Year fourteen of the Firefolk Era, Qingming.
Spring mist spread across the Nine Provinces like a veil of gauze. Starfire Envoy Su Li set up a mechanical array outside Ironridge Pass to monitor fluctuations in the Ruin Abyss Fire Vein, when an anomaly appeared on the earth-vein map—at every midnight, faint currents of light surged deep within the earth veins. They were neither Fire Energy nor crystal energy, but veins of light formed purely from "thought," flowing silently like a river whose bed had just taken shape.
Stranger still, the paths of those light veins coincided with children's dreams.
That night, she went in person to the children's school in Gray Ridge Village and kept watch beside A Ya's bed. Three quarters into the midnight hour, A Ya's breathing slowed, her brow stirred slightly, and a faint crimson glow rose from her fingertips. Su Li used a mechanical mirror to reveal her dream. What appeared within the mirror took her breath away—
Countless children stood amid boundless darkness.
Their eyes were all closed, yet they raised their hands together, a lantern kindling in each palm. Each flame was no larger than a bean, yet they answered one another, light joining light until they wove a vast river of radiance through the void. It wound into being from every corner of the Nine Provinces, pierced mountains and rivers, crossed frozen abysses and ruins, and pointed straight toward the fissure in the Ruin Abyss—the very place from which the fire seed had first come, and to which it would ultimately return.
Little Bean's figure appeared upon the river. He was no longer the boy who had leaped into the fissure, but had become the river of light itself. He whispered softly, "**What you dream of is not the past. It is the