97: Burning Wish Array

The sea breeze brushed against Su Qingzhu's hair tips, and the air was filled with a salty, humid heat.

From the voice recorder, a childish voice repeatedly sang "Tan Huo Yao," over and over again, like an endless tide.

She wore headphones, her fingertips tapping rapidly on her laptop as she imported the audio into analysis software.

When the waveform graph generated, her pupils constricted sharply.

Most of the recording's sound wave curves were smooth and archaic, but in a dozen samples, at the end of the melody, there appeared an extremely subtle rise that was almost imperceptible to the naked eye.

This rising tail note formed a sharp, discordant peak on the spectrogram.

It was like a needle, precisely piercing a specific frequency.

Su Qingzhu held her breath, took a brocade pouch from her bosom, and poured out a few shriveled, dull-colored bean husks.

These were the Heavenly Eye Mung Bean husks left behind by Zhang Xuanyi.

She gently placed one of them beside the voice recorder and then clicked play.

The children's song rang out again.

When it reached the altered tail note, the stationary bean husk seemed to be flicked by an invisible finger, emitting a soft "hum" and trembling slightly.

Su Qingzhu's heart sank.

She immediately pulled up a map of the East Sea coast and marked every village where the altered notes appeared.

The red markers connected, precisely covering the areas where the "Fire Cult" had been most active a century ago.

Fear, like cold vines, coiled around her heart.

She pushed open the door, and under the moonlight, a five-year-old child playing with mud in the courtyard caught her attention.

The child seemed sleepy, yawning, his little hands unconsciously scratching at the wet mud.

Su Qingzhu walked closer and looked, her blood almost freezing in her veins.

What the child had drawn was unmistakably a "Burning Wish Grand Formation" rune, simplified many times over, yet still recognizable in its core structure.

The strokes were childish, but the turns and connections of every line carried a precision that did not belong to that age, like a mechanical engraving.

Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in the Southwest Miao Mountains, Cui Wujiu was sitting by the fire pit of a stilt house.

Damp, cold mist seeped in through the gaps in the floorboards, yet he wore only a single layer of clothing, carelessly poking at the charcoal in his hands.

On the wall, a newly written musical score caught his eye; it was "Tan Huo Yao."

But the ink still held a rawness, not yet completely dry.

"Is this score new?" he asked the homeowner who had brought him rice wine.

The honest man chuckled, "That's right! A new teacher came to the town school, an educated man. He said the tune passed down by our ancestors wasn't accurate, so he 'corrected the pitch' for us. The teacher said that singing to this new tune can invoke fire to communicate with spirits, blessing the village with good weather and smooth harvests!"

Cui Wujiu's eyes sharpened, and he took the rice wine and drank it in one gulp.

That night, like a night owl, he silently snuck into the town school.

Moonlight shone through the window lattice, revealing a man in a long gown sitting cross-legged in meditation.

Hovering above the man's head was a bean-sized green flame. Eerily, this flame did not rise upward; instead, it hung down like a flexible thread, penetrating the floorboards, seemingly connected to something deep underground.

Cui Wujiu did not disturb him.

He took out half a roasted sweet potato he had been eating on the road, flicked his finger, and the piece landed precisely in a nearby charcoal basin.

With a hiss, the charcoal fire suddenly burst into a spray of sparks.

At almost the same instant, the green flame thread above the man's head let out a sharp hiss, as if burned by a branding iron, and violently retracted.

The "teacher" opened his eyes in rage, glaring at the uninvited guest in the darkness with Killing Intent exposed.

Cui Wujiu slowly stepped out of the shadows, a mocking smile on his face: "The fire in a fire pit requires sincerity, not greed or deception. Your fire doesn't look like it's honoring gods; it looks like it's waiting for someone to come and collect a debt."

In the Northwest wilderness, the wind and sand were like knives.

Zhang Xuanyi, wrapped in a sheepskin coat, squatted on the edge of a group of herder children.

As the morning light just appeared, the children were surrounding the huge bonfire in the center of the tribe, singing "Tan Huo Yao" loudly.

This was their daily compulsory lesson; only after singing could they receive today's milk tea and naan bread from the elders.

Zhang Xuanyi listened quietly, his brows furrowing tighter and tighter.

This melody was exactly half a musical scale higher than the pure, rustic version in his memory.

A child grew tired of singing and ran to his side to drink water.

Zhang Xuanyi looked at him and suddenly began to hum the most primitive, most ancient version of "Tan Huo Yao" in a low voice.

The child was stunned, a look of confusion appearing on his face, and corrected him in a milky voice: "Grandpa, you sang it wrong. Teacher said the tail note should go up."

Zhang Xuanyi smiled and said nothing.

That night, under the pretext of treating a young child who wouldn't stop crying at night, he entered the child's tent.

He twisted his fingertips, and a candy pill smaller than a grain of rice, emitting a strange fragrance, was flicked into the child's mouth.

This was "fist soul candy" refined with his own Fist Intent; it could soothe the spirit and also stimulate the deepest instincts of the human body.

In the latter half of the night, the sleeping child suddenly sat up from the bed, eyes closed, his small body assuming a standard Eight Extremities Fist closing stance.

He thrust his childish fist forward, the movement flowing like clouds and water, carrying an overwhelming, irresistible force.

This punch did not hit anything, but the surging fist wind shook the dust accumulated on the tent roof, causing it to fall in a rustle.

The dust drifted down, forming a bizarre pattern on the ground—that was a cleverly hidden spirit-guiding rune, the very Foundation of the "Burning Wish Grand Formation" that reached deep into the earth's veins!

Three encrypted signals converged in the Void Realm.

Su Qingzhu's voice carried an irrepressible chill: "Listen to this." She played the altered recording; in the video feed, the Heavenly Eye Mung Bean husk in her hand was trembling violently with the eerie tail note, nearly shattering.

"This isn't spontaneous spirit communication; this is 'Fire Seed Programming'! Someone has encoded a Formation into the songs, wanting to use the pure thoughts of thousands of children to unknowingly reconstruct that all-consuming Burning Wish Grand Formation!"

Cui Wujiu's voice was low and hard like iron: "On the Southwest side, I have already found the 'teacher.' He is not an outsider; he is the last survivor of the 'Ascension Sect' that was wiped out by the Quansheng back then. I have tested him; he doesn't want to harm these children, or rather, in his perception, this isn't called harm. He just wants... to let everyone be 'saved' in his way, entering what he calls the realm of flame Ascension."

The channel fell into a long silence.

After a long time, Zhang Xuanyi's voice slowly sounded, carrying an unexpected calmness: "Then let him teach."

Su Qingzhu and Cui Wujiu were both stunned.

Only hearing Zhang Xuanyi chuckle, his laughter revealing a worldly wisdom: "Fire is not afraid of being tampered with; it is only afraid of no one singing anymore. Let them sing, sing until their throats are hoarse, sing until doubt arises in their hearts, sing until they realize for themselves that this 'corrected' tune can never ignite the warmth in their hearts—only then will they understand that the true Tan Huo Yao was never sung from the throat, but hummed from the heart."

Three days later.

From the fishing villages on the East Sea coast, to the schools in the Southwest Miao Mountains, to the bonfires in the Northwest wilderness, when thousands of children were reciting "Tan Huo Yao" in the morning, as if by a pre-arranged impromptu performance, they all "went off-key" in unison.

The tail notes that had been forcibly raised suddenly fell back at the same moment, returning to that most primitive, most archaic melody.

In an instant, the spirit-guiding runes scattered everywhere—hidden on rooftops, underground, and in corners—were activated simultaneously.

However, the frequency of the Power Of Will surging into them experienced a fatal disorder!

The power that should have gathered gently turned into a violent torrent.

Countless spirit-guiding runes appeared, twisting in the raging firelight, and then emitted a groan of being overwhelmed, exploding with a "bang"!

Wisps of black smoke emerged from the explosion sites, frantically diving underground and disappearing without a trace.

Zhang Xuanyi stood on a high slope in the wilderness, watching this scene coldly, and said softly: "You teach people to light fires, but fire—is never something that can be taught."

As soon as he finished speaking, the last Heavenly Eye Mung Bean in his sleeve spontaneously ignited with a "poof" without warning, instantly turning into a pinch of fly ash.

Zhang Xuanyi's heart jolted violently, and he looked sharply toward the southeast, in the direction of Mount Longhu.

An aged and urgent thought crossed mountains and rivers, crashing into his mind like a gale: "The main vein has a crack! Someone is using the 'Will Of Human Hearts' to refine 'Ten Thousand Fires Into One'!"

Zhang Xuanyi's gaze swept over the distance.

The tribe's bonfire, the lights of distant towns, the lights of ten thousand homes remained bright and brilliant, as if nothing had changed.

But in the vision of his opened Heavenly Eye, he saw that at the roots of certain flames, without knowing when, a dark red color like rusting steel had quietly emerged.

Although the Formation was broken, a more hidden, more terrifying toxin had already seeped silently into the capillaries of the world through the most ordinary hearth fires on this land.

It no longer needed unified songs, nor did it need deliberate rituals.

It only needed the most ordinary, most insignificant hearth fire in this world, the temperature sufficient to warm a bowl of late-night soup, or to bake a piece of bread for a child's breakfast.

Because the most sincere wishes, now, seemed to have become the most fatal fuel.