One Person: I, the Dragon Tiger Stall King! I Won!

Others dreamed that they had only made a wish to one day be able to pay off their debts in an upright and honorable way. Upon waking, they silently polished their long-neglected tools and set up their small stalls in the Ghost Market once again.

Three days later.

A youth who had once retracted his wish for ’Success on the Golden Rankings’ was using ’Heart-Clearing Charcoal’ to start a fire at his family’s newly opened baked cake stall.

As the charcoal fire burned out, a wisp of blue smoke carrying charcoal ash drifted slowly onto the yellow paper he used to wrap the cakes.

A strange scene appeared.

The charcoal ash fell onto the yellow paper and surprisingly did not scatter, but instead automatically outlined and moved, finally forming a complete and clear Talisman pattern—it was exactly the ’Heart-Guarding Talisman’ that Zhang Xuanyi had originally drawn.

”Heavens! It’s manifested! The charcoal fire has manifested!” the youth cried out in surprise.

The people around instantly crowded in, each face showing wonder and awe.

Zhang Xuanyi happened to be passing by. Looking at the fanatical crowd, he just shook his head and gave a faint smile: ”It’s not the charcoal manifesting; it’s your own hearts finally daring to tell yourselves the truth.”

Having said that, he turned and left, leaving behind a crowd of gazes that were either in awe, shocked, or thoughtful.

The camera slowly pulled back, rising above the eaves of the Ghost Market and passing through the wreathing mist.

In the invisible depths of the Ghost Market’s earth veins, the Old Earth Vein Turtle that suppresses everything let out a low breath. A faint, ethereal Dragon-shaped Earth Qi quietly split off a strand and coiled around the pillar of the ’regret lamp’.

And under Zhang Xuanyi’s tea stall, the old yellow dog’s shadow, illuminated by the firelight, slowly distorted once again, finally forming a character on the wall.

This time, it seemed that Zhang Xuanyi wasn’t the only one waking up.

Something in the air of the Ghost Market began to change.

That murky aura once mixed with greed, despair, and false hope was quietly receding.

In its place was a brand new silence, like the one before a prairie fire.

In the eyes of those who had just ’woken from the dream’, what burned was no longer the incense for begging gods and Buddhas, but a resilient, resolute flame that relied on their own hands.

This flame had no direction for the time being, yet it already possessed the momentum of a prairie fire.