standing on the street, looking up at the street lamp.

Inside the lamp shade, golden flames churned, condensing into a bird shape about to take flight.

And in her hand, she held half a charred piece of paper.

Zhang Xuanyi's pupils shrank.

At the same time, Su Qingzhu stood in the middle of the street at 3 a.m., crazily taking continuous shots of the street lamp with her camera lens.

But the viewfinder was empty; although she could see flames soaring to the sky with her naked eye, the playback only showed a dead, silent darkness.

It's not that we can't see... it's that we can't photograph their world. She muttered to herself.

A wandering boy walked out from the alley, ragged and tattered, but his palms faintly revealed golden light.

He handed over half a burnt piece of paper, with crooked handwriting on it: Sister, you said the light should shine for others to see, but we have never been able to see it.

Her blood froze instantly.

This sentence—was the original words in the recording of her father's last interview before he died in the line of duty.

At that time, he was investigating a chemical plant explosion, and before entering the scene, he said this inexplicable sentence into the microphone.

No one understood what it meant.

Until now.

Until all the lights on this street ignited with golden flames because of her; until those flames turned toward her in unison, like subjects seeing their king, bowing their heads and drooping their wings, as if paying homage.

She reached out with trembling hands and took the paper.

The boy smiled, the golden light in his palm flashed, and he disappeared into the night fog.

And at the foot of Mount Longhu, thousands of miles away, the morning mist had not yet dissipated.

The market was already bustling, and the hawkers' shouts rose and fell one after another.

Only in a corner of the open space, a bamboo basket was turned upside down, with only the last bag of gray-black powder left inside.

A wooden sign stood quietly beside it, with scribbled handwriting: Take it for free, but don't ask about its origin once you've taken it.