176: Boom, boom, boom

The river water was ink-black, flowing slowly. The ferry docked in the morning mist, emitting a dull "thump."

They had arrived at Qingweikou.

This place seemed like a corner forgotten by time.

Crooked wooden houses stood along the river, their wall plaster peeling and window frames empty. Only a few wisps of cooking smoke rose stubbornly, swaying in the cold wind, refusing to dissipate.

The faded old flag at the town entrance curled and fell, like a tired hand, still insisting on waving.

Zhang Xuanyi, carrying his worn-white cloth bag, jumped off the gangplank.

The soles of his shoes stepped onto the slippery stone steps, making a faint "patter" sound.

He didn't rush to leave, but paused for a moment, looking up at the sky.

It was gray and murky, with no stars or moon, nor any miracles.

But he knew that some things had already quietly changed.

Beside a trash heap at the street corner, a thin, small figure was bending over, rummaging through it.

She wore an oversized cotton-padded jacket, the cuffs worn through to reveal the cotton, and the rubber shoes on her feet were split open like a fish with its mouth agape.

She held half a candle stub tightly in her arms, her fingertips frozen purple.

When Zhang Xuanyi approached, she looked up alertly.

"You're not here to collect the 'fire seed fee,' are you?" The girl's voice was very soft, but held wariness.

Zhang Xuanyi was stunned.

Then he laughed, the corners of his eyes curving slightly, his eyebrows raised: "Who would dare collect that? Fire doesn't belong to anyone."

He squatted down, his movements as natural as if he had done it a thousand times.

He took out a small packet of roasted sesame seeds wrapped in oil paper from his cloth bag and gently poured it into the iron can the girl had picked up.

Black, shiny oil droplets seeped into the sesame seeds, and the fragrance instantly permeated the air.

"Add some oil, and the flame will be willing to obey," he said.

The girl froze, staring at the can, as if for the first time someone had taught her—how to make a fire last longer.

"You... are you a Daoist?" she asked.

"I used to be." Zhang Xuanyi stood up, patting the dust off his knees, "Now, I'm just a man with sesame seeds."

Night fell quickly.

The classroom of the abandoned elementary school was drafty, and frost drifted in through the holes in the roof.

Zhang Xuanyi spread out a thin blanket, lay on a desk, and listened to the wailing sound of the wind blowing against the power lines outside.

He should have been unable to sleep, but after closing his eyes for only a moment, a rustling sound suddenly came to his ears.

He opened his eyes and quietly lifted the window crack.

In the corner of the playground, four or five children gathered in a circle, using red bricks to build a crude stove ring.

The sesame oil in the iron can in the middle had been lit; the flame was not large, dancing like a soybean, but it was enough to illuminate their frozen red faces.

"The reporter auntie from the city said," a little girl with braids lowered her voice, "as long as someone remembers to tend the fire, no one will truly die."

Zhang Xuanyi's breathing hitched.

Su Qingzhu's report... had actually reached here.

He still remembered the sentence she had written: "We have finally become our own gods."

So, miracles were not in the heavens, but in this lamp of fire in the human world that refused to be extinguished.

He didn't make a sound, nor did he approach.

He just silently felt around in the depths of his luggage and took out a small pinch of yellow paper ash—that was the last remnant of the System's broken Talisman, which could once summon myriad laws and reverse heaven and earth, but now only had a trace of warm spirituality left.

He gently pushed open the window, sprinkled the ash onto the soil at the base of the stove, and then quietly pressed it down with the tip of his shoe.

It was like burying a seed that would never sprout.

But it would protect the roots.

Three days later, several men in black jackets came to Qingweikou.

They were driving a gray-green pickup truck, with five red characters printed on the body: "Cultural Revitalization Office," the characters looking glaringly new.

The leader had a square face and a buzz cut; he spoke with official jargon, but his eyes didn't look at people, only at the ground.

"The old granary is a dangerous building with safety hazards; it will be demolished starting today and converted into a folk custom experience hall."

He spoke in a high-sounding manner, but when his gaze swept over the open-air stove frame the children had just built, a cold sneer appeared at the corner of his mouth: "This kind of wild fire will cause trouble sooner or later."

No one dared to refute.

The elderly left behind in the town shrank behind their doors, and the children hid in the alleys.

Only Zhang Xuanyi sat on the stone pier at the school gate, slowly cracking melon seeds, as if it had nothing to do with him.

At night, he walked alone to the back of the granary.

The moonlight was ghastly pale, illuminating the traces of cement slurry left by drilling at the edge of the foundation—those were the marks of the violence of modern machinery.

He squatted down, his fingertips brushing the ground, and closed his eyes to sense.

After a moment, his brow furrowed slightly.

As expected.

They were cutting off the "Cooking Smoke Vein."

This was not Feng Shui superstition, but a channel of warm Qi formed over a hundred years by the townspeople gathering and cooking.

It was intangible, yet it truly existed—like a Bloodline, maintaining the warmth between people.

Once sealed off, people's hearts would become like cold wells, where indifference would breed and isolation would become a sickness.

Zhang Xuanyi was neither angry nor did he speak.

He took out a handful of charred mung bean powder from his cloth bag—the remaining dregs of the heavenly eye mung beans from last time. Although they had lost their effectiveness, they still retained a trace of connection to the Earth's Qi.

He gently sprinkled it into the cracks at the base of the wall, then took out a piece of rusted iron sheet from his bosom and tapped out a rhythm of three longs and two shorts with his knuckles.

Thump, thump, thump... thump—thump.

That was the "Earth-Listening Code" passed down from ancient Mount Longhu, specifically used to awaken the dormant sensing of the Earth's veins.

It didn't harm anyone, didn't break any laws, just a whisper delivered into the depths of the earth.

The wind suddenly stopped.

The leaves stopped swaying.

Even the sound of the distant river flow seemed to recede.

After a moment, a very faint "hum" came from underground, like the roots of an old tree gently stretching in the darkness.

Zhang Xuanyi stood up, clapped his hands, and turned to leave.

No one saw what he had done.

And no one knew that that night, every worker who participated in the demolition dreamed a dream after returning home.

The strange thing was, the content of the dream was exactly the same.

The next morning, the mist in Qingweikou hadn't yet dissipated, and the rooster's crow was lazily stuck in its throat, but a silent tremor had quietly swept across the whole town.

First, Old Man Wang, who lived by the granary, woke up from his dream in a start.

He dreamed of when he was seven years old, lying in front of the earthen stove waiting for his mother to cook sweet potatoes; the firewood crackled, and a wisp of smoke got into his eyes, stinging them until they teared up.

His mother's hand gently stroked his forehead and said, "Don't be afraid, the fire is burning brightly."

When he woke up, his pillow was soaked, and outside the window at the construction site, the pile driver that had been roaring all night was gasping like a dying old ox, with pale cyan flocculent matter seeping from the oil pipe, as if someone had secretly replaced the engine oil with hundred-year-old dust.

"Strange... why does this thing look like it's been soaked in pot-bottom ash?" The technician squatted on the ground, his gloves stained with the eerie liquid, his fingertips actually feeling slightly numb.

He didn't believe in evil, so he changed the oil and restarted it—Click!

The gears cracked, and sparks flew everywhere.

He tried twice more, but the result was the same.

After the machine stalled for the third time, the entire construction site fell into a deathly silence, and even the wind refused to blow.

Even more bizarre was that more than a dozen workers, regardless of where they were from, had all had the same dream last night: the dim light of the stove fire, a mother humming a song, and snow falling silently outside.

Some dreamed they were so hungry they gnawed on wooden chopsticks, and their mother brought them a bowl of hot porridge; others dreamed their father was sitting on the threshold smoking, saying, "This family's fire cannot be cut off."

The dream was too real, so real that upon waking, their chests felt tight and their eyes hot.

No one spoke, but the tools were quietly returned to the pickup truck one by one.

A young man with red-rimmed eyes put his hard hat on the ground: "I'm not doing this anymore. If my mother knew I was tearing down someone's stove, she'd crawl out of her grave to beat me."

The foreman's face was livid; he couldn't scold them, nor could he persuade them.

He didn't believe in ghosts or gods, but when he opened the construction blueprints in the office, he discovered that the location originally planned for the folk custom hall had been circled with a red pen by someone at some point, and next to it, four characters were scrawled crookedly—"Your Turn To Tend The Fire."

He looked up abruptly; there was no one outside the window. But those four characters felt like a branding iron searing his heart.

Meanwhile, on the playground of the abandoned elementary school, the open-air stove the children had built yesterday had actually been built into the shape of a small house with neat red bricks, its chimney pointing straight to the sky, and black marks from the burning sesame oil still remained at the bottom of the pot.

A few roasted sesame seeds were embedded in the gaps between the bricks, like some kind of secret offering.

Su Qingzhu had come on the morning ferry.

Carrying her camera, travel-worn, as soon as she stepped onto the stone steps, she heard the townspeople whispering: "Last night there was a buzzing sound underground, like someone was beating a drum..." "The pile driver is ruined, the oil is full of ash!" "The workers have all run away!"

She walked all the way to the playground, raised her camera, and slowly zoomed in the lens—

The red-brick stove stood quietly in the morning light, the characters carved on the wall were naive yet powerful; a stray cat curled up beside the pot bottom, its tail curled around the lingering warmth; in the distance, a young man wearing an old Daoist robe had his back to the lens, burying the last pinch of yellow paper ash into the base of the wall.

She pressed the shutter, her fingertips trembling slightly.

Returning to the temporary village committee office where she was staying, she wrote in her chronicles of vows notebook: "They have no Talisman, do not understand Formation, and don't even know what 'Power Of Will' is—but they know that if someone is hungry, they must start the pot; if the fire goes out, they must add firewood. And the true Dao, perhaps, has never been about summoning wind and rain, but about letting a tiny flame have the right to continue flickering in the cold night."

She closed the notebook and looked toward the gloomy northern skyline.

There, the dark clouds pressed lower, as if the earth were breathing slowly, waiting for some sound to awaken the sleeping pain.

And on the mountain road outside the town, Zhang Xuanyi walked alone, carrying his cloth bag.

The morning wind blew his half-old clothing hem, and an old scar on his palm suddenly felt faintly hot—it was a brand left when the myriad laws street vendor system collapsed three years ago, but now it pointed to the distance like a compass.

He stopped, and from his bosom, he took out a rusted compass.

The needle vibrated violently and finally locked firmly toward the north.

There, a neglected collapsed area was quietly calling out for something.