Fire.
The story began in ancient times: the raging blaze that came down with lightning in a storm and devoured the forest; the sparks struck from stones rubbed together in the hands of upright, two-legged apes deep within dark caves.
Countless years had passed, and intelligent beings had long since grown used to this hot substance.
It drove away darkness, brought warmth, forged tools—
Even a country farmwife who could not read a single word and had never stepped beyond the fields and mountain hollows in her life knew how to light firewood and use its searing heat to cook a meal.
But to this day, it had never been tamed.
It swept through cities and burned forests. Even the faintest little flame atop a candlestick was enough to brew a monstrous disaster that devoured countless living beings.
Xia Nan, of course, knew its power.
The profound lessons passed down through thousands of years of human history in his previous life had made him deeply aware of the extremely terrible effects this substance could cause.
And it was precisely because of that—because of repeated teaching, over and over, and the safeguards created by technology—that the most dangerous fire-related incident he had experienced before crossing over...
...had merely been a kitchen fire that spread from the stove and churned up inside an iron pot when he personally cooked once, thanks to his own dreadful culinary skills. In the end, he calmly smothered it by putting on the pot lid and cutting off the oxygen.
After arriving on the Aifala Continent, thanks to a thrown item called the "Fire Oil Bomb," he had clearly come into contact with flames much more often.
He had barely experienced a few scenes approaching the level of a so-called "fire."
But perhaps because his now inhuman