93: The flame is not extinguished, the stall owner saves himself

Su Qingzhu's pen tip traced a nearly resolute line on her miniature notebook.

The noise of the night market seemed to be isolated by an invisible film, and in her world, only this strange and sacred scene before her eyes remained.

Deep in that old alley, a corner that should have been forgotten by the city, now became the center of the world because of a handful of flames.

The stall owners used a strange cyan flame to warm wine, roast cakes, and boil tea. The fire color was as gentle as jade; although it was a flame, it had no heat, but instead exuded a refreshing coolness, undulating like a living creature, synchronized with human breathing.

She stopped in front of a sugar water stall. The stall owner was a blind Granny, her face etched with deep ravines, carved by the years.

Granny's eyes were cloudy and dull, but her hands were as steady as a rock. Just by the distance of the back of her hand from the stove fire, she could accurately judge the sweetness and heat of the sugar water in the pot, without the slightest error.

Su Qingzhu was about to record this miracle full of the smoke and fire of life when a roar tore through the tranquility.

"You old hag, where is this month's 'Peace Money'!" Three roguish hoodlums swayed over, reeking of alcohol, their eyes fierce.

Granny ignored them and continued to stir the sugar water with full concentration.

"Hey, you're looking for trouble, aren't you!" The leading yellow-haired hoodlum sneered and kicked the small stove.

"Clatter!"

The clay stove rolled onto the ground, hot sugar water spilled everywhere, emitting sweet, sticky white steam.

The docile cyan flame struggled twice on the stone floor before being trampled out by the yellow-haired man, leaving only a faint trace of blue smoke.

The cyan flames in the entire alley seemed startled, their light dimming in unison.

The hoodlums laughed triumphantly, preparing to overturn other stalls.

Su Qingzhu clenched her fists, just about to take out her phone to call the police, when she saw the blind Granny slowly squatting down, groping in the mess.

There was no anger on her face, no fear, as calm as an ancient well.

"The fire is not in the stove, but in the heart." Granny whispered softly, as if speaking to herself.

The hoodlums' laughter stopped abruptly, and they felt an inexplicable palpitation.

They saw Granny carefully take out a small, completely carbonized black object from her inner pocket; by its shape, it looked like a withered bean husk.

That was exactly a residue of a scorched green bean husk that Zhang Xuanyi had casually scattered into some stove ash while playing among the Mortals, which had drifted here.

Granny couldn't see, but she precisely threw the scorched bean husk into the already cold stove center.

No fuel, no spark.

In an instant, a miracle happened.

A wisp of emerald cyan flame rose silently from the center of the stove, purer and brighter than all the flames in the alley before.

What was even more breathtaking was that inside the emerald cyan flame core, there were strands of golden light flowing, like a coiled Dragon.

The light surged instantly, illuminating the entire deep alley. The mottled moss on the walls, the gravel and rubble on the ground, and even the terrified pores on the hoodlums' faces were all clearly visible, shrouded in a dreamy emerald-gold halo.

The light was not hot, but carried an irresistible majesty.

The three hoodlums felt as if their throats were gripped by an invisible hand, and they scrambled out of the alley, disappearing into the night.

The alley returned to tranquility, with only the emerald-gold flame burning quietly.

Su Qingzhu's chest heaved violently; she finally understood that this fire was not an ordinary fire; it originated from a belief that transcended matter.

She flipped open her notebook abruptly, her pen tip racing across the paper, almost tearing through it: "The Dao is not bestowed by gods, but is a self-igniting fire."

Almost at the same moment, in a town in the Northwest thousands of miles away, dawn was breaking.

Zhang Xuanyi was wearing a washed-out old Daoist robe, squatting loosely by an old man's stall selling lamb offal soup, slurping the soup.

He seemed no different from the villagers rushing to the early market, but his eyes inadvertently swept across a house on the edge of the market.

Under the cooking smoke drifting from the chimney of that house, a very abnormal purple light was faintly visible.

The fire color contained a manic and violent air, as if a trapped Vicious Beast might break out of its cage at any moment.

It was the aura of Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid.

Zhang Xuanyi frowned imperceptibly.

This thing was a failed product refined by some practitioner who had suffered Qi Deviation; it should have been destroyed, but for some reason, a trace had leaked and caused harm to the public.

It would infect the Earth Qi, pollute the smoke and fire, and long-term contact was enough to cause mental confusion.

He noticed that the child of that family, a seven or eight-year-old boy, had a sallow complexion and dark circles under his eyes.

The old man selling lamb offal sighed: "Poor thing, Old Li's grandson has been sleepwalking every night recently, muttering strange words in his mouth that no one can understand; I'm afraid he's been possessed by something evil."

Zhang Xuanyi finished the last sip of soup, put down the bowl, and quietly pulled out a yellow paper from his bosom.

The texture of the paper was strange; it was not a physical object, but like a photocopy yellow paper of light and shadow, with runes flowing on it. It was his last remaining photocopy yellow paper.

He tore the yellow paper into three pieces, and under the cover of the crowd, he quietly pasted one on the outer wall of the house's water vat, stuck one on the inside of the door lintel with a flick of his finger, and the last one turned into a barely visible stream of light and burrowed into the base of the stove.

After doing all this, he blended into the crowd and disappeared.

That night, there was a clap of thunder from a clear sky, and a heavy rainstorm broke out.

In that house, the three pieces of yellow paper ignited spontaneously in a corner where no one noticed. They did not turn into ash, but instead steamed up three strands of misty water vapor.

The water vapor circled the room, accurately capturing that trace of violent purple Qi, wrapping it up, leading it, and rushing into the sky.

The three strands of water vapor merged into one, triggering the power of heaven and earth in the thick clouds, and finally turned into a silent, huge lightning bolt. It did not fall on the town, but precisely struck a barren mountain tens of miles away, completely dissolving that violent Qi into heaven and earth.

The next morning, the child woke up safely, his eyes clear, and he no longer sleepwalked.

The stove fire in the house also returned to its normal warm cyan color.

Old Li was pleasantly surprised and told everyone he met: "A deity visited last night!"

In the Central Plains, in a certain historic city.

Cui Wujiu walked slowly along a bluestone road.

This was once the old site of the "Power Of Will Notary Office," which has now been transformed into a simple market school.

The sound of reading aloud came, mixed with the laughter of children practicing drawing talismans.

He stood quietly outside the window to listen, watching the children inside learning how to identify fire colors under the teacher's guidance, and how to write the simplest peace talisman with the most basic Power Of Will.

This was the most basic popularization of Xuanmen knowledge in the new era.

Suddenly, his eyes were attracted by a boy in a corner.

The boy was about twelve or thirteen years old, his clothes washed until they were faded, and he was using the cheapest red mud to draw talismans on tiles.

When he finished the last stroke, a peculiar scene occurred—in the air above his head, several characters composed of pale cyan flames condensed out of thin air. Although they flashed and disappeared, that was the sign of "Spontaneous Inspiration"!

Such talent is rare in a hundred years.

However, the boy's face was full of anxiety and loneliness.

He knew that with his family's poverty, it was impossible to raise enough tuition to enter the Longhu Mountain Tianshi Mansion to practice.

Cui Wujiu's heart moved slightly, and he walked in slowly.

He came to the boy, took out the most ordinary copper coin from his bosom, and handed it over.

"I will buy a talisman from you, with the Power Of Will as the contract." His voice was low and magnetic.

The boy was stunned, hesitantly took the copper coin that was still warm, then picked up his pen, and solemnly drew the most complete peace talisman he could on a clean tile.

The moment the pen fell, the red mud talisman on the tile flashed with fire.

Cui Wujiu took the tile but did not put it away; instead, he turned around and gently stuck it on the beam of the school.

With his back to the boy, he whispered: "It's not that I am buying from you, it's that the world owes you an Opportunity."

That night, in the deep of the night.

The tile on the school beam ignited without wind.

The cyan flame rose from the talisman, circled the beam three times, did not burn anything, but turned into a gentle breeze, passed silently out of the window, and floated straight toward the southeast—the direction of Mount Longhu.

Not long after, the article "Fire Arising from the Heart" written by Su Qingzhu based on her experiences in Lingnan caused a huge stir on the internal forum of the supernatural circle.

The point of view in the article that "the Dao is not bestowed by gods, but is a self-igniting fire" ignited the hearts of countless grassroots practitioners.

Markets in many places spontaneously set up "Nameless Stove Corners," which did not charge stall fees, but only provided a place for those nameless people who had no connections but were full of enthusiasm to come and try to ignite their own "Heart Fire."

Su Qingzhu sat on the high-speed train back to Beijing, quickly modifying the details of the manuscript. Outside the window, the lights of cities and towns flashed by like light.

Suddenly, a classified report forwarded by the Meteorological Administration popped up on her mobile phone's special channel.

The content of the report was extremely strange: in the past twenty-four hours, "Static Meteorological Zones" appeared in the sky in seven locations across the country.

These seven locations were exactly where the cyan flame markets were most active.

The so-called "Static Meteorological Zone" refers to a radius of about one hundred meters where raindrops hover in the air, the breeze stops abruptly, all meteorological movements completely stagnate, lasting precisely for three breaths (about three seconds), and then return to normal.

Su Qingzhu's heart trembled violently; she immediately took out the old notebook belonging to Zhang Xuanyi that she carried with her.

In the messy drafts, she found a page with scribbled handwriting: "The Earth Vein has awareness, and fire resonates when it passes through."

She slammed the notebook shut, her deep eyes piercing through the train window, looking at the endless nightscape flying backwards, and said softly in a voice only she could hear: "It's not a coincidence... It's the Earth Vein responding."

Late at night, everything was silent.

Deep underground in Mount Longhu, the huge body of the sleeping Old Earth Vein Turtle moved slightly, and a breath heavier than a mountain was exhaled from its nostrils.

As one of the oldest guardians of this land, it sensed a rhythm that ordinary people could not perceive.

In its vast Divine Sense network, more than 370,000 cyan flames ignited by Mortals across the Divine Land were flickering like stars.

But just now, it clearly perceived that three of the fire sources had started "reverse burning."

The flame was no longer rising gently, but like possessing an evil life, it was stubbornly drilling inch by inch into the depths of the earth, attempting to infect the roots of the Earth Vein.

This is a phenomenon that defies physics, and even more so, defies the principles of the "Dao."

The Old Earth Vein Turtle's eyes, which were like lava lakes, slowly opened a slit.

It spat out a stream of pure Earth Qi, invisible and intangible, which instantly branched out and probed toward the three reverse-burning locations: the distant Northwest wilderness, the humid East Sea fishing village, and the miasma-filled Southwest Miaoling.

A moment later, the Earth Qi flowed back, bringing back a trace of an extremely faint, yet incredibly clear, fishy and rusty smell.

That was the polluted Power Of Will.

A low, muffled sound came from deep in the Old Earth Vein Turtle's throat, like tectonic plates deep in the crust groaning.

It did not hesitate any longer and injected a glimmer of light from its own Origin into the main Earth Vein under its feet.

The "Mountain Root Locking Array" that had been silent for three hundred years was quietly awakened, and an invisible energy network began to spread underground, attempting to seal the three pollution sources.

The camera was invisibly pulled back.

In those three places of reverse burning, the market stove fires were still warm, the stall owners were still chatting and laughing, and the diners were enjoying an ordinary night.

No one noticed anything unusual.

Only after they extinguished the stove fire and packed up their stalls to leave, in the still-warm ashes at the bottom of the stove, a few invisible black lines were slowly emerging and spreading like poisonous vines.