108: The fire in my heart is not extinguished

The System's cold, mechanical voice boomed in his Sea of Consciousness, announcing the end of an era.

"Myriad Laws Street Stall mission completed; the store is permanently closed."

There was no cheering, no excitement; Zhang Xuanyi simply watched calmly as the last spark in the stove ash faded into silence.

A smile slowly spread across his face, like the first crack in a frozen lake, carrying an indescribable sense of gratification and relief.

He reached into his robe and pulled out a palm-sized bronze compass covered in intricate markings; it was the "reverse fate altering compass" capable of reversing Karma and stealing Luck.

He casually buried it in the still-warm stove ash, as if burying an insignificant past.

"Fire doesn't need to be bought," he whispered to the Void Realm, or perhaps to himself. "Only the fire you light yourself burns hot."

As his voice fell, a barely audible wail emanated from deep within the stove ash; the bronze compass's spiritual light dimmed completely, and it became nothing more than an ordinary object.

That night, a cold wave swept across the north.

However, in the thirty-seven remote villages that had previously relied most on the fire supply stations, tonight was different.

Gone were the daily, rationed, stable, yet lifeless cyan "standard fires"; in their place were countless orange-red flames pulsating with primitive Life Qi.

The villagers sat around bonfires, using the most ancient method—friction fire-making—to ignite their own warmth.

The firelight reflected on their weathered faces, dispelling not only the bitter cold but also the reliance and numbness that had long been rooted in their hearts.

A young child held up a burning branch, the firelight flickering in his clear pupils. He looked up and asked his father, "Dad, is this fire ours?"

The man's calloused palm pressed firmly onto his son's head, feeling that vivid warmth.

He nodded heavily, his voice hoarse but firm. "It is, but not entirely—it's that defiance against the cold in your heart, it's something we humans have in our bones."

At the same time, in the place of the first ignition.

Su Qingzhu sat under the old locust tree that had witnessed everything; the surrounding air still held a faint trace of cinnabar and paper ash.

She turned on the voice recorder that had accompanied her through countless truths and lies, and spoke the first sentence toward the faint indicator light.

"I once thought the truth was about exposing a carefully planned conspiracy. It wasn't until today that I understood: the real truth is having the courage to light a match with your own hands."

Her voice lacked its usual sharpness, replaced by a sense of relief and clarity.

After speaking, she turned off the recorder, opened her laptop, and began writing a brand-new document titled: "Chronicles of the Fire Seed."

First chapter title: "Who is Keeping Warm."

The night grew deep, and the stove beside her grew dim; the fire was about to go out.

In the past, she would have gotten up to retrieve the "standard firewood" rationed by the supply station.

But now, she just sat quietly until the last flicker of flame vanished into the darkness and the chill began to encroach.

She didn't move, but instead pulled a crystal-clear, amber-like candy from her pocket, imprinted with a tiny fist mark.

fist soul candy.

She put the candy in her mouth, and a scorching warm current instantly exploded from her throat, surging through her limbs and bones.

Her body, which had been slightly stiff from sitting for so long, was now filled with explosive power.

She stood up, walked into the courtyard, faced a withered tree, and assumed a steady horse stance.

"Ha!"

With a soft shout, she threw a punch through the air using a perfectly standard Baji Mountain-Collapsing Strike.

The wind of her punch whistled, the force traveling through the air to strike the tree trunk with precision.

The entire withered tree shuddered violently, and countless dry branches fell with a rustle, piling up at her feet.

She walked back to the stove, threw the dry branches in, and ignited them with the remaining flint.

A new flame rose, more vigorous and wilder than the previous "standard fire."

The firelight reflected on the slight upward curve of her lips, and she chuckled softly.

"So, I can also be a Fire Master."

At the Yangtze River ferry crossing, the night fog was thick.

Cui Wujiu stood facing the river wind; his face, usually covered by a mask, was now completely exposed.

He opened his "Fire Patrol Logbook" for the last time; it was densely packed with records of the fire seed stability, energy fluctuations, and abnormal consumption in every region.

This had once been his entire duty, the meaning of his existence.

He flicked his finger, and a wisp of blue flame manifested at his fingertip, igniting the corner of the logbook.

He let go, allowing the burning book to drift and fall into the surging, eastward-flowing river water.

The flame drifted along the pages on the river surface like a lonely river lantern.

However, the scene it illuminated was magnificent—on both banks of the Yangtze, in the endless villages and towns, lights shone in front of every household's windows.

They were no longer the stable, lightbulb-like cyan points of light from the past, but flames that flickered and jumped violently, like breathing, like a heartbeat.

An old fisherman poling his boat silently brought it close to the shore, watching this stranger.

Cui Wujiu did not turn back, just looked at the river and said indifferently, "Go back and tell Lin Shouhai, there is no need to trouble yourself with arranging the fire into the character for 'human' anymore. Standing tall is what makes one human."

The old fisherman's cloudy eyes brightened; he raised a torch at the bow of the boat, lifting it high.

It was as if it were a signal.

In an instant, on both sides of the river, countless windows were pushed open, and countless people walked out holding torches, oil lamps, or even burning firewood.

They didn't shout or speak; they just silently directed the light in their hands toward the center of the river.

In the reflection on the river, thousands of fire points merged into one, converging into a surging, endless river of flame.

Northern lands, snowy plains.

Zhang Xuanyi walked barefoot on the ankle-deep snow, yet left no trace of cold or discomfort.

The street stall cloth that had followed him for many years was whipped up by the biting cold wind behind him; it didn't fall to the ground, but instead turned to ash inch by inch in mid-air, dissipating without a trace.

He walked to a river that was completely frozen over and took a simple porcelain bottle from his robe; the bottle had three characters written in cinnabar: Pseudo-Three Caverns True Qi Liquid.

He pulled out the stopper and poured all of the liquid inside, which resembled liquid blue flames, onto the hard ice surface.

Hiss—

With a soft sound, the liquid seemed to possess life, instantly penetrating the thick layer of ice.

The next second, beneath the entire frozen river, veins of blue flame spread wildly, like a waking Dragon, winding and roaring as it sped toward the distant ruins of the southern underground vault.

"Qi is not yours," he whispered to the fire Dragon beneath the ice, "and neither is fire."

As soon as he finished speaking, his expression suddenly shifted as he sensed a will coming from deep within the earth's veins.

It was a chuckle that spanned thousands of years—aged, yet carrying the joy of new life.

Deep underground, the remnant consciousness of an old turtle that had slept for who knows how many sixty-year cycles was completely awakened by this fire of freedom that connected heaven and earth.

It slowly opened its massive, magma-like eyes, carrying the half-broken mountain root stone on its back, changed direction, and slowly swam toward the South Sea.

At dawn, the horizon turned a fish-belly white.

The ancestral home of the Dao, Mount Longhu.

The great defensive array covering the entire mountain shook violently without warning, stirring up clouds throughout the sky.

The Tianshi Mansion standing on the mountain peak—its heavy, vermilion-lacquered gate, which was said not to have been opened from the outside in three hundred years—now emitted a soft creaking sound from within.

A gap was gently pushed open from the inside by an utterly ordinary burning piece of firewood.

Through the gap in the door, a flickering, vibrant blue flame shone through.

The camera pulled back infinitely, rising from the peak of Mount Longhu to ten thousand meters in the air, overlooking the entire land of Shenzhou.

From the Mohe ice plains in the far north to the Sanya coast in the far south, countless points of firelight lit up one after another in this darkest moment before dawn.

They were no longer the thin, weak streams of the past, extracted by the earth's veins and uniformly allocated; they were fields of stars, patches and clusters burning freely across the vast land.

In the wind and snow, Zhang Xuanyi's voice seemed to drift from afar.

"The stall is packed up; the road ahead is long."

The voice dissipated in the wind, and the Tianshi Mansion gate, unopened for three hundred years, remained open by only that single gap; the darkness behind the door was as deep as an abyss, with only that blue flame flickering quietly on both sides of the threshold, as if waiting for something.