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

196: Who is teaching children to draw symbols?Night, the mountains in the southwest were stained like ink.

The wind slid down the ridge, carrying damp, cold mist, and slapped against the mottled earthen walls of the village primary school.

The shadow of the old locust tree on the playground stretched long, like a withered hand reaching out to the mortal world, quietly crouching there, waiting for something.

The first grade’s recess had just ended, and the children returned to the classroom, noisy and boisterous.

Teacher Li Xiulan walked down the corridor holding a stack of homework books, her footsteps suddenly halting.

In the last row in front of the blackboard, a little girl named A-Miao had not yet left.

She was squatting on the ground, clutching a half-burnt piece of charcoal in her hand, drawing stroke by stroke on the stone floor.

The sunlight slanted in, reflecting on her focused little face.

”Scribbling again.” Li Xiulan approached, intending to scold her a little, but her gaze suddenly froze.

That was not a child’s random graffiti.

The crooked lines actually outlined a... Talisman?

It was not a character from a textbook, nor was it a deity statue seen at a temple fair.

But the flow—the slight pause at the start, the swirl in the middle, the hook at the end—was clearly the framework of some ancient Talisman!

Even more eerie was that these patterns were shockingly similar to the basic Talisman bones of the ”photocopy yellow paper” that had gone viral online ten years ago!

”How do you know this?” Li Xiulan’s voice tightened.

A-Miao looked up, her eyes bright: ”Grandpa needs a slow fire to cook soup, so I draw a circle to help him stabilize the flame.”

She said it naturally, as if she were saying ”chopsticks must be used in pairs.”

A chill ran down Li Xiulan’s spine.

She forced herself to remain calm and asked the students in the class one by one.

The result made her scalp tingle: out of the twelve students in the class, seven children had squatted alone in front of the stove at night, tracing strange gestures in the air with their fingers.

At first, the parents just thought it was mischief, until someone discovered that the embers in the stove would inexplicably reignite after those movements.

”No one taught them,” an old farmer said, rubbing his hands. ”It hasn’t been on TV either. The kids just love watching that old rerun, ’There is a Talisman Seller Under Mount Longhu’.”

This sentence, like a needle, pierced into Su Qingzhu’s mind.

Three days later, an inconspicuous black off-road vehicle crushed over the muddy mountain road and stopped at the entrance of the village.

When Su Qingzhu got out of the car, the wind lifted the hem of her clothes.

She didn’t carry an umbrella, nor did she wear protective clothing; she only carried a silver-gray briefcase on her back, her eyes as cold and clear as a deep pool.

She was here to investigate the ”fire”.

For the first time in ten years, the Power Of Will Archives dispatched an investigation team, not for a Great Grandmaster duel, nor for the opening of a Secret Realm, but for the charcoal lines drawn by a group of children.

The technicians were confused, the higher-ups were skeptical, but she insisted: ”If the Dao can spontaneously combust, then we must figure out—where it starts to breathe.”

She visited seven households in the village, retrieving medical records, consumption data, and family videos.

A clue gradually emerged: within three years, every household had purchased or come into contact with early System products—either the grandmother who ate ”fist soul candy” to improve body coordination and treat arthritis, or the high school student who temporarily took ”heavenly eye mung beans” to cram for exams, or even an infant who accidentally ingested a candy residue mistaken for vitamins when running a fever.

They didn’t know they had participated in an invisible sowing.

What truly made Su Qingzhu’s fingertips tremble was that news footage from ten years ago.

In the footage, the young Zhang Xuanyi sat behind a tattered street stall, grinning as he took the crumpled banknotes handed over by customers.

He took the money with his left hand and prepared to tear the yellow paper with his right, and at that very instant—

His wrist tapped the tabletop three times.

Click, click, click.

It was an extremely subtle movement, one that even the cameras at the time hadn’t specifically captured.

But Su Qingzhu zoomed in frame by frame, her heart almost stopping.