198: A ember still remained at the bottom of the bowl.

Morning light slanted into the front courtyard of the archives. Su Qingzhu held the coarse ceramic bowl, hesitating to swallow the last bite of sweet potato.

The sweet, soft taste melted on the tip of her tongue, yet it felt like a heavy lump of coal, burning her throat tight.

She stared at the charcoal handwriting remaining at the bottom of the bowl—'The soup is too hot, drink it after it cools'—the characters were crooked, like a child's doodle, yet the turn of the brushstrokes hid that familiar, lazy air, just like the way Zhang Xuanyi used to lean on a bamboo chair, cracking melon seeds while writing his price list.

She gently stroked the chip on the rim of the bowl with her fingertips and suddenly paused.

There were marks on the inner wall.

Not kiln-change patterns left during firing, but three extremely thin, shallow arc-shaped carvings, deeply embedded in the clay, as if someone had carefully gouged them out with their fingernails while the mud was still wet.

Her heart jolted; this shape was too familiar—the 'Qi Gathering Method for Equalizing Objects' positioning point recorded in Chapter 3 of 'Dragon and Tiger Talisman Primer' was exactly like this: three arcs to form a guide, fixing the base to lock frequency, specifically used to anchor dissipated Power Of Will.

Her breathing hitched slightly.

How could a broken bowl picked up from the street hide the Foundation of Talisman arts?

Just as she was thinking this, her fingertips suddenly felt a heat.

It was as if the bottom of the bowl had just been taken off the stove, and the heat surged up along her skin.

But this was impossible—last night, frost had condensed on cups in the basement, and this morning, the cold stone steps were covered in dew. If this bowl truly carried heat, it should have steamed up long ago.

She kept her composure, hugged the bowl to her chest, and turned back into the building, her footsteps as steady as usual, only the slight trembling of her cuffs revealing her state of mind.

The safe room door closed, and the thermal imaging scanner started.

The silver-grey metal surface cooled to minus five degrees, the infrared probe aimed at the bottom of the ceramic bowl, but the data screen was deathly silent.

No reaction.

She stared at the bowl, her brow furrowed slightly. Was it an illusion? A phantom born from ten years of obsession?

No, Zhang Xuanyi never spoke nonsense, nor would he leave behind anything meaningless.

She closed her eyes, parted her lips, and whispered the almost forgotten incantation: 'Fire burns without ignition, people know without speech.'

The words fell.

The instrument hummed, and the screen suddenly lit up!

A pale cyan ripple spread from the bottom of the bowl, like rippling water, snaking down along the gaps of the tabletop, projecting a broken trajectory of heat flow onto the floor.

Those lines were chaotic at first, but as the energy stabilized, they pieced themselves together into an incomplete map—mountain terrain, diverging streams, winding stone steps... every corner overlapped with her memory.

This was the location coordinate of the first spirit coin transaction on the night the Myriad Laws Street Stall first opened ten years ago.

At the foot of Mount Longhu, beside the old locust tree, at the third crack of the blue stone slab.

Su Qingzhu opened her eyes abruptly, her heart pounding like a drum.

He still remembered.

Even if his form and spirit were scattered, even if the System was annihilated, he had still set up a game in this world—not a resurrection, not a manifestation, but a 'delivery' spanning life and death.

She immediately drove down the mountain.

The mountain road was desolate, with weeds reaching her knees.

The stone steps that were once crowded with pilgrims had long been swallowed by vines, and only the old locust tree stood alone in its original place, its bark cracked like ancient Talismans, its branches twisted like Dragon claws.

She squatted down, pushed aside layers of fallen leaves and rotten soil, and her fingertips touched an unusually soft layer of earth.

Digging further down, several pieces of scorched black cloth were embedded in the soil.

The material was exactly the same as the System remains in the glass case in the basement—rough linen, carbonized edges, with faint residual waves of spiritual energy lingering between the fibers.

This was an extension of the 'Myriad Laws Street Stall'.

Just as she was about to take out a sample bag for collection, her gaze suddenly fixed.

An ant dragging half a grain of rice was crawling over the scorched cloth.

The moment its six feet stepped over the cloth, a fleeting cyan pattern rose from the ground—as thin as a hair, yet it was clearly the Talisman light pulse from when 'photocopy yellow paper' was activated!

Immediately after, the second and third cyan patterns flashed one after another, forming a miniature array that dissipated without a trace in less than half a second.

Su Qingzhu held her breath.

This was not residual spiritual power.

It was the land itself remembering the feeling of being 'ignited'.

Just like human muscles have memory, this piece of soil had quietly completed a kind of irreversible 'Qi Transformation Sedimentation' due to countless exotic treasure transactions, the flow of Power Of Will, and the direction of human hearts over the past ten years.

Every transaction, every bit of trust, every 'Just bring a bowl of soup next time' had carved an invisible mark under this land.

And now, someone had used a broken bowl, half a sweet potato, and three fingernail marks to awaken it.

She slowly stood up and looked at the distant mountains.

The wind passed through the treetops, the shadows of the leaves rustled, as if countless whispers were echoing in her ears.

She didn't take the cloth scraps, nor did she disturb the ants.

She just gently smoothed the soil and covered the fallen leaves again, as if burying a secret that had yet to be revealed.

Returning to the archives, it was late at night.

She sat under the lamp, opened the terminal, and brought up a new document: 'Observation Report on Cultural Memory-Based Power Of Will Carriers.'

Her fingers tapped on the keyboard, her pen tip flowing with rational analysis, but her thoughts kept drifting back to that young man with the lazy smile—he said 'Carefree is not a Divine Ability, but lies in the human heart knowing without being told,' and he said 'The best Talisman is when no one thinks a Talisman is needed.'

Halfway through writing, she suddenly stopped.

Outside the window, seventeen households opened their pot lids at the same time.

Steam rose, condensed in the night sky without dispersing, quietly aligning into rows—Chapter 199: Don't Archive Me, Let Me Live

The night wind passed through the observation window on the top floor of the archives, making the metal instruments emit a low hum.

Su Qingzhu stood in front of the main console, the cold light of the screen reflecting on her face like a thin layer of frost.

Her fingertips were still hovering above the keyboard, the sentence she had just typed, 'This is not a Legacy, but a spontaneous Awakening,' lay quietly at the end of the document, like a declaration, and like a sigh.

She didn't save it, nor did she close it.

She just gently closed the terminal and turned to walk to the giant projection screen in the center of the observation deck.

The holographic map slowly unfolded, covering thirteen active Power Of Will zones across the country, with red dots flickering like sparks.

Her gaze, however, fell on the blank spaces—remote villages that had no strange human organizations, no Sect ruins, and hadn't even been recorded in ancient books, were quietly emerging with faint blue light spots, like breathing seeping from deep within the earth.

'It's not a revival,' she whispered to herself, 'It's taking root.'

At this moment, the big screen suddenly flashed a frame.

Snow.

A blurry figure was squatting, the remnant corners of a worn-out Daoist robe fluttering with the wind, the face indistinguishable.

He stuffed something into a child's palm—perhaps a Talisman paper, perhaps a candy, or perhaps just an ordinary stone.

The child looked up and smiled ignorantly.

The next instant, the image collapsed and returned to darkness.

Su Qingzhu didn't look back.

But her heartbeat skipped a beat.

She was too familiar with that posture—lazy yet serious, hiding solemnity in casualness.

Just like when Zhang Xuanyi squatted by the street stall and stuffed the last 'fist soul candy' to the bullied teenager, saying: 'Don't be afraid, you can hit hard too.'

But he was gone.

The System was extinguished, the Physical Body dissipated, and even the base frequency of the Power Of Will had turned into stray fluctuations; theoretically, it was impossible for any manifestation to occur again.

But this image... it wasn't an intrusion, not an illusion, but an abnormal association automatically triggered from the underlying logs of the national children's doodle database—it didn't belong to any known data stream, yet it was precisely embedded in the metadata of three hundred and forty-seven paintings containing 'fire' imagery, like some kind of... self-replicating seed.

She called up the original image for comparison.

A painting of a 'cooking immortal uncle' by a five-year-old girl, the background was a crooked stove, a pot on the stove, the lid lifted, steam rising, which actually overlapped perfectly with the trajectory of the seventeen households lifting their pot lids tonight.

Even more eerie, she detected trace amounts of bioelectricity residues on the edge of the drawing paper—the frequency of the nerve impulses from the child's fingertips was 78% similar to the brainwave spectrum when 'heavenly eye mung beans' were activated.

This wasn't imitation.

It was resonance.

'You used to sell Talismans to save people,' she looked at the darkened screen and suddenly chuckled, 'What about now? Not even letting people have a peaceful dream?'

Before the words faded, the coarse ceramic bowl on the desk, the bowl of cold sweet potato, emitted a wisp of white steam without warning.

A thin wisp, rising straight up, condensed in the air for seven seconds, neither dispersing nor swaying, like a line connecting heaven and earth.

Then, it dissipated silently.

Like a response.

Like a farewell.

And like... sowing seeds.

Su Qingzhu slowly stood up and walked to the window.

The distant mountain shadows were heavy, and the city lights were gradually thinning.

She didn't know if that wisp of white steam was seen by people elsewhere, whether some mother working overtime, some child writing homework late into the night, or some veteran on night watch, at the moment of opening their lunchbox, saw the steam spell out three words—Don't archive.

She finally understood, Zhang Xuanyi never tried to resurrect.

He just lived himself into a part of the human world: the warmth of a bowl of soup, the echo of a piece of advice, a glance at the sky unintentionally.

His 'Carefree Dao Heart' was no longer someone's cultivation, but had become the instinctive, spontaneous growth of this land—as long as there were still people willing to believe that a bowl of sweet potato could warm their hands, that a yellow paper could change their fate, and that a stranger in a Daoist robe could nod and smile, then the 'Myriad Laws Street Stall' had never closed.

The wind rose outside the window, the leaves rustled, as if countless tiny voices were whispering.

And in a fishing village on the South Sea coast thousands of miles away, which no one paid attention to, it lay quietly in the morning mist.

The tide receded, the beach was exposed, and a five-year-old child from a fisherman's family ran barefoot, picked up a fish bone, and drew a circle on the wet sand.