190: The last handful of ash is thrown to the wind

The late autumn wind scraped across the desolate road like a knife.

Zhang Xuanyi carried an aluminum lunchbox, rusted to the point where its original color was unrecognizable, walking step by step along a path woven with gravel and withered grass.

His soles had long since worn through; with every step, the cold air shot straight from his soles up to his spine.

He wore no thick clothing, only an old Daoist robe washed until it had faded to white, the collar crooked and the cuffs unraveled, fluttering in the wind like two banners on the verge of extinguishing.

He had been walking for seven days.

There was no destination, nor did he record the direction anymore.

He had thrown away the compass long ago, and on the third night, he had buried his astrolabe in a dried-up riverbed—back then, he was still thinking about "Fire Omens," wondering which gust of wind could spark a flame, and under which cloud a chance for Rebirth was hidden.

But later, he realized he didn't want to find any "fire source" at all.

He just wanted to walk.

Like an ember blown away from a stove by the wind, drifting lightly over mountains, gullies, broken bridges, and ruins, with no known destination and no asked-for return date.

The lunchbox swayed gently behind him, emitting a faint metallic friction sound.

That was the only thing he had left.

The inner wall had been scraped down to a thin layer of ash, the last traces left from the era of the "Myriad Laws Street Stall"—once, this lunchbox had held photocopy yellow paper, heavenly eye mung beans, and fist soul candy; it had held the spirit coin trembling handed over by the Old Ancestor of Quanxing; and it had also held the bag of warm ginger candy that Su Qingzhu had secretly stuffed inside.

Now, nothing was left, only ash.

Just as the Dao need not exist forever in form.

Three days ago, he passed by an old city district about to be demolished.

Bulldozers roared, dust filled the sky, and several families who refused to move were being forcibly cleared out.

Hanging at the entrance of one restaurant was a broken plaque: "Century-Old Stove King."

The handwriting was mottled and the wood cracked, yet it stubbornly hung there.

The owner was a man in his sixties, kneeling at the entrance, holding a section of burnt stove brick in his hands, his voice hoarse: "This stove supported my father, my grandfather, and my son... Can... can you let me burn it for one more day? Just one day!"

No one paid him any mind.

The enforcement officers frowned and pushed him aside, and the demolition team raised their hammers to smash it.

Zhang Xuanyi stood outside the crowd, watching quietly for a long time.

No one recognized him.

And no one needed to recognize him.

He walked silently into the kitchen.

Rubble was falling, beams creaked, and the air was filled with the scent of scorched wood mixed with aged grease.

That old stove was still there, the furnace cracked, the bottom of the pot covered in thick grime, but it still felt warm to the touch—the fire had just gone out last night.

He untied his lunchbox and opened the lid.

The last pinch of ash was gently sprinkled into the furnace.

The movement was very light, as if he were afraid of disturbing something.

"Thanks for the meal," he said in a low voice.

His voice fell into the ruins; there wasn't even an echo.

The ash didn't burn; it scattered with the wind, mixing into the dust, never to be seen again.

That night, he took shelter from the cold under the bridge of an abandoned overpass on the outskirts of the city.

Rainwater dripped along the cracks in the concrete, gathering into small puddles on the ground.

He sat curled up in a corner, clutching an old portable radio in his arms; the battery was almost dead, emitting a constant static buzzing.

Suddenly, the broadcast became clear for a moment.

[...As of midnight today, the Power Of Will base frequency has completed full-domain self-consistent oscillation, and the state has officially shut down the central control System.]

The announcer's voice was solemn and calm, carrying a certain ritualistic weight.

[From this moment on, all Power Of Will networks condensed from collective belief enter a state of decentralized autonomy.]

[From now on, every bite of human life is an autonomous breath.]

The signal cut out again.

Zhang Xuanyi didn't move; he just slowly turned off the radio.

He stared at the broken machine for a long time, then suddenly smiled—the laugh was very soft, like self-mockery, and also like relief.

Then he reached out and took the blue cloth shirt from his bundle—it was the first piece of clothing he wore when he set up his street stall back then; the collar was embroidered with a tiny talisman, sewn by Su Qingzhu herself, who said it was for "peace and safety."

The fabric had long been worn out, the sleeves were gone, and the front was full of patches. But he had kept it all along.

Now, he took out his pocket knife and cut off the last intact piece of fabric.

Carefully, he rolled it into a cylinder, like an unlit stick of incense.

He crawled out of the bridge arch, walked to a large bridge pier, found a crack, and stuffed the cloth cylinder inside.

His movements were solemn, as if placing a shrine.

"Nameless stove position," he whispered, then added three words, "May the fire live on."

After doing this, he sat down against the pier, looking up at the night sky stained dark red by the city's residual light.

There were no stars.

Nor was there a moon.

But his heart was calmer than ever before.

It was as if he had unburdened himself of the three-hundred-year weight of the Tianshi Mansion and let go of the name of the "Daoist lineage" pursued by thousands.

He was no longer the "Myriad Laws Street Stall owner" driven by the System and coveted by all parties, nor was he some folk fire-starter, fate-changer, or savior.

He was just Zhang Xuanyi.

A man who had walked past thousands of stoves and furnaces, finally ending up with empty hands.

The wind grew stronger.

He wrapped his tattered Daoist robe tighter and closed his eyes.

Just as his consciousness was about to sink into the darkness, a very slight "click" came from somewhere in the distance, like an old-fashioned gas stove lighting up.

He didn't open his eyes.

But the corners of his mouth moved slightly.

In the coldest moment before dawn, the monitoring Systems of seventeen cities simultaneously captured a burst of inexplicable data fluctuations.

Inside hundreds of thousands of stoves in old residential buildings that had been out of use for years, the internal temperature rose abnormally, and faint cyan patterns, shaped like ancient seal script, appeared on the metal surfaces of the pot bottoms, dissipating quietly after seven seconds.

No one noticed.

The System automatically archived it as "equipment error."

But in that instant, some people who had long forgotten the fire source dreamed of cooking smoke.

In the coldest moment before dawn, the nights of seventeen cities had not yet awakened.

But in this silence, something earlier than the morning light quietly awakened—it was the long-sealed tacit understanding between iron pots and flames, the instinct awakened by that phrase deep in memory: "Time to Cook."

The monitoring System faithfully recorded all of this: hundreds of thousands of old stoves heated up in the same second, faint cyan patterns in the shape of ancient seal script appeared on the metal surfaces of the pot bottoms, circulating for seven seconds before quietly fading away, as if just a weak spasm of electric current.

But data does not lie.

The times when these stoves were refueled had no pattern, the users spanned the north and south, and their economic levels varied; the only commonality was a thought among millions of people that night, a thought so ordinary it couldn't be more ordinary: "Time to Cook."

No one saw the flames, and no one smelled the food.

But some people ate long-missed hot noodle soup in their dreams.

Su Qingzhu sat before a terminal on the third floor of the archive, the screen's ghostly light illuminating her sleepless face.

Her fingertips hovered over the "Abnormal Event - S-Class Report" button, trembling slightly.

She had been tracking this wave of Power Of Will base frequency fluctuations for a full forty-eight hours, reverse-engineering the signal source from the underlying protocol, eventually pointing to a long-cancelled IP address—the shadow of a cloud server that once belonged to the "Myriad Laws Street Stall."

She could have pressed the confirm button.

The national emergency anomaly response mechanism would have started immediately, and investigation teams, suppression squads, cleaners... everything would repeat itself.

But she didn't.

When she deleted the label, her movements were very light, as if she were afraid of disturbing something.

Then she typed a line of small text at the end of the log:

"Normal; it is millions of people remembering one thing at the same time."

At that moment, she suddenly understood why Zhang Xuanyi had to leave.

It wasn't to escape, but to fulfill—to return the "Dao" to the people, to return the "fire" to the honest folk.

No more System malls, no more spirit coin transactions, no more people kneeling to beg for a talisman or a bottle of liquid.

There was only millions of families whispering "Time to Cook" in the middle of the night, and then the stoves would self-ignite, patterns would appear on the pot bottoms, like the Awakening of a Bloodline.

Seven days later, outside a post station on the edge of the Northwest Gobi Desert, sandstorms were sweeping across a wasteland.

The herders sat around a campfire, whispering about recent strange occurrences: "At night, we always see light on the sand dunes, as if someone is cooking porridge... but when we get close, there's nothing." Someone said it was a mirage, others said it was geomagnetic anomalies, but the old grandmother shook her head: "That is the 'Cook' returning; he remembers we aren't full."

Just then, a figure walked slowly over.

Zhang Xuanyi was wearing that tattered Daoist robe, carrying an empty lunchbox, his steps not fast, yet steady as if pressing against the pulse of the earth.

He didn't speak, just smiled, hung the aluminum lunchbox on a crooked wooden post at the entrance of the post station, and turned to walk into the sandstorm.

The yellow sand soon covered his retreating figure, as if no one had ever been there.

Three days later, an off-road vehicle crushed the gravel and stopped in front of the post station.

Su Qingzhu got out of the car, the wind lifting her hair, but her eyes were harder than the wind.

She walked to the wooden post, took down the lunchbox with the rusted-through bottom, and her fingertips brushed over the bottom—there, at some point, a line of crooked small text had been carved with a knife:

"Fire recognizes the honest—gifted by a Cook who wishes to remain nameless."

She stood there for a long time, speechless.

The wind blew from the depths of the Gobi Desert, carrying coarseness and warmth, like some kind of silent response.

That night, in her tent, she wrote the title of the final chapter of the "chronicles of vows":

"He left, so we can all stay."

Outside the window, the herders set up iron pots, boiling porridge of coarse grains for mutual aid.

The first wisp of heat rose, cyan patterns slowly appeared on the bottom of the pot, beating like a heartbeat, lasting for seven seconds before returning to calm.

And in a corner where no one noticed, the aluminum lunchbox hanging on the wooden post was being polished over and over by the sand.

Where the rust peeled away, the metal emitted a faint glow, like a star that refused to be extinguished, quietly hanging at the end of the wilderness.