Wangxi stood at the edge of the heart abyss, its depths mirroring the starfire of the highest heavens. With Heart Flame as her guide and the memories of the people as her ink, she refined the countless glimpses of the past she had seen in fire over a hundred years—those burned villages, buried names, forgotten dawns and dusks—one by one, forming nine hundred and ninety-nine steles of the "Civilization Stele Forest." The steles were neither stone nor metal, neither carved nor cast, but the memories of all living beings tempered by Heart Flame, like souls taking shape, like fire becoming monuments. Crimson-gold patterns flowed across every stele, winding like blood vessels, surging like veins of fire, like the meridians of civilization itself, threading through life and death across the Nine Provinces, joining the breaths of past and present.
She erected the first stele at the entrance to Ash Kiln Village, where she had once been abandoned, and where she had been reborn. No words marked it, only a scar of fire shaped like a newborn flame, yet also like the lines of a human palm, winding and twisting as though recording the warmth and fate held in every mortal hand. The villagers gathered around it, silent for a long time, until an old woman finally said in a trembling voice, "That fire scar... it looks like the lines on my mother's fingertips when she taught me to light a lamp."
Wangxi stood before the stele, her voice like a clear spring piercing the cold night. "This stele records neither merits nor faults, commemorates no emperors, praises no divine venerables, and recounts no victories." She raised her hand and gently stroked its surface. The fiery patterns flowed with the warmth of her fingers. "What it records is—we once lived."
That night,