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

He just crouched down and took a handful of cold ashes from his bundle—this was the residue he had collected along the way from the ruins of seven out-of-control fire altars, mixed with burnt paper, broken Talismans, broken incense, and a few blackened mung bean shells.

He sprinkled it gently into the pottery jar, his movement like he was burying something.

He did this every day: adding cold ashes in the morning, taking warm liquid in the evening, and dripping it into the creek.

At first, no one believed it.

The creek remained muddy, and nightmares continued to occur frequently at night.

But by the fifth day, a child said they had slept soundly; on the sixth day, even the most restless wild dogs stopped barking.

On the seventh night, the wind suddenly stopped.

A hunched figure came walking in the moonlight—it was the old woman from the east end of the village who had suffered from asthma for many years.

She held a rusty tin box, her fingers trembling so much she could barely open the latch.

”Can I... burn the slips of paper I wrote before?” Her voice was weak, yet it cut through the silence like a knife.

Zhang Xuanyi looked at her and finally nodded.

The old woman tremblingly lifted the lid, revealing a pile of yellowing slips of paper, each one saying ”Pray for peace,” ”Pray for medicine to arrive,” ”Pray for my son to return.”

She slowly dropped them into the pottery jar.

There was no roar, no blazing flames.

Only a cluster of ghostly blue flames rose silently, as gentle as a breath.

The bizarre thing was that after the fire burned, the temperature in the room dropped sharply, even the residual fire in the stove was sucked dry, and thin frost formed on the walls.

The villagers retreated a few steps in shock, but saw that the fire did not hurt anyone; instead, it made the long-suppressed anxiety in their hearts fade away bit by bit, as if it had been washed clean.

That night, the whole village had the same dream.

In the dream, a young man in coarse cloth clothes stood on the mountain peak, with his back to the sky full of fire, saying: ”You have warmed others enough, it is time to let the fire catch its breath.”

When they woke up, it was not yet dawn, but their chests felt unprecedentedly light.

Su Qingzhu arrived at noon the next day.

She walked through the muddy path, the camera on her shoulder feeling heavy.

She had written many reports about the ”rise of faith,” but this was the first time she saw what faith’s self-reflection looked like.

She saw Zhang Xuanyi burying the pottery jar deep under the roots of an old locust tree, his movements solemn as if performing a Seal.

He was not chanting scriptures or incantations, but a nonsensical nursery rhyme: ”Three coins of mung beans for a Heavenly Eye, five coins of yellow paper for peace—but from now on, the one on credit is yourself.”

As his voice fell, the whole old locust tree suddenly trembled slightly, and its branches emitted a pale golden shimmer, as if its Bloodline had been reconnected.

Deep underground, the golden lines of the earth veins, which had once broken due to the runaway Power Of Will, actually stretched out inch by inch, reconnecting, and slowly weaving into a new network.

She suddenly raised her camera.

The lens was empty.

The tree was just a tree, the soil was just soil, there was nothing.

But when she played back the recording, thousands of whispers poured out from the headphones, layered and overlapping, merging into one incredibly clear sentence: ”We remember.”

She froze, her finger hovering over the stop button, not falling for a long time.

Then she turned off the device and looked up at the night sky.

There was clearly no fire there, but it seemed as if billions of stars were burning.

She suddenly smiled, but her eyes were wet.

So this world finally no longer needed heroes, nor did it need gods.

It only needed every person willing to bow their head and pick up the ashes.

And in the distance where she could not see—in the Northwest wilderness, in a crack in the wall of an abandoned cave dwelling, a wisp of blue smoke quietly rose, straight into the sky, neither dispersing nor shaking, like a letter that no one had delivered, but which was destined to arrive.

There were no words on the letter.

But heaven and earth knew what it wrote: I understand.