202: Who gave them the audacity to light this fire?

The news of the blue patterns appearing on the stoves of seventeen households swept through over three hundred villages in the Northwest in just three days, like a hurricane carrying sparks.

The flames of public opinion burned even brighter—and more painfully—than the actual stove fires.

At first, there was awe and ecstasy.

People ran to tell each other, calling it the "Talisman of the Tianshi," the final remnant of orthodox fire left for the common people by Zhang Xuanyi, who had long since transcended into the Dao.

But soon, a different voice quietly emerged from the secluded cultivation grounds of the major Schools: "Pseudo-fire."

"This fire originated from a young girl's act of 'returning the fire.' While her intentions were sincere, her methods were wild. She has already triggered a backlash of Power Of Will, contaminating the fundamental purity left behind by the Tianshi!" an Elder from Kunlun said, heartbroken, to the camera.

"If this continues, the fire veins will fall into chaos, and the world will be thrown into turmoil!"

Once these words were spoken, followers flocked to the cause.

Within a single day, several petitions jointly signed by the major Schools piled up on the desk of Su Qingzhu, Chief Steward of the Power Of Will Archives.

Their core demands were shockingly consistent: immediately verify the authenticity of the fire patterns, investigate the source of the "illegal fire spreading," and propose the immediate establishment of a "Fire Seed Bureau," an authoritative body composed of Elders from various Schools and the Archives to review, register, and uniformly distribute all fire-lighting qualifications across the world.

Su Qingzhu's fingertips traced over the sternly worded petitions, and a cold curve appeared at the corner of her mouth.

Human nature, always wanting to cage the wind that breathes freely into that gilded cage called "orthodoxy."

She did not convene any meetings, nor did she issue any official statements.

Under the gaze of countless eyes, this Fire Keeper chose the most unexpected method: silence.

The next morning, she drove alone toward the boundless Gobi Desert outside the Northwest villages.

Her colleagues at the Archives assumed she was going to clear her head, but no one knew that she was hiding three top-secret reports in her sleeve.

First, the astrology was abnormal last night; the seventh star of the Big Dipper, "Yaoguang," was flickering like breath.

Second, the resonance sensor box deep within the Archives had captured a very low-frequency vibration for three consecutive days—a frequency of 1.3 Hertz—which was exactly the same as the humming of the loom emitted when that piece of rag from the "Myriad Laws Street Stall" was fully unfurled back then.

Third, analysis of the photos of the little girl's stove showed that the energy fluctuations in the ink residue of the final stroke of the crooked pinyin character "huo" were completely identical to the printing ink on the packaging of the "fist soul candy" that Zhang Xuanyi sold years ago.

The jeep stopped among the sand dunes.

Su Qingzhu stepped out of the car, and the wind and sand hit her face, blowing her long hair into a wild dance.

She took a piece of coarse, washed-out linen cloth from the trunk and slowly spread it out on the sandy ground.

The System had long since disappeared, but this original object that once hosted the Myriad Laws trades remained the most sensitive frequency resonance board in the world.

She connected the repaired old-fashioned tape recorder to a portable power source and pressed the play button.

The raspy "Kitchen God's Doggerel" sounded once again; the singing was torn to shreds by the wind, yet it stubbornly seeped into the sand beneath.

Immediately after, she took out a cloth bag and sprinkled the stove ash voluntarily sent by the seventeen households onto the linen cloth, one pinch at a time, according to the geographical orientation of the villages.

She was waiting. Waiting for a moment.

At the third quarter of noon, the sun rose to its zenith, and the light with the strongest Yang Qi of the year pierced down vertically.

A sudden change occurred!

The seventeen pinches of seemingly lifeless ash on the linen cloth suddenly began to tremble violently without any warning!

As if drawn by an invisible magnetic force, they slid and arranged themselves on their own, outlining a huge circular pattern in the center of the linen cloth within a few seconds.

And in the very center of the pattern, the ashes gathered, slowly revealing half a blurry, incomplete sentence:

"...It wasn't given by me."

The moment the words appeared, a strange spectacle occurred simultaneously in the seventeen villages over a hundred miles away.

"Oh my! The pot lid! The pot lid is jumping!" A cry of surprise came from Aunt Wang's kitchen.

She mustered the courage to lift the scalding iron pot lid, only to see the rising steam not dissipate immediately, but instead condense in the air into a fleeting line of small characters:

"You knew how to do it all along, you just didn't dare to believe it."

Similar cries of surprise rang out simultaneously in Old Man Li's earthen house, in the back kitchen of the supply and marketing cooperative, and in seventeen different places.

That line of words was like an answer that had arrived too late, branded onto everyone's heart.

On the Gobi Desert, Su Qingzhu slowly closed her eyes, and amidst the sound of the wind, she smiled.

Zhang Xuanyi... that devil-may-care guy, from beginning to end, had never granted anyone even a shred of power.

All that photocopy yellow paper and fist soul candy were just "excuses" he handed over, one "give it a try" after another.

What he sold wasn't some exotic treasure; it was the courage to let people dare to strike the first match.

The real fire seed was never some Tianshi Talisman; it was that drive rooted deep within everyone's Bloodline—the refusal to go hungry, the unwillingness to freeze, the unwillingness to admit defeat!

She opened her eyes, took a photo of the ash pattern on the linen cloth with her wrist-mounted camera, and then returned to the Archives calmly.

That afternoon, a piece of video footage was uploaded to the entire Huaxia network.

The video began with scenes of the Sect Heads and Elders of the major Schools taking solemn oaths, claiming to the camera that they would do their utmost to "guard the orthodox fire veins and put an end to the spread of pseudo-fire."

The camera then cut to that morning in the Northwest, where a small, thin figure in a blue cloth School uniform was crouching in front of a cold stove, silently "returning" the warmth she thought she had borrowed in her own most clumsy way.

Finally, the image froze.

On the left were the three gold-traced characters for "Fire Seed Bureau" on the joint petition from the major Schools; on the right were the varied blue patterns on the bottoms of the iron pots of the seventeen households—palm prints, leaf veins, pinyin letters... each one was a unique mark of life.

A huge subtitle slammed into the center of the screen like a heavy hammer:

"Who gave you the courage to light this fire? It was yourself."

At the end of the video, Su Qingzhu's figure appeared.

She was not sitting behind the Chief Steward's desk, but standing at the entrance of the Archives, with countless dossiers recording the Power Of Will of Mortals behind her.

She looked at the camera, her gaze calm and resolute:

"From now on, the Power Of Will Archives will not establish a Fire Seed Bureau, will not judge orthodox or pseudo-fire, and will not conduct qualification approvals. We will only do one thing—"

She paused slightly, and word by word, it clearly spread across the network:

"Record everyone who dares to light the fire themselves."

That night, more than twenty remote villages across the country marked as "signal isolated" reported "spontaneous cooking successful" almost simultaneously.

Far away at the Longcheng research station in Antarctica, an electric heating stove usually used for thawing samples inexplicably flashed a faint blue flame.

No one argued about "orthodoxy" anymore, and no one begged for "bestowals" anymore.

Some people sobbed in the darkness, some knelt for a long time before their stoves, and more people just silently walked into their long-dusty kitchens, struck their flint, and lit that long-unused fuse that belonged to them.

The storm subsided, and the smoke and fire of ten thousand homes were rekindled.

Deep within the ruins of the old Mount Longhu site, a Tianshi Mansion boundary marker buried under rubble suddenly emitted a faint "crack" sound in the silence of the dead of night.

A crack quietly spread from the center of the marker.

From the gap, a mung bean sprout that had been suppressed for who knows how many years stubbornly broke through the stone wall and unfurled two delicate leaves.

The night wind blew past, the leaves swayed gently, and just happened to brush away the dust from an ancient, long-blurred seal script character on the marker.

It was the character "Chi."

The Spring Equinox was approaching, and the first ray of morning light was about to illuminate the foot of this long-silent mountain.