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

An elderly sanitation worker recognized her; he was an old reader of the Huaxia Metropolis Daily and asked curiously: ”Reporter Su, I read your newspaper’s previous reports; where did that Daoist Zhang you mentioned go later?”

Su Qingzhu scooped up a spoonful of hot porridge, blew on it gently, and looking at the rolling white rice grains in the bowl, a smile that only she understood flashed in her eyes.

”He went to all the places no one pays attention to.

For example, in this mouthful of porridge you are drinking now, every grain of rice, every drop of water, is tainted with that Dao.”

As soon as she finished speaking, at the bottom of that special giant iron pot in the Communal Cooking Workshop, a gentle cyan pattern quietly flickered for a moment, then vanished in an instant.

Su Qingzhu did not see it, but beside her, the old sanitation worker squinted his eyes, a glimmer of clarity flashing in his cloudy eyes, and he laughed: ”This flame, it flickers exactly the same as when my grandmother was tending the stove thirty years ago; it has Spiritual Qi!”

In the dead of night, Zhang Xuanyi finally ascended an unknown solitary peak deep within the Mount Longhu range.

The peak was flat, the moonlight was like water, stretching his figure extremely long, merging with the mountain beneath his feet.

He took off the burlap bag embroidered with the ”stove pattern” from his back and carefully spread it out, using it as his former Myriad Laws Street Stall.

However, the cloth bag was empty, without a single item, nor was there the familiar notification sound of the System.

There was only the cold moonlight and the rustling sound of the breeze brushing over the fabric.

Zhang Xuanyi sat cross-legged, looking up at the vast starry sky.

He whispered to himself, his voice so light it seemed as if it could be blown away by the wind: ”The stall is closed, but the fire is not out.”

At almost the same moment, amidst the surrounding mountains in the distance, seventeen Ash-Returning Points across the land of Huaxia simultaneously flickered with a faint cyan light.

The light was not dazzling, but highly penetrating, as if the earth at this moment had slowly opened countless warm eyes.

And thousands of miles away, deep in the sea of city lights, under a single lamp, Su Qingzhu was writing diligently at her desk.

Her fingertips tapped lightly on the keyboard, writing the preface for her new book —

”What he taught us was not how to become a god, nor how to summon wind and rain.

What he taught us was how to live together — a warm, down-to-earth, Mortal Dao.

He used his life to interpret the true meaning of ’carefree’; it is not about being isolated from the world, but about merging into all things without attachment.”

Outside the window, thousands of lights flickered, and countless wisps of cooking smoke rose curlingly in the night; they no longer rushed to the sky, but gently intersected with the starlight, like incense lit by humanity itself, stretching on endlessly.

The morning mist had not yet dispersed, and Zhang Xuanyi walked down from the solitary peak to the valley at the foot of the mountain, his clothing hem stained with the gray petals of the heart-burning stamen.