199: Whose child drew a fire talisman crookedly and then worshipped it?

The morning in the southeastern fishing village was wrapped in a salty, fishy sea breeze; the sound of the tide had not yet ceased, but the village entrance was already crowded with people.

Incense smoke swirled before the newly erected stone tablet, and a few sticks of low-quality incense bought from town were stuck into a coarse porcelain bowl, their smoke rising in crooked wisps, as if imitating the wisp of white steam that rose from the kitchen stoves last night.

What was etched onto the stone tablet was a spiral pattern from the sand—circle after circle, completely devoid of any technique; even the youths in the village who had attended elementary school could recognize that this was no Talisman, but at most, a snail shell scribbled by a child.

Yet, strangely, this very thing had caused the entire village's kitchen stoves to warm up without fire, remaining hot for three whole days.

The fishermen knelt on the ground, chanting "Xuanyi, bless us," and spread the story as a miracle.

Some said they dreamed of an uncle in Daoist robes nodding and smiling lazily; others said it was their ancestors revealing themselves, wanting to rekindle the incense; still others rode motorcycles out of the village overnight to bring back relatives from afar, just to get a touch of the "sacred fire."

But Su Qingzhu stood outside the crowd, her brows furrowed into a line.

She wasn't wearing a uniform, just a dark grey trench coat, and in her hand, she carried a portable Power Of Will resonance detector.

The waveform on the screen was pulsing slightly, at an extremely low frequency, yet eerily stable—a 98.7% match, nearly overlapping with the brainwave harmonic frequency recorded in the database from Zhang Xuanyi's final breath before his death.

It was no coincidence.

She crouched down and lightly touched the back of the stone tablet with her fingertips.

The chill seeped into her skin, but at that very instant, the tip of the instrument suddenly trembled and emitted a faint hum.

Her pupils constricted—there was feedback.

The stone itself possessed no inherent spirituality, but it "remembered" something that had been repeatedly awakened, just as the soil remembers a transaction, and just as that broken bowl remembered the instructions.

"Do you really think this is fire bestowed by immortals?" she finally spoke, her voice not loud, yet it cut through like a knife into hot oil.

The crowd fell silent.

"I've checked; among the twelve households in the village, whenever someone sincerely chanted 'I want to light the fire myself,' the stove temperature rose immediately; but for those who only prayed for 'the immortal to give warmth,' the stoves remained as cold as an ice cellar."

She stood up, her gaze sweeping over the dark, weathered faces, "What you are worshipping is not a Talisman at all, but the person within your hearts who dares to start the fire."

An uproar ensued.

"Bullshit!" An old woman wrapped in a headscarf stood up abruptly, pointing her withered finger at her, "Then you tell me, why is it that only the one my kid drew works? Little Qiang next door draws Dragons and Phoenixes every day, so why don't I see his stove steaming? Huh?"

Su Qingzhu remained silent.

The wind whipped at her coat, and in the distance, the waves crashed against the shore, their rhythm seemingly synchronized with the pulses of the instrument.

She slowly took an old-fashioned voice recorder from the inner pocket of her trench coat; its metal casing was worn shiny, and the corners were taped up.

This was something she had discovered in the lining of a stall ledger while sorting through Zhang Xuanyi's belongings; it hadn't been played for ten years.

She pressed the play button.

After a crackle of static, a lazy voice flowed out, carrying a smile, as if he had just finished eating melon seeds: "Don't be afraid, fire is the most obedient; if you believe in it, it will come."

The air solidified.

The next second—the kitchen stoves in the entire village hummed in unison!

It wasn't the crackle of flames burning, but a kind of low-frequency resonance, as if the iron pots were responding, the woodpiles were resonating, and even the old stove foundations buried in the earth were trembling gently.

A dozen wisps of white steam emerged from the chimneys simultaneously, intertwining and swirling in the air, actually forming a huge, fleeting spiral pattern, identical to the design on the stone tablet.

Some people's legs went weak and they knelt down, while others covered their mouths, not daring to make a sound.

The old woman's lips trembled, her eyes shifting violently, as if she had seen something she shouldn't have.

Su Qingzhu turned off the recording, put away the instrument, and without saying a word, turned and walked toward the village elementary school.

And on that five-year-old child.

That night, moonlight spilled onto the fishing village's only cement playground, and a faint light shone from the classroom windows.

Su Qingzhu hid behind the wooden shed at the school gate, her gaze fixed intently on that window.

Inside, a little boy was squatting barefoot on the ground, clutching half a piece of chalk in his hand, meticulously redrawing that spiral pattern stroke by stroke on the blackboard.

His brows were tightly locked, his little mouth muttering silently, his expression so serious it didn't look like a child's.

The wind blew the curtains, and she vaguely heard a few words—"Dad fell down today... I have to make the fire listen and be obedient."

The night wind swirled around the edge of the village school playground, picking up a few dead leaves and slapping them against the wooden shed.

Su Qingzhu held her breath, her knuckles turning white from gripping the voice recorder.

The chalk inside the window made a rustling sound against the blackboard, like spring silkworms gnawing on mulberry leaves, and like some ancient spell being reawakened.

She should have rushed in—a five-year-old child, drawing a Talisman and summoning fire alone in the dead of night, this had already exceeded the scope of "folk belief" and touched the critical point of Power Of Will Awakening.

But when she saw the boy frowning and murmuring to himself, "Dad fell down today... I have to make the fire listen and be obedient," she suddenly couldn't move.

This sentence was too familiar.

Just like ten years ago, when Zhang Xuanyi was squatting in front of a street stall eating melon seeds, saying to a mother with burn injuries: "If you don't believe you can get better yourself, it's useless even if an immortal comes."

Just like three years ago, when he pushed away her camera in the pouring rain, smiling and saying: "Comrade reporter, don't film me, go film those who stand up on their own."

And now, this sentence was spoken by a child, filled with childishness, yet so heavy it suppressed the sound of the tide across the entire fishing village.

The chalk landed on the final stroke, and the spiral pattern was complete.

The boy stepped back two paces, clapped his hands, and grinned: "This time I'll light it myself!"

He stepped barefoot across the cold cement floor, walked to the abandoned little stove in the corner of the classroom, and reached his hand into the cold ash.

His palm turned slightly red at first, then a layer of extremely faint orange light emerged, like the morning sun just piercing through the clouds.

Three breaths later—the dry wood ignited without fire, flames rose half a foot high, steadily supporting a rusty iron pot, with so little smoke it was almost invisible.

Su Qingzhu's pupils shrank suddenly.

It wasn't the Talisman taking effect, nor was it external force; it was this child using his own will to ignite the fire.

His consciousness resonated with some deep-seated frequency, just like how Zhang Xuanyi taught people about "faith fire" instead of "begging for fire."

This was not a Legacy of magic, but the wild growth of the Dao.

She didn't go in.

It couldn't be interrupted.

This moment was more important than any official certification or data sampling.

She quietly opened her phone, switched to hidden video mode, and aimed the camera at the small patch of dancing flames inside the window and the little face that was covered in ash yet smiling brilliantly.

After a long while, the fire went out, the child blew out the remaining embers, stood on tiptoe to hide the chalk back in the crack of the podium, and hopped out of the classroom.

When passing the window, he even looked up at the moon and muttered: "Brother Fire is tired, come back to eat tomorrow."

Su Qingzhu leaned against the shed pillar, remaining motionless for a long time.

Just before dawn, she returned to the village entrance.

The incense had long since extinguished, the crowd kneeling before the stone tablet had dispersed, leaving only the coarse porcelain bowl standing alone, the incense ash inside blown by the wind into a diagonal line, like a rest note drawn by fate.

She took out a portable cutter and silently sliced the stone tablet in half.

The instant it crashed down, the ashes rose like dancing butterflies, fluttering in the morning light for a moment, before she scattered them into the sea.

A wave rolled in and swallowed them completely.

"Sacred object?" she sneered, "True miracles are never carved onto stone."

Before she left, the village head chased her to the pier and shoved a crumpled piece of paper into her hand.

"The kid drew this this morning... said it was for the 'auntie who doesn't burn incense'."

She unfolded it and looked—it was still that same spiral pattern, but this time a crooked smiley face had been added, with two little short legs drawn underneath, and a line of pinyin written crookedly on the side: "Huo ge ge pao bu lai chi fan" (Brother Fire runs over to eat).

She froze, a hint of warmth flashing in her eyes, and finally folded it up, placed it in the innermost layer of her bag, right next to that old voice recorder.

As the plane took off, the sea and sky were one color outside the porthole, and the lights of seventeen coastal villages lit up one after another, connecting into a winding belt of light, as if someone were walking on the waves, igniting the hearth fires of the human world along the way.

She opened her phone and discovered that the video recorded last night had somehow automatically uploaded to the internal network, and the title had been identified and renamed by the System as—"The First Child Who Doesn't Believe in Immortals."

Her fingertip hovered over the delete key; she paused for a few seconds, then gently tapped it—Publish.