This is a novel about "fire".
It's not a beacon, it's not a war, it's not a candle on the throne.
It's the green smoke that never goes out in the coke oven, it's the water droplets that slowly condense in the pottery steamer, it's the trace of warmth that comes out of the cracks in the earthen wall pounded by three hundred and twenty-seven hands.
It writes about a person who died of hunger and woke up in a desperate situation thousands of miles away;
Write about how a group of dying people used Guanyin soil to quench their thirst, used mugwort juice to prevent epidemics, used black armor to identify mineral veins, and used gurgling water to nourish new roots;
Write about how technology develops from a life-saving recipe into a sincere rule, and finally settles into the memory of the land——
When Uncle Wang carved his name into the green brick and sunk it into the water, when Lin Fuxuan used the empty eye as a fire hole, when Li Xiaozi's son mixed the furnace ashes into the purslane roots...
That fire no longer belongs to a certain person, a certain city, or a certain court.
It belongs to all those who, in the gap between history, still stubbornly lower their heads, scrape off a little ashes, and take a bite of wild vegetable roots.
When mountains and rivers collapse, dynasties can be wiped out;
And as long as there are still people who remember——
How to make a fire, how to protect the fire, how to burn the fire into light, into seeds, and into the temperature of the palms of those who come after you...
Civilization is never truly extinguished.
——Where the fire is gone, there is still light.
