81: The fire is not extinguished, flowers bloom in the ashes

The night was as dark as ink. The mountain wind, once scorched by the faith fire, had finally lost its last trace of dry heat, becoming cold and bone-chilling.

Seven days after the faith fire was extinguished, the market, with a hundred things waiting to be rebuilt, reopened. It was bustling with noise, as if the great fire that had burned away all obsessions was merely a nightmare.

However, only those within it knew that the dream had never truly ended.

Cui Wujiu's boots stepped on the morning flagstone road, making a hollow echo.

His brow was furrowed as his gaze swept across the seemingly busy stalls.

The stall owners wore forced smiles, but deep in their eyes hid a trace of panic and excitement that even they hadn't noticed.

"Lord Cui, look at this wall..." An old man selling flatbreads pointed at his earthen wall, his voice trembling.

Deep cracks spread across the wall like a spiderweb, and at the center was the twisted, unformed prototype of a rune.

Cui Wujiu reached out to touch it, and a faint burning sensation came from his fingertips.

He was all too familiar with this power.

"Did you sleep well last night?" Cui Wujiu asked in a heavy voice.

The old man turned pale and stammered, "I... I just had some strange dreams. Everything else... everything else is fine."

"Open your mouth." Cui Wujiu's command brooked no argument.

The old man hesitated before opening his mouth, and a burnt smell wafted out.

Cui Wujiu focused his gaze and saw that deep in the man's throat, there were specks of black ash finer than dust.

"Cough, cough!" The old man burst into a fit of coughing. A few specks of black ash fell into his palm, unexpectedly glowing faintly in the morning light.

That morning, Cui Wujiu patrolled the entire market, and the results made his heart turn cold.

Dozens of stall owners, regardless of age, had coughed up the same black ash in the morning.

They had all unconsciously waved their limbs in their sleep, carving those runes born of obsession onto their walls, floors, and even their own bodies.

The embers of the faith fire were like maggots in the bone, hiding inside everyone's bodies.

Anxious and impatient, he rushed toward Zhang Xuanyi's stall.

That fellow was leisurely squatting under the eaves, using a broken bowl to catch the dew dripping from above.

"The fire is about to burn into people's bones, and you still have the heart to catch water?" Cui Wujiu said angrily.

Zhang Xuanyi didn't even look up, staring only at the bowl.

A drop of dew fell with a soft 'ding', spreading a ripple at the bottom of the bowl.

And at the center of the ripple, a wisp of cyan flame, thinner than a strand of hair, flashed and vanished.

Cui Wujiu's pupils constricted suddenly.

"The fire isn't out." Zhang Xuanyi finally looked up and grinned, revealing pearly white teeth. "It just changed places and hid in people's mouths."

At that moment, by the ruins of the Atonement Tower dozens of miles away, Su Qingzhu was performing the final proofreading of the manuscript for self-salvation.

Suddenly, she felt the paper at her fingertips begin to grow slightly hot.

In alarm and doubt, she flipped to one of the pages and saw that on the originally blank footer, a line of ink emerged on its own like a living thing, each word scalding hot:

"When faith reaches its limit, even ash becomes a seed."

Zhang Xuanyi carried that bowl of 'ash water' shimmering with cyan flame and, under Cui Wujiu's suspicious gaze, quietly circled to the withered well near the roots of the market stalls and poured all the water inside.

The well water was deathly still, as if it had swallowed everything.

Three days later, a sudden change occurred.

From the scorched earth beside the withered well, strange green sprouts actually poked through.

The leaves of those sprouts were shaped like charcoal, charred and curled as if they had been roasted by intense fire.

But strangely, the veins on the leaves flowed with a faint golden light, shining brightly in the sun like a miracle.

A child chasing a dragonfly curiously plucked a charred leaf and put it in his mouth.

The next moment, his body stiffened. He actually sat cross-legged on the spot with his eyes closed, entering a meditative state of being oblivious to himself and the world.

After a long while, he suddenly opened his eyes, a golden light flashing through them.

He looked at two vendors not far away arguing over a single copper coin and blurted out, "You're not angry at his greed; you're angry that you were just as foolish back then."

A single word revealed the secrets of heaven.

The child could see through others' obsessions!

The news swept through the entire market like a storm.

This new variant of heavenly eye mung beans born from the ashes instantly ignited everyone's greed and fear.

Some saw them as 'Sacred Seeds,' shouting that they were a gift from the heavens that allowed one to perceive heavenly secrets, and immediately wanted to dig up the ground to snatch them. Others were scared out of their wits, certain they were 'Roots of Calamity,' a curse left by the faith fire that would turn everyone into monsters peering into people's hearts, and proposed burning the fields to destroy the source and end the trouble forever.

The two factions were at each other's throats, and it looked like a conflict even more terrifying than the faith fire was about to break out.

"We must issue a ban immediately and blockade this place!" Cui Wujiu pressed his hand on his law enforcement seal, his expression solemn.

"Don't be in such a hurry." Zhang Xuanyi waved his hand. He leaned against the well's edge, lazily basking in the sun. "Whether they plant them or not is their fate. Whether they are afraid or not is their heart. I only care about the watering."

That night, the moonlight was like frost.

The Old Yellow Dog guarding the stall woke up at some point. Its aged shadow stretched very long under the moon. Suddenly, a corner of the shadow slammed into the corner of Zhang Xuanyi's stall cloth.

Zhang Xuanyi's eyes moved. He lifted the stall cloth and, following the shadow's guidance, actually pulled a cold, hard object out of a stone crack at the bottom of the well beneath that scorched earth.

It was half a turtle shell.

The turtle shell was extremely ancient. On it, in an old rune he had never seen before, three words were carved—'Obsession-Suppressing Art'.

Between the strokes of the runes, there was a faint, almost imperceptible trace of Dragon Qi flowing.

Zhang Xuanyi understood instantly. This was a technique carved with his own Dragon Qi by the Old Earth Vein Turtle deep in the earth before it fell into slumber.

Beside the art's text was a line of small characters: Power Of Will as the lead, self-reflection as the fuel.

This technique was not for forced suppression, but for guidance.

It required a person to use their own willpower as a fuse and self-reflection as fuel to transform the fire of obsession growing in their heart into a furnace fire for tempering the mind.

Zhang Xuanyi did not make a sound.

He returned to his stall and traced the runes from the turtle shell stroke by stroke onto hundreds of sheets of blank yellow paper.

The next day, a new item appeared on his stall: "Today's Special: Mind-Clearing Mung Bean Cakes, comes with one free exclusive Mind-Clearing Talisman."

The market residents, whether greedy or fearful, bought the mung bean cakes with skepticism and casually tucked the seemingly useless yellow paper talisman into their robes.

That night, everyone who ate the mung bean cakes had an incredibly vivid dream.

In the dream, their lifelong obsessions took on physical form.

Some saw their lost loved ones and knelt on the ground weeping; some saw the wealth they dreamed of and grabbed at it frantically; and some saw their former enemies and ground their bones to dust in the dream.

Others silently lit a fire in the dream, burning away the old objects that carried painful memories.

On the fifth day, among those who had snatched the seeds, three people suddenly went mad.

Their eyes were blood-red, and they acted like demons. They muttered incessantly, and what they repeatedly chanted was actually the vicious curse of that Lame Old Man from the Atonement Tower before he died!

"With my broken body, I sacrifice to this resentful soul! Fire, rise! Fire, rise!"

"Stop them!" Cui Wujiu shouted. His law enforcement seal radiated golden light as he prepared to suppress them.

"Wait." Zhang Xuanyi stopped him, taking out a piece of yellow paper that had been chewed to a pulp from his robe.

It was the 'Obsession-Suppressing Art' talisman paper he had given out earlier, stained with mottled saliva and a bit of pitch-black ash.

"He ate the cake and had the dream." Zhang Xuanyi's tone was terrifyingly calm. "But he was unwilling to face the self in his dream, and instead took that obsession as the truth."

He casually stuck the tattered talisman paper onto a nearby flatbread oven.

"Fire must always burn out before it can truly be extinguished." He looked at the three increasingly frenzied people, his gaze deep. "If you stop it now, you'll only hold the fire back, letting them burn from the inside out into a pile of true dead ash."

At midnight, upon the ruins, the three danced wildly.

The black ash runes on their bodies were completely activated. Three pillars of faith fire that had been suppressed for days soared into the sky, more violent than any time before, as if they wanted to drag this land that had just gained a breather back into the abyss.

At the critical moment, a small figure carrying a mung bean seedling with charred leaves and golden veins walked before the raging flames.

It was the child who had first eaten the bean sprout.

He looked up at the three faces twisted in the flames and said in a youthful but incredibly clear voice, "What you fear is not the injustice of the Heavenly Dao, nor that your enemies are not dead. What you fear is that you do not dare to forgive your powerless self."

As the words fell, it was like a thunderclap from the earth.

The three soaring fire pillars seemed to be suddenly grabbed by an invisible giant hand, abruptly shrinking inward and vanishing entirely into the bodies of the three people.

They gave a miserable cry and fell straight into a faint.

And where they fell, the ashes on the ground automatically arranged themselves into two shocking words:

Repentance.

Zhang Xuanyi plucked a new charred sprout of the bean seedling and put it in his mouth to chew slowly. A bitter taste with a hint of sweetness spread across his tongue.

He looked at his weathered stall cloth. The six large characters written with Dragon Qi, 'The Dao does not save people; people save themselves,' were slowly fading in the moonlight at a speed visible to the naked eye, as if a completely new intent was about to cover them.

The camera slowly pulled back, sinking deep into the earth.

The Old Earth Vein Turtle, which had slumbered for untold ages, gave an almost imperceptible twitch of its nostrils.

A wisp of pure Dragon Qi wound along the earth vein onto the roots of that charred-leaf bean seedling.

Under the moonlight, the Old Yellow Dog's shadow shifted slightly on the ground, finally transforming into a clear word:

At dawn, the first ray of morning light pierced through the clouds.

Su Qingzhu carefully wrapped the final manuscript of self-salvation in oilcloth, preparing to contact bookstores in various places to discuss publishing matters.

The moment she pushed open the door, several messenger pigeons descended from the sky almost simultaneously, fluttering their wings as they landed in her courtyard.

She untied the message tube from the leg of one, unfolded the note, and the calm on her face instantly froze.

Immediately after, she untied the second, the third... every note from a different region added another layer of shock to her eyes.