99: Fire doesn't recognize its owner, it only recognizes its heartbeat

The changes in this world were far more ferocious than anyone could have imagined.

In the Lingnan night market, the seventh day of staking out had almost exhausted Su Qingzhu's patience.

Just when she thought she would return empty-handed again tonight, that bizarre scene finally unfolded before her eyes.

In front of the blind Granny's sugar water stall, the stove fire was blazing, and the dancing blue flames illuminated Granny's wrinkled hands, making them look as warm and smooth as jade.

She did not use her eyes, relying only on her sense of touch to gauge the temperature of the sugar water by the stove, her movements skillful and serene.

Suddenly, that flame, which had been burning for half a lifetime, shuddered without warning, as if its heart had been gripped by an invisible hand.

It did not burst or struggle; instead, as if all its bones had been pulled out, it collapsed and contracted inward violently, finally turning into a tiny glimmer before extinguishing silently.

Throughout the entire process, not even a wisp of blue smoke escaped.

The surroundings fell silent for a moment, only to be immediately drowned out by the noisy crowd.

Several neighboring stall owners looked over in unison, their eyes complex, yet not one of them stepped forward to help relight the fire.

Su Qingzhu walked over quickly and asked a man selling beef offal next to her in a low voice, "Granny's fire has gone out; why doesn't anyone help her light it?"

The man forced a smile that was uglier than crying and pointed to the brand-new charcoal stove at his stall, his voice filled with a chill: "Light it? How can I light it? A couple of days ago, my old stove at home went out just like this. My wife was kind and used a fire starter to light it. Guess what happened? In the middle of the night, the fire leaped out of the stove on its own. It didn't burn anything else, just burned my account book hidden under the pillow to ashes! Not a single cent was left! I... I'm scared!"

Su Qingzhu's heart gave a violent jolt, and a chill rushed from the soles of her feet straight to her scalp.

She quickly opened the old police notebook she carried with her and flipped to the page circled by her father in red ink.

The incomplete handwriting appeared particularly glaring under the dim light—"Fire seeds return to the source, only blood can activate."

In the past, she had only considered this an incomprehensible prophecy.

But now, looking at the extinguished stove fire before her and the crowd's eyes filled with awe as if facing ghosts and gods, a subversive thought exploded in her mind: Fire was no longer a tool to be used at will.

It no longer obeyed human will, but... had begun to "choose people"!

A thousand miles away, in the Southwest Miao Ridge.

Cui Wujiu stepped on the rotting leaves covering the ground and walked into a deep mountain filled with miasma.

The former site of the "Fire Cultivation Society," which once made countless cultivators yearn for it, had now been replaced by a temple called the "Quiet Fire Shrine," and the incense was eerily flourishing.

Inside and outside the shrine, devout villagers knelt, kowtowing to a half-person-tall copper stove in the shrine, muttering incantations, praying that the fire in the stove would grant them the ability to communicate with spirits, ward off disasters, and even help them achieve Immortal Ascension.

Cui Wujiu curled his lips into an undisguised sneer and walked straight into the shrine.

He glanced at the flames in the stove and saw that the color was not a bright crimson or a pure cyan-blue, but a sticky, dark red that seemed to have congealed, like filthy blood that had been stagnant for a thousand years, exuding a suffocating Death Qi.

He casually took out half a roasted sweet potato he had been gnawing on from his bosom, flicked his finger, and the half sweet potato landed precisely into the center of the stove.

That lifeless "blood fire" seemed like a Vicious Beast instantly enraged, suddenly leaping up more than three feet high, transforming into a giant flame mouth, and with a scorching, fishy wind, lunged straight at Cui Wujiu's face!

The surrounding believers let out exclamations and retreated one after another.

Cui Wujiu stood in place, motionless, not even blinking once.

He let the scorching flames sweep past his brows, burning a few strands of hair into charcoal, and only then, in a volume that was almost a whisper, said softly: "You are not worshipping fire; you are begging for enslavement."

The moment his words fell, that ferocious giant flame mouth seemed to have heard the most terrifying edict in the world, suddenly shrinking inward, recoiling back into the stove at a speed ten times faster than when it lunged out, turning back into that stagnant, blood-clot-like dead fire.

The hundred or so believers in the shrine seemed to have been collectively pulled out of a dream; the fanaticism and piety on their faces faded instantly, replaced by confusion and bewilderment.

They looked at each other, as if they did not understand why they were kneeling there, worshipping a ball of dead fire.

At the same moment, in the Northwest wasteland.

Zhang Xuanyi, like a ghost, squatted on a sand dune in the distance.

His gaze fell on a sacrificial altar built of giant stones not far away.

In the center of the altar, the child he had once seen struggling to make fire by rubbing wood in the cold night was now dressed in gorgeous but heavy sacrificial robes, hailed by a group of fanatical villagers as the "Son of the Fire Seed."

Every morning and evening, he had to perform a cumbersome and humiliating ritual, "igniting fire to show the public," under the watchful eyes of everyone, to prove the "Divine Fire's" favor toward the village.

Zhang Xuanyi looked at the boy's eyes, which should have been clear and bright, but now held only numbness and emptiness; the light in his eyes was completely lost, like a puppet pulled by strings, his soul long since extracted.

That night, the moon was dark and the wind was high.

Zhang Xuanyi sneaked into the altar silently.

He pulled out the last fragment of photocopy yellow paper, thin as a cicada's wing, from his sleeve. On this paper, complex runes were printed in cinnabar, which he had made a rubbing of from an ancient site.

He gently stuck the paper fragment to the bottom of the cold copper stove.

Without a fire source, the yellow paper suddenly lit up with a faint glimmer, igniting without fire.

But the way it burned was extremely peculiar; it did not turn into ashes but transformed into a reverse rune seal made of light, completely opposite to the runes on the yellow paper, slowly branding itself deep into the heart of the stove.

The last trace of lingering thought from the "Burning Wish Grand Formation" entangled in the heart of the stove was, under the impact of this reverse rune seal, like ice and snow meeting the sun, forcibly stripped away and purified.

The boy sleeping in the wooden house in the village far away shuddered violently and woke up from a nightmare.

He gasped for breath, a glimmer of spirit returning to his eyes, and then, he opened his mouth and, in an ancient language he had never learned or heard, clearly uttered a sentence: "Fire is borrowed, life is one's own."

Several days later, when the strange news from the three places—the "silent extinguishing of fire" in Lingnan, the "evil fire confusing the heart" in Miao Ridge, and the "son of fire slaves" in the Northwest—gathered in Su Qingzhu's hands through different channels, she locked herself in her room for a whole day and night.

She laid out all the cases side by side and finally discovered a shocking common point: all the households whose stove fires extinguished on their own and could not be relit, whether relying on "fire ballads" passed down by word of mouth or using "fire talismans" circulating on the market, had long relied on these "shortcuts" to ignite fire.

And those who could still use fire freely to this day, without exception, retained the most primitive habits of making fire—they had personally rubbed wood, struck stones, or used a copper mirror to focus sunlight to ignite moxa.

She picked up her pen and wrote five large characters on a brand-new sheet of manuscript paper: "Fire Does Not Recognize Its Master."

However, after finishing the entire article, she did not submit it to any newspaper or journal as she usually did.

She found the best coppersmith in the city and had the entire text engraved, word for word, onto three thick copper plates.

She mailed these three heavy copper plates to three vastly different yet equally remote mountain schools.

Enclosed with the letters was only a note that read: "Don't teach children to sing to fire; teach them to fear the cold."

And in a dimension that Mortals cannot perceive, a more magnificent farewell was taking place.

Deep within the earth veins of Mount Longhu, that old turtle, which had lived for who knows how many tens of thousands of years, finally closed its eyes completely.

Its massive shell petrified in an instant, merging with the entire mountain range, and its last long, lingering breath also ceased completely.

Just at the last moment when its consciousness was about to dissipate, its Divine Thought, like an invisible giant net, instantly swept across the entire Divine Land.

It clearly perceived that among the 370,000 clusters of "blue flames" still burning across the country, 36,999 clusters were beating at their own chaotic rhythms, having long lost resonance with the main veins of the earth.

Only one cluster, in the courtyard of an inconspicuous small town in the south, where an old woman was warming food for her grandson returning home, still maintained a faint yet incomparably pure resonance with the main earth veins beneath her feet.

The old turtle's last wisp of earth Qi, which was about to dissipate, like a kind grandfather, quietly bypassed the main veins and wrapped around that weak yet tenacious flame.

A whisper that no one could hear echoed deep within the earth's core: "You are not the source, but you... are the most like him."

The camera pulled back; the stove fire in the small town jumped gently in the night, appearing to be a fraction brighter than before.

In the ashes of the stove, half a scorched withered grass appeared out of thin air, and then immediately turned into a wisp of blue smoke in the breeze, vanishing without a trace.

The world knew nothing of this; the change had already quietly settled in the most subtle of places.