166: The fire is out, but the bill is still not settled

The night in Southern Anhui was so quiet, it felt as if someone had covered its mouth.

The stream was still flowing, but it was no longer as warm as it had been in the past few days.

A thin mist floated on the water's surface, reflecting a crescent moon. Occasionally, as ripples gently rose, blurred characters would appear—"Pray for warmth," "Protect the harvest," "Child return home"... These were all wish notes written by the villagers themselves, once tossed into a clay jar and burned to ash, but now, as if their souls had returned home, they manifested in the water.

No one dared to speak aloud; even the dogs curled up under the eaves, their ears pressed tight against their heads, not daring to bark.

Zhang Xuanyi squatted beside the roots of the old locust tree, his fingertips still retaining the slick sensation of cold ash shells.

He gazed at the inverted clay jar, the corners of his mouth twitching: "It’s one thing that you dug it up, but your hearts are still restless. You’ve had your dreams, you’ve heard the words—what, do you still want to see the fire jump out of the ground and bow to you?"

No one answered.

In the distance, light shone through the paper windows of a few houses; shadows flickered as people peeked, only to shrink back.

He wasn't annoyed, merely tapping his knuckles against the bottom of the jar three times.

Click.

A muffled sound, like a lock cylinder loosening, or perhaps bones shifting out of place.

Immediately after, the entire stream shuddered violently. Ripples burst out in concentric circles, and the remnants of the paper strips in the reflection slowly pieced themselves together, eventually solidifying into a sentence as clear as if carved by a chisel: "Let the fire take a breath."

The wind stopped, the leaves went still, and even the frog calls ceased abruptly.

A moment later, the long-extinguished embers in the hearth of a household suddenly ignited a small, ghostly blue flame on their own. It wasn't hot, didn't smoke, just flickered quietly once, then extinguished.

A stifled sob came from the house—it was the mother whose child had frozen to death last winter.

Zhang Xuanyi stood up, brushed the dust from the hem of his Daoist robe, and muttered to himself: "Fire can reach the heavens, but it can also burn the heart. I won't stop you from believing, but you must learn to shut up, bow your heads, and Repay the Debt."

He turned and walked toward the riverbank outside the village. His steps were neither hurried nor slow, but with every step he took, a faint golden pattern flashed and vanished at the edge of his footprint, as if a Talismanic Incantation about to shatter was hidden beneath his skin.

His palm burned again, as if a branding iron were pressed against his flesh.

Gritting his teeth, he pulled out the last half of the photocopy yellow paper; its edges were charred and curled, its spiritual essence nearly exhausted.

Yet when it gently landed on the stream's surface, it floated eerily without sinking, like a dead leaf that could not get wet.

The yellow paper vibrated slightly, the scorch marks spreading into characters: "...Thirty-seven li to the north... kiln cracked... smoke unceasing... where Cui's bones are buried... fire seed growing in reverse..."

Zhang Xuanyi's pupils contracted sharply.

Cui Wujiu—one of the three great villains of the Quanxing back then, who called himself the "Immortal Master of Wish Fire," refining his own body with the incense fire of the masses, suffered Qi Deviation, and was ultimately suppressed by the combined efforts of the Tianshi Mansion in an abandoned kiln in the Northwest wilderness.

The place of his fall later became the source of the first batch of villages where "Wildfire Altars" spontaneously gathered.

And now, there... the smoke is unceasing?

He suddenly looked up toward the north. The night sky was as black as ink, but a southeast wind blew against his face, carrying an indescribable scent—a fishy sweetness, like blood and honey burned together, mixed with a fragrance bordering on decay.

That was the "Breath of Spiritual Agitation" that only occurs when the Power Of Will is burned excessively; ordinary people would fall into a stupor upon smelling it, while superhumans would be driven to madness.

He rummaged through the corner of his backpack for the heavenly eye mung beans shell; it was already shriveled and brittle, its spiritual efficacy completely gone.

But he still put it in his mouth and chewed hard.

Crunch, crunch.

The residue turned to powder under his tongue, and a faint yet familiar sense of clarity swept through his mind.

In an instant, the wind had shape, and the scent had a trajectory.

That fishy sweetness traced a secret path along the airflow, pointing directly to a spot thirty-seven li to the north-northeast—it was precisely the burial place of Cui Wujiu!

"Madness..." Zhang Xuanyi muttered, "Who is restarting the Wildfire Altar? Aren't they afraid of the earth's veins exploding and flipping half of Southern Anhui into the ground?"

He remembered the old man Su Qingzhu had interviewed during the day, who had said with red eyes: "Now that our own hearths can reach the heavens, who is willing to kneel to rules set by others anymore?"

Once freedom is ignited, the door can never be closed again.

But if no one guards the boundary, this fire will sooner or later burn into the depths of human hearts, burning out an abyss with no way back.

He grabbed his backpack and turned to leave.

The village behind him gradually faded into the distance, and the stream returned to calm, save for the clay jar under the roots of the old locust tree, glowing with the luster of cold glaze in the moonlight.

A fine crack quietly opened in the tree bark, oozing a pale golden sap, like a tear.

Meanwhile, Su Qingzhu sat under the lamp of the temporarily rented farmhouse, repeatedly playing back the sounds from her voice recorder.

Three hundred and twenty-seven vow-fulfillment records; seventy percent of the requests were concentrated on "curing illness," "praying for warmth," and "protecting the harvest."

But she noticed a detail: almost everyone, when describing their dreams, had a tone that shifted from excitement to dazedness, and then to shame.

"In the dream, he said, you still owe it a quiet night."

She stared at this sentence in her notebook, her fingers pausing.

Outside the window, the galaxy was vast, but there was no firelight anywhere.

Yet she always felt that beneath this land, something was awakening—not a god, not a demon, but an echo of collective will, like thousands of people whispering simultaneously, converging into a silent scream.

She picked up her pen and wrote the title: "We Ignited Freedom, and We Ignited Greed."

Then she closed her notebook and looked toward the northern night sky.

There, a very thin thread of blue smoke was rising straight up, shooting into the clouds, neither dispersing nor wavering, as if it were a letter sent to the end of the world.

And when Zhang Xuanyi, traveling by starlight and moonlight, arrived at that wilderness, stepped over the cracked yellow earth, and finally saw the abandoned kiln hidden among the gravel—

The entrance was covered in layers upon layers of red paint.

Neither Daoist nor secular, neither seal script nor clerical script, those symbols were crooked and twisted, like children's graffiti, or perhaps the trembling handwriting of an old person.

Some drew hearths, some depicted flames, but more were simply a horizontal line and a vertical line, yet they had been piously circled with red thread, splashed with chicken blood, and pasted with faded "Fortune" characters.

A dozen or so villagers were queuing up, silently throwing paper money and old clothes into the cave; even a live chicken, flapping its wings, was shoved inside, its cries shrill.

No one spoke.

But in their eyes, they all burned with the same light—

That was the heat of faith at its birth, and also the last sliver of clarity before losing control.

Chapter 167: Fire Does Not Extinguish, Debts Must Be Recorded

The wind swirled at the kiln entrance, carrying paper ash and chicken feathers spiraling into the air, but it could no longer break through the night sky.

That blue smoke, which had once risen straight and torn through the firmament, now fell listlessly like an arrow with a broken string, seeping into the cracked ground fissures as if the earth had suddenly taken a breath and swallowed all the arrogance back down.

Zhang Xuanyi stood up, the hem of his Daoist robe covered in yellow dust; the half of the photocopy yellow paper in his palm had long since turned to flying ash, dissipating with the wind.

He did not look at the villagers, nor did he pay attention to the ball of flame still growling deep inside the kiln—it no longer rose, but coiled in place like a trapped beast, with twisted human figures convulsing in the firelight, as if countless mouths were screaming silently.

"Show us a character! Let us know whose fire is the most efficacious!"

An old woman was still muttering, clutching a charred bamboo slip in her hand, tear tracks crisscrossing her face.

The young man beside her was also kneeling, his forehead knocked bloody, but what he was chanting was: "I want the fire seed! I want to reach the heavens myself!"

Zhang Xuanyi closed his eyes.

Freedom is never without a price.

But these people didn't understand; the Power Of Will is like a debt, and those who borrow fire must repay in ash.

Now they fight over miracles, but the day the fire burns through the earth's veins, they won't even have a place to cry.

He looked down at the rusted copper bell in his hand; its edges had been polished until they shone.

This was the notification sound prop given by the System on the first day the Myriad Laws Street Stall opened—one ring of the bell, the transaction was established, and the spirit coin arrived.

At the time, he thought it was just a joke of an ornament, but until tonight, he hadn't truly understood its sound.

It wasn't hawking; it was settlement.

He squatted down and gently buried the copper bell into the hard soil in front of the kiln, his movements slow, as if burying an era.

As his fingertips brushed across the soil, a very faint golden pattern spread from his wrist to his palm, then vanished.

He pressed his palms together, not in prayer, but using his fingers as a Talisman and his Qi as a guide, forming the "Earth-Suppressing Returning Breath Seal," long lost by the Tianshi Mansion.

There were no incantations, no Talismans, only breathing.

One exhale, the fire lowered by three inches; one inhale, the smoke sank by seven feet.

This seal was originally an ancient method used to pacify the agitation of the earth's veins, long since regarded by modern superhumans as pedantic, old-fashioned rules.

But at this moment, in front of this "Wildfire Altar" spontaneously piled up by the common people, it faintly resonated with the lingering rhyme of the copper bell—as if some rule was being re-established: for however much fire you take, you must leave behind that much root.

Suddenly, the ground trembled slightly.

It wasn't an earthquake, but a deeper rhythm.

Between the distant mountains, dozens of golden light spots that had originally been jumping chaotically—the spiritual waves of the Wildfire Altars spontaneously lit across various places—began to slowly synchronize, their frequencies converging and their rhythms becoming consistent, as if thousands of heartbeats were being smoothed out by an invisible hand.

Su Qingzhu stood ten steps away, her camera lens losing focus once again, the image blurring into a chaotic red glow.

But the voice recorder in her ear clearly recorded a whisper from Zhang Xuanyi's closed lips: "I am not here to extinguish your fire... I am here to teach you how to breathe."

She was stunned.

These words didn't sound like a warning, nor like salvation; they sounded more like the helpless advice of a father to a willful child.

Yet, just this one sentence made the agitation of the entire wilderness quiet down.

The villagers finally raised their heads; the fanaticism in their eyes receded a layer, leaving behind only confusion and unease.

Some retreated quietly, some stared blankly at the old clothes they had thrown in—that was the burial shroud their mother had worn on her deathbed; was it really burned just to "reach the heavens"?

Zhang Xuanyi didn't say anything more; he clapped his hands and turned to leave.

The night wind lifted his half-old Daoist robe; his figure was thin but steady, like a nail driven into the ground, quietly supporting the boundary that was about to collapse.

Su Qingzhu watched the direction he had disappeared into, suddenly remembering something; she opened her notebook abruptly and wrote a line on the last page: "When everyone can light a fire, who is responsible for turning off the lights?"

She closed the notebook and looked up toward the north—there, nestled within the mountains of Southern Anhui, an ancient ancestral hall stood quietly on the edge of the morning mist.

Under the eaves, a brand-new wooden plaque was quietly hung; the lacquer was not yet dry, and the ink had just set.

No one knew who had erected it.

But the two characters on it were already branded into the silence before dawn: Ash Ledger.