149: Whose kitchen is full of immortals?

The night wind carried the faint fragrance of sweet osmanthus, sweeping over the walls of the small town in the southwest.

Zhang Xuanyi squatted beneath the outer wall of the orphanage, half a cold sesame seed cake hanging from his mouth, his cheeks bulging as he chewed.

He was dressed casually, his Daoist robe collar askew, his shoes worn at the edges, looking every bit like a wild Daoist wandering through Jianghu.

Yet his eyes were startlingly bright in the darkness, as if they held embers.

The courtyard was unusually quiet.

The whole town had extinguished their fires for the day—this was the first "Cold Stove Festival" officially recognized by the authorities.

There were no electric stoves, gas, or lighters, and even charging mobile phones was restricted.

People said it was to commemorate the day "fire woke up from the human world," though no one could clearly explain its origin.

Yet when the children sang nursery rhymes, the adults would follow suit and extinguish their stoves.

But right there, in the most inconspicuous kitchen of the orphanage, deep within the stove, three points of golden light slowly surfaced.

It was not fire, yet it surpassed fire.

They drifted like fireflies and whispered like stars, outlining a certain ancient rhythm within the ashes.

Several older children sat in a circle, holding their breath; the youngest girl, barely five or six years old, wearing a faded, washed-out cotton coat, timidly reached out to touch the remaining ashes.

In an instant, half a lotus flower appeared on her palm.

Golden patterns spread from her fingertips, warm but not scalding, shaped like ancient seal characters, yet carrying a vivid sense of life.

She was stunned, looking down at her hand, and suddenly smiled: "It's warm."

Outside the wall, Zhang Xuanyi swallowed the last bite of the cake, his Adam's apple bobbing.

He did not go in.

Nor did he make a sound.

He simply silently untied the cloth bundle in his arms, poured out the last bit of stove ash, and gently buried it in the soil at the roots of the old sweet osmanthus tree by the wall.

His movements were as gentle as if he were laying a dream to rest.

"You no longer need me to teach you how to dream," he murmured, brushing the dust from the corner of his robe. "Fire recognizes the human heart, not the Master."

As his voice fell, the tree roots trembled slightly.

An imperceptible thread of gold burrowed into the ground along the roots, winding away like a reviving Bloodline.

A hundred miles away, under the cooling tower of an abandoned old power plant, rusty copper shavings suddenly vibrated slightly, and spiderweb-like crystalline cracks appeared on their surface—this was the trace of resonance with the earth's meridians.

At the same moment, in Jiangnan.

Drizzle, like needles, wove between the blue-tiled, white-walled buildings.

Su Qingzhu stood under an umbrella in front of a century-old ancestral hall, rainwater sliding down the ribs of the umbrella and dripping onto her slightly wrinkled suit jacket.

She had just pried open a floor tile, revealing a dense network of golden threads beneath, resembling meridians—slender, warm, and pulsating.

An infrared camera was still set up in the corner, recording the scene just now: at three-quarters past midnight, golden mist seeped out from the cracks in the floor, circled the incense burner three times like a ritual, and then quietly vanished.

This was not supernatural, nor was it superstition.

It was alive.

She put on gloves and was about to take a sample, but as soon as her fingertips touched a golden thread—

Her mind exploded!

Images surged forth: a snowy cliff at night, a man's solitary figure, a dagger in his hand slashing through the earth's talisman lines, blood spraying.

But those severed fire meridians were not completely broken; instead, ninety-nine "living knots" had been artificially tied into them, buried deep like seeds, like cocoons that had not yet died.

Cui Wujiu.

He was once a Fire Patroller, and also a Meridian Cutter.

But in the end, he couldn't be ruthless to the very end. At the moment of severing the meridians, he had quietly left a mark for the return of the fire's origin.

Now, those "living knots" had all awakened.

They were borrowing the earth's Qi to revive, using villages as nodes and human hearts as firewood, weaving an invisible net of fire across China—it was not in the sky, not in the temples, but on stove tops, by wells, and in the scribbles of children.

Su Qingzhu pulled her hand back abruptly, her breathing rapid.

She looked up at the plaque of the ancestral hall, the four large characters "Ancestral Virtue Flows Forever" blurred in the rain.

But she knew that the so-called "ancestral manifestation" was merely the sleeping Power Of Will finally finding a new vessel.

And this Awakening had long since slipped beyond anyone's control.

In a forest farm in the Northeast, it was minus thirty degrees.

A fierce wind wrapped in snow pellets lashed against the corrugated iron shed, and a group of loggers cursed around a frozen welding machine.

Steel beams had snapped, the crane was stalled, the deadline was looming, but the equipment just wouldn't ignite.

"This damn weather, even the electricity is frozen to death!"

Amidst the complaints, a figure swayed closer.

Zhang Xuanyi brushed the snow off his shoulders, pulled a blackened, old welding rod from his sleeve pocket, and handed it over: "Try this."

The worker was stunned: "Where did you pop up from? Can this thing even be used?"

"If it doesn't work, you don't have to pay," he grinned, though there was no humor in his eyes. "Besides, I can't finish my cake anyway."

The man took it, half-doubting, loaded it into the welding gun, connected the power, and pressed the switch—

A golden arc of light erupted, blazing yet not blinding, actually forming the silhouette of a bird spreading its wings in the air; with a single flap, it landed precisely on the broken steel beam.

Molten iron flowed like tears, self-mending the crack. Even more strangely, the surrounding snow began to melt slowly, forming a circular warm zone with a diameter of over ten meters, like a miniature oasis in winter.

Everyone was stunned, and someone blurted out: "A deity!"

Zhang Xuanyi had already turned and walked away.

The cold wind lifted the corner of his Daoist robe, revealing the empty cloth bag at his waist—his street stall gear, once filled with extraordinary treasures, now held only a few remnants of stove ash.

That welding rod was something he had rolled together last night using stove ash and scrap iron filings.

Inside was sealed a wisp of "Fire Consciousness" that refused to sleep.

It did not belong to any System, nor did it take orders from anyone.

It was just... that it had once watched, through countless deep nights, this slacker of a Daoist chewing on a cake while whispering: "The human world is quite good, don't be in such a hurry to extinguish it."

So it remembered this person.

So it was willing to burn once more.

Several days later, at a city subway station.

The last train of the night slowly pulled into the platform, its lights dim and yellow.

There were few passengers in the carriage, including white-collar workers returning from overtime and sleepy students.

The moment the train started, all the lights suddenly went out, plunging it into pitch darkness.

The silence lasted for three seconds.

Then, in corners unnoticed by anyone, faint golden patterns simultaneously appeared on the palms of several passengers.

Like lotus flowers, or perhaps bird feathers.

They looked at each other, without exclamation or panic.

They just smiled softly.

Meanwhile, in an editorial office a thousand miles away, the notification sound of Su Qingzhu's email inbox chimed softly.

An anonymous email lay quietly in her inbox, the subject line blank, with only a single video file attached.

She stared at the screen, her finger hovering over the mouse, hesitating to click.

Su Qingzhu stared at the email, her fingertips hovering over the mouse, as if suspended by invisible threads.

Three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds... she did not click to open it.

The dim light of the screen reflected on her face, as cold as frost that hadn't melted on a snowy night.

The video thumbnail showed a pitch-black carriage, with several blurry figures whose palms glowed with gold, like wicks quietly lit in a dark room.

The title was blank, yet it was heavier than any words—"We are not Extraordinary Humans, but we remember."

She suddenly smiled, a somewhat bitter smile.

Her finger shifted; she did not click play, but instead right-clicked to save, saving it as a local file named: "Fire Origin · Unarchived 07".

The next morning, the editorial office was as busy as usual.

Reporters shuttled between workstations, discussing the latest outbreak of a "Power Of Will Resonance Event"—during a middle school break, a hundred students had unconsciously formed an ancient Daoist Qi formation, and golden patterns had appeared on the playground ground for a brief moment.

The editor-in-chief slammed the table and roared: "This is all feudal superstition! Don't touch it!" But Su Qingzhu knew that these were no longer superstitions, but a kind of grander Awakening seeping into the cracks of daily life.

She did not submit her draft.

Instead, after work, she returned to her empty apartment alone and dug out an old printer from the bottom of a cabinet.

The paper slowly fed out; in the black-and-white image, the subway passengers' palms glowed, golden liquid flowed along the handrails, and finally coalesced into a complete "Xiaoyao Token" totem—it was the talisman shape that Zhang Xuanyi had once casually drawn on the corner of his street stall cloth, and now it had become an imprint resonating in the hearts of millions.

She taped this printout to the study wall.

On the left was her father's posthumous photo in his police uniform, his gaze resolute; on the right was the screenshot from the video that came from the depths of darkness.

In the middle, there was an empty space.

It was as if it were left for someone who had yet to return, or perhaps for an answer that had yet to take shape in the future.

At night, she sat at her desk smoking. The cigarette ash fell, startling her from her deep thoughts.

Her phone vibrated.

The IP tracking results came back: invalid address, signal sources scattered across twelve city base stations nationwide, with millisecond-level frequency hopping, making it technically untraceable.

But she didn't care anymore.

What she cared about was the boy wearing a hat in the corner of the video.

The half-pencil exposed at his cuff—charred, carbonized, as if it had been burned by high temperatures countless times yet he still couldn't bear to throw it away.

That was Xiao Wu, the homeless boy she had interviewed seven years ago on a snowy night at the station.

At that time, he was using that pencil to copy a yellow talisman onto scrap paper, saying it was a "life-saving diagram given by my big brother Daoist."

At the time, she didn't understand.

Now she understood.

The fire was not bestowed by anyone; it was because someone refused to forget.

At a highland post station, the wind and snow were like knives.

Zhang Xuanyi squatted on the roof of a yak-felt tent, stuffing a strip of torn cloth into the gap in the wooden beam.

Inside the house, an old person coughed twice, the stove fire weak, barely illuminating the thangka on the wall.

He jumped down from the ladder, patted the snow off his shoulders, and suddenly felt a heat in his chest.

He reached into his chest, pulling out a copper coin.

Rusty and worn at the edges, it was the very first spirit coin that had dropped when the System first activated years ago.

He had once thought this was just a useless souvenir; after all, the System had long since dissipated, the street stall rags had turned into scraps, and even the upgrade notifications had become a thing of the past.

But at this moment, golden patterns were wriggling on the surface of the copper coin, moving like living snakes, gradually outlining a miniature star map—the Big Dipper, crystal clear.

And the seventh star was trembling unceasingly, as if it were about to fall.

He looked up abruptly.

The clouds were splitting open, and starlight fell, like needles piercing a curtain.

As far as his eyes could see, across the thousand-mile snowy plain, one herdsman's tent after another lit up with golden flames.

It was not a campfire, nor an electric light, but light rising spontaneously from stove tops, floor tiles, and even from the protective talismans under children's pillows.

Every cluster of flames was in a posture of holding up, palms upward, as if reaching for the stars in the sky.

The wind stopped.

The snow stopped falling too.

Between heaven and earth, only that silent transmission remained.

He stood under the eaves, looking at the distant mountain peak—there stood a bronze pillar that had been severed and then revived, which had suppressed the fire meridians a thousand years ago, but now it was soaked in golden light, as if taking a deep breath.

He said softly: "So it wasn't me igniting the fire..."

The voice dispersed into the wind, the words unfinished.

But on the snow, a line of footprints had already quietly extended toward the south.

There, spring thunder was about to rumble, and ruins were waiting to be awakened.

And in the empty bag at his waist, only a scrap of old, long-cooled cloth remained, quietly pressed against his body heat, waiting for a reunion that required no ritual.