156: Those who deceive fire will eventually be recognized by fire

The night wind passed through the forest, the galaxy like a waterfall.

Zhang Xuanyi sat by the edge of the cliff, crushed the charred carbon debris, and scattered it into the abyss.

Sparks surged from all directions, circling and dancing around those worn-out work shoes, spelling out two incomplete yet clear characters—not "Zhang Xuanyi," nor "Celestial Master," but the unextinguished cry from the bottom of millions of hearts.

He laughed, stood up, and turned into the darkness.

Three days later, in the depths of an abandoned subway tunnel in a suburb of North China.

The sound of dripping water echoed in the gloom, mold crawled all over the corners, and the mixed scent of rust and inferior incense was suffocating.

This was the "Gray Market"—an underground world that operated outside the law, a place of filth and corruption, yet teeming with hidden vitality.

Remnants of Quanxing, fugitive Outcasts, speculators, and Fire Seekers traded everything that could not see the light of day here: lost Talisman ash, incomplete Cultivation Technique manuals, contaminated Qi cores... and the legendary "True Fire Seed."

Footsteps came from the end of the stairs.

A man walked down slowly, his hair cut extremely short, his jacket greasy and shiny, carrying a tattered woven bag on his shoulder, his hat brim pulled low to cover half his face.

The scarred man guarding the door reached out to stop him: "Name?"

The man grinned, his voice hoarse: "Old Zhang."

The scarred man squinted to size him up, then waved him through.

No one used their real name in this place, but "Old Zhang" looked too ordinary, making it seem less like a fake.

The lights in the Gray Market were dim and yellow, stalls lined up along both sides of the tunnel, with iron boxes, plastic sheets, and broken cardboard boxes serving as counters.

Some sold poisoned daggers, some peddled "Pulse-Burst Pills" that could briefly stimulate Innate realm combat power, and more people were reselling ash of various colors—black as ink, white as snow, blue with green gleams... each pack priced from tens to tens of thousands.

Zhang Xuanyi set up a small stall in a corner, with only a rusty iron basin in front, filled with gray, dusty furnace residue, priced at fifty yuan a pack, with a limit of three packs.

"Ancestral furnace ash, burned through thirty years of incense at Mount Longhu," he said slowly, his tone like an old timer chatting in a wet market, "It doesn't cure diseases or ward off bad luck, it’s just a little foundation for warming the Fire Pulse."

Surrounding stall owners sneered: "Where did this bumpkin come from? You dare to sell this kind of ash?"

Buyers immediately crowded around to question him: "Your ash doesn't even have gold threads, it doesn't precipitate when soaked in water, can this even be called real ash?"

Zhang Xuanyi was not annoyed. He reached into his bag, grabbed a handful of ash, poured it into an iron bucket, took out a scrap of newspaper, rolled it into a tube, stuffed it in, and clicked his lighter with a "snap."

The flame ignited, dim and flickering at first, as if it were about to go out at any moment.

The crowd was about to jeer, but they saw Zhang Xuanyi lower his head and softly hum a tune—it was the chant from the "Scripture of Clarity" used during morning lessons at Mount Longhu, ancient, calm, and carrying some unspeakable rhythm.

In an instant, the flame trembled.

The originally orange flame gradually turned translucent, clear as glass, with fine, phantom Talisman patterns appearing at the heart of the fire, burning continuously for thirty minutes without extinguishing, smoke-free and ash-free.

Everyone was silent.

Until an old man wearing a bamboo hat said in a trembling voice: "This is... 'Singing Fire'!"

Someone gasped sharply: "Only real ash containing the lingering rhythm of dormant Talismans can be awakened by sound-induced methods! He... he has a Living Fire Seed in his hand!"

"Old Zhang" grinned and packed up his stall: "Three packs today, sold out."

The crowd was still stunned, but he had already disappeared around the corner of the tunnel.

Meanwhile, deep in the other end of the Gray Market, Su Qingzhu was wrapped in a dark trench coat, disguised as a middleman buying loose ash.

She had just stepped away from an unpublished investigative report—about "the fission of faith behind the Gray Market," and the clues pointed to a mysterious organization.

"You want to test ash?" A thin young man handed her a cup of hot water, his eyes vigilant, "Pay the deposit first, one hundred."

"A-Cheng" was his name in the Gray Market, in his early twenties, his garage converted into a testing point, the equipment simple but systematic: under UV light, real ash left a faint green glow; after soaking in clear water, top-tier fire seeds would precipitate gold threads; the best part was the third level—igniting it in a ceramic bowl to listen to the clarity of the fire's sound.

"Turbid sounds are fake, hissing is dead, only those clear and melodious like chimes are living fire," A-Cheng said while operating.

Su Qingzhu stared at the transparent flame jumping in the bowl, her heart rate accelerating: "How do you know all this?"

A-Cheng didn't answer, pointing to a hand-drawn map on the wall—over three hundred red dots across the country, connected by dark lines, with strange code names marked next to the nodes: "We are the 'True Ash Alliance.' No one leads us; it's an ash-testing network that spontaneously formed across various places starting last year. We rely on messages, secret signals, and copper buttons to connect."

He handed her an old military copper button: "Don't wear leather shoes next time you come. The floor tiles here have cavities; stepping too heavily will alert the hidden sentries."

Su Qingzhu squeezed the copper button, suddenly understanding—

Zhang Xuanyi's smiling exit that night was not a surrender.

He was planting fire into the soil.

And in corners no one saw, this fire was being guarded, passed on, and purified by ordinary people using folk methods.

At the same time, in an abandoned factory area in the suburbs, Zhang Xuanyi lay prone in a ventilation duct, crawling while holding his breath.

This was the former Qi energy laboratory of the Under Heaven Society, long abandoned, but now occupied by a gang selling fake ash at high prices.

They used chemical synthetics to forge "high-purity fire seeds," selling them to Outcasts eager to improve their Fire Pulses for staggering profits.

He had tracked them all the way here, just to find the source.

Cold wind blew in from the gaps in the duct, and suddenly, his feet felt hot.

He lowered his head, and by the residual light of his flashlight, he saw clearly—his right foot was stepping on a pinch of yellowed paper scraps, the edges charred black, with faint traces of cinnabar Talisman runes visible.

His pupils suddenly constricted.

This was... a remnant of the photocopy yellow paper left behind ten years ago!

Even more eerie, extremely fine gold threads were seeping out of the soil around the paper scraps, slowly winding around the concrete column base like living creatures, as if constructing some form of invisible network.

His heart was shaken: this place had once buried waste from the Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid, which he thought had completely lost its effect back then... but now, had the fire seed actually completed a secondary spread through rodent transport and microbial activity?

This was not pollution—this was Awakening.

He was silent for a moment, took a small pinch of ash from the old stall site from his woven bag, gently sprinkled it into the cracks of the column base, tore half a page from his cigarette box, and wrote three words: Xiaoyao Token.

Then he quietly retreated.

Seven days later.

The internal temperature of the laboratory walls rose abnormally, maintaining a constant 28°C, and golden crystals began to precipitate on the surface of the steel bars.

And those members who had come into contact with the fake ash began to have hallucinations—but what they saw was not fear, not madness. It was... fire.

Seven days later, in an abandoned factory area in the suburbs of North China. At 3:17 AM, the temperature plummeted, and cold fog wrapped around the rusted iron gates like gauze.

However, deep in the third basement level, the interior of the concrete walls eerily maintained a constant 28°C—neither rising nor falling, as if precisely regulated by some invisible force.

Spiderweb-like golden crystals appeared on the surface of the steel bars, the clusters as fine as veins, slightly warm to the touch, seemingly breathing like living things.

"It's here again... that sound." A man curled up in the corner muttered to himself, the whites of his eyes bloodshot.

He held his head with both hands, and a childish voice echoed in his ears, reciting the "Scripture of Clarity" word for word, clearly: "The Great Dao is formless, it gives birth to heaven and earth; the Great Dao is emotionless, it moves the sun and the moon..."

This was not an auditory hallucination, but the memory of fire backfiring.

The entire building was no longer just a simple laboratory.

When the police technical team broke in, they could hardly believe what they saw: the basement structure had been completely rewritten, the interior of the walls riddled with honeycomb-like cavities, countless golden root-like threads crisscrossing, penetrating load-bearing columns, permeating floors, and wrapping around cables—they were not metal, nor biological tissue, but a kind of "Activated Ash Pulse" between Qi and matter.

"What the hell is this... an ecosystem?" The SWAT captain's hand holding the gun trembled slightly.

The flash went off, and Su Qingzhu stood at the edge of the crowd, her camera lens aimed at that eerie golden web.

She didn't speak, only quietly swapped the memory card into a backup device.

Back in the car, she repeatedly replayed the final footage—just at the moment the lens swept across the wreckage of the main control room, the image flickered, and a line of phantom text quietly appeared: "Those who deceive fire shall eventually be known by fire."

The handwriting was as faint as smoke marks, vanishing in an instant.

But she recognized this handwriting—three years ago, Zhang Xuanyi had once written the same warning on a piece of Talisman paper, which had burned to ash before the ink was even dry.

Her fingertips trembled slightly, but she did not upload it to the database, nor did she contact the editorial department.

Instead, she took out a blank disc, burned the data, sealed it, and wrote the address according to the coordinates in her memory: Ganxi, Southern foothills of Mount Longhu, Fork in Forest Patrol Road No. 3.

Meanwhile, the Qingming night rain had just ceased, and the mountain wind was chilly.

At the foot of Mount Longhu, the weeds were overgrown, and the site of the old street stall had long been buried by vines.

Ten years ago, a tattered cloth had been laid out here, selling photocopy yellow paper and heavenly eye mung beans; ten years later, even the stone slabs had crumbled into powder.

But just at the third quarter of the Zi hour, the earth suddenly trembled slightly.

A ring of fire rose silently, not from burning wood, nor from a Talisman, but emerged on its own from beneath the scorched earth—red flames swirling, the patterns clear, it was the Talisman array evolved from the three characters "Xiaoyao Token" written by Zhang Xuanyi back then!

The flames did not burn, but instead carried a gentle warmth, like a greeting after a long separation.

Zhang Xuanyi stood before the firelight, his black clothes stained with dew, his expression complex.

He crouched down, pressed his palm to the ground, and closed his eyes to perceive.

In an instant, a weak yet resilient pulsation came from beneath the ground—like a heartbeat, like breathing, slowly throbbing along the broken earth veins.

He opened his eyes suddenly: "Cui Wujiu's broken weapon... actually connected to a branch of Earth Qi here?"

That broken sword that had once severed the Quanxing altar—its fragments had actually become the medium for the fire seed to take root.

Footsteps approached from afar.

A group of teenagers walked through the mud, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, but their faces bore a determination that did not belong to their age.

They carried a mottled iron box, the lid open, filled with colorful ashes—there was old ash from incense burners, embers from ancestral hall sacrificial fires, and even holy ash brought from the night-watch furnace of the Martyrs' Cemetery.

"I heard this is where the first furnace fire rose?" the leading teenager asked loudly, his voice piercing the night, "We've come to add fuel to the fire!"

The firelight flickered, reflecting on Zhang Xuanyi's silent face.

He did not answer, but slowly stood up and stepped aside.

Just as his sleeve slid down, half a yellowed mission slip quietly fell to the ground—it was the last remaining trace of the "myriad laws street vendor system," and the ink for "Sell 100 items" was fading at a rate visible to the naked eye, as if a certain mission had already ended.

And deep underground, the golden veins hummed softly, and the fire's intent was not extinguished.