191: The lunch box hangs in the wind without making any noise

The sandstorms came from the Northwest, ceaseless and endless.

That aluminum lunchbox, rusted through at the bottom, hung on a wooden post at a station on the edge of the Gobi Desert, polished year after year by the sandstorms, revealing a dull, matte silver glow, like a star on the horizon that refused to be extinguished.

The herdsmen at the station initially thought it was left behind by some unlucky lost soul; a young, strong man wanted to take it down, saying the tin was thin and would be perfect if melted down to make a few nails for horseshoes.

But just as his hand touched the lunchbox, a strange gust of wind suddenly rushed into the inconspicuous hole at the bottom of the lunchbox, emitting a low, wailing sound.

The sound was not shrill; instead, it carried a strange tune, sounding exactly like a little ditty hummed by someone guarding a fire in front of a kitchen stove.

He reached out several times, and the wind sounded several times.

"Don't touch it." An old herdsman with a pipe in his mouth squinted, exhaling a puff of murky smoke, "That's no ordinary pot; it's a 'Message Pot'."

The young man didn't understand, and the old herdsman didn't explain further, simply untying a faded red cloth strip from his waist and carefully wrapping it around the wooden post.

From then on, no one touched the lunchbox, leaving it hanging in the wind, humming that kitchen stove ditty that no one understood, day after day.

Seven days later, a black sandstorm that blotted out the sky swept across this stretch of the Gobi.

After the wind stopped, the station remained, but the wooden post had been uprooted, and the lunchbox was long gone.

It had been blown into a long-dried riverbed dozens of miles away.

A teenager who made a living by scavenging found it while sifting through trash; the cold touch and unusual weight made him take extra notice.

He used his sleeve to wipe away the mud and sand from the bottom of the lunchbox, seeing a few blurry carvings.

The boy was illiterate, but he felt those were no ordinary scratches, so he tucked the lunchbox away and ran several miles to the village to find the old accountant, the only person who had been to school.

The old man put on his reading glasses, tracing the carvings that were older than he was, looked for a long time, and finally shook his head: "These aren't quite characters, nor are they quite talismans. It's not for praying to gods, nor for passing down a dharma... It looks more like... a secret code for Cooks to pass messages to each other."

The boy understood even less, but the word "Cook" reminded him of the earthen stove at home, blackened by smoke and impossible to light in damp weather.

He brought the lunchbox home and casually placed it under a pile of damp firewood beneath the stove to keep it pressed down.

That night, a miracle happened.

His mother struck matches as usual, failing time and again, muttering that Heaven was giving them no way to survive.

Just as the last match was about to go out, that pile of damp firewood in the stove "poofed" and a bright, cyan flame shot up!

The firelight reflected on the bottom of the pot, and a blurry, half-circle pattern, never seen before, vaguely emerged.

That night, the boy's family drank the hottest bowl of lamb soup they had had in three years.

The news seemed to grow legs, quickly reaching the ears of the technicians stationed at the Communal Cooking Workshop.

The technicians arrived with precision instruments, and after some testing, wrote a conclusion in their report: The metal composition of the lunchbox contained trace amounts of "Power Of Will Ash Crystals," belonging to an unstandardized experimental product from the early "Power Of Will Fire-Starting" System, possessing extremely high research value; it was recommended to be immediately recovered and sealed.

The report was passed up through layers, finally landing on Su Qingzhu's desk.

She looked at the four words "Recover and Research," her fingertips tapping lightly on the desk.

After a long time, she picked up her pen and wrote a line at the end of the report: "Any object capable of autonomously starting a fire is a carrier of a living Legacy; extraction and analysis are prohibited."

After signing her name, she seemed to feel it wasn't enough, and at the end of the approval, she added a sentence in a tone bordering on an order: "Let it continue to wander."

That night, Su Qingzhu stayed alone in the empty Central Archives.

She from a file box labeled "Top Secret: Zhang Xuanyi," she took out a yellowed, tattered piece of photocopy yellow paper—it was the first "shoddy product" Zhang Xuanyi had sold her at a street stall many years ago.

She gently placed the paper over the perpetual, constant-temperature brazier in the center of the archives.

The paper did not burn, but the originally docile flame in the brazier suddenly jumped violently, swirling into a clear kitchen fire pattern before vanishing in an instant.

The lunchbox, with the boy's gratitude, left the village with a traveling caravan.

Seeing that it was sturdy, the caravan leader modified it slightly, adding a simple stand, turning it into a small stove liner for boiling milk tea, which was carried on the back of a camel all day.

One night, while the caravan was camping deep in the Gobi, they encountered a pack of hungry wild wolves.

In the darkness, green eyes surrounded the campsite, leaving no way out.

In the panic, a worker accidentally knocked over the scalding hot lunchbox from the stove, tossing it outside the campsite.

A bizarre scene unfolded.

The lead wolf was not startled; instead, it stopped, cautiously walked up to the steaming lunchbox, and lowered its head to sniff it.

It did not attack, nor did it retreat; it simply led the entire wolf pack in circling the lunchbox three times with great ritual, before silently retreating into the darkness.

The caravan leader, having escaped death, was filled with doubt and fear, suddenly recalling a legend passed down by his ancestors: "The lonely fire of the wilderness is the soul of the Night Watchman."

From then on, this lunchbox became a holy relic of the camel caravan.

It was no longer used for boiling tea; every night, it was respectfully placed beside the campfire in the center of the camp, not for utility, but to "suppress the wild."

Three months later, a rare spring rain soaked the arid land of the Northwest.

The caravan's holy relic was washed away in a flash flood, following the streams formed by melting snow all the way south, finally settling at the drainage outlet of a long-abandoned water conservancy station.

The next morning, the new intern at the station, Xiao Wang, dug it out while clearing silt.

Xiao Wang was a fresh college graduate with no reverence for such old items; he just thought the lunchbox had a unique design, so after cleaning it, he casually placed it on the windowsill of the duty room, planning to take it home as an ashtray one day.

That noon, a strange thing happened.

The six old electric stoves in the water conservancy station's kitchen, which had long exceeded their service life and were temperamental, all "buzzed" and started up simultaneously, their indicator lights shining with unprecedented vigor.

Surveillance footage captured a strange scene in the duty room: the midday sun shone through the window glass, landing squarely on the hole in the aluminum lunchbox, refracting a faint cyan light spot that slowly swept across the dusty floor.

And the trajectory traced by that light spot was exactly the same as the waveform chart of the "Seventeen City Communal Cooking System Fundamental Frequency Resonance" that had shocked the entire Huaxia supernatural world years ago.

Intern Xiao Wang was completely oblivious to this; he just scratched his head and muttered to the station chief, Old Li: "Strange, it's not even mealtime today; why is everyone suddenly shouting 'It's time to Cook,' as if they'd agreed on it?"

Far away in the capital, Su Qingzhu, watching the "Group Unconscious Behavior Anomaly Report" uploaded by the water conservancy station and that eerie surveillance footage, finally allowed a long-lost, heartfelt smile to appear at the corners of her mouth.

Though he was not in the Jianghu, the Jianghu was filled with echoes of him everywhere.

This silent, moistening penetration was far closer to the Origin of the "Dao" than any thunderous decree.

She picked up her teacup, preparing to enjoy this moment of peace.

Just then—

Beep! Beep! Beep—!

A sharp, unprecedented, highest-level alarm suddenly exploded from the central smart brain terminal on her desk!

Su Qingzhu's face changed drastically, her gaze fixed firmly on the map of all of Huaxia that popped up on the terminal screen.

A glaring red dot was flashing frantically at the southernmost tip of the map at a frequency bordering on collapse.

It represented the most Advanced, most stable intelligent communal cooking benchmark city in Huaxia, known as the one that "never crashes."