165: The fire has reached the sky, who cares if his surname is Zhang or not?

Three days ago, golden characters appeared on the Jade Slip atop Mount Longhu, and the "Decree of Returning Incense" struck like a thunderbolt, shattering the three-hundred-year Seal.

The Talisman array collapsed, and the Power Of Will was released, allowing everyone under heaven to light fires to create altars and bestow their own Talisman scriptures.

At that moment, the masses worshipped heaven, and a hundred cities released lanterns. Some knelt and wept, some burned incense and kowtowed, and others held yellow paper high and laughed, "I am a Daoist now too!"

But Zhang Xuanyi did not watch.

He sat with his back to the mountains, fishing by the creek. His fishing float was tied with a half-burnt piece of Talisman paper. Suddenly, a ghostly blue flame surged, and a System prompt appeared in the fire: [Let the people of the world light themselves up].

He smiled, threw away his fishing rod, and turned to head south.

Now, in Southern Anhui, the mountain mist is like gauze, and the light rain weaves a curtain.

The bluestone road is slippery enough to reflect silhouettes, and the small village under the old peach tree is so quiet that only the crackling of firewood remains.

The old ancestral hall at the village entrance has changed its appearance—a crooked wooden sign hangs on the lintel: "Commoners' Fire Hall."

There are no statues, no Daoist robes. On the incense table, there are enamel mugs, old cotton shoes, and half a sesame seed cake, all stained with oil yet arranged with great reverence.

The walls are covered with "Efficacy Lists" written in red paint: "Year of Bingshen, Li family's child's fever broke—three sticks of incense as thanks," "Year of Guimao, cold wave, Granny Wang found warmth—returned the ashes once."

The handwriting is childish, yet every stroke seems to carve all the hope in their lives into it.

Zhang Xuanyi stood outside; his Daoist robe was dampened by the rain at the hem, but he did not move.

He only watched, his gaze as faint as the mountain mist, yet deep enough to suppress the entire sea of clouds.

Suddenly, a seven or eight-year-old child stood on tiptoe and carefully tucked a slip of paper into the incense burner.

The movement was so light, as if afraid of disturbing something.

On the paper, a line of words was written crookedly in charcoal: "Grandpa Fire, I want my mom to stop coughing."

As the wind passed the hall, the embers in the burner jumped lightly.

The corners of Zhang Xuanyi's mouth moved imperceptibly.

It was not a smile, nor was it sadness; it was more like... a long-lost sense of familiarity striking his heart.

He did not go in.

He only reached into his bosom and pulled out half a scorched shell of heavenly eye mung beans—the residue left after using his first strange treasure, a relic of his past.

He crouched down and tapped the threshold three times gently.

Once, twice, three times.

This was the "vow fulfillment signal" he had once secretly taught his customers: if it truly worked, come back and tap three times; no need for many words, he would know.

The burner fire trembled violently, a spark of ember leapt up and then fell, as if nodding.

But he also knew clearly that this fire no longer belonged to him.

Su Qingzhu arrived at this village on the evening of the third day.

She wore her press pass and carried a camera on her shoulder, with rainwater sliding down the lens.

Over the past month, she had traveled across three southern provinces, recording the frenzy of this "faith revolution."

At first, it was moving—mothers lighting lamps for sick children, farmers drawing Talismans in the fields to pray for rain; but gradually, things changed.

In one town, because "spiritual fire revealed words" on a stove in the middle of the night, a dozen families refused to yield to each other, each hiring retired strange people to set up arrays to protect the fire, and even using residual Talismans to trigger "household fire resonance," competing to see whose flame was brighter and whose dream was more "orthodox."

She recorded a conversation during an interview: "Was your fire given to you by a Bodhisattva in a dream? What a coincidence, I dreamt of Zhang Xuanyi!" "What's Zhang Xuanyi? Isn't he just a street vendor selling Talismans?"

She did not cut it, but instead put this segment into the report exactly as it was.

She thought about the title for an entire night and finally typed out ten words: "We no longer kneel to gods, but we have started competing to become new gods."

At the end of the article, she added a note: "When fire belongs to everyone, the most dangerous thing is not that no one believes, but that everyone thinks they have the final say."

What she did not know was that on the very same night she published this report, there was an anomaly at the earth vein node at the northern foot of Kunlun.

The golden pattern on Zhang Xuanyi's palm—the System brand—had been burning like needle pricks for three consecutive nights.

He set off overnight, trekking through snow and crossing mountains, heading straight for the old riverbed site.

The frozen soil was dug up three feet, and the golden veins underneath, which originally flowed orderly like rivers, were now in chaos, like a torn spider web.

Some crystal grains were rotating in reverse, devouring the surrounding energy and forming miniature whirlpools.

Even more bizarrely, the map projection of these chaotic areas completely overlapped with the villages where "wildfire altars" had recently exploded in growth.

He took out the last half-piece of photocopy yellow paper and stuck it to the ground.

It ignited without fire.

The ashes rose into the air and automatically arranged themselves into four words: Power Of Will overload.

His pupils shrank suddenly.

He finally understood.

Back then, Tianshi Mansion extracted the Power Of Will from the masses, refining it into a "will core" to drive the Talisman array, which resulted in draining faith and severing the root of the Dao; now, people spontaneously light fires, everyone can worship, and everyone can make requests, which was originally a gathering of good intentions, but once "efficacy" becomes a transaction and "vow fulfillment" turns into investment returns, the greed in people's hearts grows like wild grass—the fire is no longer the firewood of the Legacy, but has become a wish-granting machine.

The fire is not broken; what is broken is people's expectations of the fire.

He stood on the edge of the riverbed, the cold wind blowing his robes until they rustled loudly.

In the distance, on the roof of a mountain village, three clusters of wild fire were rising into the sky simultaneously, as if competing for some invisible crown.

He closed his eyes and heard countless voices intertwining in the wind: "Grandpa Fire, bless me to get into college!" "I want to get rich!" "Let my old man wake up!"

Every wish was sincere, and every request was heavy.

But the fire could not burn through so much debt.

He opened his eyes, and the golden pattern on his palm was still aching faintly.

It was not to save the world, nor to preach the Dao, but... to let the fire stop and catch its breath.

Seven days later, he returned to that small village in Southern Anhui.

The misty rain remained.

There was no one under the peach tree.

He stopped outside the ancestral hall and took a broken pottery jar from his bundle; the jar had cracks in its body, and the bottom was chipped, obviously something picked up as junk.

He crouched down, turned the jar mouth down, and inverted it on the ground.

There were no incense tables set up around, no memorial tablets erected, and no lists posted.

He only hung a rough wooden sign nearby, writing two large characters in charcoal: — — Stop Burning.

The fire has burned all the way to the sky, who still cares if it's surnamed Zhang.

But now, Zhang Xuanyi was persuading people not to burn it.

The misty rain in the small village of Southern Anhui lingered, the bluestone road shimmered with a ghostly light, and the old peach tree stood silent like a night watchman.

That broken pottery jar was inverted outside the ancestral hall, its crack facing the sky, like a tightly closed mouth, able to swallow a thousand words but not uttering a single one.

The villagers gathered in circle after circle, their eyes mixed with awe, suspicion, and mockery.

"Isn't this the vendor who used to sell 'fire coins'?" An old man wearing rubber shoes spat, "Making a fortune by relying on Talismans, and now you come to teach us not to worship fire?"

"Is he afraid that the fire others light is more effective than his?" A young man sneered, "I heard that over in Kunlun, there are already three 'True Fate Fire Altars' claiming to have received divine revelation, calling him a usurper of the Dao."

Zhang Xuanyi ignored them.

He just crouched down and took a handful of cold ashes from his bundle—this was the residue he had collected along the way from the ruins of seven out-of-control fire altars, mixed with burnt paper, broken Talismans, broken incense, and a few blackened mung bean shells.

He sprinkled it gently into the pottery jar, his movement like he was burying something.

He did this every day: adding cold ashes in the morning, taking warm liquid in the evening, and dripping it into the creek.

At first, no one believed it.

The creek remained muddy, and nightmares continued to occur frequently at night.

But by the fifth day, a child said they had slept soundly; on the sixth day, even the most restless wild dogs stopped barking.

On the seventh night, the wind suddenly stopped.

A hunched figure came walking in the moonlight—it was the old woman from the east end of the village who had suffered from asthma for many years.

She held a rusty tin box, her fingers trembling so much she could barely open the latch.

"Can I... burn the slips of paper I wrote before?" Her voice was weak, yet it cut through the silence like a knife.

Zhang Xuanyi looked at her and finally nodded.

The old woman tremblingly lifted the lid, revealing a pile of yellowing slips of paper, each one saying "Pray for peace," "Pray for medicine to arrive," "Pray for my son to return."

She slowly dropped them into the pottery jar.

There was no roar, no blazing flames.

Only a cluster of ghostly blue flames rose silently, as gentle as a breath.

The bizarre thing was that after the fire burned, the temperature in the room dropped sharply, even the residual fire in the stove was sucked dry, and thin frost formed on the walls.

The villagers retreated a few steps in shock, but saw that the fire did not hurt anyone; instead, it made the long-suppressed anxiety in their hearts fade away bit by bit, as if it had been washed clean.

That night, the whole village had the same dream.

In the dream, a young man in coarse cloth clothes stood on the mountain peak, with his back to the sky full of fire, saying: "You have warmed others enough, it is time to let the fire catch its breath."

When they woke up, it was not yet dawn, but their chests felt unprecedentedly light.

Su Qingzhu arrived at noon the next day.

She walked through the muddy path, the camera on her shoulder feeling heavy.

She had written many reports about the "rise of faith," but this was the first time she saw what faith's self-reflection looked like.

She saw Zhang Xuanyi burying the pottery jar deep under the roots of an old locust tree, his movements solemn as if performing a Seal.

He was not chanting scriptures or incantations, but a nonsensical nursery rhyme: "Three coins of mung beans for a Heavenly Eye, five coins of yellow paper for peace—but from now on, the one on credit is yourself."

As his voice fell, the whole old locust tree suddenly trembled slightly, and its branches emitted a pale golden shimmer, as if its Bloodline had been reconnected.

Deep underground, the golden lines of the earth veins, which had once broken due to the runaway Power Of Will, actually stretched out inch by inch, reconnecting, and slowly weaving into a new network.

She suddenly raised her camera.

The lens was empty.

The tree was just a tree, the soil was just soil, there was nothing.

But when she played back the recording, thousands of whispers poured out from the headphones, layered and overlapping, merging into one incredibly clear sentence: "We remember."

She froze, her finger hovering over the stop button, not falling for a long time.

Then she turned off the device and looked up at the night sky.

There was clearly no fire there, but it seemed as if billions of stars were burning.

She suddenly smiled, but her eyes were wet.

So this world finally no longer needed heroes, nor did it need gods.

It only needed every person willing to bow their head and pick up the ashes.

And in the distance where she could not see—in the Northwest wilderness, in a crack in the wall of an abandoned cave dwelling, a wisp of blue smoke quietly rose, straight into the sky, neither dispersing nor shaking, like a letter that no one had delivered, but which was destined to arrive.

There were no words on the letter.

But heaven and earth knew what it wrote: I understand.