76: If your thoughts are not right, then the result will be evil talismans.

The next morning, Xie Long Mountain was shrouded in a thin dawn light, while the market at the foot of the mountain was already bustling with people and the scent of daily life.

The cries of street vendors, the rumbling of wheels over stone slabs, and the playful shouts of children intertwined to form a vivid tapestry of sentient life.

Not far from the market entrance, a small child about six years old was squatting on the ground, his small hand clutching a leftover piece of charcoal, laboriously scribbling on a relatively flat bluestone slab.

He drew with extreme earnestness, his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth and his brow furrowed, as if he were completing an earth-shattering task.

An Outlier who had just returned from gathering herbs on the mountain passed by, preparing to enter the market for some breakfast. He suddenly stumbled, the Qi surging within his body coming to an abrupt halt, as if an invisible hand had seized his throat.

He looked down in horror, his gaze falling exactly on the child's graffiti—the pattern drawn with charcoal was crooked and utterly ridiculous, yet one could vaguely recognize the prototype of a 'immobilization talisman.' More terrifyingly, this crude graffiti actually contained a faint but pure Qi rhythm!

This startling scene happened to fall into the eyes of Su Qingzhu, who was patrolling nearby.

She walked over quickly and, under the Outlier's suspicious and uncertain gaze, crouched down and asked the child softly, "Little friend, what are you drawing? Who taught you?"

The child lifted his small face covered in charcoal dust and answered in a milky voice, "It's a immobilization talisman! My daddy sets up a stall inside every day to sell yellow paper, and I learned it by watching!"

Su Qingzhu's heart jolted, a chill creeping up her spine.

She immediately pulled up the surveillance footage of yesterday's stalls, reviewing it frame by frame with great care.

A shocking discovery surfaced: every stall owner who had set up shop under Zhang Xuanyi's self-igniting lantern yesterday—regardless of whether they practiced cultivation themselves—had family members, especially young children, who showed signs of this "self-taught" phenomenon to some degree!

They were either doodling on walls or sketching in the sand, and the things they drew were all prototypes of Talismans!

She rushed back to Zhang Xuanyi's small courtyard.

Zhang Xuanyi was using a battered pot to stir the bubbling heavenly eye mung bean porridge, the steam blurring his cynical face.

After hearing Su Qingzhu's horrified report, he merely grinned, revealing a mouthful of white teeth: "That's a good thing! It shows that when the human heart believes to the extreme, thoughts can become reality. The yellow paper I sold them before were 'Copy Talismans' that relied on my Qi as a guide. Now, the common people are 'birthing Talismans' themselves—this is what you call a real business!"

Beside him, Cui Wujiu's brow was tightly knit, his expression solemn: "Xuanyi, do not take this lightly! I also saw that child just now; what he drew was not a immobilization talisman at all. Those strokes clearly belong to the long-lost 'Soul-Locking Talisman'! Although it's only a prototype, if an ignorant child were to accidentally use it on a living person, the consequences would be unthinkable!"

Before his voice could fade, a shrill scream erupted from the western district of the market!

The expressions of the three changed, and they moved like lightning toward the source.

A crowd had gathered in front of a flatbread stall in the western district. The stall owner, a sturdy man, was now standing frozen against his own wall like a statue, his limbs stiff, his eyes bulging, his face filled with horror and suffocation as he made a "hissing" sound in his throat.

On the wall beside him, a child's graffiti drawn with colorful stone powder was flickering with an eerie glimmer. A cold aura had the man firmly locked in place, making him unable to move!

The surrounding Outliers were helpless; any attempt to forcibly break it with Qi only made the graffiti's glow brighten, and the man's situation became increasingly precarious.

Just as everyone was in a state of extreme anxiety, Zhang Xuanyi strolled over slowly.

He didn't perform any earth-shattering techniques, nor did he try to tear down the graffiti on the wall. He simply pulled a handful of roasted, strangely shimmering heavenly eye mung beans from his robe and casually tossed them toward the wall.

He looked at the panicked five or six-year-old girl by the wall and smiled: "The child doesn't know better when drawing Talismans, but does this wall know if it hurts?"

The moment the words fell, a miracle occurred!

The wall hit by the mung beans seemed to truly feel pain. The graffiti Talisman on the wall actually twitched and distorted like a living thing, and the Qi rhythm condensed upon it faded and dissipated rapidly, like ink meeting water.

The trapped man collapsed to the ground with a thud, gasping for air in large gulps.

Zhang Xuanyi turned back, his gaze sweeping over the shock-stricken faces, and said slowly: "Talismans have spirits and know good from evil. They are nurtured by 'Will.' It's fine if your children want to draw Talismans, but you must first tell them that these things are meant to help people, not to scare or trap them. If the mind is corrupt, the Talisman born is evil."

That evening, a new rule appeared on the market's bulletin board.

A massive "Childhood Will Wall" was erected. Any child wishing to draw a Talisman on it had to first stand before the notary desk nearby and loudly state a kind wish, such as "I hope Daddy's business prospers" or "I hope Mommy stays healthy," before they could pick up the brush.

Three days later, an even more incredible sight appeared.

A blind youth sat quietly behind his mother's herb stall, his expression solemn. With no brush in hand, he was 'writing' the Heart-Cleansing Incantation stroke by stroke in the void.

His mother said the child had been blind since birth, his heart as still as water, and reciting scriptures daily was his only solace.

The moment he 'wrote' the final stroke, atop a stack of blank yellow paper on the table before him, a complete Heart-Cleansing Incantation Talisman with powerful strokes and flowing Qi rhythm emerged on its own!

A golden light flashed and vanished so quickly that people thought it was an illusion.

Cui Wujiu stepped forward to inspect it personally, and the result left even this seasoned Senior of the occult world shocked beyond measure: this Talisman bore no traces of externally injected Qi. Its method of creation was neither copying nor Legacy, but was purely catalyzed by the blind youth's incredibly clear "belief"!

This was true "Creation of Talismans from Nothing"!

He spent the night writing feverishly, drafting a "Provisional Regulation for Thought-Based Talismans," stipulating: all such self-generated Talismans must be publicly displayed in the market for three days. If no resentment or evil thoughts from the holder or others are found entwined on the Talisman within those three days, it can be recognized as a Good Talisman and permitted for use.

Zhang Xuanyi looked at these rules and merely smiled: "The rules are well-set and can save many people. But don't manage things too rigidly—if the Dao could be framed by rules, could it still be called the Dao?"

Cui Wujiu didn't understand his meaning, assuming he was just being cryptic again.

However, late that night, Su Qingzhu, who was responsible for data monitoring, discovered a hair-raising anomaly.

She aggregated and compared the brainwave activity data of all "self-generating Talisman" users and found that at a specific high-frequency band, their brainwaves actually produced a startlingly consistent resonance with the seemingly messy patterns on Zhang Xuanyi's stall cloth!

That cloth was the source!

She stood up abruptly and rushed toward Zhang Xuanyi's main stall like mad.

Under the moonlight, she saw Zhang Xuanyi squatting on the ground behind the stall, carefully burying the last page of a tattered booklet into the soil, his movements as gentle as if he were burying an old friend.

Without turning his head, he said softly, "Don't waste your energy. The System has been useless for a long time."

Su Qingzhu's footsteps came to a dead stop as she stood there dazed.

Zhang Xuanyi stood up, patted the dirt off his hands, and turned to look at her, the moonlight reflecting in his deep eyes: "Since that night on Xie Long Mountain, it hasn't been me selling Talismans. It's this stall—it wants to transmit the Dao to all living beings itself."

A bolt of lightning tore through all the fog in her mind.

She suddenly realized: Zhang Xuanyi's Golden Finger System might have been exhausted or actively abandoned by him long ago.

And this stall that followed him, carrying countless transactions and wishes, had surpassed the scope of a "Magical Artifact" under the nourishment of the most devout Power Of Will from thousands of people. It had become a living "Collective Dao-Thought Carrier" with its own will!

The camera silently pulled back, past the market, past Xie Long Mountain.

In the depths of the earth veins that Mortals could not peer into, a sliver of long-dormant Dragon Qi seemed to tremble slightly due to this majestic belief spread throughout the city.

And beneath that stall, amidst the dreamlike flow of light, the blurred shadow of the Old Market-Stall Dog seemed to nod its head gently in satisfaction.

The belief of the masses had pried the Heavenly Dao, granting Mortals the Divine Ability to make their wishes come true.

However, Power Of Will is both nourishment and a shackle.

When what people seek is no longer blessings and health, but the most secret regrets and redemptions from the depths of their hearts, what kind of vastly different "reality" will this pried Dao give birth to?

As the night deepened, in an unnoticed corner of the market beneath the base of a stone tablet, a faint trace of black Qi quietly seeped out, accompanied by a phantom-like sigh.