The spring chill bit deep, and the wild grass lay withered and yellow.
In Gray Ridge Village, the most remote wilderness hamlet in the Nine Provinces, a boy named Aye found a scorched roll of bamboo slips in the snow. Half had turned to ash, leaving only a few lines legible: "Fire is born of movement, not prohibition." "The people may wield fire; it need not be bestowed." "Wildfire has no master, yet it can be nurtured."
He did not know that this was the Fragmentary Fire Principles Scroll Nian Sheng had lost while fleeing his pursuers years before. He only felt each word strike his heart like thunder.
"Can fire... really be nurtured by ourselves?" he asked an old man in the village.
The old man sighed. "Fire belongs to the alliance, to the officials, to the great and powerful. If we want to use fire, we have to pay taxes and beg on our knees. Wildfire? That's disaster. Calamity. Something that must be extinguished."
But Aye did not believe him.
He had seen villagers die coughing blood on winter nights, with no fire to warm them; he had seen children freeze stiff before their stoves, waiting for a trace of lingering warmth. He knelt on the wasteland and cupped a handful of wildfire—a spark that had ignited on its own in a dead forest struck by lightning. No one tended it, no one controlled it, yet it still flickered in the wind without going out.
"It has no master, but it burns."
"It has no name, but it warms people."
"It... is our fire."
With the fragmentary scroll as his foundation and wildfire as his kindling, he built the Grassroots Fire Lodge—without bricks or tiles, using only mud blocks to build stoves, dead branches for fuel, and the