160: Folk altar

The night wind, carrying yellow sand, swept across the Longxi market.

The morning mist had yet to disperse, and the smoke from cooking fires intertwined with the sweet scent of roasted sweet potatoes, coalescing into a tapestry of mortal life.

Zhang Xuanyi, wrapped in an old Daoist robe, walked along the dirt road, his cloth shoes creaking with every step.

He was originally just passing through, but suddenly felt a jolt in his heart, as if something were gently tugging at his life pulse.

He stopped, his gaze falling upon an inconspicuous roasted sweet potato stall on the street corner.

The old woman, her back hunched, used iron tongs to turn the sweet potatoes in the furnace, the firelight reflecting upon her heavily wrinkled face.

But that fire—something was wrong.

The blue-gray flames burned quietly; they did not leap or sway, but instead flowed steadily like ripples in water.

Most eerily, at the tip of the flame, an illusory lotus shadow had condensed—three petals just beginning to bloom, entirely translucent, as if woven from countless fine Talismanic Incantations.

It neither flickered nor dispersed, trembling slightly in the air like some silent summons.

"A living immortal!" the watching children clapped and shouted.

"Yesterday, my mother wouldn't stop coughing up blood, but this morning, after eating a sweet potato from her stall, she could actually get out of bed and walk!"

"My child had a fever for three days that wouldn't break. Last night, I dreamed of a little child handing him a candied hawthorn, and when I woke up, the fever was gone—and the way that child looked was exactly like the drawing on the wall of this stall!"

The crowd chattered, their voices filled with awe.

The old woman merely shook her head, her withered fingers pointing to the corner of the stove.

"I haven't practiced any cultivation, nor am I literate. It's just that a while ago, in a dream, a child stood by my pot laughing and taught me to draw a circle in the corner... so I just traced it."

Zhang Xuanyi squatted down, his fingertips lightly stroking the charcoal graffiti.

It was a circle, crooked and with broken lines, even smeared in some places.

Yet, amidst this crudeness, he recognized a familiar structure—it was a simplified diagram of the reverse fate altering compass!

It was not the complete version, nor was it a standard template produced by the System, but rather a prototype "conceived" out of thin air, bearing a childlike innocence, yet strangely aligning with the laws of the circulation of heaven and earth's Qi.

His pupils constricted.

The System had never released this pattern.

This logic of power should have been known only to him.

Yet now, an old woman who had never practiced Qi could, because of a dream, draw symbols that triggered true Power Of Will, transforming ordinary fire into a spiritual flame?

"The collective will of the people... can even deduce a Golden Finger?" he whispered to himself, his voice dry.

"It is not I who am lighting the fire; it is they themselves, digging the spark out from their own memories."

He suddenly recalled that night three years ago when he had packed up his stall, the golden threads surging from the earth as he poured out the Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid; he remembered the child's voice that had drifted past his ear: "Uncle, we are keeping your fire safe for you."

It had not been a hallucination, after all.

Those hawkers who had once pulled out wrinkled banknotes to buy mung beans at his stall, those elders who had secretly copied the yellow paper Talismans to stick on their headboards, those mothers who had used "three coins of mung beans for the Heavenly Eye" as a nursery rhyme to lull their children to sleep... their memories, trust, and expectations had long since quietly fermented, brewing into this wave of fire sweeping through the common people.

This was not a loss of control.

This was an Awakening.

He stood up and looked toward the distant mountains.

The horizon turned a pale, fish-belly white.

In this ordinary marketplace, smoke of strange colors was already rising from the chimneys of over a dozen households—some crimson as blood, some deep blue like frost; and even more remarkably, roof tiles were shifting without a breeze, revealing incomplete Talismanic seals.

As he was thinking this, a grayish-brown letter slipped from his sleeve.

The paper was coarse, and the ink was a faded gray, as if written with stove ash mixed with water.

On it was only one line of text:

"The fire will burn the temple."

There was no signature and no sign-off, yet it sent a chill down Zhang Xuanyi's spine.

He set off immediately, following his intuition toward the city outskirts.

Half an hour later, a dilapidated Earth Temple appeared before him.

Weeds obscured the doorway, and spiderwebs sealed the beams; it had been ignored for years.

But the moment he stepped over the threshold, his skin suddenly stung—the air was permeated with a subtle, scorching heat, as if an invisible fire were slowly gnawing at everything.

Looking up, he saw that the surfaces of the temple's beams and pillars were covered in dense, honeycomb-like holes of varying depths.

In every hole, a current of Qi faintly circulated, connecting with the others to spontaneously form a vast and precise Spiritual Qi gathering Formation!

"This is not simple vandalism..." he gritted his teeth. "Someone is using 'Soul-Eroding Fire' to pre-corrode the building. When the common people eventually come to worship and the Spiritual Qi gathers, the entire temple will explode into a fire-thunder, backfiring on those who offered their wishes!"

He took out the last of the fist soul candy residue and flicked it into the incense burner in the main hall.

Hum—the entire Earth Temple suddenly trembled!

The holes in the beams and pillars simultaneously erupted with pale golden threads of light, instantly weaving into a massive web that enveloped the entire temple, the sound of resonance like a bell ringing through the nine heavens!

Zhang Xuanyi sneered.

"You want to sever the folk altars? You fear that ordinary people can also ignite spiritual fire? How unfortunate... nowadays, even a rock or a broken pot can become an incense burner, as long as a sincere person is willing to kneel and worship."

He turned and left, his figure blending into the morning light.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away amidst the city's high-rises, Su Qingzhu sat in a dimly lit editing room, repeatedly playing a video.

The screen was pitch black; nothing could be seen.

Only the audio slowly emitted a whisper:

"Incense fire returns to the people, Tianshi closes its doors."

She stared at the screen, her fingertips trembling.

This was not a technical failure; some force had actively erased the footage—leaving only this sentence, which sounded like both a declaration and a warning.

She pulled up the anomaly reports from the last three months:

An old woman in a Jiangnan village burned an old calendar to pray for rain, and that very night, a sweet rain fell;

Herdsmen in Western Sichuan used paper money made from horse dung to sacrifice to the Mountain God, and their lost cattle returned to the pen on their own;

A family in the Northeast built a simple stove in the ruins of a demolition site and worshipped a wooden tablet inscribed with "Xuanyi Peace," and that night, their home cracked during an earthquake but did not collapse...

These folk sacrifices used no Talismans and involved no Daoists; the offerings were sometimes nothing more than soot from the bottom of a pot and old newspapers.

Yet what they chanted were all the rhymes that the street-stall Daoist at the foot of Mount Longhu had once shouted—

"Three coins of mung beans for the Heavenly Eye, five wen of yellow paper for peace."

She slammed her notebook shut, her eyes sharp as knives.

This was not a resurgence of superstition.

This was hundreds of millions of ordinary people rebuilding a belief System in their own way.

And someone was trying to snuff it all out in the dark.

She opened her drawer, retrieved a micro-recorder disguised as an ear stud, and took a black invitation from her safe—it had a gold-stamped border of flame patterns, a cryptic serial number, and only a small seal-script stamp at the bottom: "Ash."

Outside the window, thunder and lightning flashed; a heavy rain was imminent.

Su Qingzhu threw on her trench coat and walked out into the night.

What she did not know was that at this very moment, seven descendants of extraordinary families across the country had quietly disappeared. The final surveillance footage of all of them froze at the entrance of an underground parking lot—there were no signs there, only a crooked circle scribbled in charcoal on a wall.

The moment Su Qingzhu, in her high heels, walked into the underground parking lot, the air suddenly grew heavy.

There were no lights, only a few sporadic emergency lamps glowing with a ghostly green, like the eyes of a beast.

She adjusted the frequency of her ear-stud recorder, her fingertips clenching the "Ash" invitation inside her trench coat pocket.

A chill crawled up her spine—this place shouldn't have been this cold, unless... someone had used a Qi field to create a concealment Formation.

She walked along the base of the wall, and the circle drawn in charcoal gradually became clear at the end of her vision.

It was not graffiti; it was a marker, a guide, and, more importantly, the starting point of some kind of ritual.

Turning the corner, an iron door slid open silently, and warm light poured out, mingled with whispers and the scent of burning spices.

Inside the auction hall, gold-velvet curtains hung down. The central dais was surrounded by a circle of bronze braziers; the flames were dark purple and gave off no heat, instead absorbing the surrounding temperature.

The host, wearing a semi-transparent mask, spoke in a modulated voice: "The next item—True Three Caverns Original Liquid, 97% purity, allows direct access to the Grandmaster realm. Starting bid is ten million, with minimum increments of one million."

The hall fell silent.

Su Qingzhu's pupils constricted.

She had seen this description in the archives of Zhang Xuanyi's stall—it was one of the System's most Advanced commodities, limited to three bottles worldwide, and it was impossible for it to have reached the black market.

She quietly approached the front display stand and, under the guise of adjusting her cuffs, aimed her micro-spectrometer at the bottle of liquid.

The data feedback popped up instantly: Ingredient analysis—basic medicinal primer + centennial scorched ash mixture; spiritual power reaction was zero.

It was fake.

But what truly shocked her were the eyes of several bidders in the audience.

Three of them were all slightly squinting their left eyes, with a faint golden halo glowing deep within their pupils—she was all too familiar with that hue.

Three years ago, while staking out an interview at Mount Longhu, she had seen with her own eyes a thug swallow the "heavenly eye mung beans" sold by Zhang Xuanyi and, within six seconds, predict three consecutive strikes from a boxing champion.

Yet now, these people had not consumed any known spiritual items, but had activated a similar state on their own.

"The heart of faith fire..." she muttered to herself.

It was not relying on external forces, but on belief itself to ignite a momentary spiritual sense.

Just as those old women could replicate Talismanic seals from memory, ordinary people were using their own methods to tear open the sky curtain monopolized by the extraordinary.

A sneer came from the stage: "No response to the starting bid? It seems you all still do not believe the saying, 'The common people can also attain the Dao.'"

Before the voice had even faded, bidding paddles were raised one after another.

Su Qingzhu quickly retreated into a shadowed corner and opened an encrypted channel to prepare for transmitting the evidence.

But the moment she pressed the send button, the entire building violently shook!

All the braziers were extinguished simultaneously, and darkness surged in like a tide.

She heard a sigh brush past her ear: "Incense fire returns to the people; how can it be allowed to be sold privately?"

Immediately after, the iron door slammed shut, and gray mist sprayed from the vents—Soul-Eroding Smoke, designed specifically to break spiritual sense; even a Grandmaster who inhaled it would be temporarily incapacitated.

Chaos erupted, and the crowd screamed as they fled.

She gritted her teeth and rushed toward the exit, but was dragged toward a side corridor by an invisible force.

In her final glance, she saw the bottle of "Original Liquid" explode on the display stand, the black liquid splashing against the wall and slowly coalescing into a line of text: "You are burning incense; they are lighting a fire."

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away on a cliff at Mount Longhu, a wild wind roared.

Zhang Xuanyi stood at the edge of the cliff, his Daoist robe fluttering, his gaze locked firmly on the direction of Tianshi Mansion.

The night sky churned like boiling water, and a massive, glowing Talisman Formation appeared within the thick clouds. Nine layers of thunder patterns encircled the Taiji Yin and Yang fish, rotating slowly, the intent of suppression piercing through heaven and earth.

It was a Restriction, and a blockade.

But just then, a piece of gravel at his feet suddenly grew hot and cracked open, revealing winding golden veins within—they were of the same origin as the inscriptions on the pottery jar at the Star Gazing Platform years ago, a remnant of an ancient earth-fire ritual.

The two forces stood in opposition from afar: the Talisman Formation in the sky pressed down, while the golden veins underground surged upward, as if a game spanning a hundred years had restarted at this moment.

Zhang Xuanyi looked down at the faint flame rising from the crack in the stone and suddenly threw his head back and laughed, his laughter tearing through the wind and rain: "Three hundred years of closed doors, and you thought there was no fire left in the world? But you forgot—a single thought from the hearts of the people is a light that spans ten thousand zhang!"

As his words faded, the village at the foot of the mountain suddenly responded, as dozens of faint lights lit up one after another.

Some were on windowsills, some in stoves, and some were even just little suns drawn by children with crayons on paper... but in every single place, there pulsed a warmth that did not belong to the mundane world.

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

And the Talisman Formation above Tianshi Mansion, under the reflection of this sea of lights, developed a crack that was barely visible to the naked eye.

The wind grew fiercer; a heavy rain was imminent.

Zhang Xuanyi turned to head back, but suddenly noticed a strange light flash by the stream.

He walked over and picked up a fragment of green jade from the wet mud.

The jade was icy, but the moment it touched his hand, it felt like holding a burning coal.