175: The first pot of porridge you cooked was louder than thunder.

The sky was just beginning to whiten, and the wind in the southern coastal industrial city carried the smell of rusted iron and salt into his nostrils.

Zhang Xuanyi carried half a bag of brown rice and two handfuls of mung beans, climbing the creaking stairs to the top floor of the old staff dormitory.

The room was so dilapidated that even the window frames were crooked, and the wall plaster peeled off like a dried-up riverbed, but he only swept a glance at it and grinned: "As long as it's livable, it's fine."

He didn't rush to unpack his luggage; instead, he carried two discarded oil drums downstairs.

This six-story red brick building backed onto a factory wall that had collapsed halfway. There used to be a collective canteen downstairs, but now the doors were nailed shut, and the glass was shattered, leaving only a few shards.

But every morning, there were always a few hunched figures wandering at the entrance—elderly people living alone, sickly women, single mothers with children, clutching lunchboxes, their eyes vacant.

They couldn't afford hot meals, and their lives seemed to have no light.

Zhang Xuanyi squatted in the open space, the welding torch ignited with a "hiss," sparks flying everywhere.

His technique was skillful; in a few swift moves, he transformed the oil drums into a large pot, then used a few broken bricks to build a stove, padding the bottom with scrap metal to prevent dampness.

When the pot was placed on top, it made a dull thud, like some kind of ancient summons.

The first pot of porridge was brown rice mixed with mung beans, coarse yet solid.

His movements stirring with the long ladle were unhurried, as if he were drawing a Talismanic Incantation, or perhaps practicing Tai Chi.

Steam rose up, mixing with the fragrance of rice and spreading out; everyone in the entire alley smelled it.

On the first day, three elderly people came.

A grandmother leaning on a cane held out her bowl, asking tremblingly: "Do you charge money?"

"No charge," Zhang Xuanyi said with a smile, handing over the ladle, "But tomorrow you must bring some firewood—only with firewood is there fire, and only with fire is there food!"

That night, the old woman really brought back a few old wooden planks.

On the second day, six people came.

On the third day, eight people lined up.

By the fifth day, young people were squatting by the stove waiting for the pot to open before dawn.

Someone brought a bag of rice, someone carried half a bucket of mung beans, and a child in a school uniform ran over hugging a worn-out fairy tale book: "My dad said, burning this will make the fire stronger!"

Zhang Xuanyi took the book, looked at the cover "Snowpiercer", and couldn't help but laugh out loud, but still gently placed it into the stove.

The flames "whooshed" up, illuminating the fleeting gentleness in his eyes.

On the tenth day, the community director came in person.

The chubby woman carried two bags of rice and a basket of eggs, stood outside the crowd watching for a long time, and finally squeezed in: "Little Zhang, this isn't just serving porridge; you're extending the life of our street."

Zhang Xuanyi just smiled and continued stirring the pot.

No one noticed that every time someone added firewood, he would gently stomp the ashes at the bottom of the stove, his toes landing rhythmically nine times—three to the left, three to the right, three in the middle; seemingly casual, but actually secretly conforming to the flow of the ancient "Nine Stomps of Stove Setting."

This technique originally required Grandmaster-level Qi perception to trigger the earth's energy, but now he had no Qi to channel. Relying only on his movements, intention, and the belief repeated a thousand times, he actually used the fire ignited by everyone to quietly stabilize the "people's livelihood energy" on the verge of collapse in this dilapidated urban area.

And Su Qingzhu saw all of this with her own eyes.

She arrived on the evening of the second week.

Dusty and travel-worn, rain stains from the high-speed rail station still on her backpack.

Seeing the steaming large pot from afar, with the crowd gathered around like sparks, she froze at the entrance of the alley, as if she had traveled through some dream that shouldn't exist.

"Who brought firewood today?" Zhang Xuanyi held the long ladle, his voice loud.

"Me!"

"I have old tires!"

"I have newspapers at home!"

Laughter rose one after another.

Children ran in circles around the pot, adults chatted while holding bowls, and even the usually reclusive Old Li sat on a small stool, squinting while drinking porridge.

When Su Qingzhu approached, she heard him teaching a five-year-old boy to clap and recite a rhyme: "Fire burns without being asked, food cooks without being begged, hearts warm without being invited—isn't that miraculous?"

She suddenly felt a lump in her throat.

That night, the whole city lost power.

The continuous high temperatures overloaded the power grid, and the entire district was plunged into darkness and sweltering heat.

Mobile phone signals were intermittent, air conditioners stopped running, people were anxious and uneasy, and the sound of arguments echoed in the hallways.

Someone smashed a beer bottle and almost started a fight.

Just at the edge of this chaos, Zhang Xuanyi stood up.

"Stop arguing," he walked into the center of the open space carrying a kerosene lamp, the pot still steaming in the residual heat, "Since you can't sleep anyway, why not have a 'Starry Night Talk'? Everyone brings a signature dish, tells a story, and you can only eat after you're done."

No one responded.

He wasn't annoyed either; he first scooped a bowl of hot porridge from the pot, then took out a pack of preserved vegetables, tore it open, and placed it on the table: "I'll go first—when I was a kid, I stole the offerings from my master's altar, and ended up with a stomachache in the middle of the night, rolling all over the mountain, thinking I had been struck by the Thunder God."

One sentence made the whole crowd burst into laughter.

Then someone brought out pickled radishes, someone brought fried egg pancakes, and even an old lady tremblingly brought out a dish of sun-dried preserved vegetables from her own home.

Everyone sat in a circle, sharing food and telling stories of the past.

The laughter increased, and the words became warmer.

Strangely, as the human voices rose and fell, the air actually began to flow—a breeze arose from nowhere, gently brushing across their foreheads.

And the surface temperature of this area was clearly displayed on the Meteorological Bureau's monitoring map: two degrees lower than the surrounding area.

The only "cool island" in the city was born from the resonance of the Power Of Will from a bowl of porridge, a laugh, and a group of ordinary people talking around a fire.

Zhang Xuanyi sat by the pot, looking up at the starry sky, the corners of his mouth slightly raised.

It wasn't Spiritual Qi, it wasn't a technique, but a power more ancient and silent than these.

Until the early morning of the fourth day, he was just preparing to get up to add firewood when his footsteps suddenly paused.

A very faint vibration came from under his feet—not the kind that a seismograph could measure, nor the vibration of a passing truck.

It was a spasm from the depths of the city, as if the earth's intestines were festering after swallowing too much bitterness.

His pupils shrank slightly.

"The national destiny vein... is about to break." In the early morning of the fourth day, the cold dew had not yet dispersed, the large pot at the alley entrance still retained residual heat, the steam had long since vanished, only a dark red ember remained under the ashes, like the dying heartbeat of the city.

Zhang Xuanyi squatted in front of the stove, his fingertips gently brushing over the cracks in the ground—it was half an inch deeper than yesterday.

It wasn't the crisp sound of concrete cracking, but muffled groans coming from deep underground, like a giant beast with perforated intestines, twitching non-stop.

His brows furrowed slightly; his body was already empty of Qi, but his three hundred years of Dao perception remained, sharper than any instrument.

"The national destiny vein is broken, and a hundred grievances return to the heart." He murmured in a low voice, and the dark side of the entire city seemed to appear before his eyes: unemployed people smashing doors and roaring, couples drawing knives at each other over trivial matters, the elderly dying alone in rented rooms without anyone knowing... these were not disasters, but omens.

Once the earth vein completely collapsed, the hearts of the people would be like a bursting flood, panic, violence, and despair would spread like a plague, and civilization would regress to barbarism overnight.

He once had countless means to suppress this situation.

In the last slot of the System mall, there still lay a remnant talisman of the [Pseudo-Three Caves True Qi Concentrate], enough to allow him to briefly restore his Grandmaster-level cultivation, use ancient methods to guide Qi into the ground, and recast the Foundation of the Dragon vein; he could also use the reverse fate altering compass to forcibly reverse the fortune, even if the price was seven days of vomiting blood and the loss of his lifespan.

He was once the "Master of Myriad Laws Street Stall" who could summon wind and rain, call gods and drive ghosts; even the Old Ancestor of Quanxing had to lower his head to buy talismans from him.

But he didn't move.

He stared at the broken pot and suddenly laughed.

"I used to always think about saving people with Talismanic Incantations, turning the tables with exotic treasures, thinking that the world's affairs could only be solved by Divine Ability." He stood up and patted the dust off his trouser legs, "But this pot of porridge has been cooked for ten days, no one was beaten, no one snatched food, the children learned to share, and the lonely elderly have someone to call out to—this is the real Dao."

He turned and walked into the room, using the light of the kerosene lamp to write a few lines on a yellowed packaging paper:

"Mutual Aid Covenant"

"Those who have eaten hot food, help those who cook;"

"Those who have strength, contribute strength; those who have firewood, add firewood;"

"The stove doesn't go out, the fire doesn't die, the next generation continues to burn."

No flowery language, no moral kidnapping, only the most simple and plain promises.

The next morning, this piece of paper was pasted on the mottled wall of the porridge stall, nailed with a rusted iron nail as the starting point of a turning point in fate.

Miracles happened quietly.

The first to come was a young man in a jacket who had been a welder in this factory area, laid off for five years, and had only come to drink porridge for the first time last night.

"I'll take the early shift," he said, "I can fix the pot."

Then came a high school girl holding a notebook: "I can keep accounts, and I can also teach children to do their homework."

The third was a retired electrician from the community, carrying an old generator: "The electricity cannot stop, the fire must be strong!"

There were more and more people.

Some brought corrugated paper as kindling, some took the initiative to clean the alley, and several mothers took turns manning the ladle.

The oil drum pot boiled again, the heat rising, even more intense than before.

And just as the first ray of morning light illuminated the corner of the street, the power grid in the distance suddenly made a "pop" sound—the streetlights turned on.

It wasn't that the whole city had restored power, but just this one street, standing alone and lit up.

Cheers erupted, and people hugged and wept.

Children screamed and ran, the elderly tremblingly reached out to touch the light, as if it were a miracle descending.

But Su Qingzhu knew it wasn't a miracle.

She stood outside the crowd, the camera lens slowly zooming in, finally freezing on Zhang Xuanyi's figure.

He did nothing; he just silently put away the long ladle, wiped the bottom of the pot clean, and put the wooden handle he had used for ten days into his backpack.

His movements were very light, as if saying goodbye to a past.

She wrote in the final report "Fire Seed Project":

"We once looked up to immortals descending to the world, waiting for heroes to save us. But when a Daoist stops casting spells and only cooks a pot of porridge; when thousands of ordinary people are willing to add a piece of firewood for strangers—at that moment, we finally became our own gods."

On the day the article was published, more than three hundred "Remaining Ash Porridge Stalls" appeared across the country.

The name was taken from "Remaining ashes after the catastrophe, rekindling the sparks."

And at a pier that no one knew about, the river wind blew fiercely, and the murky waves hit the shore.

Zhang Xuanyi stepped onto the ferry, his clothes fluttering like a banner.

He took out the last piece of System remnant talisman from his bosom—the fragment of golden light that could once summon myriad laws and reverse the heavens and earth, now lying quietly in his palm, like a withered leaf.

He rubbed it gently.

The ashes scattered, rising with the wind, falling into the rushing river, flowing away with the water, like thousands of sparks, quietly disappearing into the depths of the morning mist.

The boat slowly left the shore, sailing downstream.

The river was wide, the sound of water low, and in the misty fog ahead, the outline of a silent river port vaguely appeared—

There, no neon lights, no hustle and bustle, only a row of crooked wooden houses, a few wisps of cooking smoke, and a faded old flag, gently swaying in the wind.